A Winter in India

Pam and I have officially finished our Fulbright Fellowships. As my buddy Hank says we have reverted back to being Halfbrights. We decided to head north to the state of Uttaranchal, which shares its northern boundary with Tibet and its eastern boundary with Nepal. Uttaranchal is a new state since 2000 and had been part of the large state of Uttar Pradesh. I can see why the two pieces of geography were separated. Uttar Pradesh is as flat and green as a billiard table, whereas, Uttaranchal is the foothills and peaks of the Himalaya Mountains.
Our first stop was Corbett National Park, India’s first national park. Jim Corbett was a writer, conservationist, and hunter who was noted for being able to track and kill man-eating tigers and leopards. His biography (1875-1957) is quite a story in itself and his books about the jungles where he lived are very enjoyable.

Amazingly, our four months as Fulbrighters are finished. Today we packed up all of our belongings and said goodbyes. This is our landlord and landlady, Mr. and Mrs. Soxena. They have made us feel so at home here. The apartment and the neighborhood couldn't have been better. In the morning we will be picked up by a driver and hired car, and be whisked off to Corbett Tiger Reserve in the state of Uttaranchal. We will be staying in a tent in the reserve, so I don't think we will have internet access for a few days. See you then!

We never got a photo up on the blog from Lee's visit, so here you are. This is in Agra. Lee and I were visiting a craft workshop where they make zari embroidery, a very intricate type of embroidery using very fine coils of metal. At least in the shop where the public would see it, it was all men doing the embroidery, though I have been told that the Moslem women do this craft also. Lee is with a great old gentleman, seated cross-legged embroidering on a big frame, like a quilt frame. The little boy is the grandson.

Our Dean asked us to come for an interview with a film crew from one of the local TV stations. As it turned out, this station, like most stations, broadcasts primarily in Hindi. So most of the actual interview was in Hindi with the Dean. They then wanted some photos and an interview in English with us. So off we go to meet the Dean in the clinic for the photo op. We stopped dead upon realizing that what they meant was the Dean was treating a patient and the TV interviewer wanted us to pose as helping him work on the patient. Leaving aside all of our American HIPPA rules of patient privacy and confidentiality, none of which apply here, we were still horrified from an infection control point of view since we had no gloves, no masks, no protective eyewear. Reminded Pam of when she and Lee and 20 other microbiologists had been trooped into the Intensive Care Unit at Peking Union Medical Hospital in Beijing in 1996.

Winter is over. It is getting hotter by the day. The flowers are in full bloom. We went to a spectacular garden on Sunday, the Mughal Gardens next to the President's House. India's President is a physicist/poet named A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. He gets to live in what was the British Viceroy's House, pre-Independence, a huge place with a 163 hectare garden next to it. This garden is open to the public only one month per year, and just opened this week. Lavish beds of annuals and roses, along with waterways and fountains. The bad part is, no cameras are allowed. So just to give a hint of it: the top photo is Itimad-ud-Daulah, a "small" tomb in Agra across the river from the Taj Mahal.

As you can see from the recurring theme in the two images above, this blog will not be appropriate for children. Hindu art is rife with these prurient depictions, shocking! My sensibilities are all atwitter. The following is a snippet of a recent conversation between two leading art critics here in Delhi.

David: Why is it that all the females of Hindu antiquity had large perfectly round breasts?
Lee: Back then life was fair.

The image on the left is from a temple sculpture now in the Madhya Pradesh State Museum and the one on the right is from the Sun Temple in Gwalior.

We still haven’t sorted out where all we will be traveling in March. But what we do know is that our Fulbrights end on February 26 (as Hank has said, we will go back to being Half-brights). And we have to be out of our apartment on February 28. We will be sorry to leave 55 Babar Road, Bengali Market. This has been a real haven, quiet, calm and in a nice neighborhood. The landlord (“Mr. Saxena”) and landlady (“Nimi”) live downstairs and have been wonderful to us. One night while Lee was here, we were all included in a family party: their two daughters, sons-in-law, and grandsons plus uncles, aunts and cousins from all over Delhi, plus London and Singapore, who had gathered for the wedding (later this week) of one of our landlady’s nephews. Fantastic array of foods, cooked in a tent that was put up out on the back courtyard. Mr. Saxena has tried to teach Dave the rules of cricket, but cricket remains one of lifes imponderables.

Last night was a sad night. We took Lee to the airport and said goodbye. She is probably close to Newark now, having been in the air while we slept all night and spent the morning at a garden in Delhi. Each goodbye gets a little harder, but each gets us a little step closer to home.

This morning's surprise on Babar Road was monkeys! We see monkeys around town from time to time but had never seen any right here. The top photo is two on the balcony of the house across the street. The middle photo is the baby in the branches of our peepal tree (just today we finally identified the species of that tree we have been looking at for almost 4 months, and its a peepal tree).

On the drive back from Agra to Delhi we saw many camels pulling wagons with these HUGE bags of hay. Our driver stopped so we could get a picture, and he asked the camel driver where they were coming from. They were walking 250 kilometers to bring this hay from Rajasthan to Delhi, because the price is so much higher in Delhi. Also, camels don't pay the state taxes that trucks pay at state borders, they don't require gasoline, they can eat along the way, and they can go to Delhi and back (6 days) without a drink.

The Taj Mahal sits in a very large garden, and here is how they mow the lawn. The wide rotary blade mower dumped the grass into a metal pan as the cows walked. A second man walked next to the metal pan, raking the pile of grass clippings so it didn't fall out of the pan. After a while, when the pan was full, they would stop and bag the grass into burlap bags.