Princesses In A Princely State

The Hyderabad of my childhood was full of palaces.

The first, an old bungalow where my mother grew up with her seven siblings.  I spent hot summer days there in frilly frocks, playing with small wooden toys and hiding from the dog, Cindy. My cousins and I would swing on a huge metal jula in a courtyard teeming with leafy plants and accessed through a beautiful wrought-iron gate.

I remember the stone grey floors that stayed cool in the summer, the stories that my mother told about her late father. Learning to drink milky sweet chai out of saucers so I wouldn't burn my tongue, and the sway of my grandmother's soft cotton saris when she did pooja in the morning.  I remember that next door there was a small buffalo farm with sounds and scents so strong that I knew exactly where I was when I woke up.

The second palace was my cousin's home, a sprawling estate perched on the top of a hill. There were white arches, black-and-white marble floors and a terrace where I spent hours asking Chitti, a beloved maid, thousands of questions and chasing lizards on the banisters.

This was a house meant for dreaming -- I could imagine the portraits of my cousin's ancestors coming to life, their swords and turbans and jewels in tow.  I convinced myself I was part of that royalty -- though my heart was fullest playing barefoot in the yard and following my cousin into the nearby construction sites for daily "adventures".

The palaces of my childhood are gone now. By the time I graduated from high school both had been demolished for personal and financial reasons -- land sold and replaced by apartments and modern houses where the marble and stone give way to glass and steel.

It's a lot like what has happened to the city, Shah Alam tells me when I visit his Golconda Cigarette Factory with the Chaiwallas. At 88, he is the patriarch of one of the city's oldest families, the ones who claim Hyderabadi as their identity before any state or faith. In Alam's Hyderabad, dinner tables are stocked with biryani and mirchi ka salaan and meant for at least thirty people.

Back in the day, he said, the princely states kept social order as it should be -- families were close and trustworthy, servants were loyal, and money was secondary to respect. Abolishing these states, and the power of the Nizam, monarch of Hyderabad, was the worst thing that could have happened.

His nostalgia is a little bit like the city my mom describes, one of shaded streets and rickshawvallas and more bungalows with open doors. Now, new money directs urban sprawl, and political tension has divided many people earning and living in the city. Huge malls line the streets and the cost of everything -- from a cup of Irani chai to a haircut -- has grown exponentially. My mom says she doesn't always recognize her hometown, or its people, and I've spent the last several visits vicariously bemoaning the change.

But in the past few weeks I have discovered beauty in this new Hyderabad, too. I follow my friend into the depths of Old City one day as he visits schools in mostly poor Muslim neighborhoods. I sit in a circle with thirty eighth-grade girls -- the first girls to be educated in their families -- and we learn about each other. One of them, clad in her uniform and black hijab speaks of the changes happening in her volatile neighborhood with such hope and clarity that I have to believe she and her sisters will take over -- the new princesses.

I spend hours with my cousins who have perfected the art of working to live instead of living to work -- enjoying each meal together, taking drives with their friends just to talk. I eat the best shawarma ever with Vivek, party at the most beautiful house I've ever seen, and enjoy two wonderful dinners at the National Police Academy with one of my mom's best friends, the first woman director in the institution's history.

When I think of those crumbled palaces my heart still hurts for what this city's people, and my family, have lost. But when I look into the face of that school girl in Charminar, I can think only of it's strength -- something like the stone statue of Buddha in the middle of the Tank Bund, so peaceful and timeless that it's core can't be shaken.

Florida, Man

I'm counting down the days until I go home. It's been almost a year, and I need to revisit the cycle of sitting on my dock, laying on the hammock, and dipping my feet in the pool while the heavy air of year-round summer makes everything languid and lovely.

But seriously, let's just talk about Florida for a minute. When you're north of the Mason-Dixon, that state becomes a bit of a caricature. Beaches, snowbirds and Disney aside, it's synonymous with weirdness. Just check out "Florida Man" on Twitter, or this "Weird Florida" section of the Huffington Post if you  need proof.

Part of this was obvious to me growing up between the glorious Pasco and Pinellas counties along the western coast of the state. There's a particular stretch of U.S. 19, a frenetic highway by my house, that I call "where culture goes to die". It's home to the ugliest of strip malls and most unnerving of gas station owners. The road is flanked by skeletons of would-be adorable downtown areas, huge, uninspired malls, and chipped paintings of manatees.

Oh, yes, I've had plenty of memorable weird Florida moments: landing up in front of the confederate flag store at a Waldo flea market; a young mother who told me her son was crying because he wasn't used to dark people. That time that my friend  told me that I had to be a conservative Republican because my dad was a doctor. Or when my sixth grade English teacher once marked my correct grammar wrong until I made her pull out the teacher's manual.

But none of this obscures the fact that Florida is awesome, on so many levels.

It's a diverse, amazing home to some of my favorite people in the world, and for good reason. Because sometimes you live on an old orange grove, and find out your neighbor was one of the mermaids at Weeki Wachee Springs. You can buy the best key lime pie at a place that looks like a warehouse, or walk to a restaurant that serves turtle and alligator. There are pockets of southern hospitality at its finest, and a spray painted BBQ joint alongside a biking trail that hasn't been shut down by authorities.

The town I'm from, Tarpon Springs, is also home to a huge Greek population with beautiful Greek Orthodox churches lining a small bayou off the Gulf of Mexico, with people that know how to pronounce, and make, a gyro. And you can drive and drive and drive, through Alligator Alley and to Miami, or back up through the forested almost-hills of north Florida, and discover communities that are each so different you wonder what will happen when their dirt roads happen to cross. Just read Jeff Klinkenberg or Carl Hiaasen if you need any more convincing.

When you live in D.C., or really any city in this region, you're often surrounded by people who read the same articles, watch the same channels and build some of the same conclusions about politics and society and abortion and gun control as you do. As a journalist, it's actually helpful to have Facebook friends who think the exact opposite -- reacting to every piece of news and election in a way that you both despise and need to understand. On a personal level, it's just easier to respect different ideologies when they're embodied in that kid who drove through a hurricane to watch a movie with you in tenth grade.

But that doesn't mean I'll live there again. Nah, I'll leave that wild, tangled swamp to the people who can handle it, and hope that I always have a home to visit.

Overreacting to an (Allegedly) Near-Death Experience

We were in a 30-seater bus – something between a kidnapper van and a Winnebago – thousands of feet above sea level in the Himalayan range, absolutely certain that we were going to die.

I know this because I heard the bus driver whisper, “I think we’re going to die,” and with his smart woven cap and clipped mustache, he didn’t seem the dramatic type.

This is what happens when you try to pray at ancient temples. One time my grandmother’s foot swelled up to the size of a watermelon as we trekked to a solid gold avatar of a family God. Another time I almost fainted, trying to complete the requisite one hundred rounds of a sacred statue.

But nothing was as bad as this particular stretch of a family vacation in the mountains, because there were 25 of us, and a huge box of mangos; suitcases with clothes meant for the whole year; and huge metal tins of messy stuffed paranthas and stinky chutneys that constitute portable travel food in India.

It was a month long family trip, I remember, that had been planned weeks in advance by my mother and her four sisters. I was ten years old, just growing out of a terrible haircut. I was the youngest, with my Limited Too cerulean shorts and butterfly clips.

We had hired a driver from Delhi onward, who, with a hardly nourished co-pilot named Raju, would navigate the 30 or so destinations we were told to see.

Until then, things had gone smoothly because were in safe territory – four star hotels, big cities, tour guides and unlimited chai and pakoras. We had the Mary Poppins bag of food, and we spent our free time singing Ricky Martin’s “Maria”, and imitating the Buddhist chanting that we picked up in the smaller villages. I still remember my beautiful aunt with one hand over her mouth singing, “Lubalubalubaluba boy boy boy boy,” right in front of the monks-in-training, sweet-faced Tibetan pre-teen boys wearing the orange and maroon robes of austerity.

Then there was this: A trip to visit one of the oldest temples in the vicinity, according to the people trying to get us to stay in a nearby hotel. And so we piled in the car with all of our baggage, and set off.

Halfway up the mountain our bus was trying to inch up a steep bend when the tires started to spin furiously – coughing up a smattering of tiny rocks and sand from the dirt margins of the road. Our trusty vehicle began to slide back, unable to catch hold or move forward, straight toward the unobstructed cliff that marked the end of the mountainside.

Raju jumped out of the truck with a grin and sashayed to the edge of the cliff to see how many inches we had left to back up. His calm confidence kept our family in their seats, chatting about how a friend’s son we had met in the last city was handsome, and more importantly, fair-skinned, and should probably marry into our family at some point. But then we all looked back to see Raju trying to adjust football-sized rocks behind the wheels to procrastinate our imminent death, and in that moment, I knew we were gonners.

My mother raced to the bus door, trying to jump out in some sort of heroic  attempt at safety. But the driver stopped her. “Madam, I have kids too, don’t you think I would tell you if you should be getting out of the van?”

She looked back at us and sat down in the front, smack next to the driver. Note about my mother: she once started a mini-riot at an Air India counter when the travel agents didn’t show up on time and we were close to missing our flight.

The next few moments were the slowest of my life – stretched out, panoramic seconds in which I looked at each of my cousins and aunts as people should do in their last breaths, taking in the prominent maroon bindis between their eyebrows, the orange tinge of henna in their graying hair. I said a silent prayer in my mind, one of the only ones I know, and simultaneously tried to locate the windows that had working handles.

It was some point in this film reel memory that our driver had whispered, “I think we’re going to die”, although no one remembers him saying this but me. I looked at him in the rearview mirror, trying to employ my psychic faculties to give him one last push.

And then there was a revving of the engine and sudden lurch forward. Raju made a loud whoop – the sweetest sound to ever escape a brown man’s lips (later in the trip he would be arrested for steeling some other tourists’ money), and gave the bus a whack as if he were hitting someone’s bottom with a towel. The wheels had turned just enough to gain momentum and the inches between us and the cliff turned to feet, and then to meters.

Our co-pilot raced up and jumped onto his seat like a cowboy on a rodeo bull and the bus sped up to the top of the hill in one piece. We climbed out of the van, slipped off our shoes at the entrance of the temple and went in to pray to the goddess. After all, we were alive because of her.

Hum

Outside the metal sliding door there are sounds from the slum colony that I’m still not used to -- the shouts of a drunken brawl, the sweet voice of a small girl taking care of her even younger brother.

My host family and I are lying on one bed, snuggled under a woolen blanket to combat Chandigarh’s coming winter. A dramatic Punjabi serial plays on the television, something about a man marrying a woman for money.

“Tell me the truth, didi,” my 17-year-old host brother says. “You thought I was a bad kid when you first came.”

It’s hard to say now, especially after days of cooking chole with his mother, having conversations about spirituality with his father, and sleeping comfortably in their home.

But it’s true. Before I heard Advait sing soulful Sufi songs, or saw him help his semi-paralyzed mother wash dishes, all I saw was a lazy teenager who seemed overfriendly with girls and boisterous with friends in our community library. In fact, I immediately complained to a coworker that this group of boys were trouble.

When I came to Chandigarh, my values of social justice and equality were intact. For years I had struggled with the fact that I was living in the same world as children who slept in the medians of highways, or sniffed correction fluid to forget their future, or present. I didn’t know that the expansive chasms in the economic classes were just as present in my mind as in Indian society.

My fellowship year seemed to be the perfect opportunity to understand this dichotomy. I have spent the majority of my time here laughing, stumbling, living and teaching, armed with the mission of establishing a creative, empowering learning center.

Since then, my year with Indicorps has been serving as kind of a “myth buster”, a challenge to every judgment I have ever made about poverty and slums from my home in the U.S., or through the windows of my cousins’ car in Hyderabad.

As much as I wanted to tell my students that it didn’t matter that their father sold pani puri on the road, or that their mothers could not read or write, I knew that it did matter. It mattered to employers, and school teachers. And it mattered to me.

Four months into my stay, the same teenage boys that I judged so harshly have become my friends. They poke fun at my Hindi, and cook for me after they taste my trial-and-error alu ghobi. In turn, I make sure they know that Americans don’t go to college drunk in bikinis, or buy laptops every month.

And since they have watched me adjust so quickly, and practice simple living through food, clothing, and lifestyle, they know it is true -- the assumptions just don’t hold up on either end.

At the onset of an English and computer class we created, I asked the boys why they wanted to learn these skills. Most of them answered with career opportunities and education. But one normally mischievous 16-year-old sighed and said, “Because I’m sick of people seeing me on the street and knowing what colony I came from.”

Immediately, a photo came to my mind, a photo I haven’t seen for four years. In the late photojournalist Dan Eldon’s journals, a young black man in Africa stands in front of a wall. Above his head are the words “I hate what you think of my life”.

It is only now that I understand, harshly, what he meant.

If I hadn’t met this particular group of guys in the library, would I have placed them all in the category of the same lecherous, loitering men who stare on the local bus? Would I peg them as the youngsters who would grow up to be lethargic, perhaps abusive, husbands and fathers?

I’ve been lucky this year to experiment with my own mental barriers, and they have proven stubborn and deep rooted. But the solution has also been just as obvious. After days of rolling rotis with mothers and creating nataks with the kids, I am unable to separate my new home from my old life, or my new friends from past relationships.

This is a column I wrote for Indicorps. It may or may not be published in an Indian magazine.

Backpack to Bridesmaid

It's wedding time in the Rao/Ratkalkar family and that means chaos.

As tradition goes, the wedding will last from Wednesday to Saturday and for that I have been stuffing gift bags, writing name cards in calligraphy pens, and generally following my cousin (kudos to the calmest, sanest bride I've ever been around) back and forth to Edison outfit alterations.

The house is full of silk saris and colorful bangles and pounds of Indian snacks in boxes. The phone rings constantly and the television is always on. Family members are trickling in slowly from Hyderabad, from Milwaukee, from Brooklyn -- by Wednesday there will be thirty of us here, scrounging for mattress space.

Gone are the days of washing my clothes by hand on the ground and wearing two sets of salwar kurta. And though I have mysterious cravings for the rice and daal of the villages, I eat peanut butter and jelly or spinach salad and convince myself I'll cook when I get back to school. The closest thing I've had is the Buddhist Delight from a local Chinese restaurant.

I knew about reverse culture shock coming back from India, I prepared myself, but the shock is more of a dull frustration. As happy as I am to hug my family and make Bollywood playlists on my IPod, something feels off. I walk around turning off lights and researching alternative education and wondering what to do when I graduate that will make me and my family happy.

I may have underestimated the power of change to throw me off balance. How can six weeks have an effect on me that twenty years didn't?

But I'm just being whiny. In three days, when the oil lamps are lit, the garlands are strung and uncles, aunts and cousins sit around with plates of biryani and glasses of beer, I will probably never stop smiling.

Simmerin'

I'm sitting on the periphery of my kitchen watching a pot of channa masala bubble on the stove, scared to touch it lest it becomes any worse. This is the only Indian dish I know how to make without a recipe book, and now that my family dinner is looking pretty weak, I might have to take it off the short list (pasta, omelette, grilled cheese).

And then I start wondering (because it has rained for four days and what else can you do?) if this is the channa masala metaphor of my life. By my age my mom was seeing suitors, taking care of her sister's children, and making several much more elaborate dishes by hand. Now she can feed an army (seriously...and if it's a family of four, the same amount of food will be made) in such a way that every heaping teaspoon of turmeric or coriander seed is perfect down to the grain. And even if she's a fellow vegetarian, her chicken biryani rivals the pit stops in Charminar.

Not that I want to feed the troops. Or get married by 23, or cook any more than my future husband will.

But is this diluted version of the delectable favorite a sign that my generation is destined to be just as watered down with culture? If my Hindi is, excuse me for this, "ghetto", will my kids be pronouncing their own names wrong? And while I can recite a few mantras and do pooja, my grandfather can recite scriptures for four hours without glancing down at a book.

This is what happens when it rains, and remains grey and the clouds are so burdened they almost touchdown to the river -- you hypothesize and dramatize all sorts of worldly things that are so irrelevant in Tarpon Springs.

In just a few weeks I'll be strapping on my Tevas and backpack and coursing through villages in North India without internet, cell phone or shaved legs. I will grow vegetables, treat sick children and touch the soil of villages my parents haven't even heard of before. And then, maybe, I will tell you, whether the channa masala metaphor stands.

Yoga Shakti

Awww...my mommy and her yoga center are very cute.