Reflections on Life in Udaipur

Amazingly, I have been very busy over the last few weeks! May was not the best month in Udaipur for many reasons. Most of my intern friends left, it was hot as Hades (which made it difficult for me to do anything during the day besides sit under a fan), and work was frustrating as always. In early June, the pre-monsoon weather started, which brought cloudy days, drizzles, occasional rainstorms, and cool breezes. It’s amazing how weather can change your mood – I feel so much more energetic!

The Pleasures of India

Since I have two friends coming to visit me in India for two weeks in July, and we are planning on doing some trekking in the Himalayas, I have been trying to exercise a bit more and gain back some of the muscle I have lost from being so lazy in this heat. Several mornings I have taken early morning hikes up a small mountain called Neemach Mata, which has a pleasant Hindu temple at the top and beautiful views of the lakes and the city. There are always people there in the morning, but it is never too crowded. Families, groups of teenagers, or a pair of girlfriends will come here in the mornings to offer prayers before the day begins. It’s very relaxing, and best of all - no one bothers or hassles me. I love to see the same man sitting there reading the newspaper every morning. It’s so refreshing – why not sit on a mountaintop and to read the morning paper?

Also, since a former intern recently found out he got scurvy in India, I have been making a conscious effort to eat more fruits, which are cheap and plentiful. So now, after my hikes to Neemach Mata, or on my way to work, I stop at the local juice stand in Fatehpura (my neighborhood), and buy a glass of fresh mango juice for ten rupees (25 cents). It’s a nice treat, and one of the simple pleasures that I love about India.

Auntie recently purchased a mosquito zapper that is shaped like a tennis racket. It is fabulous. Once it is charged, you hold down a button and swing the racket through the air until it zaps loudly at having killed a bug. It is Auntie’s favorite toy, and everyday after her evening prayers she whips it out and zaps all the little bugs who disturb her. Quite gratifying.

Successes at Work

Even at work I have been keeping myself busy! For the last month or so, I have been working on a vermicompost project that actually seems to be going somewhere. I did a brief needs assessment in a nearby village on vermicompost (or worm compost), and learned that many of the women who had previously prepared compost had had many problems with pests eating the worms. So I put together a workshop in the village on compost protection measures. With some money provided by FSD, I purchase new worms and new plastic sheets for the women to protect their compost beds. This week, I traveled to the village with a scientist from KVK to give a talk on ways to keep ants, crows, mongooses, and other pests from eating the worms. Then we helped the women refill the compost pit, add the right amount of water, and then add the worms. During the demonstration, I kept being showered with small purple berries, as our jeep driver was in the trees collecting as much fruit at he could to take back home.

Originally this project was supposed to take me a few weeks at most. I was racking my brain trying to come up with a second project to work on simultaneously or when I finished the vermicompost workshop. Instead, it took me about 6 weeks, and there is still more work to be done. During the last few weeks of my time at KVK I will return to the village to do some follow up work, such as delivering more worms and observing progress of the compost pits.

When I do not have much to do at KVK, I have been occupying myself at Animal Aid, which I still love and which helps pass the time. I have also been trying to organize a workshop for FSD interns and host families with one local NGO called Shikshantar that promotes zero-waste living and healthy cooking.

Women and Men and the Space in Between

Living in India has been a real challenge for me, much more so than I ever anticipated. Though I love Rajasthan and would not want to be anywhere else, it is one of the most conservative states in India. Historically, Rajasthan was very isolated from the rest of India in its traditionalism, and only very recently it has become integrated into the modernization of the country. Thus, a strict social structure still dictates how relationships between castes and between men and women should be.

When I first arrived, I thought there was something nice and romantic about such traditionalism and conservativism. Now my feelings about Rajasthani society are much more complicated and difficult to untangle. Obviously, as a liberal American woman, it is difficult to live here. It is one thing to travel in Rajasthan, another thing to live here for a month or two, but it is an entirely different experience for me to live in Udaipur with an Indian family for six months.

Though I feel very close to my host mother, our conversations are still very censored and often I feel that I can’t be honest with her about my experience in India. For example, friendships between men and women in India don’t really exist the way they do in the United States. And since there is virtually no dating in Udaipur, there is little opportunity for me to interact with males at all in India. Of course, I do have some Indian male friends who sometimes hang out with our cluster of foreigners in Udaipur, but I have to approach those relationships very cautiously and never spend time with them alone. I often find myself being overly cold-shouldered towards them to discourage their flirtations. If a male friend gives me a ride home on his motorcycle or in his car, I have to ask him to drop me a block from my house so that Auntie doesn’t see me alone with a male and get upset.

I don’t have any female Indian friends my age. Though some of my intern friends have host sisters our age, they would never go out with unmarried men with us, and usually stay at home studying or doing housework. I feel I have good friendships with my coworkers and my host mother, but they are all adults with families of their own, and so for lack of Indian friends my own age, my experience here has been much different than past experiences in Latin America.

Still, Udaipur is not as conservative as other parts of Rajasthan, I hear. One intern from FSD’s program in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, said she is not allowed to drink alcoholic beverages at all, or interact with unmarried men, and many of the houses in Jodhpur have separate entrances and separate common living areas for men and women. Goodness.

The other difficult thing about these gender restraints is that I feel constantly on-guard and suspicious of people’s intentions. On any day, I am constantly aware of my surroundings, lest I get run over by a motorcycle, butted by a cow, or fall into a pit on the side of the road. But in addition to that, I have to make extra efforts not to make eye contact with men and not get too close to anyone so that I am not groped by wandering hands. All this can be exhausting, and it can make me feel disgusting inside even if nothing bad has happened that day.

On Slooowing Down

I have had to adjust a lot to the slow pace of life in Udaipur. On the one hand, it is a welcome change from the frantic stresses of working in a law office in San Francisco, or my packed schedules in college. On the other hand, the boredom can be maddening at time. Still, I notice I have become accustomed to this slow pace compared to when I first arrived. There isn’t a whole lot to do in Udaipur, so on an exciting day I hang out with friends (or by myself) at hotel pools or rooftop restaurants, where we lounge and drink cold drinks and eat and talk for hours on end, and I am perfectly content and entertained.

I went with my friend Susanna to a small town called Pushkar this weekend. We spent a lot of time just chilling out drinking soda, or sitting on the ghats by the lake. Before we left, we met two British guys who had just finished a three-month stint in Darjeeling, where they had been teaching English in different monasteries outside of the city. We sat and talked for several hours, not thinking at all about the sights we should be touring in Pushkar. We swapped stories about our respective lives, shared the same frustrations and the same pleasures of India. I thought I was a little bored in Udaipur at time, but their stories brought boredom to a whole new level. At nighttime in a rural monastery in the hills of India, there is nothing to do but sit in your room and read a book, which I can imagine would be mind-bogglingly dull after a few weeks.

In the United States, when I come home after a day or work or classes, there is always something to do. I fool around on the Internet, call a friend, cook something, go grocery shopping, ride my bike, go to a dance class, maybe watch television, clean my room, or just reorganize something. Here, at my home in India, there really is nothing to do. Nothing interests me on television and there is nothing I can cook. Sometimes I just open my closet where all my things are crammed and stand staring at it, looking for something to do in there. I wonder what things I could reorganize, pack up, unpack, sift through or throw away. But there is nothing. So I stand and stare until I get tired and pick up my book again. Then I go sit on the front porch in the garden with Auntie while she reads her holy books and I read The Grapes of Wrath. Sometimes I come home and she is sitting on the kitchen floor sorting through grains of wheat or peeling garlic buds, so I help her. When I need some kind of stimulation, I just go walking through the Old City or go buy another glass of mango juice. This is life in India. Sometimes fabulous, and sometimes... not.

Animal Aid

For the last few weeks I have been volunteering at an organization called Animal Aid, which is an animal hospital, shelter, and rehabilitation center in a village just outside of Udaipur.

Animal Aid was founded six years ago by an American couple who had been coming regularly to India for the last fifteen years. Before I visited the hospital, the founder Erica warned me that many of the animals are in much worse condition than I am used to or have ever seen before, but that it is also a place full of hope and happiness for animals who are given the treatment and affection that they would not be getting on the streets.

I am glad she warned me, because I was a bit shocked when I first arrived. Many of the dogs walking around are “draggers,” meaning their back legs no longer function (usually from being hit by cars) and so they drag themselves around on their front paws. Other dogs have huge gaping wounds that never seem to heal because they are constantly picking at them or scratching themselves. One dog called “Sexy” has a huge tumor on her bottom that was infested with maggots, and in the wound you can still see the bloody holes from where they were literally eating her alive.

The “hospital” was not what I had envisioned. It is mostly outdoors – the building itself has some cement kennels, one teeny kitchen, one medicine room, and one somewhat surgery room. Otherwise, the “indoor” section is built of bamboo, wood, and tin roofs.

As you can imagine, the hospital is mostly full of dogs. There are a few cats, two monkeys, a good handful of donkeys and cows, and some parrots and pigeons. Animal Aid’s policy is that they do not return animals to the streets if they know they cannot survive. So dogs with only two working legs, or a blind donkey, or even a dog who has been at the hospital so long that he has lost his pack and would be attacked by street dogs, have permanent homes at the hospital. Many of the dogs have free reign at the hospital; others stay on chains either inside or in the paddock outside to avoid fights. Dogs who come in to be spayed or neutered usually have an address to where the staff returns them where a local person may have been feeding them or even vaguely looking out for them on the street.

Once I got over the initial shock of so many wounded animals, I found it was a very, very happy place. One of the funniest dogs is Minnie, who had to have both back legs amputated at the torso. So really, her back end is just a round stump, just her butt. But, she is a very happy dog, so she is constantly running around playing. When she hops around on her two legs, her butt bounces on the ground. It seems like it must be uncomfortable since her amputations haven’t healed entirely, but nothing can stop her from bouncing along because she is just too happy. It makes me laugh every time I see it.

Animal Aid loves volunteers because there are so many animals that need extra attention that the staff doesn’t always have time to give. So when I go in, I take dogs for walks (every dog gets at least one walk a day), or I sit with a dog who isn’t eating and try to hand feed him treats. Other times I find a dog who is scared to death of people and sit with her in the kennel and slowly try to socialize her. (Yes, I have my rabies vaccine.)

My favorite dog is a yellow lab puppy who came in with two horribly mangled front legs. One leg they amputated; the other had a compound fracture that they put in a cast. Unfortunately the dog has had to stay in his kennel for several weeks because he is not supposed to walk on his front leg while it heals. If it doesn’t heal, the dog will not be able to survive and they will have to put him down. Fortunately, it seems to be healing well. Now every time I go in, I take the little guy out to roll around in the dirt and get some fresh air. He tries to walk, which the doctors now say is okay because it shows the fracture is healing since he can put weight on it. Mostly we just sit and belly rub in the sun.

Besides the dogs, my other favorite animals are the baby cows. There are two now – one teeny, super soft white cow just recently born, and another reddish cow named Apple who is very ill and not eating well. Both are the sweetest creatures ever, no bigger than a dog, and they are constantly wanting attention. Even the puppies love them. There is one puppy who just refuses to stay with the other puppies, and always curls up with the cows and sleeps in the hay.

Every time I leave Animal Aid I feel so inspired by the founders and so happy for the animals who are being treated there. Here is their website, it’s a fabulous organization. http://www.animalaidunlimited.com/

Favorite Pictures from Udaipur

Sunset.

Chilled beer.

Marc and a local Danny DeVito!

My elephant friends in the Old City!

Susanna taking a phone call on the road to Bundi.

This is how we start the engine on KVK's bus.

Dave at a chai stall, and a good example of daily life as a foreigner in India.

Baby cows! I love them.

My friend Ram!

This is how we eat lunch in Udaipur.

Midday traffic.

A random foreigner we picked up: Alex from Israel who teaches "laughing yoga."

Autowallah, Autowallah

An "autowallah" is a man who drives an autorickshaw - a three-wheeled, rickety vehicles that is also known as a "tuk-tuk" and which seems like it is always going to tip over. By now, I know many of Udaipur's autowallahs very well. And frankly, they make life here more interesting, even if they do try to rip me off all the time.

Mostly when I approach a parked auto, I find the autowallah asleep on the back bench (see photo below). Sometimes when he hears me he jumps awake and eagerly negotiates prices. Other times, he lazily opens one eye and asks where I want to go. When I say "Bedla Road," he thinks for a moment and shakes his head. Too far. He would rather nap.

Autowallahs' business logic seems very... illogical at times. One time my friend was bargaining an auto for me. I gave my final price of 80 rupees, but the driver insisted on 90. I knew it was too much. My friend told him, "She will only pay you 80 rupees - good price. So you can drive her for 80 rupees, good business, or she can find someone else and you can have no business. What do you want?" He thinks, slowly shakes his head, and mutters, "No, no business," and turns around. So I found someone else.

Sometimes I hire an auto and the driver jumps in the front seat and exclaims, "Yesssss! O.K.!", excitedly showing off his nicely decorated seats. Sometimes he blasts Bollywood music and may even have some flashing colored lights under the roof. Other times I hire an autowallah to take me somewhere, and I sit in the back and wait for quite a while while he talks to his friends until he finally agrees to start the engine. My friend Maddie once hired an auto and the driver said, "First I take my chai." So they sat while he drank his tea.

My favorite autowallah is a man who always hangs around my neighborhood, but I don't know his name. He has dry, matted gray hair that kind of sticks straight up in the back. His eyes are big and round and he always looks somewhat surprised and eager and mischievous in a very boyish way. His lips are plump and always pursed out. When I talk to him, he turns his head completely around and looks at me as he accelerates.

This week I hired him to take me to a nearby village. I hopped in the back, he took out a box of bidis (small, hand-rolled, unfiltered cigarettes that smell like marijuana) and offered me one. I kindly refused, and we went. In the village, he was kind enough to drive me across a field full of pits and rocks. It was bumpy, and I bounced completely off the seat several times. When we shouted from the back, he turned around and yelled, "I am driving across a field!" as if we didn't know. The three-wheeled auto was not meant for rough terrain, and we easily could have tipped over.

Though auto rickshaws can comfortably sit about three people, I have been in an auto with eight friends before, with our overnight luggage and all. I sat on the floor by the driver's seat with my feet on the pavement below, and when we drove, I hugged my knees to my chest. One time, I went with 4 other friends to a party in an auto. The party was on the side of a big hill, which the autowallah knew very well. It was also somewhat far. So the five of us got in, and after about half of a kilometer, it was clear that the auto was not going to make it. The engine failed and started smoking. He ordered us all out so he could lift up the seat and fan the burning engine. "Just five minutes," he told us. So then we got back in, rolled downhill for a while, then when the ground flattened he started the engine again. Another half kilometer later we stopped and all got out again. He fanned the engine again. "Just five minutes, no problem." Finally we convinced the autowallah he could not take us to the party, though he protested and angrily chased our new auto down the road - until his engine overheated again.