chartandwaters

Two of my friends (did you want to be named, friends?) made the huge mistake of asking me to blog MORE. The great news is that this means that any future loquaciousness is their fault. But there are now several new blogs.

The title of this entry refers to some underlying discomforts I'm needing to express. Maybe my biggest discomfort is feeling overwhelmed by the spiritual fervor and depth here among people who could so easily feel bitter and disengaged; it challenges me, as I know I could benefit so much from a spiritual practice, and I have none. I'm not talking so much about a devotion to a god or a creative power, but to meditating on morality and goodness each day.

My second biggest discomfort probably comes from reading "Holy Cow," a simple, funny book by an Australian atheist radio broadcaster who initially hates India but finds herself living here for a year, during which she travels and investigates different kinds of religions. It's a good book, but it feels like one long blog that she was clever enough to get published, making me think: this blog's already been written, what is it I've got to add? I don't know; but in fifth grade the poet Naomi Shihab Nye, now famous, then a travelling poet in the San Antonio schools, gave us all a portion of "The Writing Life" to read, by a writer named Annie Dillard whom I would later get to take class with at Wesleyan. And it said (I may be paraphrasing), "You are here to give voice to this: Your own astonishment."

So off I and we go to voice our unique kinds of wonder. But you can overdo it, can't you, you can easily get addicted to astonishment. When I was visiting some NGOs (nongovernmental organizations, a.k.a. nonprofits) in Delhi, I was extremely disappointed to get standard answers to the standard questions (Where do you get your funding? Grants. What's your biggest challenge? Funding.) Perhaps the biggest challenge of our time--finding the money to do good work--and all I could think was: Nothing new here...must move on. You can even play dumb to the facts in order to experience surprise, but I can't think of a good example of that.

Third biggest discomfort: I don't care that my friend Jamie thinks he might be the greatest poet in the world, Tagore's a bore: "Has not the word come to you that the flower is reigning in splendour among thorns? Wake, oh, awaken! Let not the time pass in vain!" So I heed Tagore and move on with great relief to Joseph Conrad's "Nostromo".

Fourth biggest: Trying to decipher the movements of a foreign culture in an unknown language, which is giving me some combination of pause and hives. In lighter moments it reminds me of that Tom Waits song in which you hear loud banging and Tom saying over and over again, "What's he DOING down there?" But more often I feel like an unnecessary anthropologist.

Take, for example, the cuffs on shirtsleeves--and shirtsleeves in general. Most sleeves on traditional Tibetan dress end in cuffs. At the traditional dances that took place for tbe birthday in the Namgyal Temple, the men wore troubador-style jackets, only one shoulder covered, with long sleeves that widen toward the wrist and end in fat 3-inch cuffs. The women generally wore the full chupas most Tibetan women here wear every day. Full chupas are beautiful dresses that I haven't found a good web picture of, so I'm going to try describing them.

My particular admiration for chupas stems from the fact that they admit women frequently have waists and even breasts! (I think the chupa might be controversially feminine to some; for that I apologize for my adoration.) The top of the chupa is sleeveless and completely fitted, and one side crosses over to button on the other, forming a modest v-neck and a fitted waist. At the waist the skirt has several inches of extra material on either side that tie in the back, creating two long folds that drape down and out from the center of the back. The men's skirts do this too. To me it's so elegant on everyone. Chupas are ankle-length. "Half chupas" are the skirts only. If you are married, you also wear an apron that is, curiously and beautifully, always printed in a pattern of multi-colored parallel stripes. The traditional blouse that fits under the chupa has a little collar that goes over the v-neck, and three-quarter sleeves that end in 2-inch cuffs.

In the early dances in these clothes, the women and young girls made supple, rippling arm movements that made their arms look as if they had four or five different segments. If you've ever seen Swan Lake, the movements are reminiscent of the arms of the dying swan, except that in the Tibetan dances they're the exact opposite of desperate and agonized. Instead they're completely peaceful motions in a moderate and unchanging rhythm, as if the arms could move this way forever and the dance could go on forever.

The men's arms moved in right angles, in little enthusiastic marching movements (cheerful, not militaristic). For most of each dance both the men and the women made little shuffling and kicking movements with their feet. Aside from the women's rippling arms the dances looked easy to learn; the dancers maintained upright postures the whole time and the dances look effortless and even casual, as if they were a simple extension of walking.

(The upright postures bemuse the modern dancer in me; clearly no Tibetan Isadora Duncan, wacky founder of modern dance, arrived to maneuver them into forward or backward bends or threw them onto the floor to roll and writhe--although maybe that's only because such moves are reserved for possessed monk oracles, a whole nother story.)

All the while, with no resource to turn to to understand these dances, I continued to observe with care that Tibetans believe sleeves should end in cuffs.

But just as I had concluded that, a new dance troupe came out wearing overly long, cuffless sleeves that passed their fingertips by about a foot. Silliest things I've ever seen. The extra cloth made the dancers resemble unmade beds, or adolescents who couldn't be bothered to roll up their sleeves. Naturally I assumed the dancers would still manage graceful movements, but any gracefulness--if it was still there--was chopped off by these floppy sleeves. My Finnish friend Kyrsie agreed that the dances looked strange and inept to her, and we both thought the Dalai Lama looked sad watching them, as if once these long-sleeved dances had been remarkable but something in the culture had been lost.

But who the hell am I to say. If I ask Tibetans about these dances, I will get five different answers, not because that's how Tibetans are but because, I think, that's how people are. Listen to my impatience! Matt, the lay Buddhist, told me that we should feel grateful for situations that give us the opportunity to practice patience, because otherwise we cannot expect WHEN we will have the opportunity to practice it. By contrast, there are plenty of beggars, so practicing generosity, for example, is easy. But we are lucky if we get to practice patience.

Now about penants, the essence of useless anthropology. Those streamers of penants that line car lots were also--in better material and richer colors--a decoration at His Holiness' birthday celebration. For lack of a good view of the proceedings I observed carefully that after every twenty green triangles, the 21rst would be either red, green, blue, or white. Yesterday I went to a Hindu temple devoted to Shiva the Destroyer (a "Shiva temple" in nearby Bhagsu), and lo and behold it too has penants. In addition to some decaying statues of Hindu gods, typical lovely rows of tinsel and Xmas lights, and numerous many-sized bells for devotees to strike on arrival, from the ceiling hang rows and rows of small, old, fading blue penants whose aged grace make them very pretty, hanging lightly as they do against a pale blue, cracked-paint wall and numerous hung framed and fading images of deities and gurus.

(Regarding the omnipresent bells of Hindu shrines, in a country where blowing your carhorn is as frequent as using your turn signal--no, much much more--the Indians have an interesting relationship to noise. By contrast, Tibetans turn noiseless prayerwheels.) (At the Shiva temple, there's also a fire which a sadhu--man who in the Hindu tradition has renounced everything to become closer to the gods--claimed has been burning for a long, long time, but he couldn't say how long, Lonely Planet doesn't mention it, and few of the Hindu tourists even noticed it. A bunch of sadhus were sleeping around it, and it was just some smoking logs, but in a very, very old room. It's so nice when things are old that I would have looked longer except that I found the main sadhu suspect.)

So there is general agreement that penants are festive. But when did they come from India to grace used car lots, or was it the reverse? My punchiness could be due to the fact that the town is so touristy it's making me feel less sharp. In fact--and this has been in many ways very interesting--my experience has been more about the many tourists I've met from Brazil, Israel, Finland, Australia, South Africa, England, Germany, Switzerland, France--a surprising mix in such a small town.

I wish I could study religious costume across the world, I would certainly call my study "Wearing Religion on Your Sleeve." By which I am really referring to the array of public displays of religion across India, so different from our either more discrete, or more insidious, little crucifix pendants or stars of David. Here you might have a red dab on your third eye indicating you've completed your Hindu puja for the day; if you're Sikh your uncut hair is necessarily swathed in a turban; so many other examples. When I first arrived, I found myself laughing at America's claim to be a melting pot; I don't blame America for it, it was a probably needed message to avoid riots as our immigrant ancestors moved in, but I didn't predict the extent of India's pluralism--how visible it is, and how much, despite outbreaks of violence, people live not only in harmony but partaking in and respecting each other's customs. India's pluralism should be more renowned than it is, and there is so much interesting cross-pollination of religious practices (some of which was of course utilized as a method of conversion). And elsewhere India's religious expression is so gloriously public; for instance, one of the op-eds in the Times of India is always gracefully spiritual.

But there's also--arguably--a sleeve thing. In India most salwars (tunics worn with loose pants and a long dupatta, or scarf) have short or long-sleeves although you often buy them sleeveless, with attachable short sleeves, that most women attach despite how much cooler it is without. In Kashmir, where all Muslim women wear long sleeves, I wore a sleeveless salwar regularly until a leering young man told me I had "nice sleeves".

In either case the salwars are almost never worn without the knee-length dupatta (scarf), which is typically draped over the front to hide the chest, although it often enough rides up or is draped higher to hide the collar bones, where it still manages to look chaste. But please. One day, one of Tasleema's cousins was helping Tasleema wash clothes in the lake. This cousin, name forgotten, has a wildly beautiful face and glowing greenbrown eyes. She had her dupatta off as she was roughing it in the back of the houseboat when a male cousin called her name and she started to go to him, paused, gracefully turned and took her dupatta from the clothesline to drape it backwards over her perfect collarbones, then turned back and hastened out. I cannot yet tell my Indian friends that at that moment it reminded me of a noose. A Western man's business tie has a similar connotation, except that he wears it less frequently.

Meanwhile, I cannot get it in my head that the sari, a frequent alternative to the salwar in India, is considered conservative, as, although it hides the upper arms, it hugs the body and bares your midriff, right? I thought I'd see business suits in Delhi, but the woman's business attire is generally either salwar or sari. I've also lost my former fascination with the sari--it seems too complicated a method of attire.

But let us close with the beautiful Tibetan fashion. I feel like asserting that the Tibetans have the greatest fashion sense in the world (to the limited extent that I've seen the world) with the monk's attire particularly "dialed" (a word I've heard graphic designers say to mean "perfected as though tuned with precision to exactly the right station"). How did they determine so precisely the colors of God, by which I mean, how did they know that that wine and that bright yellow-orange, the warmest richest colors one can imagine, could endure centuries of wear, and how did they determine how noble it appears to cover only one shoulder with the outer robe? How did they realize how much better and happier both men and women look in long skirts? And when did they realize to be sure to have a tank top underneath in that exact orange-yellow? And where do they find them? (I saw one monk's tanktop that was the right color but screenprinted with "Armani".)

Postscript: According to the Isadora Duncan Foundation (http://www.isadoraduncan.org/about_isadora.html), Isadora directed several dance schools throughout her career. She said, “To dance is to live. What I want is a school of life.” The website adds: "Isadora Duncan died as dramatically as she had lived, when her long trailing scarf was entangled in the spokes of a wheel of a new Bugatti sports car." I'll bet hard money that many women riding scooters in their dupattas have met a similar fate.