chartandwaters

For those of you who already read my other Kashmiri post, I wanted to add that the "With you for you always" slogan is, according to locals, the Jammu and Kashmir government slogan, although I think the Delhi government slogan was similar. In Delhi it seemed sadly comical, as did the sign saying "Keep Delhi Green" (there ARE the usual city tree-planting efforts amid the haze) and one voluntary smog-check station that said something like "Keep Delhi Pollution-Free". If I hadn't already been choking, I would have then. I pictured young spunky auto-rickshaw drivers, the equivalent of the boys I knew in high school, using the station to compete to see whose rickshaw could pollute more. Srinigar is much cleaner, neater and more orderly, and everyone says you can drink the water (though I don't).

Did I say that I am staying in the private houseboat of a family that runs a guest houseboat on Dal Lake, in Srinigar? The houseboats and rickshaws and shikaras--boats that serve the lake like gondolas--are each very festively decorated, full of beautiful floral fabrics, ceilings with many colored bulbs, bunches of colorful plastic flowers (all reminiscent of Key West) and hand carved walls and furniture. The boats have odd English names like “Beauty Star” and "Rolex" and "Hawaii", and mine, Houseboat Cherry Stone. There are about 600 on Dal Lake alone and many more on the two other large Srinigar lakes. According to Lonely Planet the houseboats were built when the Kashmiri government refused to let the British own land here; the Brits, in love with the Kashmiri scenery, solved the problem by living on the water. But now they are most all locally owned homes and hotels.

I am paying for the room--whatever I can afford, they say--and have all my meals with them. The family I'm staying with: Mr. Dabloo, the father and grandfather, the down-to-earth patriarch who reminds me a lot of my great grandfather Harry, casual, informal, but very much in control, carefully counting his money and running the ship. Grandpa Harry sailed our family through the Depression with a weird confidence and cleverness. I think Mr. Dabloo did something of the same. His beautiful wife communicates with me only through her warm smile and sometimes a patting on the head. Her heart is weak and she sits still all day on the patio or living room, sometimes lying down to sleep. They are saving for surgery for her. She wears a long olive-green robe with gold embroidery at the cuffs and collar, a white scarf draped simply over her head, and she dies her hair deep black. I feel that I know her through her family, the hardworking, kind and open-minded sons and daughters.

The Dabloo's children include Rajya, who is totally mothering me, insistently tidying my messy room and stuffing my bed with too many water bottles. When I come into a room looking awkward, she shoves my shoulder and aggressively says, "SIT", which means, "Get comfortable damnit". Rajya's daughter is 19yo Tasleema, whose English is very good and who is way too charming; on the first day she sat down, put her legs on either side of mine and said, "Now I tell you everything about myself. Because I trust you. Some people I do not trust but I trust you." She is used to foreign tourists and courageous with them, as well as with her family and her life. She is feisty and argumentative and at the same time a very good and committed daughter. Her schedule on schooldays during the summer involves cleaning all the houseboat rooms in the morning, going to school, going to part-time work to learn to sew, then coming home and cleaning and ironing all the boat's laundry.

A common greeting here—perhaps only of women to women?—is to grasp your hand and kiss the top passionately. Or they may grasp your hand and hold it long and warmly, as a 10 year old boy did to me yesterday. You are good, they seem to assume, very good.

Longtime friends and employees of the family are Rashid and Gulshun. Rashid is a guide who has accompanied me on many trips, helping me feel safe as I get comfortable here and giving me some background on what I see. His English is halting so our conversations are quick and efficient. Gulshun does all the cooking and speaks no English though she understands some. I am embarrassed about the way I gawk at this family but they are all extremely beautiful; when I see Gulshun I always want to say, "You are so beautiful."

Gulshun and Rashid have three of the most endearing children you'll ever see, Shabnam (means beautiful), 7yo, Khushboo (means happy, pronounced just like it looks with the "u" as in "curd"), 3yo, and the youngest, 2yo, whose name I can't spell. Because Gulshun does all the cooking, Rajya takes almost complete care of Gulshun’s baby, feeding it, holding it, wiping its mouth and face with her scarf. Rashid's family looks all well-fed, while he appears very thin. He led me nimbly on a two-hour muddy hike the other day; at the end my shoes were covered with mud and his were not. During the winter he works construction. Normally, his hair is dark with a few bright patches of white, but this a.m. he died his hair in the living room, using a little pot of dye and a fragment of a broken mirror.

The family has no visible books, and I think a few don't read or write though the kids are all learning English in school. There are also no newspapers; shikaras passing by the houseboats sell cloth for tailoring, film, vegetables, and wood, and provide foreign money exchange, but so far as I can tell you have to take a rickshaw into the main market for a newspaper. For some reason, unique to this family, the kids aren't allowed to play with their toys during the day, so they crave all the little items in my room, the make-up, pens, and notepads. The family does not have much nervousness about what they will get into; e.g., this a.m. 3yo Khushboo brought 7yo Shabnam the sharpest knife in the house so that Shabnam could sharpen a pencil.

Rafiq, the 26yo son who speaks the best English, fled Kashmir at age 10 with his parents’ blessing and started a table selling Kashmiri goods in Goa. At the time he had no idea how to sell things, so he would just wave and smile at everyone very nicely. An English woman who visited every 6 months and always stayed in a nearby hotel saw how sweet he was and how innocent, and began to help him, directing people toward his shop each year that he came. He has no idea where she is now, but he still thinks of her with enormous gratitude. He is sharp, savvy, extremely hard-working and charismatic. He says he has never seen the inside of a school, and he appears to have no hang-ups about his lack of schooling--it seems indicative of both his ability to make his way and the deep networks of support his people provide each other.

Like a lot of people, I assume a high level of formality until directed otherwise. In this very informal family, the rules and principles that are laid out in the Koran and the culture seem all related to goodness rather than to propriety or formality. For example, because it is the Koran’s teaching, the Dabloos cover their heads and bodies; but there is nothing in the Koran that says the men cannot loudly hock a loogey into the lake, or use the lake as a sewer system--and then fish in it. However, in typical worldwide contrariness, it is not cool for women to hock loogeys into the lake.

And it’s funny how the clothing that translates to me as austere is to them--you know--attire. The women wear salwar kameez with long sleeves, pants to the ankles, their heads perfectly covered by the scarf, and in this they do their very physical houseboat work, carrying laundry across the planks that connect the boat to the dock, squatting to do the dishes, tending to the children. There is an enormous informality to their movements and something so informal and comfortable about the way everyone sits on pillows and the floor. (I confess, there is something so sensual about the way people arrange and rearrange themselves on the pillow that I understand burkas extremely well in this context.) And I am so ignorant. I though the bright white cap Mr. Dabloo wore might be an aspect of his faith, so I asked him what it symbolized. He took it off and put it on my head, “A nice cap, a very nice cap, we get you one just like it.” Although they are much used to foreigners, it was hard not to cover my head when all theirs are covered; it made me feel naked so at first I did try to cover my head as much as possible but gave up when I started to not feel myself.

Despite their own careful attire, they all watch the dastardly sexy music videos, including Mrs. Dabloo.

Because I do not want to attempt to cook for them but want to thank them I am giving face massages to Tasleema, Gulshun and anyone else who wants them.

There is an intonation, an expression, and a conviction in the way the Kashmir people I’ve met say “really” or “honest” that makes you feel that, at that moment, they are more believable than anyone else in the world, and that you will never believe anyone else as much again. But I did ask Rashid whether there was a kind of culture of goodness and trustworthiness, as some Kashmiri had told me: “Not all people are good. All five fingers of the hand not the same. But many people are very good.” And later, “I like people, but I don’t believe people. I believe only God.”

On a separate note, I just read that Monica, who has just finished with 6 weeks travel in India and now on to China (see the wonderful www.monicaintheworld.com) wrote that the sideways headnod of India for some reason makes her feel more than anything else that she is truly in another culture. I second that; some of the ways the natives’ heads move, ours just never ever move, and those ways in which our heads also move mean something else completely. For instance, this a.m. my host asked me if I had slept well. I angled my head quickly right, which means “absolutely”, but which felt like it meant (in the Jewish style) “I didn’t sleep so good, I didn’t sleep so bad, what do you want from me?” or possibly "fuck off".

There’s a wide variety of ways of angling the head right or left or swerving it right and then left here, a whole bunch of opportunities for the head that we don’t happen to take. Depending on the ways it is done and the context it can mean, “Exactly yes. Absolutely. No doubt. Obviously. Sure that’s great. Maybe. I don’t know. I doubt it. How should I know? Sure. Sort of. Hard to say. Of course of course. No way in hell do I want that fake-ass saffron but I’m being polite.” In dance we used to talk about a tendency people have to move on a grid: moving forward, backward, right or left; there’s a school of dance called Laban that places a lot of emphasis on the diagonal, which may sound ridiculous till you do it (okay it's a little ridiculous even then). This nod reminds me of life on the diagonal. It also, probably without any justification, reminds me of colonization, and how slaves in America found many ways to communicate that their masters wouldn’t understand. If I were colonized I could think of nothing more happily or deliberately ambiguous than this moving around of the head to mean either “yes” or “no”.

Sign:
“New Mazda Tours and Travels: We care to be more specific”.

The other day I went with Rashid to Shankarachaya (sp?) temple, a temple at the very top of a large hill with a beautiful view, that claims to be Hindu and that Hindi tourists flood. But Rashid explained that it was a mosque that had been converted to Hinduism when the Indian army took over—-by which I think he means after the Partition in 1947, rather than during the more recent 18 years of fighting. As everywhere else the Indian army is posted along the way and at the top. You’re searched before you go in. I asked whether I could take my camera up, since my hosts had told me I couldn’t; an army woman gruffly said, “Take one picture”—she gestured toward the entrance—“and go.” What did she mean, that I take a picture and then leave my camera, that I could take my camera with me, that I could take it but take no more pictures? “One picture and go,” she said and forcefully waved her hand toward the entrance. I asked my guide to translate. After some dialogue he concluded that I had to take a picture of the entrance. Then I could go through and take as many photos as I wanted. I had to take a photo of the ugly entrance to a temple that was really a mosque because they were insane. My guide and I shot the photo, shook our heads in amazement and fled through the gate. At the top there was a level courtyard, and in the center still more stairs to the small stone shrine. Inside, Christmas-like strung, blinking lights, fake flowers, an assortment of icons and a donation box. Many Hindi travelers lovingly kissed the steps of the shrine and forced their way through the small crowded space to circle it. And it did make me feel very gross to watch them worship innocently and devotedly at this temple that should be a mosque.

No one has been telling me ANYTHING about the way Americans are perceived here, except that they are much welcomed and safe, safe, which was making me feel very confused and annoyed and unbelieving. Finally, yesterday, I had two frank discussions. I was having trouble because I did not want to do any of the touristy things, gondolas and horseback rides on malnourished horses, shikara treks (not that they're bad) and shopping. So Rafiq arranged for me to meet with a friend of his, a well-known physics professor (specializing in quantum physics and fiber optics), just to talk. We first went to the house of a cousin of Rafiq's, who would take us to Professor Kahn.

There the family, as I’d been told before, said that the Kashmiris are so hungry for tourism that they are very grateful to each American, individually, for our patronage. Second, they believe or at least like the idea that Americans are safer here then elsewhere because everyone in Europe and Asia is hating Americans right now, but in Kashmir they desperately need our business.

They cited a lot of the conspiracy theories summarized in Fahrenheit 9/11, and said everything was for oil and the military industrial complex. More than Iraq or Israel, they focused on the fact that the fighting in Kashmir, which overtly seems to be between Pakistan, India, and the Kashmiri separatists, could stop in an hour if America wanted it to--but America wants the tension here to weaken the area and protect their oil interests in the Caspian Sea: they sell arms to both sides and feed the fire. (Please don't hesitate to comment and elaborate.)

Most Kashmiris do hate the American government but not its people; one man said with conviction that he knows we’re not the ones at fault because the government lies to us (I think Indians, with their horribly corrupt government, understand this better than we do). He said bin Laden's Islam is not theirs, and they were not happy when people died in 9/11--but they did wish, as was true of so many countries, that we could feel the pain they feel continuously. He said they know how scared Americans are when we come and they feel sorry for us: Bush has ruined our name. He looked at me closely and said, “Clinton? He was a diamond. A great diplomat.” But Kerry was a bad candidate. This man told a story about how Hillary visited Delhi and interrupted her important schedule to spend three hours in his uncle’s rug shop. Later, when the Clinton’s came back to India, they listed three people they wanted to see: the President, the Prime Minister, and his uncle.

When Rashid and I entered Professor Kahn's office, he was in the middle of a meeting in which he was explaining that the world is almost wholly electrons. Electrons are always moving, in life as in death. So science makes no distinction between life and death and doesn't answer the question of what they are. When his guests left I interviewed him about his work, and he said he was happy to talk, and in particular could try to answer any questions I had about Kashmir or Islam. When I asked what he would want Americans to know, he said that he wished we would become moral and ethical leaders as well as technological. He then led me through a Socratic dialogue about different kinds of religion which, it took me a moment to realize, was meant to lead me intellectually to the conclusion that Islam was the only true religion. He did not feel that other religions were bad, only that they did not provide sufficient principles for living--for example, Islam believes Christ is a true prophet, but he didn't do enough in the way of providing principles for good living. Only Islam does this. He hoped that eventually I might become Moslem and encourage the same in my communities at home.

On the way home I asked Rashid whether he agreed with this. No, he thought it was good that there were many different kinds of religions and thinks, as he and Rafiq had both said several times before, that we are all worshipping the same god: "Belief is the same, faith is different."