Sam Thinks He Knows Enough to Write About Religion in India: Proceed With Caution

I hear a good journalist is suppoed to let the reader have the last word, but I feel like I have more to say about religion as I've encountered it here in India, especially after Pujie teased me last post about visiting India and claiming disinterest in religion. So, here, I'd like to put forth some observations about Hinduism (and, to a lesser extent, Islam) in India, in the context of how these faiths are interpreted and enacted by people. I'd also like to try and explain why I think this is more interesting and more important that the religious beliefs and texts themselves. The usual disclaimer about me being uninformed and ignorant applies in full force, especially because my observations come from conversations with not very many people.

So basically, you can sort your academis into two camps. First, you can follow Marx, and take the view that it's all economis. The first historical act, the first act of civilization, he argues, was the economic organization of society. Everything people do has the struggle to meet their physical needs at its root, and this includes religion.

Durkheim, on the other hand, believes that religion informs economic activity. He takes the example of the Protestant work ethic leading to the success of capitalism in the West.

Elisabeth Bumiller has another example of religion informing other cultural practice in her book, "May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons." Hindu women, she writes, are happy to go along with arranged marriages because of a religiously based fatalism--that karma, our actions from past lives, prescribes our destiny.

This argument is ok, and you have to admire the interdisciplinary spirit, but there's one problem; where did this religious philosophy come from? In the West, arranged marraiges wer ecommon, and a tool for maintaining the socio-economic status quo. The economic arrangement was at the heart of the practice, and I imagine that it's at the heart of the Indian practice as well, at least historically.

What's strange is that Christianity is a religion that emphasizes choice above all else--not fatalism. If religion leads to all else in society, and totally opposite ideas can lead to the same ends, you don't exactly have a logical system for explaining social practices.

I'd like to avoid all sorts of religious reductionism, Marxian and Durkheimian--but it seems clear that people use religious texts to justify anything they want (compassionate conservatism, anyone?). I had a conversation with Shubhra the other day, where she argued that advanced religions have made the jump from worshipping an all-powerful, judging god, to a powerless, loving one. In Hinduism, you get the baby Kirshna; in Christianity, it's baby Jesus.

I have two problems with this argument; first, it puts Christianity up as an upgrade form Judaism, which seems looney and antisemetic. Second, the Jesus that mainstreamt Christians worship is the one who sacrificed himself on the cross, suffered the fires of hell, and then ascended to heaven. The nativity story is the prologue, at least as Christianity is commonly practiced. The interpretation, not the text, is key.

Making matters worse for the Durkheimians is the immense complexity of Hinduism. There are 33 crore gods to choose from (1 crore = 10 million), a number which you can get from doing permutations and combinations on the number of senses and virtues identified by Hindus. The reason for Bhuddism's decline in the land of its birth is that Hinduism has a kind of all-consuming tolerance. You want to worship Bhudda? Be a Hindu. Like Jesus? Join the Hindu club. Amartya Sen writes that when he became convinced that he was an atheist, and he told his very religious grandfather that he was not a Hindu, grandpa said, "Oh no, you're just out on the atheistic brance of Hinduism." All in all, you can be a Hindu however you want.

So I'm just not convinced that by learning the lists of sense and sins and virtures and the sites where the pieces of Sita's body fell (her left toes are in Kolkata at the Kalighat temple) you can know much about the people of India. And anyway, it's not like the world needs more Westerners to "discover" Eastern mysticism.

This is emphatically NOT to suggest aht India and Hinduism do not have a rich philosophical tradition which continues to pervade contemporary Indian discourse. The Mahabrat is used as the rhetorical playing field for conversations about politics and ethics, not to mention gender and marriage and nationalism. But it's that rhetorical playing field that I'm most interested in, and which, according ot Marx, may be rooted in something underlying the texts and traditions explicitly identified as religious. I'm interested in the questions, "What kinds of things make sense to people? How do they justify and explain their lives?"

So this is what I mean when I say that, as a traveller and a student, I care more about religion in practice that I do in theory. I want to ask Bumiller, "where did Hinduism come from?" and Durkheim, "why did the Protestant work ethic come from?" Otherwise, it seems, you have no explanatory foundation.

********

Not, incidentally, that I've found such a foundation: and as a result, the next series of anecdotes can be grouped only under the heading, "Look at all these anecdotes about religion!" Sorry Ms. Talton; no thesis statement here. But that's the luxury in having your own blog.

One thing I've noticed from the Hindus I've spoken talked with here (everyone in Vikramshila is Hindu, actually) is a total disinterest in the kind of arguments about literalism we seem to get hung up on in Christian traditions. Standing with our feet in the Ganges, one of the holy rivers of Hinduism (I don't know all of them, but one is reportedly underground), Shubbhradi told me that the river is symbol of life; changing and yet unchanging, peaceful and turbulent, all at once. I asked her about the ritual of bathing in the river, and she said that the force of life flows through the river.

"So it's a symbol and more than a symbol?" I asked her.

"Sure," she said, indifferently.

Later, I attended one part of a lecture series, where the speaker, a scholar on the Mahabharata and a monk, read from the text and held discussions. During the question and answer session, a woman and the monk expressed profound ambivalence to whether or not "Man created God" or "God created Man." The end, they felt, was the same.

After the discussion, I approached the monk, and we talked a little, and I asked him if he took the Mahabharata literally--if it was true.

"Is Dickens or Chekov true?" he asked.
"No," I said. "Is the Mahabharata? Was Krishna a real person?" He considered for a moment.
"I just love the character!" he said.

Another way that the kind of questions we ask about religion in the West are irrelevent to Hindus is the question of mono- vs poly-theism. I remember a discussion in my 9th grade World Civilization class about whether Hindus belived in many gods, or if the 33 crore which actually just manifestations of one big God. I asked this question to a couple of people, and they just didn't really know what to do with it. I don't mean to sound too Confuscian about it, but the answer is that there are both one and many gods, and why are you asking me this?

It's this kind of thing, the shape of the rhetoric surrounding religion, that I think speaks more to the consciousness of Hindus than anything else. Christians and Hindus don't just believe different things about the supernatural. They approach the supernatural from different angles, with different interests and needs. I'll have to ponder longer what this disinterest in pinning down truth to simple, statable maxims means, but it's certainly intriguing.
*******

Another thing about the people I've spent time with here is that they display a fair distaste for Islam. Immediately, I'd like to qualify this statement. Bengalis also express distaste for other ethnic groups, like Punjabis and Marwatis, and while you don't hear about violence between those groups as you do between Hindus and Muslims, I think those kinds of resentments may be different in degree more than in kind. Furthermore, the people at Vikramshila spend most of their energy on working with Muslim communities, who, thanks to the way the partitions of Bengal and then India played out, are among the most impoverished in India. I don't want to make a big stink about people who say slightly insensitive things about Muslims, and then make it their life's work to help people who are Muslim.

But that distaste is there. I've heard several people say that such and such a person is difficult to talk to because he is "so orthodox!" Others have claimed that much of the discrimination against women in India can be attributed to Islam.

"Did you know women cannot enter the mosque?" I was asked, as if I was being let in on a terrible secret. What's weird is that, when I ask Hindus about gender discrimination amongst Hindus, people say "oh no, men and women are far more equal." A couple people have told me that the purdah, or seclusion, of women, is a practice predominantly of Muslims.

But I've read in two unrelated sources that, in fact, the purdah is common amongst high-caste rural Hindus, and that it is immitated to the degree possible by lower caste families. Dowry crimes, which often involve dousing women with kerosene and lighting them on fire, are relatively rare, in the scheme of things--but the practice occurs among Hindus. Finally, and most distressingly, rural women in India, regardless of religion, work far more than their husbands, and yet have hardly any access to economic resources. This is not to claim that Hindus or Muslims have a leg up in terms of achieving gender equality. It just seems clear to me that no faith should be claiming the moral high ground.

I've also heard people say that Muslims are incredible sensitive to any discussion about the demographics of India, like the fact that nearly all the Bangledeshis who migrate into India are Muslim, and that therefore the population of India is becoming slowly more Muslim. This is politically incorrect, I was told--Muslims say that this is the kind of rhetoric used to discriminate against them.

They say this because it's true; the Hindu nationalist movement, led by the conservative BJP, has long tried to return India to its "true" Hindu origins. Claims of a Muslim invasion are part of their arsenal. If I were Muslim, I'd also be sensitive to people saying things like, "There are so many Muslims coming into this country! Watch out!" And this is assuming that the Hindus I've spoken to haven't exaggerated the depth of Muslim sensitivity.

I was given an insight into the attitudes of Hindus towards Muslims in the car ride back from Mushidabad. In the car were te driver, who didn't speak English, and three Vikramshila people. We were discussing religion, and someone said, "Well you know, almost all the Muslims in India are converts anyway."

This seemed to me to be totally bogus; there has been a large Muslim presence in India since the time of the Moghuls; the Taj Mahal was built by Muslims; all the Bangledeshis who have immigrated to India since Independence are Muslim. How could "most" or even a large proportion of Indian Muslims be converts. I expressed this skepticism, and all three of the English-speaking Hindus in the car emphatically agreed the original statement.

"Many of these families have only been Muslim for seven, eight, or nine generations!" someone said.

I explained that, to me, a "convert" is a person who "converts" to a religion during their life time. My three companions scoffed at this quaint idea.

The issue here is that Hinduism accepts no converts at all.

"It's really more of a way of life," it was explained to me. There's no date of founding, and many of the things today considered essential to Hinduism (like the awful caste system which continues to be a source of social and economic inequality) came to it relatively late in the life of the Indus valley civilization. To a religion that's more than three thousand years old, it looks like Islam is kind of faking it--the same with Christianity. When I pushed the issue, the three people in the car agreed that every single Muslim, Christian, and Bhuddist is a convert.

"And anyway," Shubhra said, "The Indians who convert to Islam are usually at the bottom of the caste system, and have suffered because of it. Islam is an escape from that social inequality." The implication was that such converts were, more or less, in it for the money.

"But if it's the case that poor and low-caste Indians convert to Islam because Hinduism has served them badly," I asked, "isn't it also the case that rich and high-caste Indians stay Hindu because it has served them well?"

Shubhra sat quietly, gazing out the window.

"I'm not going to respond to that," she said, laughing. "Now you're arguing just to argue."

And there we are back to Marx. The economic, social, and relgious lives of people in India and elsewhere are inextriably intertwined. And while religion certainly influences behavior, it also seems to me that religion is the way we talk about things that are important to us.

This isn't to say that Hinduism or Islam or any other religion isn't central to the identities of many people here.I've listened to several people tell me about the deep, personal importance they place on religion, and how such faith has been a guiding light in their lives. I'd write more about it, but these people talked to me more or less in confidence, so I feel uncomfortable putting it up on the ol' internet. Furthermore, the Muslim practice of praying five times a day made a lot of sense to me when I was in Bigha, and the farmers took rest from the grueling work of farming to have a few minutes to center themselves, as well as to sit in a cool and shady place. Suffice it to say, many (most?) people here do make their religion an intergral part of their lives.

Anyway, that's all I have for now on religion. Pujie, you can now have the last word.

Are you want conversation?

I spent the last three days in Bigha, a village of 5,000 people set upon the Bengali plateau that stretches from the ocean and jungles in the south to the Himalayas in the North. I've been assigned to write about the community-run school that Vikramshila started 11 years back. I was accompanied by Atanu, the only male member of Vikramshila senior staff, and just about my favorite person I've met. He's easy to laugh, and puts people immediately at ease. We took a train to Bhordhumon, the capitol of the district, and then hired a car to take us the last 40km.

It's as flat as Indiana. The terraced rice paddies and small vegetable plots, in pleasantly irregular shapes bordered by narrow grassy paths, extend to the horizon in every direction, interrupted by dense clusters of pacca buildings and palm trees.

In Bigha itself, narrow dirt roads wind between one and two story structures, built intimately close together; 5 or 6 man-made ponds provide homes for ducks, and water for washing and bathing and ox scrubbing. I stayed in the relatively large two story house that is Atanu's ancestral home. It has an outhouse and a hand-pump for water. In the walled courtyard, the two women who tend the property hang the clothes to dry while the two dogs wander and sleep in the shade. The whole thing is pretty darn picturesque. The sky is huge, and the air is clear. This year, when the monsoon seems to have avoided West Bengal temporarily for a lay-over in Washington, the dry mud streets are wonderfully pleasant on bare feet.

On Tuesday morning, after visiting the school, a few men from the village (I'm not really sure who they all are, actually) accompanied Atanu and I over to a neighboring village, just a mile away. It's significantly larger than Bigha, with a market and the kind of street vendors you see in Kolkata. We rode our bikes along the dirt and gravel roads elevated a meter above the paddies. The neighboring village was having a festival to the god Krishna. I was promised an explanation of everything, but the opportunity never came. I have to say, anyway, that I find explanations of religious philosophy and tradition pretty boring. Much more interesting to me is the way those ideas get played out--what people do in the name of the name of religion, how they see it affecting their lives.

As we rode in the village, we heard drums and bells being played up the lane, just out of sight behind a small crowd. We parked our bikes and followed. An older fellow named Pochu joined us, greeting Atanu and I warmly. Soon, we saw the train of drummers exiting a building and marching up the street away from us. We followed along with the crowd. As we curved around the vendors selling cheap plastic trinkets and fine Bengali sweets, Krishna's chariot, white and blue and pink, came into view. It was a wooden structure, about 20 feet tall, clearly build without any serious goal of transportation. A statue of Krishna, painted gold, adorned the driver's seat.

The drummers proceeded to the front of the chariot, arranged at the intersection of two thin streets. The other men I was with suggested that I take pictures from a position directly in front of the chariot--I said thank you, and continued to take pictures of the festival-goers, the small child dancing exuberantly between two of the drummer, his mother unsuccessfully trying to prevent him from becoming an inconvenience with a smile. They insisted, so I tried to oblige them.

After a few minutes, I heard, down the street, a new music, a rockous, joyful ensemble of drums with some sort of melodic instrument guiding the beat. I started to walk around the chariot to proceed back towards the entrance to the village. I had just got a glimpse of the scene--a few musicians and a throng of dancing men, marching slowly down the street in front of a cart fitted with an amplifier, two loudspeakers, and a car battery. The melodic instrument, it turns out, was a cheap casio keyboard set to "Mysterious Eastern Instrument." The player was holding the keyboard under his left arm and playing with two fingers of his right hand. The beat was thick and contagious.

Within moments, though, two of the men I had come with ran up behind me, obviously distressed.

"Please, just you stay here!" one of the guys, a young college student with a hip center part in his hair, said to me. He looked sincere and concerned. I smiled and continued to edge towards the festival. Finally, the Pochu asked me to follow him.

"I show you some things," he said. I agreed, despite the fact that the dancing was by far the most interesting thing I'd seen thus far. We walked back, past the worshippers at the big wooden structure, up a slight hill, and around the corner to a tall shed.

"This is where the chariot lives." Krishna spends days other than festival day beneath a tin roof support by 4 wooden posts. We stood, awkwardly, in the garage of God's departed chariot, for about a minute, until I said thank you and started to walk back toward the infectious music that was still echoed off the mud walls. The younger fellow, looking concerned again, asked me,

"Are you like the music?" I spent a fair deal of time with this fellow during my stay in Bigha. One main impediment to our communication is his grammatical technique of starting every question in the form of "Are you." As in, "Are you see the village?" or "Are you eat mango?" What's difficult is that such a sentence might mean, "Do you habitually eat mango?" or "Have you eaten mango before" or "Would you like a mango?" Indeed, he uses this structure for all of these things.

(At this point, it would be prudent to point out that I don't speak his language, and as I'm in his country, the burden of this communication dilemma rests firmly on me. I only mention this to accentuate the comedy of manners that is to follow.)

"Are you like the music?"
"Yes, I was enjoying the music very much," I replied, answering the question I figured he intended to ask.
"Are you enjoy?" I apparently had not answered the right question, or at least not the right way.
"Yes, I enjoyed it."
"The music is for the darankas."
"For what?"
"For Drunkards. This is why you are not enjoy the music." I laughed.
"But I was enjoying it. Very much." He laughed at me, saying "ok ok ok" dismissively. I laughed with him and headed down to the music, figuring I could demonstrate my preference better with actions than words.

Pochu and the young man followed me anxiously. I stood behind the loudspeaker, smiling, watching the men dancing. The young guy came up behind me, telling me that it was dangerous to be so close. I said thank you. Orun, one of my hosts, pointed at one of the men dancing, and said to me, "You are a drunkard."

"I am a drunkard?" I asked, teasing him. He blushed.

One of the dancers caught sight of me and began beckoning me into the crowd. They were dancing in a manner both uninhibited and undisciplined, so I felt fairly well-qualified to participate. After a moment's consideration, I strode into the crowd and began dancing, head down, arms up, to the great delight of the drunken men who quickly surrounded me. The moment was fun and awkward. I felt like I, and the men around me, all understood that I was joining them as an outsider, but the recognition of this felt somehow accepting. I was throwing my body around to the music, they were throwing their bodies around to the music, and there was solidarity in that.

Five seconds later, the Pochu had his farmer's hands firmly around my arm, pulling me forcibly out of the crowd, down a street, and into a bedroom in his house, where his sister-in-law immediately produced some mango and sweets and a diet coke. The man began fanning me. Everyone looked contented.

At this point, I am very confused. Twice now, I have been sternly ushered from a scene which I clearly found entertaining and interesting, to a scene of intense boredom. Pochu, too, realized that there was some discrepancy between what I wanted and what he thought I wanted. He said,

"The language problem is big problem." I smiled and agreed emphatically. It was the first time all day I felt like Pochu and I had actually communicated.

Compounding the absurdity, after taking a bite of the mango (because, why not?) two of the other men in my entourage ran into the room, inquiring as to whether I wanted to dance more. There followed a quick discussion as to whether my health would tolerate such activity. Finally, someone asked me if I wanted to go back out. I said I did, and everyone sprang to their feet, affectionately pushing me back in the street, around the corner to the revelers. I was content to watch and listen from a little way up the hill, but the men behind me were dedicated to correcting the wrong they had committed. I was thrust back into the crowd of dancers, but this time with a line of chaperones watching over the festivities like parents at dance for Mormon teenagers.

I felt intensely awkward nearly instantaneously, and, aware of the stir my presence was creating, I elected to leave the dancing to find Atanu and tell him I was ready to leave.

******

On the evening of the second day in the village, Atanu told me about the river 5 kilometers from Bigha. I suggested a morning bike ride, and he agreed. Unfortunately, a change in plans made Atanu unable to come--and I was again put in the care of the three men who had accompanied me to the festival.

We departed at 5:30. The sun had already crept above the horizon, but it looked unusually large, and land and sky to the east were flooded with light like an over-exposed photograph. To the west, the paddies were a luminous shade of green. It was just cool enough to push hard, and I found myself continually pushing ahead of my hosts. We finally came to the end of the road; the hosts paid a nearby rice farmer a few rupees to watch our bikes as we trudged along the paths between the fields, to a rise in the land and a clump of trees a half mile away.

It was a wonderful time, despite an almost complete inability to communicate. The young man continually asked me questions I did my best to interpret. In a tiny village of 35 families, a mile from the road, and without any electricity or phone, the young man asked me,

"Are you [unintelligible verb] the goat?" I said yes, assuming he was asking me if I liked the goat, or saw the goat. He smiled, mischievously, and ran over to clutch the small black animal around the belly. He looked to me for approval. I waved at him to put the goat down--my presence was already making a scene. No need to manhandle their farm animals.

The most awkward moment of the trip was a stop at the village's school, a shelter with a thatch roof and no walls under which the young children sat on a tarp on the ground with their two women teachers. We walked upon the scene, and my guides asked to fetch me a stool, firmly told me to "Sit now" and began fanning me. The young children stared at me.

"Take rest for 5 minutes," I was encouraged.
"Do you want to rest?" I asked. The young man said yes. "Well, then I'm going to walk around. Tell me when you're ready to go." I stood up. He immediately followed.

After a couple of completely pointless boat rides across the small river, which were observed by children from the village atop the river bank, we began walking back to our bicycles. We left the village and crested a small hill crowned by a wide tree with thick, welcoming, horizontal branches. I kicked off my shoes, and without my hosts realizing what I was doing, I grabbed the lowest branch and began hoisting my self up to a perch 25 feet off the ground.

The three men became increasingly worried as I ascended, laughing nervously and circling the tree to keep me in view.

"Sam? Ok, now, please get down now." I spent a few minutes gazing out over the landscape before yielding to their increasingly urgent demands.

I haven't been able to figure out why they were so worried about me--are they so concerned about all visitors, or just white people? In any case it was a good adventure, and I managed to be just obstinate enough to have a good time without ruffling too many feathers.

******

I've heard experts on adolescence say that what kids really want is to feel normal; I've heard other experts speculate that what teenagers actually want is to feel special. I think these people have found two sides of the same coin--the thing kids (and, I think, people in general) really want is the ability to control their anonymity. No one wants to be singled out when they don't know the answer, or don't want to risk embarrassment; and no one wants their voice smothered when they have something crucial they want to say.

It's this particular feature of huamn personality that makes me so uncomfortable with the kind of hospitality I was explosed to in Bigha. It made me feel like I was constantly on stage, and forever unable to escape attention and fall into anonymity. I can hear Rachel Lord saying at this point that my discomfort probably had something to do with how American's hate to recognize class; and that this hospitality constantly served as a reminder of the divide between me, a rich American kid, and these rural Bengalis. But I'm not sure these are different things; it's my social status, provided by my whiteness and my wealth, that makes me a constant source of attention here, and makes it impossible for me to fade into the background.

Another part of the failure to communicate came, I think, from the fact that Bengalis and Americans think about hospitality in completely different ways. I figure hospitality is really the ability to anticipate another's wants and needs. Part of the communication failure between me and these extremely well-meaning men was that they anticipated my needs incorrectly. They presumed that someone from American, used to the material comforts of affluence, would avoid swimming in the pond, or walking barefoot down the road.

But it's not just that the details of hospitality were slightly awry from Sam's perspective; it's that the whole apporach was alien. In Passage to India (it's a really good book, ok?) Forster writes that Indians often confused hospitality for intimacy; and I certainly felt that in the village. I also felt a kind of restrictive concern--constant inquiry into my health, my comfort, my appetite. Some of this was related to skin color, but I also think Bengalis are used to a more intense interference in a guest's well-being.

And finally, without the aid of a common language, it's very difficult to perforate these intense cultural barriers.

So all these things--social stratification, cultural difference, language barrier--contributed to a constant sense of a great divide between me and the Bengali's who were my hosts.

*****

I've told the story of my trip to Bigha somewhat backwards to preserve for a rhetorical reason. On the first day, Atanu took me to the farmers' meeting. When we had all sat down in the mango garden outside the school, Atanu asked me if I had any questions to ask the farmers. I was somewhat unprepared, which led me to do the smartest thing I've done this whole trip.

"No," I said. "I'd like to just listen to them talk for a while." Atanu said fine, and agreed to translate what was being said. The men initially discussed what to do about pesticide use, and how to best implement crop rotation, and continued planning their credit cooperative. Finally, after 30 minutes or so, one of them asked me a question, in Bangla. Atanu translated.

"He wants to know what the agricultural system is like in your country." I came up with a response, and the questions kept coming, from the obscure to the political.

"What are road conditions like?" "Do you have tamarind trees in your country?" "What do you think about Bin Laden?"

After a while, I asked a question about their organic farming practices, which Atanu graciously translated. We went on like this for a couple hours. Finally, it cooled off enough for us to head over to the soccer field, where we played a spirited game of 6 on 6. When we were all suitably tired, we sat down on the grass in a large circle, and the questions kept coming. One man, a member of the local communist party (the communists have been in power in West Bengal since the 70's) told me his theory about Bush and Bin Laden planning 9-11, and the US-India nuclear deal being a mere front for the establishment of US military bases on the subcontinent to control China. Most amazing, I think, was that when I tactfully but directly disagreed with him, it was fine. We eventually wandered off politics to other topics.

This, I understand, is a important tradition of rural Bengalis--to sit and chat in the evening before the late supper. It was also a moment of profound communication. I am quite different from these men. And yet, sitting in the circle, talking about those differences, made them seem really fairly minor. When it came down to it, we all liked playing sports, and drinking tea, and sitting around chatting for no particular purpose. When we had a venue where our differences (my differences, really) could be address directly and simply, recognized and dismissed; when the roles of host and guest could be subjugated to the roles of conversationalists; when we could sit and feel the tiredness in our chests and legs in the same way; it made me feel that there is an essential, universal human core that can be relied upon to direct our sense of what is good and fair.

What's a good blog without some self-depracating anecdotes? (or, a confession)

Those of you who know me are aware that, sometimes, I lose my temper. As Mr. Daniel David Crabtree once said, “Sam can huff and puff with the best of them.” True enough. And while I maintain that I actually huffed and puffed very little in the tale I put forth below, I admit that a more serene person would have acted differently.

On Monday I’ll be traveling west a few hours to the village of Bigha, where Vikramshila has helped run a school. My assignment is to document how the school has become a centre of community life—how the children monitor the health and pH of the pond, and care for it accordingly; how a geology project led to the farmers deciding to adopt organic agricultural practices; how older boys who dropped out of school have formed a group to discuss newspaper articles. It sounds like a fantastic experiment, and one that should be modeled elsewhere.

When Shubhradi, the director of Vikramshila, was making the preliminary arrangements for my trip, she discovered that the police in Bigha actually want foreign tourists to register when they visit the countryside. The presence of an ISS camp in the district compounded their worries.(ISS is the Pakistani version of the CIA, which fans the flames of communal discontent). They asked that I come down to the Tourist Registration office on Thursday afternoon this week to see about getting the necessary paperwork.

On Thursday morning, I was attending a conference of an NGO at the five-star Taj Bengal hotel. Shubhradi wanted me to come for a few hours to steal their delicious food and listen to the big wigs of the “aid business” describe the dire needs of the poor. Irony at its finest. When the time came, Kanupriya walked meto the front desk and asked the bellboy to call me a cab. He said sure, and KanuPriya went back into the meeting. A few minutes later, the bellboy told me to stand out front. A few minutes after than, when no car had come, he pointed me to the busy road out front, and told me to walk out there and call a cab myself. I rolled my eyes, and walked out the ornate gates of the Taj Bengal.

Once on the road, I approached an idling cab, and told the driver where I wanted to go. He avoided my eyes and said, rather forcefully, “No,” while beckoning to another man walking up behind me on the sidewalk. After walking down the road for a few minutes, I finally managed to find a willing driver. When he dropped me off, he pulled the standard Kolkata cab driver trick of insisting he didn’t have any change. In a rush, I didn’t have time to protest, so I over-paid and got out.

Sutapadi, who I worked on a report with for a good long while, was waiting for me at the Tourist Registration office. We walked into the building, and had a seat at a table just outside the glass partitions that separate the office’s employees from its customers. The woman across the table said hello to me, and knew enough English to ask me to see my passport, and why I was in the country, and when I would be leaving. She was a smallish woman, maybe 50 years old, with glasses and the grim, serious expression all too common amongst bureaucrats. She then started speaking rapidly in Bengali to Sutapadi. I understood enough to know that she was saying that in any town I visited in India, in every neighborhood I stayed in, I was to report to the local police station, to give them my location and my living situation, as well as a vague itinerary. This, to me, was starting to sound like a big hassle, and one that I had done without for 5 weeks. It was also starting to sound weird—why hadn’t the State Department website mentioned this to me, nor the customs people when I arrived?

I promise to record the conversation I had with the woman across the table with as much accuracy as I can muster. I also promise that my tone was courteous, and my volume normal. Later, Shubhradi asked me if my body language was threatening. I don't really remember too well, but I think not. Assertive, I think, but calm.

I leaned forward in my seat.

“Is this voluntary or is this something I need to do?” I asked.

“It’s the rule,” she replied.

“So it’s the law?”

“It’s the rule.”

“Can you tell me why you want this information?”

This, as I was assured later, was not a good question to ask.

“Don’t ask me why, it’s the rule.” Sutapadi, my companion, began waving her hand at me, and saying, in a half-yell, “Calm down, calm down!”

“I’m perfectly calm, thank you,” I said to her.

“Don’t ask me why,” the woman across the counter said, and started repeating it, and speaking loudly in Bengali to her superior across the room, who looked up blankly, and then went back to what he had been doing. The woman across the table continued this rant, gesturing pointedly with my passport, until she finally decided she should give me some sort of answer, but she addressed it to Sutapadi in a completely dismissive tone.

“Well, what if you [something in Bengali I didn’t catch] abducted? Police need to know.”

“So it’s for my own good?” The woman started saying, “Don’t ask me why,” again, and yelling to the guy across the room. It was obvious that I needed to back off or I wasn’t going to learn anything.

“Ok, now, I’m ok giving you this information. I will give you the information. I just want to know what you’re going to do with it," I said, in a tone of renewed reasonableness.

“Don’t ask me why.”

“I’m not asking you why, I’m just asking you how this system works.” She began talking to everyone but me, repeating her trademark phrase. Sutapadi continued encouraging me to calm down. I had had about enough of the interaction. A minute passed without me saying anything. Finally, she put down my passport. I picked it up and quietly put it in my backpack.

“Sutapadi, do we need anything else here?”

“Calm down, calm down.” I was feeling pretty frustrated at this point. I also knew what this woman wanted me to do, and since it was going to require a return trip anyway, I figured there wasn’t much point in hanging around. I stood up.

“Sutapadi, I’m going back to the Taj Bengal, OK?” She said “OK, fine,” and I walked out of the building.

(As a side note, it turns out that Sutapadi actually hadn’t been listening to me, and thought I was going to wait for her in the lobby or something.)

The only real outcome of this whole thing is that it has provided endless entertainment to the folks in the office. Shubhradi says she’s glad to finally have seen me “act my age,” as it was the first time I came anywhere close to losing my cool since I’ve been here.

Everyone was pretty perplexed that this interaction had frustrated me. “It’s the government!” people have been saying. “You’re not supposed to know why! You just wait for them to tell you what to do, and then you do it. You Americans!” I’m a little reluctant to write the whole thing off as a lesson in comparative politics, since I imagine that the folks back home will also be a little surprised that I didn’t do the calm, practical thing—smile and nod, do whatever she said. This is good advice, and advice which I'm sure a few of my readers (Hi Mom!) will send me via e-mail upon reading this post. All I can say is that it was one of those moments where you have an emotional reaction that you'd rather not have, but there's not anything you can do about it. Every bone in my body told me, "leave."

The end of the story is that I’m going to register with the police in the village where I’m going. But nobody here at the office thinks I actually need to register with the police in my neighborhood, ha ha, and isn’t the government funny?

In case it's not obvious from the tone of this post, I feel pretty conflicted about the whole event. On the one hand, I feel that the woman really was behaving irrationally and disrespectfully. I have a hard time imagining that I'd feel provoked if I and the woman acorss the table were to switch places. On the other hand, I feel embarassed, as I always do, about losing my temper. Whenever such things happen to me, I always end up feeling like I have a little less control over the enigmatic Self than I'd like to admit.

Give the Readers What They Want: Long, Unfunny Analyses of Linguistic Politics

Before leaving for India, I had a lot of conversations with people about what I was going to do here. One common concern I heard was about the language barrier; would I be able to communicate with the people I was associating with?

My response was to say, a bit dismissively, “Oh, everybody who’s educated speaks English.” This has proved to be more or less true. India’s educated, corporate middle class speaks English very well. But I had no idea just how fascinating and complex the language politics of India would be.

To say that English is one of the two national languages doesn’t begin to explain its cultural importance. The first time I visited the Lake Centre, where I play with five teenagers a few times a week, I told the kids I was learning Bengali. (It’s coming along, by the way, although not too quickly. Given that the people at work and at home are all essentially native speakers, there’s not a crushing incentive to get on the Bangla ball.) The kids’ response was a bit sad. Swarupa, who’s conversant in English, but not much more, said, “Bengali is a very bad language.” Surprised, I said, “I think it’s a very beautiful language.”

“No, no,” she told me. “English is a better language.”

It’s worth noticing that all the billboards for cell phones and new cars are all in English; and CNN-IBN, a national TV news station, has all of its programming in English, cricket updates and all. Furthermore, the ‘best’ schools are all English-medium schools. The national college entrance exams are in English. English is at once a symbol of affluence and social status, and a means of acquiring it. No wonder Swarupa wishes English were here mother tongue; Bengali is the language of the poor, while English is the language of camera phone users.

I can’t stress how weird I think this phenomenon is. Consider the debate about the national language in the US. I’ll just put it out there; I think it’s fascist to try and control the way in which people communicate. But at least, in the US, English is the language most people speak. In West Bengal, English has to be the 4th most common language, behind Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu. And yet, as it all states in India, there is an agreement that if you speak English, it means you are better, smarter, and more important.

Of course, for the people who do speak English, there’s a big incentive to protect the privileged status of the minority language. As long as academic institutions function in English, road signs are written in Roman script, and the advertisements for luxury items are in English, there is a real barrier to gaining social status, political clout, and economic power.. These three are finite resources, and so it’s a game of gaining monopoly power. I spoke to an anthropologist for a while when we were riding around Kolkata, and she actually wrote her thesis on this topic. “It’s the colonial hangover,” she told me. How do you fight that kind of discrimination, the kind that’s no more than a social agreement?

Furthermore, many of the new service sector jobs (like handling American companies’ customer service calls) are only available to those with high ability in English. English is part of the national strategy for economic development. To buck the trend and emphasize the mother tongues of children in education is to deny them a path to affluence. On the other hand, the typical Indian doesn’t have much access to those jobs in the first place. But the question remains—is it economically just to prevent someone from buying a lottery ticket, even if the odds are bad?

But what makes English in India even more intriguing is the way Indian speakers of English think about it. KanuPriya (who appears in episode 2, I think, when she makes me go buy sandals) told me that while Bengali is her ‘mother tongue,’ English is her ‘first language.’ I’d never hear anyone differentiate between the two. What she means is that her entire education occurred in English, from primary school to her undergraduate and graduate studies in the US. All her academic vocabulary is in English. She is quintessentially bilingual. When she is talking with Bengali-English speaker, she will (and this is typical) switch back and forth between the two languages, often in mid-sentence. Her Bengali is punctuated with copious amounts of English vocabulary—and not just because the Bengali language has absorbed so many words from the British (bicycle is ‘saikel,’ office is ‘ophish, etc). Her switching occurs spontaneously, using whatever word comes to mind first, regardless of language.

For two languages as different as English and Bengali, this is a bit surprising. For example, English, like all European languages, is a Subject-Verb-Object language; Bangla, like most (if not all) Asian languages is Subject-Object-Verb. Using foreign nouns isn’t to hard to imagine. But even English verbs get stuck into Bengali sentences, aided by the use of two words (kora, meaning ‘to do’ or ‘to make’ and hoya meaning ‘to get’ or ‘to become’) which are used as super-helping verbs. “Communiate korche” (meaning “communicating”) would be just as common to KanuPriya’s speech as would the Bengali synonym.

English isn’t the only linguistic way that the British made their mark. Shubhradi told me the other day about the origin of Urdu and Hindi. Prior to British involvement in the subcontinent, no such language existed. It wasn’t until the British started organizing armies of Indians that Urdu/Hindi developed as a amalgamation of various tribal dialects. Urdu/Hindi (originally the same language) was the common language of the soldiers, and it spread rapidly.

But the British saw this new common language as a possible tool for Indian unification. There’s a great line in “Passage to India,” where one stuffy British officer remarks “caste, or something of the sort, will keep them from coming together” to oppose British rule. The British came to power in India more or less by playing one Moghul king against another. Spurring divisiveness was a tool of conquest. To restrict the power of this new language, the British carefully advised Muslims to adopt a Persian/Arabic script to maintain their tradition, while they suggested that the Hindus use a Sanskrit-based alphabet, to preserve their cultural heritage, or something. Gradually, the two languages began to adopt more and more words from their respective “ancestral” languages, and drifted slightly apart. Today, a speaker of Hindi and a speaker of Urdu can understand one another entirely: but the two languages are held separate by deep religious and cultural chasms, dug by the British conquistadores.

Ultimately, the British were right to worry about a common language uniting Indians together. The language the freedom fighters eventually adopted was English—the initial home-rule newspapers were in English, and it was English-language education that provided Indian activists to the writings of the Enligthenment thinkers which they used to oppose British rule. It seems like so often, the colonized must resort to the language (both linguistic and rhetorical) of the colonizers in order to confront them; consider Dr. King quoting the Jefferson and Shakespeare on the steps of the Lincoln memorial—he picked the Lincoln memorial, for god’s sake!

In India, the residue of such a strategy was to polarize the nation with the language needed to liberate it. On one level, you can’t mind it too much as a tourist—even the average cab driver knows enough to tell you how much the fare was, using English numbers. But it’s a bit frightening to watch this footprint of British rule fly by you in every single conversation.

A good day in Cal

It was the hottest it has been. We sat sweltering in the office beneath our fans, laughing at the futility of struggle, giving in and becoming limp rags. Shubhradi and I left the office around 5:30 today to run a quick errand. I work in a room with a bunch of windows, but as it's shaded by neighboring buildings, I hadn't noticed that the sky had turned completely pink, from horizon to horizon. When we stepped outside, everything was lit in a radiant shade of pink--from the asphalt to the rickshawallas, from the stray dogs to the road-side tea shops. I remarked on it to Shubhra, and she told me that it's common in the summer. I'd noticed it before, but today was by far the most striking.

In the country, she told me, this time of day has a particular significance. Arranged marriages are well and alive here, and it's the custom for the mother-in-law and father-in-law to be to meet the girl. It bodes well, then, for the girl's parents, to wait until the light is perfect, and can illuminate the scene to their daughter's marital advantage. You do begin to feel that this time of day has mysterious powers. The overwhelming sensation I had until dark was that I was seeing things as they were supposed to be seen, and that the rest of the time, we survive with only mediocre light.

Shubhradi then dropped me off at her favorite bookstore, Seagulls, and I browsed for an hour. It's a beautiful building--completely open, up to the second floor, with a narrow spiral staircase connecting the two uninterupted rows of shelves. The selection was somewhat limited, and completely out of order except for vague segmentation by subject--but that made for fantastic browsing. I picked up a couple of books on women and urban development, and put down ten others I had flipped through. As I was checking out, I noticed a flyer of a reading of a new play, with a discussion afterwards involving a Bengali author, whose book "Those Days," I'm reading right now.

Then, having spent all my pocket change, I walked the long route back home. It still hasn't cooled off very much, and when it's so sticky, you feel as though the bus fumes stick to you when you cross the street. But I walked past dozens of sidewalk book shops and eateries and slums where little babies were running around, some laughing and some crying, with nothing but a string for a good luck charm running around their waists. And the adults in the slums were all sitting round pots of tea, or woks where samosas were frying. As I passed through the park, all the couples were cuddling under the Banyan trees, and the police were performing their usual act of benign neglect.

In other Indian cities, such heavy petting is strongly persecuted by law enforcement. Here, there's a casual air, especially in the parks. I like to think that the police fancy themselves defenders of the peace and the public's right to have a romantic place to snuggle.

Maybe it was the pink light, but Kolkata was beautiful tonight, and I'm happy, and I'm grateful to be here.

Conclusive Photographic Evidence of the Author's Present Location

This is just a housekeeping post: if you'd like to see the photos I've posted on snapfish.com, please send me an e-mail at smccormally@gmail.com. I need to invite everyone individually, and I'm not sure all who cares enough to read this blog. So let me know.

Globaliziation means travellings 5,000 miles and still living on the same block as a Domino's

Sometimes globalization can be a good friend to an American tourist, even if he claims to resent it a lot of the time. At other times, however, Americanization hasn’t quite taken hold in India’s third biggest city. So, what exactly can you get in Kolkata with regard to American accoutrements?

You Can Get: Pizza

I’m recovering from being a little sick, and last night I was in the mood for something extremely familiar, so I went over an ordered myself a “Veg Extravaganza” for too many Rupees. It was ok, but for the record, the Domino’s on National Rd. W in Richmond beats the pants of the one in Jodphur Park. I can’t say I’m a fan of corn on my pizza. A variety of other pizza joints litter the northern cities. Even Papa John’s has announced that they’re going to make a foray into the Indian market.

You Can’t Get: McDonalds

I know, right? McDonalds is in every other Indian city, and they advertise their McVeggie heavily on TV, and they have a whole line of McTandoor Chicken Sandwiches, but Kolkata for some reason hasn’t sparked the interest of the big wigs over at Golden Arches Headquarters.

You Can Get: A Cell Phone

Upon landing up at the office, it seemed to me like cell phone usage wasn’t just possible—it was mandatory. The second I arrived (well, the second after they made me buy sandals), the ladies at Vikramshila provided me with an unused handset and marched me over to a little hole in the wall shop, where they gave me some forms and a sim card, and told me to get a copy of my passport and proof of residence in Kolkata to them the next day.

You Can’t Get: A Good Cup of Coffee

You want tea? No problem. There are 3 tea shops on every block, little street-venders that serve wonderful, freshly brewed, wonderful smelling stuff in small ceramic cups that are thrown out after one customer. The tea is great. You want coffee? Don’t bother. They have a kind of instant coffee, but my bourgeois upbringing has made me intolerant of it.

You Can Get: Any Drug You Want

Kolkata is littered with “Druggists” and “Pharmacists” who sit behind counters and dish out antibiotics without a prescription. As a result, everybody is your own personal physician, throwing packets of pills at you willy-nilly the moment you get the slightest bit sick. It makes one glad that one has doctor parents that one can call for a consultation.

You Can’t Get: Toilet Paper

I should clarify; you can get toilet paper, in the sense that it is sold within the city limits. But it is invariably never around when you need it: for example, when you need to poop. Literally, people don’t use it. Mr. Chatterjee, sweet fellow that he is, actually bought me some when I arrived. However, when his wife came home, she set things straight and promptly hid it away. I’m pretty intrigued by her thought process here. Was it, “They can’t actually use that stuff in the US! That’s absurd!” Or was it more, “Not under my roof, he won’t!” Maybe it was just too gross for her to see the roll of toilet paper sitting there in her bathroom. Anyway, I certainly wasn’t consulted, and, as a result, I’ve been making do with the Indian left-hand method.

(Remember—this is a country that eats with its fingers, but only ever with the fingers on the right hand.)

I don’t tell you these things to bemoan the lack of material comforts here in Kolkata—I am, on the whole, extremely comfortable, even in the heat. But it would be flatly false to suggest that, every once in a while, I wouldn’t really like a burrito from La Mexicana, or a bottle of Gatorade.

Don't get sick, or someone might try to help you!

My prolonged absence from this blog, dear readers, has not been due to a prolonged illness, as you might suspect from the title of this post. I was sick--the shits, vomiting, the usual--but, mercifully, it passed within 24 hours, and now I'm back on track.

But I have been away from a computer. This last week, I went with Vikramshila to Mashirabad, a province of West Bengal about 4 hours north of Kolkata. Mashirabad, it turns out, was the capital of India under the Moghuls, and so the area is littered with impressive mosques and palaces and tales of political intrigue. One day, I rode around in a car drive by a local guy who was very excited to tell us about the area's history. Lots of the stories involved clever deception on the part of the British, who played upon the fraying allegiances of the empire to gain control in India. Others detailed the opulence of the nobility. One powerful queen contracted TB, and heard that by eating the livers of men she could regain her health. So she had a different lover every night, and in the morning had him killed to eat his liver. Who cares if it's true? When you're wandering between mango orchards and silkworm farms, and standing on the banks of a 400 year old lake dug as protection for an 400 year old palace, you do understand why India has a reputation as a mythical place.

The occasion for the trip was a 5-day literacy summer camp headed by Vikramshila and UNICEF. Mashirabad is an extremely poor province. It also borders Bangladesh, which is even poorer; thus, via Mashirabad, India is constantly infused with immigrants looking for work. The border security here is even more laughable than in the US. Furthermore, many of the kids do various kinds of piece-work--a delicate kind of sewing called jute and rolling cheap cigarettes called biris are the most common types.

The idea of the camp was to introduce some new teaching techniques and give the kids some unusual attention. India's education system is extremely top down, on all levels; in the classroom, there is a real "back to basics" emphasis, which keeps any kind of creative, participatory activitiy out in favor of "discipline." In addition, community participation in the schools is basically limited to meetings where the headmaster or district secretary tells mothers, condescendingly, to send their children to school. Vikramhsila and UNICEF were encouraging teaching reading and write by emphasizing that they are, at the root, communicative and expressive processes. So the kids did things like make colorful mind maps with Bengali letters on them, and read stories out loud to one another and then talked about them, and sat in circles with the teacher and the other students. Who knows how much can be done in five days--but it was clear that the children were engaged in learning, and that the teachers had gained some confidence in these wacky new teaching techniques.

Perhaps the most interesting thing I learned in Mashirabad, however, was a lesson in Bengali etiquette, and, in the process, about how I interact with people. Take this interaction for example; this is the second day after I fell sick. The first day all I ate was a bowl of corn flakes. Today, I'm eating some dal (a kind of lentil stew) and rice and a little vegetable curry.

Shubhra, the Vikramshila director and kind of the mom of the operation: Sam, have some more dal with your rice, you're having it so dry.
Sam (chipperly, but feeling like he doesn't really want any more food): No thank you.
Shubhra: But you're having it so dry!
Sam (half-lying here, in part simply trying to get out of taking more food): Actually, I'm still trying to take it a little easy on my stomach, so this is perfect.
Shubhra: You're right. It would have been better to have yoghut and rice [Note: this is Indian comfort food]. You will not eat any more of that. (She beckons over to the waiter. Sam laughs out loud and holds onto his plate and waves the waiters away. Shubhra finally leaves him alone.)

So people can be a little pushy with regard to food. This is particularly obstrusive when I'm ill, and I just want to be comfortable. But, in addition, there is a real miscommunication going on in that last interaction about how Shubhra could best helpe me.

As a secondary note, I should mention that I've developed a reputation as being too polite.

To explain these phenomena there are, I think, two distinct elements of interest:

1. The Bengali "No."

The Bengali "No" does not mean "No." If someone asks you to take food, "No" means, "I'd rather not say I want to take more, but I want to take more." It also means this sometimes in other facets of life. This custom is accompanied by a high amount of pushiness, which is needed to figure out when a "No" is really a no.

This one has been pretty easy for me to figure out. If I say "No" enough times, in the right tone, with the right amount of casual, sincere dismissal, I can usually deny things I don't want. Usually. The rest of the time, I'm stuck.

The other element has to do with something I realize I do, which confuses Indians beyond belief, and that is:

2. My response to the question, "How do you like it?"

A couple of interactions have indicated to me how mysterious my valuations of food items are to Indians. In Shubhra's hotel room, the staff brought tea for everyone else and coffee for me. I was asked how it was, and I answered "It's not great, but I'll put some milk and sugar in it, and it'll be fine." In fact, after I had make these measures, it was still bad, so I had about half the cup. Shubhra then accused me of lying about how the coffee was. I responded that I had not lied--I had said it was fine, but had not wanted to drink it.

Later that day, at dinner, Shubhra ordered a soup, and it sounded like a good idea to me, so I did the same. She got her's first, tasted it, and said it was terrible. When I took a spoonful, I thought it was perfectly palatable, and said as much, but spent most of the meal on the sandwich I had ordered. Again, I was accused of lying. I said that I hadn't lied, which induced Shubhra to exclaim, jovially, "That's it! I give up! I am done trying to figure out what you like!" Actually, I was happy that she had decided to give up--to me, her constant inquiries into how I liked things seemed like intrusions.

But then I had a realization: when I hear the question, "How do you like the soup?", I interpret it to mean, "With regard to the soup, would you like that any action be taken on your behalf?" Taken this way, my responses can be similarly interpreted to mean, "Though I find the soup to be of low culinary quality, I would not want to induce inconvenience on the part of any present member"; or, alternatively, "Though this soup is mediocre, it is fulfilling my current need for simple nourishment, and therefore acceptable." But Shubhra was actually asking for my opinion of the soup! Fancy that! And, when I told this to her, she responded that it would never occur to her to take any response to imply such obligation.

If I have been more polite around here, it's because I've wanted to avoid the tussles that come as a result of the Bengali "No," by heading them off at the root.
What magnified these tussles in my mind this week, and thus lead to my realization of these obstacles to Bengali-American communication, was my illness. When I'm sick, I often just want to be left alone, and not asked to justify what I want to eat or do. In West Bengal, I think, a higher level of intervention in another's personal habits is tolerated than in the US.

All of this leads me to remember a famous saying about honesty: "Let your yeas be yea and your nays be nay."

Sure. Whatever that means.

I Pitched My New Sitcom Idea to NBC, But They Said It Didn't Have Enough Ethnic Flair

Consider a new show, "Life with the Chatterjees."

Cast of Characters:

A White Boy named something really simple, but totally unpronounceable in Bengali--like "Sam" which comes out "Shem," which is coincidentally one of Krishna's names. Sam can't decide if he likes this or not.

Sam is spending the summer in Kolkata, paying the equivalent of $200 for room, home-cooked meals, and personal laundry service. He is living with a Bengali family comprised of...

Mr. Chatterjee.
Mr. Chatterjee welcomes Sam with an air of refined bumblingness. For the first week, when his wife is away in Momboi visiting their middle daughter, Mr. Chatterjee complains, in a tone that is at once serious and self-deprecating, that his wife better come home soon, or the house will fall to pieces. Despite his assertions to the contrary, Mr. Chatterjee is a pretty good cook, and offers Sam far more food than their official agreement calls for.

Mr. Chatterjee, a very wealthy businessman, now runs an export firm, which requires very little of his time. With all his free days, Mr. Chatterjee takes morning walks, visits his elite country club to golf and get served extremely expensive tea, and visit his village. His family has owned an estate in this village, about 2 hours from the city, for 3 generations. When Mr. Chatterjee says that he "loves village life" and Sam asks him what he means, Mr. Chatterjee replies that he loves going for walks in the forest, stopping in with his private assistant, and eating food cooked by their chef.


Mr. Chatterjee, a very friendly fellow, does very little socializing, because he says, "Friends will come if you give them food, but not otherwise. Sometimes I go out to cocktail parties, that sort of thing, but usually I stay home. I say, the less socializing the better, yes?" He pauses, long enough to make Sam think he should respond, and then utters a high pitched laugh. He does this kind of thing often.

Mr and Mrs Chatterjee have 3 daughters, the youngest of which lives in the house. Her name is...

Sharana. She is a very nice person who works at a multinational out in Salt Lake, where they give her complimentary French classes (although, she complains, she has to make up for her work by staying late). Her father says that she is fat while referring to his oldest daughter, who lives in Philadelphia.

"My oldest daughter," he says, "She use do be so fat, twice the size of her!" He makes a vague gesture over towards Sharana's room.

Sharana holds the opinion, typical (as far as I can tell) of the Anglo-Indian corporate class, that quotas for poor students in major universities are a bad idea because it will hurt India's chances at becoming a superpower. When pushed, she agrees that some measures to ensure social equality need to be taken, but at the primary school level.

Sam notices, one day in the The Telegraph, that the national government has been considering repealing quotas at the primary level as well.

While Mrs. Chatterjee is away, Sam is cared for by...

The Maid
Mr. Chatterjee's case that he has no idea how to run the house without Mrs. Chatterjee is more compelling by his inability to tell the maid what to do. She is very friendly, and wakes Sam up to give him tea that he doesn't know how to say he doesn't want, because his Bengali is very poor. Sam doesn't really understand their methods; for the first week, she changed his sheets twice every day, regardless of whether or not Sam has slept in the bed since last the sheets were changed. Then, she leaves the same burlap-textured thing on the bed for 3 days. Sam cannot tell if its cultural difference or vindictiveness for something Sam didn't know he did.

Mr. Chatterjee, ever the aristocrat, once says about the maid, while Sam is eating breakfast. "I can't get her to do anything right! I have to tell her a hundred times." Then, he remarks, contemplatively, "But you know, if she had a high IQ, would she be working as a maidservant? No! She'd be working as a minister. Yes?" Mr. Chatterjee delivers a magnificent performance of one of those awkward pauses I was telling you about, and then, predictably, laughs, and bumbles into his room.

Finally, the triumphant return of


Mrs. Chatterjee

She is a kind, strong woman, who is both relaxed and accommodating. She and Sam work out a system by which she makes him dinner most nights for something like a dollar a meal. It turns out she used to run a catering agency, and it shows.

Her daughter tells me, kind of regretfully, that her mother is not actually a Bengali--she's from the Punjab--but, she hastens to add, that her mother can cook Bengali food as well as any Bengali, so I had no need to worry.

Believe you me: I didn't.

So there's the cast of characters. You can only imagine what wacky adventures those folks are having! And way over there in West Bengal, too!