Even when I visited Pondicherry four years ago, the quality of light and the color in this town remained as my main memory of the place. The light is extremely white with a bit of golden peach mixed in. This small city is on the ocean and there are trees here, but the light is like that of a desert, it feels so open and exposed. The colors feel very washed and sun-bleached, like neon pastels: turquoise, salmon, gold. My friend Milind told me that when he came to Pondicherry he could hardly open his eyes.
While riding my bicycle to Notre Dames des Anges church on Sunday mornings the light always felt gloriously soft and calm. The town would not have really woken up yet, so I got to savor everything in peace. I’d ride past the old colonial park full of twisted dark green trees and vines behind a fancy filigreed white gate. I’d pass thru ashram territory with fellow bike riders slowly working down the grey cobblestones, old ashramites in white shorts riding like they were still half asleep. I would ride past the vast rocky promenade along the Bay of Bengal, the sea and sky a bleached, muted shade of blue that must be the result of a landscape that is never overcast, save for the monsoon months.
Many tourists I’ve met who came to Pondicherry came during the months of December, January and February when the climate is most agreeable thought Pondy was a bit chaotic. Yes, during high tourist season and during the peak times of the day, this town can be nuts, especially the French-colonial strip along the ocean. But May-November this place has an eerie calm and peace to it, and if you got up early enough to beat the heat, it was a paradise.
I have many of those keep-in-a-music-box memories from Pondy, they’re sort of like little poems. One monsoon morning I was standing under an overhang of a hole-in-the-wall business that made signs specializing in chiseling letters into granite. They also must have made other signs as well because the backings of letter stickers covered their stoop, a strange fallen confetti of negative and backward letters of Tamil and English. This particular morning from behind a cluttered counter came a sound that I had never heard before. It was a violin playing some startling notes just as a line of water buffalo walked past, their glistening black skin slicked with rain. I love the water buffalo of this town, elongated primal cows with spiraling horns, big doe eyes, and fuzzy whiskers. The babies are particularly fuzzy and cute. A herd of water buffalo would take up two lanes of traffic everyday at 5:45 to cross the main artery of town, buzzing with motorcycles. They would patiently wait for an opening as traffic built up behind them.
I remember riding my bike down this same main artery during a strangely calm time of day, and the smell of roses started coming up from the pavement. Sure enough, I was riding on a carpet of magenta rose petals that was left behind by a funeral procession. In a town where you are always dodging cow and dog shit on the pavement, this was an enchanting surprise. I will also always fondly remember the smell of fresh jasmine, a smell unlike any other, wafting from many a lady’s hair where they pin a garland daily. On a crowded bus, a lady will practically sit on top of you, but at least you get to savor the smell of her jasmine.
I will miss the chai stalls everywhere, huge battered aluminum pots brimming and bubbling. The chai wallah pours milky tea through cheesecloth strainers into tiny cups and serves it to men who sit on the stoop with a newspaper, lighting their cigarettes from a jute rope hanging with a smoldering end like incense. I’ll miss going to my neighbor’s house for coffee and dosas to sing Karnatic songs and play cards. I’ll miss all those crispy, spongey, cultured dosas with delicious chutneys. I’ll miss going to the beach with Meghan, Galen, Yenina and the kids to karate chop the forceful waves of the Indian Ocean. It was so salty it stung! We would laugh and jump through the waves full of exhilaration and pretend we were merlions, whatever those are, as the crazy sun beat down upon us. I will miss laying on my rooftop as the sunset, relaxing after a long school day, staring at the sky full of hawks, crows and bats. It was moments like these when I felt incredibly connected to the earth and my surroundings. It was so nurturing to be cradled in the curve of the sky.
Oh Pondy, you will always be a treasured home to me, it will be a beautiful day when I return to you!
Sunday, May 2, 2010
The Matrimandir
Auroville is a village near Pondicherry where people from all over the world live. It was a vision of the Mother, a place she wanted people to be able to come to where they would be free from the pains of life, no matter who they were, where they came from, or how much money they had. Auroville is an inspiration, but it is also flawed. There are many people with beautiful intentions trying to realize the Mother’s dream and succeeding in small ways every day. However, I don’t believe a utopia like this is achievable as long as human beings are involved, and Auroville illustrates this. I’ve experienced Auroville in small pockets, so I don’t claim to be an expert at all about it. I was very intrigued by it.
When I first came to Auroville, I stayed at a guesthouse run by an Aurovillian family. I had a deep wound on my leg from a fall and a young girl named Mirabelle who wanted to be a vet fixed me up with iodine and gauze. We became friends, and she was the daughter of the man who ran the guesthouse. She was half German, half French, and had lived in Auroville her whole life. For a pre-teen, I was impressed by her maturity and worldly sophistication. I asked her, “So, I don’t know much about Auroville, and I’d like to learn. What should I be sure to check out? What are your favorite places here?” She replied, “Well, you have to go to the Matrimandir. That is a must. It is the real center of Auroville, every feeling about this place comes from there.”
I went to the Matrimandir time and time again over this past year. The realizations I had there during times of personal reflection were intense, unexpected and extremely meaningful. They were visions that appeared as if out of nowhere, like the Mother was blowing them in through my ears. They are quite personal, so I won’t share them, but I was always filled with a sense of joy, love and a deep peace whenever I went there.
The Matrimandir was a vision of the Mother, and to her it was a dream from “The Divine Conciousness.” (She and Aurobindo preferred this to the term “God”, as they felt it more properly described their spiritual beliefs.) She described the vision of the Matrimandir in detail to architects, and they drew up blueprints. The Matrimandir in the flesh is said to be exactly as the Mother had described it. This place is not a temple, it is not a place of worship. It is a place enveloped by extreme silence, and meant to be a place for personal concentration.
From a distance, the Matrimandir looks like a huge golden golfball emerging from the earth like a mushroom. Its surface is made up of hundreds of gold-plated discs, not unlike satellite dishes. Up close they look like mosaics, as the gold leaf is pressed in-between two small pieces of glass, and hundreds of these make up one disk. The whole structure is propped up by 12 huge brick “petals”, that represent the twelve qualities of the Mother, and each of these also has a small meditation chamber inside. The entrance to the main chamber, the golfball, looks a lot like the drop-down stairs of a spaceship in the movies. You leave your shoes outside, and when you enter you put on a pair of fresh white socks, meant to keep their white carpet pristine.
Despite the new-agey, garish pomp of the exterior, in my opinion the inside of the Matrimandir is very beautiful. It is dimly lit and extremely quiet; you could not hear a pin drop (because of the plush white carpet). There is a ramp that wraps around the interior in an upwards spiral, and it is like being inside a gigantic snail shell as you glide up. Along the concave walls are four vertical streams of water, also lined with gold tiles, gold-plated veins streaming down and keeping a pulse of the four cardinal directions.
At the top of the spiraling ramp is the inner chamber for concentration. It is a circular room, with twelve pillars spacing out separate meditation areas, with white cushions radially placed to face the center. It is lit by a spotlight of sun coming from a hole in the center of the domed ceiling. There is actually a computer that tracks the sun throughout the day so there is a steady stream all day long. The hole in the ceiling is definitely remeniscient of a belly button in the center of the bulbous ceiling. This makes the dark, silent interior feel like a womb, the light streaming down in a beam an umbilical cord. The light strikes a huge spherical crystal on the ground, totally a crystal ball, and it diffracts into rainbow rings on the ceiling in two places: one small ring right around the belly button, and another about 7 meters away. All the people in personal reflection around the crystal pall are reflected around its equator. Meditating people sitting cross-legged while reflected upside down look like the continents of Africa or South America. They are strange, shadowed calligraphy around the belt of this universe.
The silence sinks inside all the openings of your face: eyes, ears, nose, mouth. It is like being submerged under the surface of the ocean and there is that same hollow echo inside your brain as when you are under water. I could actually feel a light, gentle force weighing down my eyelids. Quieting the chatter inside my skull was much easier in this place compared to others.
Underneath the Matrimandir, once you exit and are in the outdoors cherishing the golden bright light in a new way, you go underneath the golf ball via ramps going down (it is indeed suspended above the earth) to a covered terrace area. In the center of this slight depression is a lotus fountain made up of 12 rows of 24 milky white marble petals radiating from the edge, points of the petals facing the center unlike a normal flower. This is an introspective lotus, all petals pointing in, and the rows get smaller as they get to the center where another crystal ball is located, but it is much smaller than the one inside. The brick around is red, the sky showing through the exits of the 6 ramps leading out is very blue, and it is amazingly spacious and open down there. This place is also an active wind tunnel, and the breeze channeling down these ramps is strong and cool. It’s nice to watch the water move like milk down these smooth petals and hear the birds chatter.
There is one more special place at the Matrimandir, and that is the banyan tree. Auroville was an open wasteland of red clay when it first began. There were no trees, save for a few banyan trees, and you could see straight to the ocean. The place was a parched wasteland full of dreamers pioneering the Mother’s dream. Since then, the place has become a dense, lush jungle. But one of the original trees of Auroville is this gorgeous banyan tree outside of the Matrimandir. The Mother found this tree and she said, “Here. Here is the center, the heart. Build from here and build outward.”
I always felt that the Mother manifested herself in the tiny chipmunks with long tails that scampered and chirped in the tree above her Samadhi (grave) at the ashram in Pondy. But after meeting this tree, I feel that more than ever this humongous banyan is the embodiment of the Mother. There is the one main trunk with many smaller trunks dropping down back to the ground from the horizontal, roof-like branches stretching outwards. This is the cool thing about banyans, branches can also decide to grow down and become roots. This tree is all wrinkles folding into wrinkles, thick pocked skin, braided limbs like veins streaming back down into the earth. This is the Mother. The best thing about this banyan tree is that it has an open heart; there is a hole in its trunk, a window full of glaring white light. A few stray dogs sleep in the lap of the tree and when you come close to touch her scaly skin, her open heart is buzzing with tiny flies. Life is everywhere. Things are dying and being born again. Walter Pater was writing about the Mona Lisa when he wrote this, Satprem quoted this beloved bit when he was describing the Mother, and I would also like to quote it while writing about this banyan tree:
“She is older than the rocks among which she sits;
Like the vampire she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave;
And has been a diver in deep blue seas, and keeps their fallen days about her...
The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one....”
When I first came to Auroville, I stayed at a guesthouse run by an Aurovillian family. I had a deep wound on my leg from a fall and a young girl named Mirabelle who wanted to be a vet fixed me up with iodine and gauze. We became friends, and she was the daughter of the man who ran the guesthouse. She was half German, half French, and had lived in Auroville her whole life. For a pre-teen, I was impressed by her maturity and worldly sophistication. I asked her, “So, I don’t know much about Auroville, and I’d like to learn. What should I be sure to check out? What are your favorite places here?” She replied, “Well, you have to go to the Matrimandir. That is a must. It is the real center of Auroville, every feeling about this place comes from there.”
I went to the Matrimandir time and time again over this past year. The realizations I had there during times of personal reflection were intense, unexpected and extremely meaningful. They were visions that appeared as if out of nowhere, like the Mother was blowing them in through my ears. They are quite personal, so I won’t share them, but I was always filled with a sense of joy, love and a deep peace whenever I went there.
The Matrimandir was a vision of the Mother, and to her it was a dream from “The Divine Conciousness.” (She and Aurobindo preferred this to the term “God”, as they felt it more properly described their spiritual beliefs.) She described the vision of the Matrimandir in detail to architects, and they drew up blueprints. The Matrimandir in the flesh is said to be exactly as the Mother had described it. This place is not a temple, it is not a place of worship. It is a place enveloped by extreme silence, and meant to be a place for personal concentration.
From a distance, the Matrimandir looks like a huge golden golfball emerging from the earth like a mushroom. Its surface is made up of hundreds of gold-plated discs, not unlike satellite dishes. Up close they look like mosaics, as the gold leaf is pressed in-between two small pieces of glass, and hundreds of these make up one disk. The whole structure is propped up by 12 huge brick “petals”, that represent the twelve qualities of the Mother, and each of these also has a small meditation chamber inside. The entrance to the main chamber, the golfball, looks a lot like the drop-down stairs of a spaceship in the movies. You leave your shoes outside, and when you enter you put on a pair of fresh white socks, meant to keep their white carpet pristine.
Despite the new-agey, garish pomp of the exterior, in my opinion the inside of the Matrimandir is very beautiful. It is dimly lit and extremely quiet; you could not hear a pin drop (because of the plush white carpet). There is a ramp that wraps around the interior in an upwards spiral, and it is like being inside a gigantic snail shell as you glide up. Along the concave walls are four vertical streams of water, also lined with gold tiles, gold-plated veins streaming down and keeping a pulse of the four cardinal directions.
At the top of the spiraling ramp is the inner chamber for concentration. It is a circular room, with twelve pillars spacing out separate meditation areas, with white cushions radially placed to face the center. It is lit by a spotlight of sun coming from a hole in the center of the domed ceiling. There is actually a computer that tracks the sun throughout the day so there is a steady stream all day long. The hole in the ceiling is definitely remeniscient of a belly button in the center of the bulbous ceiling. This makes the dark, silent interior feel like a womb, the light streaming down in a beam an umbilical cord. The light strikes a huge spherical crystal on the ground, totally a crystal ball, and it diffracts into rainbow rings on the ceiling in two places: one small ring right around the belly button, and another about 7 meters away. All the people in personal reflection around the crystal pall are reflected around its equator. Meditating people sitting cross-legged while reflected upside down look like the continents of Africa or South America. They are strange, shadowed calligraphy around the belt of this universe.
The silence sinks inside all the openings of your face: eyes, ears, nose, mouth. It is like being submerged under the surface of the ocean and there is that same hollow echo inside your brain as when you are under water. I could actually feel a light, gentle force weighing down my eyelids. Quieting the chatter inside my skull was much easier in this place compared to others.
Underneath the Matrimandir, once you exit and are in the outdoors cherishing the golden bright light in a new way, you go underneath the golf ball via ramps going down (it is indeed suspended above the earth) to a covered terrace area. In the center of this slight depression is a lotus fountain made up of 12 rows of 24 milky white marble petals radiating from the edge, points of the petals facing the center unlike a normal flower. This is an introspective lotus, all petals pointing in, and the rows get smaller as they get to the center where another crystal ball is located, but it is much smaller than the one inside. The brick around is red, the sky showing through the exits of the 6 ramps leading out is very blue, and it is amazingly spacious and open down there. This place is also an active wind tunnel, and the breeze channeling down these ramps is strong and cool. It’s nice to watch the water move like milk down these smooth petals and hear the birds chatter.
There is one more special place at the Matrimandir, and that is the banyan tree. Auroville was an open wasteland of red clay when it first began. There were no trees, save for a few banyan trees, and you could see straight to the ocean. The place was a parched wasteland full of dreamers pioneering the Mother’s dream. Since then, the place has become a dense, lush jungle. But one of the original trees of Auroville is this gorgeous banyan tree outside of the Matrimandir. The Mother found this tree and she said, “Here. Here is the center, the heart. Build from here and build outward.”
I always felt that the Mother manifested herself in the tiny chipmunks with long tails that scampered and chirped in the tree above her Samadhi (grave) at the ashram in Pondy. But after meeting this tree, I feel that more than ever this humongous banyan is the embodiment of the Mother. There is the one main trunk with many smaller trunks dropping down back to the ground from the horizontal, roof-like branches stretching outwards. This is the cool thing about banyans, branches can also decide to grow down and become roots. This tree is all wrinkles folding into wrinkles, thick pocked skin, braided limbs like veins streaming back down into the earth. This is the Mother. The best thing about this banyan tree is that it has an open heart; there is a hole in its trunk, a window full of glaring white light. A few stray dogs sleep in the lap of the tree and when you come close to touch her scaly skin, her open heart is buzzing with tiny flies. Life is everywhere. Things are dying and being born again. Walter Pater was writing about the Mona Lisa when he wrote this, Satprem quoted this beloved bit when he was describing the Mother, and I would also like to quote it while writing about this banyan tree:
“She is older than the rocks among which she sits;
Like the vampire she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave;
And has been a diver in deep blue seas, and keeps their fallen days about her...
The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one....”
The Mother
Pondicherry is a land where many saints come from or gravitate to. The most famous holy people from Pondicherry are Sri Aurobindo and his spiritual partner, The Mother. While living in Pondy, I read some books and talked to a lot of people about Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, and learned quite a bit of their fascinating history. There is certainly a lot to learn, especially since Aurobindo was an extremely prolific writer. Multitudes of disciples have written about their experiences as well.
Pondicherry is full of the Mother’s presence, full of flowers and golden sunlight. The city is distinctly feminine in my opinion, and it is full of calming grace. I must admit I feel extremely grateful to have lived in such a place for a year, the effect of it has penetrated deeper than my nerves.
Many people in Pondicherry wear a ring of the Mother’s symbol, a twelve-petaled lotus. Almost every little storefront has an image of the Mother on the wall, in front of which they place daily offerings of flowers. The Mother loved flowers, and she would hold them in her hand and meditate on their energy, and then rename the flowers according to what they emitted: Jasmine means purity, lemongrass means help, rose is love for the divine, plumeria is psychological perfection. Someone told me that even when she was a young girl in France, the flowers in the garden would tell her when they wanted to be picked or not.
Mirra Alfassa was born in Paris in 1878 to an Algerian mother and a Turkish father. When she was a little girl she would have a reoccurring dream of towering over Paris like a mushroom in a golden gown whose skirts had no limit. Her skirt would parachute around the whole city like a net of golden stars. People of Paris would climb up it and stick their heads out from underneath to implore her to help them with their woes. She could always give them whatever they needed, and this feeling was the best in the world.
As a young lady, she frequented in circles with famous artists, and she also became interested in occultism. She befriended the famous occultist Max Theon, who had a place high up in the mountains of Algeria. Once when visiting him here, she met Madame Theon, who had even more powerful powers than Max. Madame Theon saw Mira and pointed to her head and said, “You have THAT. You are Her.” What Madame Theon was referring to was a halo of twelve pearls she could see spinning around Mira’s head that represented the twelve qualities of the Divine Mother, a force always on earth that chooses to inhabit the body of a select few. Mirra knew there was something different about herself, but she didn’t really know what to make of Madame Theon’s words.
Her life is full of wild tales: attempting to banish demons from men’s souls, living in Japan, having two marriages, and having encounters with Lord Krishna in her dreams.
When she met Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry, she knew he was an incarnation of Krishna, and the person in her soul she had met time and time again. Sri Aurobindo also saw what Madame Theon saw, and acknowledged the Divine Mother in Mirra. Pretty soon after she joined Aurobindo in Pondicherry in 1926, she took care of the followers in his ashram while he retired to his room for the rest of his life, communicating with his disciples by writing letters to them at all hours of the day.
Not surprisingly, many of Aurobindo’s followers were very suspicious of Mirra. She was a western woman who had been married twice, and now she was the Divine Mother, living amongst them in Pondicherry? In my opinion, the dual opposites of male and female, east and west, are some of the most fascinating aspects of the spiritual union between Aurobindo and the Mother. These dualites still cause tension in India and the world today. Aurobindo and the Mother were already calling people to transcend them in the 1920’s and believed there were no limits to the human soul, no polar opposites that could not be balanced and brought into harmony.
Multitudes of people from all over the world were drawn to Pondicherry to be with the Mother. Many say that while in her presence, they felt all their apprehensions melt away. She was an inviting and unintimidating character. A French man named Satprem spent a lot of time with her and has several volumes published of his talks with her. In these books the Mother’s speech is pocked with exclamation marks and spurts of laughter. She was full of wisdom and insight, but had a great sense of lightness and humor.
There is obviously much more to her story, and if you want to learn it you can pick up a biography, but I felt the need to introduce her briefly. I believe it is her who brought me to Pondicherry, and I believe she is a spiritual force who has joined with many others on my path. There is no doubt in my mind that I’ll be back in Pondicherry in my life. Now that I am away from Pondicherry, I sense how much I miss her presence being so close by. She is a woman who I will always feel in my soul, a saint who came down to earth for a brief while to inspire the Divine in others, and her spirit is still more alive than ever.
Pondicherry is full of the Mother’s presence, full of flowers and golden sunlight. The city is distinctly feminine in my opinion, and it is full of calming grace. I must admit I feel extremely grateful to have lived in such a place for a year, the effect of it has penetrated deeper than my nerves.
Many people in Pondicherry wear a ring of the Mother’s symbol, a twelve-petaled lotus. Almost every little storefront has an image of the Mother on the wall, in front of which they place daily offerings of flowers. The Mother loved flowers, and she would hold them in her hand and meditate on their energy, and then rename the flowers according to what they emitted: Jasmine means purity, lemongrass means help, rose is love for the divine, plumeria is psychological perfection. Someone told me that even when she was a young girl in France, the flowers in the garden would tell her when they wanted to be picked or not.
Mirra Alfassa was born in Paris in 1878 to an Algerian mother and a Turkish father. When she was a little girl she would have a reoccurring dream of towering over Paris like a mushroom in a golden gown whose skirts had no limit. Her skirt would parachute around the whole city like a net of golden stars. People of Paris would climb up it and stick their heads out from underneath to implore her to help them with their woes. She could always give them whatever they needed, and this feeling was the best in the world.
As a young lady, she frequented in circles with famous artists, and she also became interested in occultism. She befriended the famous occultist Max Theon, who had a place high up in the mountains of Algeria. Once when visiting him here, she met Madame Theon, who had even more powerful powers than Max. Madame Theon saw Mira and pointed to her head and said, “You have THAT. You are Her.” What Madame Theon was referring to was a halo of twelve pearls she could see spinning around Mira’s head that represented the twelve qualities of the Divine Mother, a force always on earth that chooses to inhabit the body of a select few. Mirra knew there was something different about herself, but she didn’t really know what to make of Madame Theon’s words.
Her life is full of wild tales: attempting to banish demons from men’s souls, living in Japan, having two marriages, and having encounters with Lord Krishna in her dreams.
When she met Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry, she knew he was an incarnation of Krishna, and the person in her soul she had met time and time again. Sri Aurobindo also saw what Madame Theon saw, and acknowledged the Divine Mother in Mirra. Pretty soon after she joined Aurobindo in Pondicherry in 1926, she took care of the followers in his ashram while he retired to his room for the rest of his life, communicating with his disciples by writing letters to them at all hours of the day.
Not surprisingly, many of Aurobindo’s followers were very suspicious of Mirra. She was a western woman who had been married twice, and now she was the Divine Mother, living amongst them in Pondicherry? In my opinion, the dual opposites of male and female, east and west, are some of the most fascinating aspects of the spiritual union between Aurobindo and the Mother. These dualites still cause tension in India and the world today. Aurobindo and the Mother were already calling people to transcend them in the 1920’s and believed there were no limits to the human soul, no polar opposites that could not be balanced and brought into harmony.
Multitudes of people from all over the world were drawn to Pondicherry to be with the Mother. Many say that while in her presence, they felt all their apprehensions melt away. She was an inviting and unintimidating character. A French man named Satprem spent a lot of time with her and has several volumes published of his talks with her. In these books the Mother’s speech is pocked with exclamation marks and spurts of laughter. She was full of wisdom and insight, but had a great sense of lightness and humor.
There is obviously much more to her story, and if you want to learn it you can pick up a biography, but I felt the need to introduce her briefly. I believe it is her who brought me to Pondicherry, and I believe she is a spiritual force who has joined with many others on my path. There is no doubt in my mind that I’ll be back in Pondicherry in my life. Now that I am away from Pondicherry, I sense how much I miss her presence being so close by. She is a woman who I will always feel in my soul, a saint who came down to earth for a brief while to inspire the Divine in others, and her spirit is still more alive than ever.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Christmas Eve
I decided to have a Christmas Eve party and invite everyone I knew. My mentality was, "Well, I'll be here, I'll be alone, and that will be depressing, so why not just bring everyone to me?" For those of you who don't know my family, Christmas is a big deal for us, full of lots of traditions and festivities. Bringing a taste of Strassman-Gutzwiller Christmas spirit to India seemed like the thing to do. No one I know celebrates Christmas, because everyone I know is Hindu. They didn't have plans on Christmas Eve, so I decided I'd give them the chance to have plans. The more I thought about it, the more I liked this idea, because I like throwing parties.
It was to be a potluck. I just thought that if everyone who comes brings something, we won't need to worry about numbers. So I made little hand-drawn invitations, photocopied about 50 of them at school, and set out personally inviting all the teachers I have a relationship with, which are most of them. I think many were a little surprised, and many of them were already going to be out of town Christmas Eve. Many seemed like they would come, but I didn't put on the pressure of RSVPing. Several of my really good friends were 100% enthusiastic and were instantly planning what they would bring. It was such a nice feeling to give people something to be excited about. But really, I was quite clueless of who would actually show up.
I had a great time preparing. I decorated my house with all these amazing star lanterns that are a big part of Christmas in India. I bought a little fake Chrismas tree, and wove some plastic jasmine garlands, put lots of silver stars on it, some tinsel garlands, and homemade white paper cranes. It was a white and silver tree, but it sat on top of a riotously colorful Indian table cloth. It was a nice effect with little twinkling lights. The night of the party I bought some fresh jasmine garlands which are sold on every street corner daily (women wear them in their hair). If my tree wasn't going to smell like pine, well then fresh jasmine is the next best (if not better) thing. All the guests admired my multi-ethnic tree: Indian-Japanese-Euro-American.
Well, pretty much the only guests who came were the colleagues who were 100% enthusiastic from the beginning, plus some neighbors from my building. Everyone brought their kids, and all in all it was over 20 people, which was perfect in my book. I was pleased as punch. My colleagues prepared enough food for an army, which I felt a little bad about, but it was really tasty feasting. I had made cornbread, mung dal with coconut, and cabbage salad. There were some sweet breads and cakes, stuffed idlis with cilantro chutney, homemade veg spring rolls, vegetable pulao, some other Tamil rice and dal dish... We hardly put a dent in it all. Everyone took more home then they brought.
But it was a gay time! I had downloaded some free Christmas music that was all over the board in genres, we all sat and ate and talked, while kids ran around and played. The mosquito net around my bed was popular with the little kids, because it was like a tent-fort that they had never experienced before. People came and went, many stayed. A few people had even brought me little presents that I opened on Christmas morning.
Really it was sooo sweet and nice, I felt very loved. And I felt like had given my share of love and goodness to others as well. After all, you're supposed to spend time with people you love for Christmas. I remember telling my kids that the true meaning of Christmas is "God loves the world, so we should love each other." My quote had sort of come out of nowhere, it surprised me a little. I had given it no forethought. I actually wrote it on the board as one of my impromptu hangman games, and once they guessed all the letters, they read it out load. Many of them took careful note of this wisdom, I don't think they had heard this take on Christmas before. And I was not too far from the mark at all. "And God so loved the world, that He gave to it His only begotten Son." There you have it! It was a lovely Christmas here in Pondy!
Saturday, January 16, 2010
My Birthday
December 14th was a very special day. My 5th standard students were definitely more excited for my birthday than me. Starting months back, they started asking me when it was. (They are extremely interested in every element of my life. When Liz and Maggie were here they came up to ask, "Which one is Elizabeth, and which one is Margaret?") I told them my birthday, because why not? Vidiya Lakshmi, the other 5th Standard English teacher told me that when they ask her when HER birthday is she simply responds, "I don't know, I forgot. I'll have to ask my mother." Now I understand why.
Nonetheless, despite all their pains of making the biggest deal out of my birthday, I truly enjoyed it. My birthday was on a Monday, so the week before they started scheming. "Kate Miss, we don't have to go to computers on Monday. Come to this room instead. And come 10 minutes late." "Kate Miss, what's your favorite flavor? Chocolate? Ok." "Kate Miss, I know what they're all planning-- ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!" Lots of whispers and hushes and excited yelps. Vidiya Lakshmi came up to warn me: "I hope you're prepared for Monday." I laughed and admitted I knew they were all excited about my birthday. Apparently Adu had told her, "But Vidiya Miss, she's all alone, she doesn't have any family here. We NEED to do something for her! What if she starts CRYING?! Who's going to be there to comfort her?" This is how sweet these kids are. You don't really get a much better job than this.
For Monday, I bought 80 Kit Kats, which isn't even enough for all the students I see everyday, but oh well. It's traditional to give out chocolate on your birthday, and I told them all that when I was a little girl my mom called me Kit Kat. So for the week they all called me Kit Kat Kate. It being a Monday, I wore my teacher's sari which is our uniform for Mondays. This made all the kids gasp, "But WHY didn't you wear your COLORED dress today?" Everyone wears "colored dress" on their birthdays, which means new clothes that are NOT your uniform. This lets others know it's your birthday. I told them grown-ups don't need to wear colored dress. Besides, I was saving my money for when my sisters came. I'm way too good at buying clothes for myself, so I practiced restraint this year.
After lunch, the party started. The whole 5th standard planned it with the help of Vidia Lakshmi. Each one had made a homemade birthday card for me. I also got a nice pen and a purple plastic dolphin clock. They all had glittery birthday hats, and Priyanka's mom had bought a beautiful, delicious and fancy chocolate cake complete with edible white chocolate bobbly-boos. Yum. They all sang me happy birthday, and the principal came to stuff cake into my mouth with her bare hands (another tradition here.) It was great. I cut cake for all 31 guests. It was very orderly with the help of the teacher and principal, and they cleaned up spic and span just 10 minutes from when it all began. Then I opened all the cards and oohed and aahed at their thoughtful craftsmanship.
But there was a surprise waiting for me 7th hour. My 6th standard also had something up their sleeves, and they had kept it quite secret from me. In the morning I had just given them their English exam, so our focus had been on that the previous week. But they also had something on the back burner.
Someone came up to me and told me to come to the gazebo in the back garden for our class, "but not YET!" I said Ok, and waited to be escorted. It was raining that day, so they were all scampering around in bare feet. They made me cover my eyes, so I walked carefully with my sari cape in front of me just so I could see the ground below and all the little feet dancing excitingly around. All these tiny toads had come out for the rain, so they were hopping everywhere, dodging our feet. When I got into the gazebo, I pulled away my saree and there were 15 smiling faces, all barefoot and glowing, screaming "Happy Birthday!" around the sweetest little cake. It was really precious. This class I particularly love, and oh man they showed it back to me this day. I cut the cake, but not before they all took the first piece and EACH one of the 15 of them grabbed a hunk of it to stuff into my mouth and smear all over my face. It was hilarious! I cut their pieces with my face full of crap, and then gave them all hugs trying to wipe the frosting back onto them. We danced and played in the rain. Great, great Birthday!
Nonetheless, despite all their pains of making the biggest deal out of my birthday, I truly enjoyed it. My birthday was on a Monday, so the week before they started scheming. "Kate Miss, we don't have to go to computers on Monday. Come to this room instead. And come 10 minutes late." "Kate Miss, what's your favorite flavor? Chocolate? Ok." "Kate Miss, I know what they're all planning-- ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!" Lots of whispers and hushes and excited yelps. Vidiya Lakshmi came up to warn me: "I hope you're prepared for Monday." I laughed and admitted I knew they were all excited about my birthday. Apparently Adu had told her, "But Vidiya Miss, she's all alone, she doesn't have any family here. We NEED to do something for her! What if she starts CRYING?! Who's going to be there to comfort her?" This is how sweet these kids are. You don't really get a much better job than this.
For Monday, I bought 80 Kit Kats, which isn't even enough for all the students I see everyday, but oh well. It's traditional to give out chocolate on your birthday, and I told them all that when I was a little girl my mom called me Kit Kat. So for the week they all called me Kit Kat Kate. It being a Monday, I wore my teacher's sari which is our uniform for Mondays. This made all the kids gasp, "But WHY didn't you wear your COLORED dress today?" Everyone wears "colored dress" on their birthdays, which means new clothes that are NOT your uniform. This lets others know it's your birthday. I told them grown-ups don't need to wear colored dress. Besides, I was saving my money for when my sisters came. I'm way too good at buying clothes for myself, so I practiced restraint this year.
After lunch, the party started. The whole 5th standard planned it with the help of Vidia Lakshmi. Each one had made a homemade birthday card for me. I also got a nice pen and a purple plastic dolphin clock. They all had glittery birthday hats, and Priyanka's mom had bought a beautiful, delicious and fancy chocolate cake complete with edible white chocolate bobbly-boos. Yum. They all sang me happy birthday, and the principal came to stuff cake into my mouth with her bare hands (another tradition here.) It was great. I cut cake for all 31 guests. It was very orderly with the help of the teacher and principal, and they cleaned up spic and span just 10 minutes from when it all began. Then I opened all the cards and oohed and aahed at their thoughtful craftsmanship.
But there was a surprise waiting for me 7th hour. My 6th standard also had something up their sleeves, and they had kept it quite secret from me. In the morning I had just given them their English exam, so our focus had been on that the previous week. But they also had something on the back burner.
Someone came up to me and told me to come to the gazebo in the back garden for our class, "but not YET!" I said Ok, and waited to be escorted. It was raining that day, so they were all scampering around in bare feet. They made me cover my eyes, so I walked carefully with my sari cape in front of me just so I could see the ground below and all the little feet dancing excitingly around. All these tiny toads had come out for the rain, so they were hopping everywhere, dodging our feet. When I got into the gazebo, I pulled away my saree and there were 15 smiling faces, all barefoot and glowing, screaming "Happy Birthday!" around the sweetest little cake. It was really precious. This class I particularly love, and oh man they showed it back to me this day. I cut the cake, but not before they all took the first piece and EACH one of the 15 of them grabbed a hunk of it to stuff into my mouth and smear all over my face. It was hilarious! I cut their pieces with my face full of crap, and then gave them all hugs trying to wipe the frosting back onto them. We danced and played in the rain. Great, great Birthday!
Diwali!
Diwali is by far the most beloved festival in India. It is sort of like Christmas. It was my first significant holiday off from work, so I decided to visit my friends in Bangalore. I stayed with Nimish and his mom Promilla, and it was a super time. It's definitely worth staying with a family for Diwali, because my favorite part of the festival was all the friends and neighbors coming by to bring homemade crackers and cookies, and everyone sitting around visiting and drinking tea. My favorite part within the favorite part of food and snacks was helping Promilla make stuffed parathas called kachoris. You roll a ball of dough, work a big hole into it, put some ground dal filling into the hole and pinch it closed. Then you roll it out into a flat disc and carefully put it into a wok of hot oil. Fry on both sides and watch it puff up like a balloon, and eat hot with pumpkin spiced with garam masala and cilantro. Yum! THE BEST!
Here's the first night they called "dress rehearsal". We even "practiced" lighting fire crackers. :) Here is also cousin Tushar, Nimish, Promilla, and brother Ayush practicing their prayers.
Diwali is the festival of lights, and represents the triumph of good over evil. Nimish's family are Jains, so for them it represents the birth of their main prophet Mahavira. Promilla drew this picture! These pictures are from the "real night". Filling the tiny terra cotta lamps with oil and wicks, arranging them, and lighting them was so much fun. Just like decorating a Christmas tree.
Here's the first night they called "dress rehearsal". We even "practiced" lighting fire crackers. :) Here is also cousin Tushar, Nimish, Promilla, and brother Ayush practicing their prayers.
Diwali is the festival of lights, and represents the triumph of good over evil. Nimish's family are Jains, so for them it represents the birth of their main prophet Mahavira. Promilla drew this picture! These pictures are from the "real night". Filling the tiny terra cotta lamps with oil and wicks, arranging them, and lighting them was so much fun. Just like decorating a Christmas tree.
Navarathri
So, in the September and October of last year we celebrated some pretty sweet Hindu festivals. I haven't posted to my blog in a LOOONG time, and this dark thunder cloud hanging over my head of wanting to write about Diwali and Navarathri has just grown bigger and bigger. It's daunting, because I feel like I need to give a full, educated description of these festivals to teach all you all about Hinduism. Ha. Well, I've given up on that desire. I've learned a lot, but the Hindu faith is still a crazy web of folktales and names and I just can't seem to be that expert for you all. Parvati alone has 108 names. And in Tamil Nadu, they call them all different names too. Every family I've talked to has a different way of understanding these festivals. Different scriptures say different things, and then there are regional folktales that confuse it all even more. But I will share what I've learned with my running commentary on these pictures.
Navarathri is a nine day goddess festival. It is mostly dedicated to Durga, who is the angry warrior form of Parvati, who is the mother goddess. The other two goddesses in the uber-important goddess trio are Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and luck, and Saraswati, the goddess of education, music and art. Each goddess has her own special day in this nine day festival. My downstairs neighbor Priya made this impressive display that took up half her living room. It sort of reminds me of a Christmas Nativity with Mary, Jesus, the cows, angels, wisemen and shepherds... But this is waaaayyy more. The eleven tiers represent different stories and scriptures. The top shelf has an idle of the three goddesses coming together as one. My other neighbor Sujata said this was Mookambigai! But I heard that comes from a Tamil Nadu folktale, not everyone believes that. Then below are the three goddesses. One shelf even has all ten avitars of Vishnu (Krishna being the most popular by far.)
Here are small dolls representing Priya, her husband, her son and daughter. They are at the base of the 11 shelves, and the offering is placed before them. I think it's pretty cool how this female-based festival also makes this a festival to worship the family unit. Every day is about bringing your family peace, wealth, education, luck.... Keeping everyone from harm. Placing the idols of yourselves in front of the idols of the gods seemed very important to me.
Here is a shopkeeper selling all his goods. On Lakshmi puja day, all the store keepers clean and decorate their shops to bring wealth and luck. Priya's spread also included the entire miniature scene of Krishna playing his flute up in a tree to coax the beautiful bathing maidens out of the river. My camera battery died before I could take the picture of that. Sorry.
Saraswati puja was my favorite day by far, because I consider Saraswati to be my personal goddess. For this day, I got invited to my friend Sujata's house. This is their family prayer room, with a special alter set up for Saraswati. Notice the scissors, spoons, and other daily tools placed to the right of the alter. The significance is to bless the things you use everyday so you do things with the educated, artful guidance of Saraswati. All the books the family was currently reading were placed underneath the alter. I put my pen along with the tools, which Sujata returned to me a few days later. The whole family sang some songs, and they process around the house with incense to bless every room.
After puja (prayer), they went outside to feed the cow who comes everyday for breakfast (not their cow, just a cow who knows to come every morning by 9:30), and then up to the roof to deposit some rice for the crows to eat. Sure enough, the crows came flocking the minute Sujata banged the plate to call them.
That evening, I went with Sujata and family to the big temple near our neighborhood for even more Saraswati puja. Here is a vendor outside the temple selling all the figurines you can collect to make your alters like Priya's. Believe it or not, this was the first time I've set foot into a temple since I've been in India! I thought this was very significant, that my first trip was to go worship Saraswati. I lit her a little lamp of ghee, and Sujata and her mom explained all the parts of the temple, with names that sent my head spinning because I realized, once again, that I do not completely understand who is who amongst the Hindu gods. I did buy a small idol of Saraswati. Manjula helped me finagle a really reasonable price. Here she is in my house!
Navarathri is a nine day goddess festival. It is mostly dedicated to Durga, who is the angry warrior form of Parvati, who is the mother goddess. The other two goddesses in the uber-important goddess trio are Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and luck, and Saraswati, the goddess of education, music and art. Each goddess has her own special day in this nine day festival. My downstairs neighbor Priya made this impressive display that took up half her living room. It sort of reminds me of a Christmas Nativity with Mary, Jesus, the cows, angels, wisemen and shepherds... But this is waaaayyy more. The eleven tiers represent different stories and scriptures. The top shelf has an idle of the three goddesses coming together as one. My other neighbor Sujata said this was Mookambigai! But I heard that comes from a Tamil Nadu folktale, not everyone believes that. Then below are the three goddesses. One shelf even has all ten avitars of Vishnu (Krishna being the most popular by far.)
Here are small dolls representing Priya, her husband, her son and daughter. They are at the base of the 11 shelves, and the offering is placed before them. I think it's pretty cool how this female-based festival also makes this a festival to worship the family unit. Every day is about bringing your family peace, wealth, education, luck.... Keeping everyone from harm. Placing the idols of yourselves in front of the idols of the gods seemed very important to me.
Here is a shopkeeper selling all his goods. On Lakshmi puja day, all the store keepers clean and decorate their shops to bring wealth and luck. Priya's spread also included the entire miniature scene of Krishna playing his flute up in a tree to coax the beautiful bathing maidens out of the river. My camera battery died before I could take the picture of that. Sorry.
Saraswati puja was my favorite day by far, because I consider Saraswati to be my personal goddess. For this day, I got invited to my friend Sujata's house. This is their family prayer room, with a special alter set up for Saraswati. Notice the scissors, spoons, and other daily tools placed to the right of the alter. The significance is to bless the things you use everyday so you do things with the educated, artful guidance of Saraswati. All the books the family was currently reading were placed underneath the alter. I put my pen along with the tools, which Sujata returned to me a few days later. The whole family sang some songs, and they process around the house with incense to bless every room.
After puja (prayer), they went outside to feed the cow who comes everyday for breakfast (not their cow, just a cow who knows to come every morning by 9:30), and then up to the roof to deposit some rice for the crows to eat. Sure enough, the crows came flocking the minute Sujata banged the plate to call them.
That evening, I went with Sujata and family to the big temple near our neighborhood for even more Saraswati puja. Here is a vendor outside the temple selling all the figurines you can collect to make your alters like Priya's. Believe it or not, this was the first time I've set foot into a temple since I've been in India! I thought this was very significant, that my first trip was to go worship Saraswati. I lit her a little lamp of ghee, and Sujata and her mom explained all the parts of the temple, with names that sent my head spinning because I realized, once again, that I do not completely understand who is who amongst the Hindu gods. I did buy a small idol of Saraswati. Manjula helped me finagle a really reasonable price. Here she is in my house!
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