Joshi Bhojanalay

I've been meaning to write a post about food for a while. It seems that I've finally gotten tired of the canteen food here, so perhaps now is a good time.

As far as the canteen food that I'm sick of - it is actually not bad. There are two canteens, the west canteen looks out over the lawn with the amoeba topiary and is open for lunch except on Sundays, as well as breakfast during the week and tea and tiffin (generally something deep fried in the afternoon and the same as what was for breakfast in the morning). The lunch varies a certain amount, but often includes attempts to create some sort of non-Indian cuisine. East canteen is open for lunch and dinner every day but Sunday, and the food is always the same. It is roughly what people from Maharashtra would eat at home: dal, rice, chapati and some vegetable. It is vaguely spicy, but only very vaguely. For institutional food, it isn't bad, but it is always the same, and eventually almost everyone gets tired of it.

This happened to me, and I've been going to Kailash Parbat more often. It is nice to be a regular at a place like this. When I show up I get a friendly head wobble and last night I heard one waiter tell another, "hey, the cycle guy is here." Even the grumpy head waiter smiles and asks me about my bike. I almost always get a fresh lime soda (lime juice and club soda) and some sort of snack (like Pani Puri - crispy deep fried pockets that one spoons a watery chutney into and eats in one bite) and then a vegetable curry (there are dozens of choices, and everything is vegetarian) and some naan and rice to eat it with. I drink a cup of tea and sit for a while to digest before riding home.

I've also been trying to get a gas canister. My quest for a kitchen pretty much ended when after I had acquired a few basics, I tried to make a cup of tea, and I had exactly enough gas left between two canisters to boil one cup of tea. When Jill came there was a brief flurry of getting a kitchen knife and a frying pan, but getting a new propane canister is not as easy as it should be. I started trying again last Wednesday after Bill and Yuko had people over for dinner and Bill shamed me for being so lazy until he realized that it was not so easy for those who are living in one of the apartments and not the guest house. So in the past week I've spent a total of about two full days waiting around my apartment for the gas delivery tricycle to show up, but they never come when they say they will, or even within an hour or two of this time. So until then, a grilled cheese sandwich remains an unfulfilled longing, and I eat out or go to the canteen.

One of my favorite places to go is Joshi Bhojanalay, aka Friends Union Joshi Club. Places like Joshi's are nestled in corners all around the city, and many are quite old. Joshi's dates back more than a hundred years, and though the owners changed from one family to another at one point during that span of time, the food is still a straightforward Gujarti thali. (Gujart is a state in India, and thali is a style of meal, where a variety of dishes are served together. Ilangovan discovered the place and introduced the current TIFR crowd. (Ilangovan, or IG, is a mathematician of Keralan extraction who has been in Bombay for 18 years and has been my local guide to all of the best restaurants that I have found with the exception of Kailash Parbat. IG also was the one who finally dragged me to a Bollywood movie.) Anyway, IG showew Pranab, and Pranab took several of us there once, and I was hooked. I went there with Jill, Sreekar and the Ducrohets, and have never seen Jill enjoy a meal so thoroughly. Tonight I took Bill and Yuko.

The walk there from the TIFR bus stop is always moderately exciting. After a walk along one of the few relatively unobstructed sidewalks in Mumbai, one must navigate the big open place where traffic crosses haphazardly and various construction projects are underway - in other places one might call it a square - by Metro cinema, and this is always interesting. And the street between there and Joshi's is one way unless you are a bus or a pedestrian (or six pedestrians pushing a handcart twice the size of a car), which makes for interesting navigation. It is also perpetually heavily under construction. But eventually, one makes it to the arched entrance leading to the courtyard and the stairs leading up to the restaurant on the first floor. This is truly not the sort of place that can be found without a local guide.

Upon entering Joshi's, one sits down at one of the two-seat tables. One side of each table is open to the aisle where the waiters circulate. First, they bring a cucumber and tomato salad, raw red onion, small green chiles, a little bit of mango pickle, and scoop each of a red and a green spicy condiment. Then come buttermilk and water to drink. There is a choice of two dals, one sweeter than the other, or a sweet yogurt or coconut based dish. Usually, they give me all three, because I don't seem to be able to pick one fast enough. After this, the specific menu changes with the days of the week. On the day I went with Jill, Sreekar and the Ducrohets, we got a little fried ball with stuff inside and some sauce to go with it. It was quite tasty, and I think Jill had three or four by the time the meal was done. The dry vegetable was a wonderfully spiced cabbage and green pea thing, and then there was an aloo palak, some bright green stuff, and a paneer in curry. Crisp papad goes well with the spicy chutneys that come with the salad at the beginning. The roti guy came around with his ghee-drizzled disks, regular chapathi and the kind with a tumeric yellow tint. There were the hard, cookie like biscuits and a darker puffy roti, spiced with some combination that didn't get a chance to be critically examined before being consumed. Then the sweet nutty yogurt sauce came out. Jill liked this one. I turned to ask her what she thought of the place and she bubbled, "I keep going from this green one (the condiment that came with the salad and onion) to this white one (the sweet nutty yogurt sauce). The spicy one is so good, but it hurts, and then this one makes it better, but then I want the spicy one again..." Her eyes glazed over and she reached for another morsel of delicious fried thing with stuff inside.

A thali at Joshi's is a proper Indian meal, and most of the eating is done sans utensils. The rotis are torn into small pieces and used to scoop up the other foods. After a bit of practice, I am able to do this without making much of a mess, but there is a learning curve, during which the sauce often makes it well past the first knuckles. Especially in the south, rice is also eaten with the fingers, after adding just enough dal or curry so that it sticks together. I've tried this a few times, but doing it generally leads to a big mess, and I prefer to use utensils. There is a sensuality to eating with one's fingers that is missed when food is mediated by spoon and fork. Like the cacophony of spice that goes into most Indian meals, it isn't something that I want to have all the time, having not grown up eating like this, it is a bit overwhelming to have every meal be so intense. But the experience of eating a good thali like at Joshi's is one of the acmes of food experiences.

Harishchandragad

Saturday's trek up Harishchandragad was my favorite of the past three. (Comparing it to the green trek up Manikgaht is difficult, because this place is so different in the rainy season.) On the trek were Antiaji and Yogish, our expert guides and Yogish's wife Shoba. There was Sreekar and I from the math department, as well as Bill Casselman (who is visiting the math department from UBC) and his wife Yuko. Sam, Kevin and Tanaka (who is visiting from Japan) joined from physics, and Girish from astronomy. Travel was long but straightforward, involving only a train ride to Kalyan and 90 km bus ride.

We got off the bus at a wide spot on the road and set off across fields towards the cliffs a few miles distant. A local priest, barefoot and wrapped in an orange robe walked ahead of us. He had a string tied around one ankle, a reminder that he had said his prayers, or perhaps that he needed to pick up a loaf of bread at the store. An ox cart trundled along the road with us as well. A plastic bottle full of dark liquid was tied to the axle and hung down like a scrotum. My guess is that it was full of oil for when the squeak of the bearings (if there were any, which is questionable) became noticeable over all the other rattles associated with taking a wooden wheeled cart on a dirt track.

It was early morning still, and a lot of birds were about. A pair of black and white kingfishers were looking for fish in the stream. The way that they would hover they looked like gargantuan hummingbirds.


(Bill's picture)

We arrived at a village after about an hour, and stopped for tea and some breakfast. Supposedly the place where we stopped made an amazing poha, but I didn't get a chance to find out what this is, because Yogi was justifiably worried about getting such a large group up and down the hill in time to catch the bus and the train back to Mumbai. On the way out of town, we passed a woman washing dishes at a well, which was deeper than I thought it would be, and the water did not look good.

For the next 90 minutes or so, we gradually ascended through forest to the sound of singing bulbuls and rollers. The canopy provided shade and there was a pleasant breeze blowing. At one point, the trail split. Antia wanted to take the upper route because he thought it would lead to a shortcut. I expressed my reservations about following anything that Antia termed a shortcut, recalling the other two times I'd been on a trek with him. It isn't that breaking trail isn't fun, it's just that I was really enjoying the peaceful walk through the woods and didn't feel the need to add unnecessary adventure just yet. Yogi soon caught up and confirmed that following the upper path would be just fine, and we continued. Antia in the woods is almost the archetype of taciturn mountain man, but I think that he cracked the mask looked a little smug about the fact that we went his way. In any case, everyone was amused.

The trail led us up to a col where we rested and drank some water. A rock had been carved with a simple bas relief of a monkey's outline. This had then been painted bright orange. A bell hung from a tree branch above the rock, and the breeze ruffled an orange pennant. Following Girish's lead, Bill, Yuko and I gave the bell a ring as we left.

From the col, we ascended a trail that wound back and forth across a steep face. Large parts of the trail were carved into the rock, but there was nothing as steep as the staircases from Goragad two weeks ago. As we rose above the canopy, I spotted a few monkeys jumping about, mostly hidden by the foliage.

The trail topped out onto the plateau after 45 minutes or so, and we were able to look back over the valley we had crossed this morning. A long dam made half the valley into a reservoir that was used to irrigate the other half. After a short rest, we were on our way towards the other end of the plateau, where the Deccan plateau upon the edge of which Harishchandragad stands drops off to the plains of the Konkan coast in a massive cliff called the Konkan Kada. (Kada means wall.)

After a few miles of up and down through scrub and across dry washes, at about halfway to the Konkan Kada, we came to a temple. We stopped here to look at the carvings and to collect a little water from the spring fed tank that was in the temple. Only Yogi, Shoba and Antia were willing to drink the water. It was still quite nich though, because by this time the the sun was being rather assertive, and a few of us to the opportunity to rinse the sweat from our faces. I wet a handkerchief to cool my neck and keep the sun off.

Near the temple was a cave carved from the rock and full of water. A Shiva Lingam (a fairly common sort of shrine representing the god's penis) stands in the middle of the pool, and is bracketed by the remains of four pillars. Only one pillar still stands, signifying that we are in the fourth age, Kali Yuga (a Kali that is not the godess Kali, but some other Kali that doesn't sound different in English). Anyway, that pillar also falls when the age comes to an end in a few tens of thousands of years.

The path continued up and down, crossing dry washes that are sure to become impossible torrents in the monsoon rains, until it came to the edge of a lot of air. The cliff arced around to the left and right, and dropped what was certainly in the hundreds of meters. The edge on which we stood was overhanging, so looking out over the edge induced quite a bit of vertigo. A hot breeze drifted up from the plains below, and we amused ourselves tossing bits of chaff and watching them float on the updraft.

3.4 M avi of the edge of the cliff



Lunch was had in the shade of a tree. Shoba's chutney was once again the star of the show, but the boiled eggs, potatoes, tomatoes and flatbreads that it enhanced were quite welcome in the hot afternoon. Lunch was finished by a little bit of chocolate that Kevin had thought to bring. Unlike chocolate made for consumption in cooler climes, Indian chocolate is made with a smaller proportion of cocoa butter and does not melt in the mouth, or more importantly in the backpack. I caught a few minutes nap while my companions talked about cricket or Bollywood or something.

Our return was via the exact same route by which we came, only the light and our energy levels had changed. When we at last came back to the place where we had had breakfast, we found that to our pleasant surprise, there was a refrigerator full of orange soda and half frozen mango juice. It was one of the best orange sodas I've ever had.



The most notable feature of the long trip home was the fact that most of us were able to sleep on the bus. I was lucky and had a seat near the front, but still had to constantly fight the centrifugal forces that wanted toss me into the aisle or into the lap of the guy next to me. Somehow by clasping my fingers around the bar on the seat in front of me I was able to find a set of stable points that didn't disappear when I relaxed and went to sleep.

Legos+Math

Neil pointed this one out to me.

http://www.andrewlipson.com/mathlego.htm

Happy cycles and Keralan trike tricks

After his talk the other night, I introduced myself to Greg Roberts. Learning that I was a mathematician and would be in town for a while, he told me to email him and that perhaps we could for a cup of tea at some point, or that if I saw his motorcycle outside Leopold's that I should stop in. I did email him, and mentioned that I'm more likely to be found at Kailash Parbat than Leopold's, and that if I was there, the only fixed gear bike in India would be sitting outside. (That may be an exaggeration, but I'm not so sure. According to a recent report, India's only velodrome, near Delhi is, "full of bumps and cracks, and more often visited by snakes and rats that humans.")

Roberts told me about Hamu-bhai, his friend and a bike shop owner in Colaba. I stopped by there Sunday on my way to lunch. Happy Cycles is on Third Pasta Lane. (There are at least three Pasta Lanes; Kailash Parbat is on First Pasta Lane, two blocks down.) The shop was a typical looking Indian bike shop, with an array of wheels hanging in the doorway, and an ordered clutter of tools and parts filling the small room. Work stands don't seem to exist here, at least not in south Bombay. I guess that there is too much a premium on space. Hamu-bhai's two mechanics were working on bikes in the street, occupying space that would otherwise become parking. One was adjusting one of the standard workman's bikes - a double top tubed black frame built to haul heavy loads and last like a tank. I rarely see them well maintained, but I also rarely see them broken. The other mechanic was changing the seat on a kid's BMX. The bike was so badly rusted that a considerable amount of hammer usage was being employed to extract the old seatpost. I rode up and introduced myself, telling Hamu-bhai that Gregory had told me about him, and that I was just stopping by to say hello. He heard Gregory's name and looked at my bike and smiled, pulled out a chair and asked his son to go and get us some tea.



Happy Cycles sells and repairs both bicycles and motorcycles. (Note that both motorbike and motorcycle are short for motorbicycle, which is no longer a word.) There were a few almost shiny new hero brand bicycles leaning against the building on the sidewalk next to the shop, and an array of motorcycles and scooters, many of them covered against the constant abuse that is being outside in Bombay. I parked my bike at the curb and took the offered chair. Hamu was the first Indian I met who knew what a fixed gear was, and he explained the lack of rear brake to his mechanics, who set aside their tools to take a look at the American bicycle. Sitting on the sidewalk and sipping tea, I answered all of Hamu's questions about my bike, and about what I was doing in India.



His curiosity about me satisfied, he pulled out a picture book of the sort that one can have made at a photo studio these days and showed me some of his finer creations. The artistic bicycle is not a much existing thing in India - the only human powered vehicles where much attention to aesthetics is ever paid are the tricycle rickshaws and cargo haulers (more on this later). But put a motor on some wheels and Indians go for detailing like the best of them. Hamu-bahi was into restoration and customization of classic Indian bikes, mostly Enfields. Classic is a loose term of course, because until recently the models were pretty much the same year to year. When you think about it, redesigning a working device and updating one's manufacturing plant is an expensive and somewhat wasteful task to do every year. Mostly for this reason, Indian bikes changed rather slowly compared to their counterparts in other parts of the world, and Enfield Bullets are still rolling off the assembly line looking a whole lot like they did in 1947. Now the UK even imports "brand new classic" motorcycles back from India. In any case, some of the bikes in the Happy Cycles stable are restored 50 year old gems. The pictures in the book depicted the conversion of a few of these aged finds into sleek machines. A significant enough chunk of my formative years were spent being enamored with the combination of steel, tires, and motor that is a muscle car that I stiil love an artistically done machine. (I used to have one of these, but of course, mine was black.) The motorbikes that Hamu-bhai showed me were in this category of vehicle as art. Two of the bikes from the picture book were parked outside the shop, Hamu-bhai's own in red, black and silver, and another apinted in black and green and heavy on the chrome. Gregory has restored this bike for Johnny Depp, who plays Shantaram in the movie of the book. My favorite bit of detailing was the pressed tin grips, kickstart and foot pegs, textured with chromed vines and flowers.



I took my leave of Hamu-bhai, and made a few notes in my mental picture of what sort of Indian bike I might be tempted to build. As I said, a decorative bicycle is pretty rare in India, but it could certainly be done. The cycle rickshaws in West Bengal were often nicely decked out in bright paint, though often maintenance was seriously deferred. A smaller number of the cargo trikes were similarly decorated, including the one that I took a ride on in Kerala. We were walking back to the guest house where we were staying in Allepuzha and I stopped to admire a shiny new trike. The owner was resting in the shade and wagged his head, smiling at my approach. He made a gesture that I didn't understand until his friend said I should get on and go for a ride. This proved tremendously amusing. An Indian bicycle is not a light thing to start with. To make a trike, the frame is often modified to include not just a double top tube but a doubled down tube as well. The rear triangle is removed, and in place of the chainstays, a wishbone of angle iron extends back and spans the axle. Rebar seat stays are welded in, and an angle iron frame is made for the wooden box that sits behind the rider. The wheels are special heavy duty things, often forgoing tensioned spokes for solid bars of rebar welded to hub and rim. The drivetrain consists of a standard Indian set of cottered steel cranks on a chainring (perhaps with "Atlas" or "Hero" stamped into the steel), about eight feet of chain, and a cog bolted to the middle of the axle. I estimate about at 2:1 ratio of chainwheel to cog.



My first attempt at getting started consisted of me lifting myself off the seat by pressing down on the pedal. It seemed that one of the wheels was in a bit of a divot, and lifting the contraption out of the hole took more force than I had in just mass. I pushed the trike forward a foot to get all three wheels ready and started slowly forward as I looked for another opening in the light afternoon traffic. I knew that quick and agile were not going to apply to the handling of this beast, so I waited for a good sized opening, slowly moving forward all the time. There was a car parked by the side of the road, and I swung wide to pass it, still waiting for the trickle of auto rickshaws and motorbikes to stall for long enough for me to make a u-turn. The way the vehicle was pointed moving forward would lead up and over a bridge crossing a canal, and into more traffic, so I needed to get it pointed the other way.

Suddenly, the trike stopped. I had misjudged how wide the rear axle was, and the right wheel had scraped along the bumper of the car. I jumped off and hoped I hadn't caused any damage to car or trike. The trike was fine, but there was a minor but noticeable scratch on the car, which was a fairly new model. Fortunately the car's owner, who was standing nearby, was laughing so hard that he had no ability to be upset. The trike's owner was having a blast watching the giant white guy try to pedal his trike, and insisted that I continue when I tried to give up in embarrassment. Trike backed up away from car, I found my opening and eased out into the street. With a lumbering turn, I was headed back the the other direction. I pedaled along, feeling a bit like an elephant, turned back and returned the trike to the very amused owner.

Some books

One of the ways that I have been getting to know this place is by reading it's books, both books about the place and just books by Indians.

The first one I read was Suketu Mehta's Maximum City. It has its fans, but I found it only so so. By the author's own admission, his chosen topics are ideally suited for 14 year old boys, or others with a love for the life stories of mobsters, prostitutes, religious fanatics and others similarly extreme. I must admit that it gave me a little apprehension to be reading this book in Seattle, preparing to go to this place where Suketu made it sound like people got taken out in broad daylight by thugs hired for a pittance on a daily basis. I've yet to see a gangland murder, or even anything looking particularly violent. (I don't think that the rock throwing mob ever actually got around to it.) Not to say that the violence isn't real, it just isn't what I'd fill three quarters of a book about this relatively nonviolent city with. Not to say it didn't teach me a lot about Bombay, it contains a wealth of interesting anecdotes, and certainly helped me to orient when I showed up here.

On the night when Sukhendu, Ilangovan, Chan and I went out for dinner and Ramzan sweets at Muhamed Ali Road, I picked up Yann Martel's The Life of Pi. The protagonist is Indian, but the book is not so much explicitly about India as about exploring the Indian way of mixing fantasy and reality. This is of course also manifested in Bollywood, but shows up (from what I can tell) in the literary tradition going back to ancient times. Lots of storytelling in India is unabashedly fantastic. In a collection of stories adapted from old sources (they all predate the Muslim influences), gods and magic show up as frequently as they do in Ovid. It seems that if it would be more interesting to mix things up a bit, the storyteller will more likely than not mix them up. And of course Indian food is the great metaphor of the culture, and the unchecked cacophony of spices come together with the same flexible attitude towards consistency.

In Madras, I acquired Midnight's Children. I could have read this book before I and I can read it again after I have spent the rest of the year in India and again after many visits to this place and all would be different experinces. The book is as thick with sideways description and cultural reference as the city is thick with humanity.

At a party at an apartment building in downtown Seattle full of artists lofts, Jordan (who I made the digital sundial with) told me about Shantaram. I had just learned that I was coming here, and he was all jazzed up about this book. I put off reading it until last month, when I found it in Darjeeling and wanted to have something to read while curled up in my sleeping bag against the cold. It is a bit of a door stopper, but I tore through it in little more than a week. I completely understand how Jordan found it a great story even without my particular reason for being interested in this corner of the world. But a lot of it happens to be set pretty much in my backyard. After I read it and Jill started reading it, we would go for walks from my apartment and I'd point out the slum where Shantaram lived and set up his clinic, Leopold's bar, the Taj Hotels and so on. We went for drinks at the Oberoi, and every time we went to the airport, we passed by Haji Ali Mosque, lit up at night in decrepit splendor.

Shantaram's description of the experience of a Westerner becoming Indian illuminates many things about the culture that I find confusing. Like Maximum City, it is a book about gangsters, but it is written by a (former) gangster, and the stories are somewhat autobiographical, rather than presented with the excitement of a hotel room interview. And there is a lot more to the book than a gangster story. When I arrived in India and began my journey through this culture, I was very aware of the shifts in resolution that I experienced culturally. Incomprehensible sound focused past accent and I began to understand Bombay English, gesture and affect began to distinguish the individuals who had previously been instances of a smaller cast of actors. I've slowed down now, the newness of the city has worn off and I am less likely to venture out from TIFR than I was at first (Kevin and I were talking about this at lunch today - it is a bit frustrating how disconnected from the city this place can be). Reading Shantaram, I followed the story of a similar path, retracing some of the steps that I had taken, and then going much further.

Shantaram is the name given to the book's author, Gregory David Roberts, when he went to live in a village in northern Maharashtra. When he goes there in the story, they get off at Jalgaon, which is where Mike, Rhi and I hopped off on our trip to Ajanta. After the events of the book, he was captured and served the prison time that he had escaped and was living on the run in Bombay from. He now lives in Bombay, near Kailash Parbat, the restaurant where I am most likely to go if I go out to eat. He still helps run the free clinic in the slum where he lived and is involved with a number of other humanitarian projects in Bombay and otherwise. Roberts spoke last Sunday at the arts festival, and I went to see what he had to say. In the book, one of the characters takes some time to explain a philosophical system based on an advanced layman's understanding of physics and a belief that the general tendency of the universe is to order itself, and that mind is the current acme of our understanding of this process. In any case, he's a smart guy and a competent speaker, and it was interesting to hear him out.

In other news, I've bought my ticket to come back to the States in May. I'll be in the bay area for a week for a conference, and then up to Seattle and down to Santa Fe. I'm looking forward to the trip. The conference in San Jose is an AIM workshop on rational curves, which I'm supposedly developing some formalisms to help describe. Hopefully I'll have something concrete in time to share with the experts in May. I certainly have a clearer idea of what is going on, but that also means that the obstacles and dead ends are more defined.

The slew of job applications that I sent out over the past months have begun to send back echos, and so far nothing positive has turned up. I'm not really willing to stay another year in India (and it isn't clear that that's an option anymore, because of the housing allotment). I've been meaning to make another set Freelance Mathematician business cards anyway...

The 12 megabyte ideal

Math has funny ways of unpacking itself. I was playing with a fairly simple example, the surface defined by x^3+y^3+z^3=1, and suddenly the answer the question I asked the computer was not an a handful of one line equations, but a list of equations that made a 12MB text file. It didn't shed any light. The feeling was not unlike missing a turn on a mountain bike and going ass over teakettle into the bushes.

The old man with cats gives me hope. Everyone else, ...

Last Saturday there was another trek. It was much shorter this time. Pictures are here:



After the trek people got together at Gokul. Fun, but something seems to have followed me home lodged in my gut and is causing general unpleasantness. Regardless, the most memorable thing of the day was meeting the man who fed the cats. Yogish and Shoba had told me about him earlier that day, and we came upon him walking from where the taxi dropped us (everyone else had a desire to go home and take showers that somehow overpowered the desire for food and beer). The man who fed cats is an old man, and according to Shoba, he spends about 150 of the about 200 rupees (approximately $5) that he makes every day on fish for the city's stray cats. We stopped to watch the cats eat. There were about a dozen, tabby, calico, a couple not yet full grown teenager-kittens, all of them looking sleek and tough. They devoured the bombil fish that the man would pull the bones out of and tear into small pieces that he gently tossed to these cats. Shoba tried to pet a tabby who was devouring a piece of fish on the recessed part of a wall, but the cat didn't seem so keen on having its back pet while it was eating so she let it be. I learned that the cat feeder has about fifty cats that come to the three or four places where he regularly brings food. He knows them all, and they recognize him.

Sunday was a slow day. I eventually made my way into the office to check the internet. (I still don't have a connection for my apartment - which wouldn't be such a big deal if I had a phone that could make outgoing calls, but my "phone" is really just an intercom that can receive calls from the outside world. I could also get a mobile, but the general hassle of getting one is a common topic of discussion for other expats, and I'd rather avoid it...)

Anyway, I ended up reading this article in Rolling Stone about Tibet. I visited Tibet 20 years ago. I remember Lhasa as a place where I ate momos and fried bread from the market, drank tea with butter and salt with a family who adopted Eric and I just because. In the Bharkor market I bargained with thumb and pinky for a brown corduroy chupa (and then acquired the nickname "Khampa Chunchun" when I wore it) and some leather glacier goggles. I remember hitchhiking out along a dusty dirt road towards the valley with caves where one version of a Tibetan creation story holds that the monkeys decided to come down out of their caves and become humans. We camped in a field by the side of the road and woke up in the middle of the night as a herd of yaks wandered by. In the morning we climbed the ridge of rock and sand. I made it about 100 feet from the top and couldn't keep going because I felt altitude sick for the only time in my life. I read the article's description of what things are like there now and my eyes swam with tears. That place where I was is gone. Tibet is consumed, and with the spoils of the carnage, China creates missiles to move an arms race into space, fighter jets to sell to those who can't get them from the US, Russia, Great Britain or France, and building the largest dam in the world.

Many people in China and India have the attitude that it is soon going to be their turn to be at the top of the hierarchy of world power, and that exploiting land and people in order to get there is perfectly allowable, perhaps necessary, because that is how it has always been done. And that "getting there" largely means having lots of shallow material junk that is all as new as possible. This may be truly the way things will play out, and I've had a number of chances to hear people spell this out for me. I tend to respond with the observation that they're a bit late in the game, that the map is pretty much closed and that there's not going to be much left if they can't come up with something more creative than copying the west. If you want to live way beyond your means and exploit the rest of the world to do it, it kind of requires a rest of the world. India at least seems to have quite a bit more compassion towards than China. Not that it's a nation of saints by any means. Ahimsa is largely a myth, but there are a few cat-feeding old men and people who know that getting along is the only way to make it work in and among the noisy bustle of those who just want more flash.

Tumling to Sandakphu

How does one describe waking up to a crowing rooster to watch dawn unfold itself at 3000 meters, spilling across the southern faces of the highest mountains in the world?



I guess I can't really.

Sitting there, I thought about how distance can create beauty. From 50 miles away, the cold, the wind, the fear of a fatally misplaced step does not exist. Instead, one sees the perfect white of snow and ice, wisps of frozen crystals blowing off the peaks, and the stark profiles of the ridge lines. I feel similarly in the emptiness of the southwest, or in the few forests of thousand year old trees that still stand further to the north, or watching waves crash on to a shore with a regularity unpuncutated by millennia. In such places, observing the structure of things at non-human scales is unobstructed, and this creates a special sort of experience where it is easy to let go of the fundamental insignificance that is one's idea of the self. The basic goodness of the world is so nakedly apparent that the fear of losing something valuable by forgetting the ego falls away into the void between the human scale and that other.




But the spinning planet is of course oblivious to our amazement, and the fiery dawn soon calmed into a clear, cold morning. We went inside and had some porridge and were on our way. Within the first mile, we changed our angle enough that we had a clear view of Everest. Jill and I stopped to let Dabar catch up (he often hung back, stopping to chat with friends he met along the trail or take advantage of a spot with cell reception to send a message or make a call - yep, 15 years ago it was McDonald's most places, Coca-Cola everywhere, now it's internet most places, cell phones everywhere). Dabar pointed out the peaks to us. This was not an angle that Everest is frequently photographed from, so the profile that we were presented with was not as familiar as expected. In fact, Makalau visually dominated the group more than Everest and it was this sharp profile that I first stopped for. Later at Sandakphu we were able with the binoculars to make out some known details.



Dabar led us up a not often used path along a ridge adorned with weathered prayer flags. Small fire pits showed the ashes of someone else's stories.

After an hour or so, the trail started down to Garibas, a village nestled into a pass where we stopped for tea and some snacks. The way down wound through forests of bamboo, rhododendron and Taxus pine, or Himalayan Yew. Dabar said that a strong tea made from the needles was used as an anti-cancer medicine. Strawberry vines crept around the edges of the trail. A few times we heard what might have been animal noises and one time it was a troupe of monkeys, but the rest of the time either whatever it was never revealed itself, or more often, it was a small group of cattle browsing on the new bamboo shoots. The trail itself had been there for quite a long time. Nearly the whole thing was cobbled and then overgrown. Runoff gullies tumbled down the hillside, braiding in and out of stone staircases that were never perfectly regular to start with. Much of the trail was in shade and there was frost in the parts that never got sun.

In the village, we stopped at the Sherpa Tea Stall Garibas, this displayed painted white on a green board. Two cats sunned themselves on a shelf by a window, through which we could hear a small fire heating tea. Garibas has a cell tower. Dabar tried to make a couple of calls but the reception didn't seem to be that great, but this instigated a bit of phone shuffling among the few locals who were hanging around. While this was going on, two women, one older and one younger, and a small boy arrived. The women carried large bundles of firewood and the boy, who must have been about five, was proudly carrying an armful of sticks.

We sat there for a while. The sun was warming my back and I was not cold and neither was it particularly humid, so I was surprised to see that my breath was visible.

From Garibas, the trail ascended steeply, and then leveled out, winding around the side of a hill to Kalapokhri, the black lake. About an hour out of Garibas, the change in weather that had been heralded by the lenticular cloud crowning the sunrise on Kanchenjunga had arrived. The wind picked up and washed our trail with cloud. I stopped to watch three white prayer flags on long poles held straight by the stiff wind. I stood breathing as the clouds flew past against the blue palette of sky. Imagining the prayers flying off towards the Himalayas carried on the wind took very little effort.

After leveling out, the trail wound around on the northeastern side of the ridge looking out over shady forest. Streams of the cleanest water that we had seen in India crossed the trail, iced over when the hill blocked the sun for most of the day. It was quiet, and we walked at our own paces in silence for a couple hours until the last bit of uphill to Kalapokhri.

From Kalapokhri to Sandakphu was another 6km, much of it steep uphill, so even though it was only early afternoon, we decided to stop there for the night. The village of Kalapokhri is a collection of huts sitting at a low place in the ridge. The place where we stayed was over a small rise from the lake (more of a pond) at the intersection of a few trails. When there was a break in the cloud, we could see Tumling in the distance and were surprised by how far away it looked. We had reached the low end of the altitude range where yaks can live, and the lowland cattle were replaced by these large black and white shaggy beasts. A corral next to the guest house where we were staying was home to about a dozen young goats who constantly clamored for attention. They were very cute and I repeated my desire to have a herd of goats of my own.



In the evening, sitting around the charcoal fire in a low ceilinged room wallpapered with old newsprint Dabar and I talked about how in the US most heating and cooking is done with electricity or gas, and that wood fires are often a luxury. He is surprised that goat milk is more expensive than cow's milk. In India it is the opposite. We talked about old forests, about the small areas of protected forest in our respective countries and how sad it would be to grow up without ever visiting a stand of trees each as big as one of the houses in the village. I told him about pink fleshed salmon and he smiles and shook his head slightly, his tongue sticking half an inch past his teeth - a gesture clearly indicating that his imagination was giving him something that tasted really good.

After dinner, the clouds had cleared and the moon was not yet up. There were more stars than I have seen in a long time. At Chaco Canyon, the glow of Gallup 100 miles away on the horizon is visible, but that is probably the closest that I can call to mind. India may have far more in the way of toxic and septic pollution, but even in the cities light pollution is less than in the west.

The next morning I woke early enough to go outside to see the village before it woke up. An Indian tourist who had been driven up in one of the land rovers and had explained to Jill that it was too windy up at Sandakphu to appreciate the view, as well as elucidated a selection of his theories about the universe was awake too, greeting the crisp morning air with a cigarette. Perhaps he was from Kolkata and it made him feel more at home. In any case, I was glad that he didn't try to come say hi.

As the livestock and their keepers began to stir, I went in to wake Jill. We brought a couple of the ruled hyperboloid stools out into the morning sun and drank tea as our hosts started their morning chores. An old man with an argyle sweater vest walked by with pails of fresh milk for our porridge, and a young woman set out a dish of corn for the goats. As each had their fill and interest in eating began to wane, the head butting and rough housing that had simply been part of getting to the food became a game that started taking over the area until they were chased away down the hill to spend the day foraging.

After a lazy breakfast (they really did have to go milk the cows first) we were on our way again. The trail wound around to the west and through a village where a baby goat had just been born. It was still wet and the mother was licking it clean while nudging it up onto unsteady legs. A little while past this village we came to the next pass. We rested a little while before the trail started uphill in earnest. For a while, we were keeping pace with a young man and his two yaks, and at one point a train of ponies passed us on the way down. It was quite steep, but the clean air and the views and the promise of the view that lay in store invigorated me and I felt like I could have run up the hill.



Our trek peaked at Sandakphu, 3636 meters above sea level. Above a sea of cloud stood a panorama vanishing into central Nepal and rising up to Everest, less than 100 miles to the east. A series of jagged black ridges, behind which could be seen the distant peaks of the Tibetan Himalaya, connected the Everest group to Kanchenjunga, lying only 50 miles to our north. From here the panorama continued across Sikkim to Bhutan and Chomling in the east.



We spent the rest of the day reveling in the views. We climbed to the highest point around, a jut of rock topped with an arch festooned with hundreds of flags.



India has many ways of wearing at a person. The noise, the pollution, the poverty and the way so many people are culturally or consciously blind to these things, not to mention the constant supply of people who see a white person and perceive nothing more than a fat wallet made mobile get to be more than a bit much. Knowing that that place is there, that as I write this the moonlight is reflecting off the ice and illuminating my panorama makes all the hassle disappear, and I can remember that not all of this place is this insanity of a city.

Kala Ghoda arts festival

I went out for lunch this afternoon and then wandered over to have a look at the Kala Ghoda arts festival. A few things were in various stages of being set up, and there were some booths selling the sorts of crafty things that one finds at booths at arts festivals. It could have been Fremont or Portland's Saturday market. One of the art pieces that was being set up as I strolled past was a collection of pictures from various protests allaround the world against the Iraq war. It was very simple, but very powerful.

Soon we'll throw rocks

So I went out for a bike ride today just before sunset, and the first thing that I noticed was that the streets were strangely devoid of cars. Then I began to see massive numbers of people on the sidewalks and spilling into the streets. I stopped and asked some young guys standing on some concrete culvert pipes that might someday be used in a public works project what was going on.

"Congress Party, they stole the elections!"

"So everyone here is upset about this?"

"Yes, you should leave, it will be dangerous."

"Dangerous or interesting?"

"Interesting for you, maybe dangerous for us. Come stand here if you want a better view."

Since it didn't seem like much was going on, I stepped up onto the culverts. People asked me where I was from and checked out my bike, and told me that this happens every time there is an election. Some Navy guys were leaning over the barbed wire topped wall next to us. They told me I should go back to my hotel, but then they also wanted to talk to me, so I didn't take the warning as too urgent.

After a few minutes, the police cleared the way for some cars to come through and a few people started shouting. I decided that it was time to go when the young guy who told me that this happens every time turned to me and said, "You should go, soon we will throw rocks."