A Winter in India

We four have been trying to figure out how to adequately describe this wedding, and have decided that it is impossible. It was at an outdoor venue a fair distance out of town, beyond the New Delhi airport. The groom arrived on a white horse accompanied by a band, revelers, hand carried electric chandeliers and LOTS of fireworks. I have never been so close to fireworks; ash was raining down on us. We were amazed that the horse stayed calm throughout.

As the groom’s party approached the gate, the bride’s female relatives and friends try to interfere with their entry, but they persist. There was a ceremony of garlanding, the males of the bride’s family, wearing turbans of one color combination, greeting equal status males of the groom’s family, wearing turbans of a different color combination. This not only involved exchange of marigold garlands, but sometimes involved one man lifting the other off the ground. In many cases, the bride’s family representative put a ring on the finger of the groom’s family rep.

The four of us attended a truly memorable wedding last night. Lavina Shankar’s brother’s wife’s cousin was getting married. In the US that would be a distant enough relationship that the brother’s family probably wouldn’t be invited, let alone four Westerners. But in India, extended families are included and they very generously included us as well. We had met the bride and the groom’s family (the Wadis) when Lavina and Rajiv were here in India. Lavina and Rajiv had both assisted me picking out a sari, and last night was the occasion.

I asked the landlady if she would give me a lesson in wrapping the sari. As you can see, it took a village. The landlady and her daughter supervised, while the daughter’s maid did the wrapping. She needed to know what jewelry I was going to wear, because that would help determine how to wrap it. There was lots of discussion, while I stood Barbie-doll-like being dressed.

Our second day in Delhi, Wednesday, January18 (Guest essay by Carolyn Schmidt)

We had another interesting day today. We started out with Pam and Dave and Milan and I getting into 2 auto rickshaws to visit the Morarji Desai National Institute of Yoga to ask about drop in yoga classes. It turned out to be a huge and beautiful new campus with gardens modern circular shaped buildings and an outdoor teaching amphitheater. It is a lively place with a very gracious and helpful staff. There were college age people sitting around outdoors in group obviously working on some group assignments. We can drop in for a class and we hope to do so at least one day. That is free but if you go for one week you have to pay 100 rupees for each class, which is $2.30! Do you think we could afford it?

We were wandering around the Bengali Market neighborhood in which we live. On the back street is a middle school that we see the top of from our apratment. As we went by, the kids were at recess and people were outside the gate selling snacks to the kids. The kids all waved at us and yelled "Hi".

Pam's sister, Carolyn, and Carolyn's husband Milan are here visiting. Yay! We started the tour with a visit to Humayon's Tomb. Here's Carolyn and some other tourists outside the gate that takes you into the garden where the tomb is. These Mughal tombs were placed in "Charbaghs", which literally means "four gardens", very symmetrically laid out gardens tht represented Paradise to the Muslems.

We are back in Delhi. Its “cold” here. It was in the 90s F in Kerala, and it’s in the low 70s here in the afternoon!! We missed an historic frost in Delhi; while we were gone it was below 32 degrees F, zero degrees centigrade. That’s the first time to hit below freezing in seventeen years, that global warming problem just keeps rearing its ugly head.

The tea plantations around Munnar cover so many of the steep mountain sides. Some of the plantations were started when India was still a British colony over 150 years ago. There are narrow paths between the plantings that allow the tea harvesters to reach all the tea leaves. They use an instrument that looks like a manual hedge clipper that catches the snipped leaves in a box type container. The tea leaves are then dropped into a large sack carried on the person’s back. The tea bushes look just like the hedges that I clipped regularly in front of my family’s house. Just like the blueberry harvest in Maine the harvestor is paid by the weight of product brought to the scales. The tea leaves are processed close by where they are chopped up and slowly heated and grated according to each processor’s secret formula.

The coast of Kerala is punctuated with many, many rivers trying to drain the rainfall from the close-by Western Ghat mountains. The coastal plain is like the bayou country of Louisiana, low and flooded. These “Backwaters” are great to tour in a narrow boat. Kerala is the state name and its means land of the coconuts. The coconut palm trees grow fast and provide food and building materials. The canals that we floated along were once part of a rice paddy economy that proved to be unprofitable.
Once the coconut meat is eaten the shells are put under water for six months. The brown fiber becomes softened, and then removed. The dried fibers seem to tangle together so thoroughly, that you just grab a small bunch and twist the fibers together and if you keep twisting you can make a rope of coconut fiber called “coir.” The coir is sold to companies that make woven matting and rugs.

“Kathakali” literally means “storyplay”. The story is told by “abhinaya” (expressions). Some of this is expressed by the costumes (“Vesham”) that represent the basic personality and good or evil nature of the character. Green faces are for good characters and for royalty. Interesting. Most is expressed through hand gestures and facial expressions. There are 24 hand shapes (mudras) that are moved in different ways to convey different animals or actions or emotions. We saw a demonstration of “elephant” for example, that used one hand in the “musti” shape as the end of the trunk. This was moved around to very convincingly show the elephant eating, spitting on the audience, etc. The actors’ other hand, in the “hamsapaksham” shape was the elephant’s ears that waved around in different ways to show the elephant’s emotions (happy, angry, etc).

Wouldn’t the sales ladies on the first floor of Macy’s love to have the sales commissions for these actors!! Kathakali is a four hundred year old tradition to act out and teach the moral lessons from the Indian Hindu classic literature. We watched part of the one hour cosmetics application. The guy with the big white wing under his chin had a buddy do the hard part. He then added the rest, as did, the other actor entirely. A true performance in a village starts around 10 PM and ends around dawn. For us tourists they do a nightly 1.5 hour show at the cultural center with a narration to orient us. These Kathakali actors use a very stylized symbolic set of hand and arm gestures, facial muscle movements and body movements. Each emotion and action has its own pantomime so the audience can learn the lesson precisely, a Sign Language for Hindu mythology.

Pam and I arrived in the city of Kochi, Kerala on Monday. On some maps the city is called Cochin, but I’ll bet this piece of turf and important harbor has had many, many names. The picture shows a modern man in his western style shirt and lungi. A lungi is like a sarong, it is a single sheet of fabric wrapped tight at the waist and folded to hold his manly parts from banging around too hard. Do you remember my picture about the underwear billboard in Delhi which used a marketing slogan of “hands free comfort,” and my response was something like, “it must be a cultural thing that will explain itself later.” Well, I think the lungi is the answer. It is very common to see men on the sidewalk partially unwrap their lungi and rewrap for tightness. If you wear briefs instead, you have “hands free comfort.” If I ever get a lesson which shows me the inner sanctum of a lungi, I’ll let you know.