Swallows

“Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them.  The least we can do is try to be there.” – Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I’ve been reading Annie Dillard.  It’s my first time in her world.  When I bought Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the guy at the used bookstore gave me a dollar discount because he likes that book so much.  “I’ve tried to read that book three times, and each time I’ve gotten so inspired that I had to stop.  I can’t finish it!” he said.  I get it now – a month, and only 91 pages, in.  It’s so good sometimes it hurts.  Instead of inspiring expectations, though, it leaves a satisfied trail.  Nuggets of light and airiness within the pages, images that bring you soaring alongside her and the banks of her creek. 

She is enthralled by the natural world, and will explain for five or ten or fifteen pages the excitement she feels when she finds the egg cases of praying mantises and watches them hatch, and grow, and mate.  When I read her prose, the awe she feels drips into me like honey, and I want to go outside and practice seeing. 

Last Sunday, I spent the afternoon on the Delaware River, tubing.  A small group of us, two cars full, drove up there and paid our thirty bucks to be bused to and from the river.  We snuck in beers and meandered lazily up to the floating hot dog stand halfway down the six-mile stretch of river we were on.  Hamburgers and pepsi.  A juvenile bald eagle and swallows.

The swallows hovered in two packs along the course of our five-hour ride.  We came at them slowly, idly in our rafts, so they didn’t notice and instead went about their business.  ‘Cigars with wings’ Matt would say, but they weren’t Chimney Swifts, but Bank Swallows, I discovered later.  White belly, brown above, each wing longer than the stout little body they propelled together.  I could feel a breeze now and then on the river in my tube, but they could feel it first.  I would watch a tiny bird swoop across in a straight line and then rise and turn, suddenly swept into the air current.  These birds were perfectly in tune to the movement of the wind, that invisible substance of earth and sky.  I realized acutely the fact that all of us – every element and creature in my immediate surroundings – were going in the direction we desired.  Rock stood firm as water fell over it, resisting in places but always bending.  Bird flew true and then flexed a wing and dove, depending on the texture of the wind on which it hovered.  We humans bumbled along on our rafts.

Annie Dillard wrote this of sitting by Pilgrim Creek, watching swallows and all manner of other elements.  “I didn’t know whether to trace the progress of one turtle I was sure of, risking sticking my face in one of the bridge’s spider webs made invisible by the gathering dark, or take a chance on seeing the carp, or scan the mudbank in hope of seeing a muskrat, or follow the last of the swallows who caught at my heart and trailed it after them like streamers as they appeared from directly below, under the log, flying upstream with their tails forked, so fast.” 

Read that last bit again.  Doesn’t that just lift you up? 

Not my swallows.  From telegraph.co.uk.

Back in time

Peaches in the summertime, apples in the fall

The peaches are excellent this year, succulent and juicy. White and yellow peaches both have wooed me in the past week with their tartly sweet flavor that melts into the corners of my mouth.

This is a point of nostalgia for me. I’ll admit, over the past few years I have avoided peaches entirely, skirting them in the grocery store and even at the farmers market. ‘They won’t be as good as my dad’s peaches’ is what goes through my mind. Ever since my dad sold his final few acres of Jersey Queens and John Boys in that hideaway south Jersey town, I’ve upheld this opinion. But this year – perhaps because I have grown more aware of the trials and rewards of growing food, I have come back around to the fuzzy fruit that followed me through my childhood and adolescence.

Our old Russian tractor, with orchard behind.

Roadstown, New Jersey - Home of the Ware Chair. That’s what the sign when you entered the town used to say. There isn’t a town really. There used to be a general store, it looks like, and a small town center. But now those buildings have been worn down into barns. They house farm tractors if they’re lucky, or flocks of pigeons if they’ve just been around awhile. I used to go down there and spend a day, or weeks in the summer. I would bring liters of water and packets of Emergen-C to revive me halfway through the day, after the dust and relentless sun began to get to me. My dad would fill the gas tank of the old John Deere or Belarus, and I would jump onboard. It felt like boarding a horse to be honest, saddling up. And then I would sit up there, all day long, driving up and down each row, keeping the Deere’s left tire aligned with the left side of the sod strip down the middle, waking up enough to turn the machine deftly around each hairpin turn. It was five rows at a time – you’d do one and then skip a row on your way back, skip another on your second turn and then fill in the blanks. Every so often I would stand up for a row, feeling tall and flexible on the rumbling mower. And then I would sit down and the rows would keep on going by.

I would sell the excess peaches sometimes. My dad sold most of his peaches to a farmers co-op, Jersey Fruit, but by the end even they were giving him pennies for his produce. I would go out to the orchard and pick all the ripe fruit he had to leave on the trees and reserve a booth at Cowtown, sell it all straight to the consumer for three times what we made through the co-op. Once or twice my mom and I took a dozen boxes to Reading Terminal Market in Philly, set up a table and sold them all quick. We handed out samples, that’s what did it. His peaches were good, honest.

We even branded the business, thanks to Lindsey Fyfe's handiwork.

But then he sold the trees, and the tractors, and the irrigation equipment we had all set up and painstakingly fixed each year – my brother, my dad, and I, and he moved to the city. I haven’t been down there since, though every summer my muscles and my mind still long for it. Hours sitting up there on that John Deere were some of the best I spent through college. I learned a dozen Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell songs up there, borrowing my dad’s heavy-duty discman and black leather fanny pack. I cleared my mind just going up and down those rows, stopping for rabbits and birds and whatever else I saw.

Peaches aren’t the same when you buy them in the store. I guess they never will be, even though they’re damn good this year. Still, whenever it hails in June or when there’s a drought in July, I think of the peaches. Or the peaches that never were. The peaches that my dad and I would be picking off the trees right now if he still owned those trees way down there in Jersey. And then, if they were ours, they would be the best peaches you ever tasted.

In Mourning

My garden has a terminal illness. 

Yesterday I came home from a girls weekend at the beach to find debris littering the bean-side of the garden, and the ivy that had been growing unchecked along the back fence hanging precariously over the snap peas and eggplant.  It looked like a tornado had torn through my triangle of life, breaking tomato plants in half and shaking climbing beans from their trellises.

The neighbors had cleared the foot and a half of garage that butted against our fence of its ivy, ripping sticky cleavers from their whitewashed brick and allowing the top-heavy vines to bow sickeningly over our cultivated beds.  Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only damage.
 
I picked up the broken bits of ivy last night, and hoped a day of sunshine would perk up the flowering beans and help the tomatoes straighten up.  Instead, I came home to a garden even droopier than the night before.  The bean leaves, with their first purple flowers just opening along two or three vines taller than me, were upside down.  The climbers were all taking nose-dives instead of reaching sunward.  The herbs – our six basil plants and out-of-control cilantro – were falling amongst themselves like drunk teenagers, and the lettuce patch splayed out as if a beach ball had repeatedly flounced on top of it.

It turns out it wasn’t just debris, but something much more terrible.  I called my dad, the trusty ex-farmer, and told him my garden’s symptoms.  Is there some sort of fungus that would attack every one of my plants?, I asked.  Some kind of blight that I’ve never heard of?  He asked if we were at the bottom of a hill, if some kind of poisonous runoff could have swept through the yard.  I went to ask my neighbor.

Sure enough, poison was the culprit.  Weeds B Gone to be exact.  She had dumped a bunch on the roof of her garage, “to keep the ivy from coming back.”  And then it had rained.

The ivy looks fine, by the way.  It’s just the vegetables that are dying.

It’ll take a few days, but one by one these plants – almost all of which I started from seed – will yellow, and shrivel, and die.  I don’t think I can bear to see that, so I’ll probably go out there early tomorrow morning and yank the whole lot of them out. 

But before I do that I’ll have some time to think about what we are doing to the earth, and to ourselves.  I know- this Weeds B Gone is just a bit of over-the-counter yard material.  But this is also about the grasses and the flowers and the food that we live on.  Eventually those chemicals will drain into the Wissahickon just down the hill, and from there into the Delaware (not to mention into our taps), then to the bay, then the ocean.  So many people don’t think about how our actions affect the rest of the world, not to mention our local ecosystem or our neighbors.

I’ll start over again, this time by pulling out all that ivy and buying a bunch of pots and fresh soil.  But I won’t forget the lessons this episode has to teach me, and the sight of a beautiful bursting garden simply turning over and dying.

Marigolds Everywhere

'This is a conspiracy!,' the typewriter-printed tag proclaims.  'We are conspiring the cover the city with marigolds.'  That's right- those dusty trash-laden squares of earth that poke through the long avenues of concrete will soon be bursting joyously into oranges and golds.  If it rains, that is.  And if we can recruit enough co-conspirators.

Our new ammunition may help.  I spent Sunday making seed bombs with the founders of the conspiracy - a due I met in India on Mojo Plantation, and an old friend from Philly.  Fueled by home-brewed dandelion wine, we patted out circles of red clay, sprinkled a dash of seed starting mix and then layered on a healthy dose of seeds, finally squeezing the clay shut around the treasure inside.  These brown beauties will be handed out/sold for a pittance this weekend at the Trenton Avenue Arts Festival, and will certainly explode into at least a couple conspiratory buds each.

The idea?  Keep a few of these miniature potatoes with you at all times, so you can be ready to launch them toward the next sad piece of bald city earth.  The next time it rains, you may see a spear of hopeful green shooting through.

Grateful

I live in the city now, but I have a country life.  I hike along a creek at least once a day.  I weed my garden a few times a week.  I am experimenting with seed swaps and growing raspberry bushes and coming home early on Friday nights.  I have to say, it’s been great.  Add to that my awesome new job, and honestly I feel a little like I’ve struck gold.  It’s exciting to be delving incredibly deep into work that is engaging both intellectually and socially.  The best part is, it’s in my own community, not in some remote rainforest in which I have little connection.  I seem to have lost my travel bug, at least temporarily.

I apologize for writing a recap post after disappearing for so long.  It feels necessary, given the drastic transitions life has offered up in the past few months.  In order to move forward and start writing about the really interesting stuff (snap peas popping out of the ground!  CAFOs in Pennsylvania!  Training Belle to be a good dog!), I need to step back a minute and see what has happened to my life.

Belle, sitting on a seed tray (bad dog!)

Matt and I moved to Mount Airy.  Technically we live in Philadelphia, but to me it’s a retreat every day.  Our two-bedroom walkup with fenced-in yard is home to a few new raised beds ready to burst with strawberries, spinach, and summer squash.  After the damp and musty room we shared in India, with bathroom full of geckos and the occasional errant leech, this is practically a vacation home. 

We adopted a dog.  We started jobs.  We built a compost tumbler.  We struggle to fit all of the things we want to do into seven short days every week.

At work, I get to think about the effect that a millennium-old shale deposit deep under Pennsylvania could have on the forests I love, the water I drink, and the small town communities that make my state what it is.  I get to talk politics and motivate people who think they don’t care about an issue to get off their high horse of pessimism, even if it just means taking thirty seconds to write a letter.  These things are so much easier when you speak the same language as the people you’re working with.

Mid-May strawberries

I am beginning to find the balance I’ve been searching for, between urban stimulation, rejuvenation in nature, and, ultimately, self-sufficiency.  Now that I’m back into a busy schedule, with work and school and various side commitments, I’ve become a bit more realistic about that last goal.  I squeeze in yogurt making on a Saturday morning when I know I’ll be home in the afternoon.  We got a bread machine.  I miss the warmth of fresh dough under my hands, but at least we have fresh homemade bread every week.  These are the compromises you make to find balance amongst all the various things you love.  And when that happens, there’s nothing left to do but feel deeply grateful. 

Bursting at the Seams

 

My sourdough starter has a mind of its own!

The best thing I learned in India was how to make food.  Not even how to grow it, but how to create real, edible food out of the simplest raw materials.  The foods that we can make for ourselves, yet we continue to buy.  Over and over.  As prices go up.  As quality goes down.  Bread.  Yogurt.  Hummus.  Granola. 

Some of you will say, those are simple things; why not go a little more exotic?  Well, I’m a beginner, and for me, these are the essentials.  Especially bread and yogurt.  Bread because it’s the base of so many meals, and yogurt because I just can’t get enough of it.  Matthew and I together consume upwards of two quarts of the good stuff each week, and at four bucks a pop for the creamy organic variety (Pequea is our absolute favorite), it can get a tad expensive for two expat returnees without jobs. 

But let me start with bread.  In India, our host and the mother of the farm, Sujata, reigned supreme over the kitchen.  During our first week in residence there, she approached our group of interns with four squares of chocolate and four mystery herbs.  Placing one secret handful in each of our palms she asked us to guess.  Whoever spoke correctly would get a sweet reward.  Rosemary, cilantro, sage, and . . . was it all spice?  (Yes, this farm had everything). 

She came to us with gifts to nurture our curiosity and singular passions.  When she discovered my ambition of culinary self-sufficiency, she slipped a ball of sticky sourdough inoculum from the loaf she was kneading and whispered crude instructions:  “Add flour and water and a little sugar.  Let it sit in the sun.  Knead it again.  Let it sit again.  Bake it for a while.”  I spent an afternoon with that first loaf of bread, watching it rise under a red-checked cloth in the sun, pressing gingerly into the soft give of its hardening skin, gauging when it was ready for the oven.

In India it was easy.  Bread was made every day, so there was always a rising ball of sourdough from which I could pluck my inoculum and grow my own sustenance out of flour and sugar. 

In the United States, things became a bit more complicated.  Active dry yeast is easy to buy, and rises well enough.  But it wasn’t self-sufficient.  I didn’t want to recreate my inoculum each and every time I started a loaf, which meant keeping a stock of dry yeast on-hand, another purchased ingredient.  It seemed so inefficient, so wasteful, so American. 

Sourdough, as far as I know (and I know very little about these things) simply means that the yeast never stops living.  Once you get a sourdough starter going, and if you nurture it with the respect and diligence that any life deserves, it breathes, and not only that but it creates.  It rises and falls, it secretes liquid, it gathers a sweet smell.  It gives bread, and pancakes, and muffins and more, on and on and on.

So I began my own starter.  I mixed in one packet of dry yeast with flour, water, and sugar and watched it grow.  I stirred it every day for a week, maybe more, until it was ripe with suggestive bubbles of air and a curd-like aroma.  And then I made some bread.  I fed the baby starter, and then I made more bread, bringing one loaf to a dinner party and giving another as a gift.  I have fallen into a sort of scientific love with my jar of sourdough just waiting to happen.

Living like this, off of the muscles in our very own hands (for kneading dough certainly requires them), is just about the most basic instinct we have.  And yet almost no one in my culture does this.  The skill of baking bread, or curdling and preserving milk, is elemental.  The act establishes a link with our grandparents and our most long-ago ancestors.  It creates a space where we can remove ourselves from an overpowering consumer culture and regain a hint of what we, as humans, once were.  And it allows us to grow.  Or perhaps I should speak only for myself, for I can see the mirror into my life that the yeast provides, growing ever more expansive with each new creation.

 

The starter grows into a new, bigger jar.

Homes

Somehow, even being back in Philadelphia, I can’t escape literature about India.  I recently picked up a book that I had tried to read on my very first trip to India six years ago.  This passage, a dialogue between two soldiers – one from Bangladesh and the other Britain - resonated with me:

“ ‘Please.  Do me this one, great favor, Jones.  If ever you hear anyone, when you are back home – if you, if we, get back to our respective homes – if ever you hear anyone speak of the East,’ and here his voice plummeted a register, and the tone was full and sad, ‘hold your judgment.  If you are told ‘they are all this’ or ‘they do this’ or ‘their opinions are these,’ withhold your judgment until all the facts are upon you.  Because that land they call ‘India’ goes by a thousand names and is populated by millions, and if you think you have found two men the same among that multitude, then you are mistaken.  It is merely a trick of the moonlight.’ ” – White Teeth, Zadie Smith

This last trip to India was a roller coaster.  It surprised me and rocked my center and taught me many unexpected things.  While during my first trip to India I was moved to extend my stay, this time around I felt instead the overpowering pull of home.  It is good to be back among my family and friends, but I am still sorting through the emotions of the last five months, and especially the final few weeks.

In South India, I saw wild elephants for the first time.  I pulled ginger and turmeric out of the ground, and tasted coffee cherries and raw green peppercorns.  I tugged leeches off my bloody feet and rode a ferris wheel fifteen stories above the ground.  In a way, the months were like an extreme adventure camp, punctuated by attempts to break through communication barriers and do something meaningful and good.  The people I met welcomed me to their homes, and simultaneously pushed me away.  Even while I was learning and connecting and contributing, I was being cut loose.  I was untethered to the community, and the locals could sense it.  So many of my first conversations in India centered on the question:  why would I leave my family and everything I know to come here for a year?  It was a good question and one that, by the end, I couldn’t fully answer.  My life is here on the east coast of the U.S.A.; my work is here; my family is here; and now, I am here.

But even though it wasn’t the experience I had hoped for – not the unself-conscious exchange of cultures or the scene of a breakthrough cooperative movement – I can recognize that it’s not India’s fault, just as it’s not my fault.  India can never be the same experience twice, and neither can I experience India the same way twice.  We are two separate entities that, this time around, passed each other in the night.  

Meandering Through Literary and Literal Kerala

Kerala, Part 2

Flash back to November, when Matt and I were exploring Kerala, getting bitten by leeches and sneaking up on wild elephants.  After the adventure in Wayanad, we took a bus on beautifully paved roads, in the twilight, to the coast, where we stayed at Kannur Beach House, a cozy little place right on the water.  Our hosts there, Rosie and Nasir, cooked up lovely meals of seafood and vegetables, always with fresh fruit for dessert.  And then they packed us up and sent us down to Kochi by train.

I mentioned before that what had pulled me toward Kochi was the setting of one my favorite books, The God of Small Things.  Re-reading the book now, after visiting the story’s landscape, is a pleasure.  In her opening chapter, Arundhati Roy describes a small town near Kochi:

“May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month.  The days are long and humid.  The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees.  Red bananas ripen.  Jackfruits burst.  Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air.  They they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.

The nights are clear but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation.

But by early June the south-west monsoon breaks and there are three months of wind and water with short spells of sharp, glittering sunshine that thrilled children snatch to play with.  The countryside turns an immodest green…”

We were there in November, after the monsoon had dried up, and before people start longing again for the rain to quench their crops’ thirst.  But the region, halfway between Karnataka and the tip of the subcontinent, still had that mysterious, swollen sense to it.  Palm trees hung heavy with coconuts; coffee trees burst forth with green berries turning the slightest shades of red; paddy fields yawned across the landscape on both sides of the train we were riding, their wild green browning slightly in the dryness. 

A hint of revolution carried on, in stenciled red sickles marking each small town a dozen times.  In Kerala, socialism meets globalization on a local scale.  Locals talked about the new Asian Trade Agreement that would make the coconuts dripping off every palm tree practically profitless.  It costs too much to harvest the fruit, given the strong labor unions in the state, and now that Kerala coconuts will compete with those of Malaysia, Indonesia, and half a dozen other countries, they may just rot 100 feet above ground.  One day, we went out to watch a coconut cutter on Rosie and Nasir’s land.  A wiry man, who must have been over forty, placed a bamboo ladder halfway up a palm, deftly scaled it and then wrapped his arms and legs around the tree itself.  He shimmied the rest of the way up in thirty seconds flat, and then began to swipe at the coconuts with a small machete.  It’s an art that is slowly losing ground in this state where a coconut is not just a fruit, but a way of life and a symbol of identity. (The NY Times has been following the story of coconut harvesters in Kerala)

In Kochi itself, the atmosphere was certainly less rural, but no less interesting.  You have to take a ferry from the major city of Ernakulam to the more manageable island town of Fort Kochi, and we couldn’t do it fast enough.  Indian cities are tiring; towns, even if they are tourist traps, are rejuvenating.  Fort Kochi is one of the best.  After a day of bumming around the Princess Street tourist track, and eating all manner of international cuisine, we walked back toward the ferry landing and found a place to rent bicycles for the day. 

Oh to ride a bike again, even for a day.  Mine was purple and had a wire basket on the front.  Matt’s was taller and blue-green.  Both had self-locking back wheels, which made it easy to hop on and off at every antique shop, palace, and temple we saw. 

First was the Dutch Palace, former home of Kerala’s maharajas and colonial Dutch royalty.  While under construction, the Palace showed us neatly through the recent history of the city, from bare-breasted maharaja women to the introduction of European silk blouses, leading to the modern sari and (this is at least how we took it) contemporary Indian modesty.  What a bastion of tolerance Kerala was!  Until recently, it had been a matrilineal society, and thus boasted some of the broadest women’s rights in the subcontinent.  The ancient rajas, nearly two thousand years ago, had given refuge and sovereignty to a group of exiled Jews.  Until they started fighting among themselves for power, the Jews had set up their own kingdom, north of Kochi in the town of Cranganore.  Leave it to colonialism to dismantle this legacy of tolerance, and to subjugate women as best they could by outlawing matrilineality.

Next we were off to Jew Town, a short bike ride along the edge of the island.  Jew Town is where most of the small collection of Jews left over from the kingdom just north of Kochi ended up after the uprising there in 1471.  The man who had killed his own brother for the throne had been exiled, and escaped his family’s wrath by swimming across the backwaters to Kochi with his wife on his back.  This is how Jew Town began, and the old synagogue there tells the story in simple, vivid paintings of the event.  When we visited the synagogue, the aging Indian man who collected our 10 rupee entrance fee kept leaning into the room to his right and hollering to the influx of guests that ‘you need to start at the left!  And then walk right!’ to get the story straight.  The story that begins with the man swimming across the channel with his wife on the back, and ends with most of the Jews returning to Israel and abandoning their temporary kingdom. 

Later, when we were in the synagogue itself, an airy blue and white tiled temple, the same man came in behind a group of ten or twelve foreigners and explained that he was one of ten Jews left in Jew Town, the last Jewish family remaining.  They still gather here weekly to pray.  I tried to picture the family here, in this most simple of holy places, in this country where most expressions of faith are tinted in extravagance.  The giant gold-painted Ganesh that a temple just hoisted next to the highway to Bangalore.  The fire-blowing Dasara floats.  Even the Santa Cruz Basilica, which we had visited the day before, had decorated its altar to Jesus with dancing Christmas lights, and blasted hymns to what sounded like a synthesized surf rock beat. 

The small courtyard surrounding the synagogue was lined with old layers of slate marking the deaths of various members of the community.  It was closed to visitors, or I would have perused the history there.  It was a quiet place; a place of exile and loss and community, but also a place still alive with faith and practice, tucked into the alleys of a small tourist town. 

Jew Town’s narrow streets burst with antique shops selling a mixture of faux-antiques and actual artifacts from the last few hundred years.  Iron and bronze are at home here, and hanging oil lamps and rusted gothic keys rub shoulders with gigantic metal and carved-wood elephants.  At one shop in proper Fort Kochi we befriended a shopkeeper and his mother who just happened to come from Kottayam, the town of The God of Small Things.  Trying to be unobtrusive, I peppered them with questions.  ‘But why would you want to go there?’ the mother said wearily.  ‘There’s nothing there.’  When she said that she knew the family who became the story, I got really interested, but uncomfortable as well.  It’s a sad tale that Arundhati Roy writes, of caste conflict and violence and a small town growing up into something uglier than it was.  I have found that most Indians are not fond of the novel, and will instead point me to literature that is a little less confrontational, a little less blunt about the state of things in India.  When Roy’s narrator returns to Ayemenem and Kottayam a decade (and a hundred pages) later, she observes:

“Years later, when Rahel returned to the river, it greeted her with a ghastly skull’s smile, with holes where teeth had been, and a limp hand raised from a hospital bed…

Despite the fact that it was June, and raining, the river was no more than a swollen drain now.  A thin ribbon of thick water that lapped wearily at the mud banks on either side, sequined with the occasional silver slant of a dead fish.  It was choked with a succulent weed, whose furred brown roots waved like thin tentacles under water.  Bronze-winged lily-trotters walked across it.  Splay-footed, cautious.

Once it had had the power to evoke fear.  To change lives. But now its teeth were drawn, its spirit spent.  It was just a slow, sludging green ribbon lawn that ferried fetid garbage to the sea.  Bright plastic bags blew across its viscous, weedy surface like subtropical flying-flowers.”

Both the earlier and the later descriptions of India’s countryside are familiar to me now, not just in literature but in my own personal memories.  While I did not make it to Kottayam itself, I saw God’s Own Country, as Kerala is known, from a tourist’s and a literary eye’s view.  It is a beautiful place, full of ripe fruit and lushness, and cultural collisions of every shape and size.  What I took from the trip was a deeper experience of my favorite novel, and also an antique oil lamp bought from the Kottayam family we befriended.  When we rubbed off the old varnish covering the darkened metal alloy, we discovered its convincing faux identity.  “1980” read the date carved into the bottom, between curling Malayam letters that only a Keralan will know. 

Auspicious Exit

Well, we did it.  We entered the New Year with a new plan and course of action.  By January 2nd, we were on our way to Bangalore, and early next week we’ll be on our way home.  It’s strange how quickly things move once you make a critical decision.  In this case, we were motivated mainly by health concerns, which when you get down to it, trumps everything else anyway.

Leaving a place always makes you appreciate it more, and makes you realize the quality of the connections you forged.  We had spent one night and morning packing up our belongings, and then the staff gathered around us to carry it all down to the car by the gate.  Maryamma, the cook, was there tearing up, and Kumar and Muthu and Ravi, the trio of strong men on the farm.  We said goodbye to Ravi’s wife Lakshmi and their toddler son Sebastian, who grabbed my finger with a two-toothed smile and then turned to hide his face behind his mother’s shoulder.  Their other son Augustine clung to the globe that Matt and I had just given him, after we pointed out where we were going, and how far it is from India.  The maverick Lakshman shook our hands and flashed his wide smile at us, red betel-stained lips framing shiny white teeth.  And Lauren, our partner in crime, our base of support, and our American community, who we were leaving behind.  Just as we were about to drive off, we leapt back out of the car and snapped one final picture, probably the only picture I have of Mojo Plantation’s staff.

In the car, we met Ganesh, our driver for the day, and began to rattle down the potholed road to Madikeri for the last time.  Ganesh turned up his Murugan Devotional Songs CD, and I settled into the ride, watching coffee and spice plantations blur past as the sitars and wailing Indian voices soothed me.  Along the way Ganesh hollered out the window and a flower-walla jogged up, throwing a rope of jasmine flowers into the car in exchange for a rupee or two.  Ganesh settled the pile of fragrant white petals around a statue of the elephant god, his namesake, mounted to his dashboard.

In Hindu etymology, Ganesh is the remover of obstacles.  He’s one of the most popular gods in South India, and it’s hard to avoid going a block or two in Bangalore without happening upon some likeness of him.  So it felt auspicious, getting a ride from Ganesh out of a place that had borne many challenges for me, propelling me in a new direction.  I hope I can carry that energy with me as we head home and into, in some ways, a greater unknown. 

Sick Days

It’s tempting to avoid writing negative entries onto this blog, about difficulties with my academic work, or homesickness, or the inevitable “Delhi belly,” which we’ve renamed the “rainforest runs.”  It took a lot for Matt and I to get here.  For me, it took a year of stressed-out academic rigor and work, months of planning and purchasing plane tickets, and saying goodbye to family and friends.  For Matt it was some of the same, and also a leap into the unknown in the name of love, and putting off his own academic goals.  So to look at the leap a few months in and not know if it was worth it is a tough thing. 

Let me backtrack.  Up until about two weeks ago, we were committed.  Life wasn’t perfect here on this farm in India, but we were going to make it through to the other side.  We would come home in May, with a Masters degree for me to look forward to, and likely enrollment in a Masters in Biology program for Matt.  But then the Indian government started squabbling, and soon enough our plan began to crumble.  Add to that a lingering stomach sickness I haven’t been able to shake, and turbulence in my family at home, and it seems like we’re struggling to keep up our resolve to stay.
So I’ve been thinking a lot about priorities.  I don’t quit on things easily, especially not something I’ve committed a lot of energy and money into already, like school.  But after a point, when it seems like so many things are pulling at you to do exactly what you’re not doing, when do you switch gears and move forward?

It started with a U.S. Consolate General warning that ended up in the inbox of our visitors, Michael and Taylor.  “Oh no, is this going to affect us?” they worried.  Due to last year’s 26-11 attack in Mumbai, which involved at least one terrorist with a United States passport traveling back and forth from Chicago to India, the government here is cracking down.  Every foreigner not on a business visa or student visa (I’m on a tourist visa because I’m not connected with an Indian university) has to leave after 180 days in-country for at least two months now.  “Shit,” the doctor I visited yesterday said when I told him I was about to be ejected from the country. 

That’s the first strike against staying:  we legally can’t.

As I mentioned, I visited a doctor yesterday.  I met Dr. Devraj just over a week ago, after Matt and I spent an hour looking for Madikeri’s private hospital.  ‘It’s at Thimmiah Circle,’ one woman told us, so we jumped in a rickshaw and headed that way.  When we got there, another man told us it was near the bus stand, back down the hill.  We started walking, weary and weak from the stomach sickness.  It didn’t help that we kept running into a raucous political parade, with music and dancing and a packed pickup truck full of whoever had just been elected.  “We won!” one dancing man with his arms in the air shouted to us as he passed, beckoning us to join in.  

We kept walking, and eventually found it, this clean, disorganized hospital tucked away behind the seedy theatres of Madikeri.  The first time around, Dr. Devraj prescribed me an anti-parasitic and told me to change hotels.  Not possible, I retorted, though Matt and I committed to preparing all of our own food from now on.  One week later, my stomach still in runny knots, he prescribed more antibiotics, and potentially a colonoscopy, at which I silently thought to myself, and later shouted to Matt, “not in F-ing India!” 

That’s strike two:  I’ve got to get healthy.  We’ll see in a few days if this new round of pills can turn that one around.

The third and fourth strikes, I’d rather not share too much about.  One is that my parents are (quite happily, it sounds) getting a divorce.  It would be nice to not be on the other side of the world when my family structure is shifting so suddenly and so wholly.  The other is that my work is not nearly as fulfilling as I had hoped it would be.  The NGO I came here to work with seems to be quietly withering away, and we’ve lost a few competent Indian interns who could have helped out quite a bit.  If this last challenge had occurred when my visa wasn’t about to expire, and my health wasn’t so precarious, I would have soldiered on.  It’s not the first time I’ve joined the scene of a NGO that has nothing going on except for its registered status, but it’s a different context here, and now my time is limited.

It could be, also, a case of the homesick holidays.  Christmas came and went with a lot of effort to bring some hominess to the other side of the world.  We had presents, a tree (well, a branch that resembled a Northeastern pine), and special food like homemade pierogies, German pancakes, and pumpkin pie.  But we also had some tears, and a lot of missing family accompanied by nearly half a dozen skype dates, with Matt’s extended family on both sides, and now my own split-up family. 

Now that we’re on the other side of Christmas, we’ve been thinking about the New Year, and how we can make the most of our situation.  Since we’ll have to leave by the end of February (after 180 days), it may make more sense to return in January and enroll in classes to make up the lost time.  Or maybe it’s better to push on through, to find some closure with our work here, and finish out at least six months of this intended yearlong endeavor.  Personally, I’m hoping for some clarity before the year turns, so we can look forward to a fresh month, and practically a fresh decade, with some future plans that feel good through and through. 

Photos:  The rallying flag of Madikeri's political procession, given to me as a Christmas gift from Matt; stockings hung up on Christmas morning, thanks to Santa (aka our awesome other intern, Lauren)

A Visit with Old Friends

We had our first States-side visitors come through about a week ago, and all of us – Michael, Taylor, Matthew and I – had a chance to see some new parts of India and catch up on the past three months. Old friends from Philly, Michael and Taylor arrived in Mumbai and headed south to Turtle Bay, a quaint little beach resort on the eastern coast. After a few days of sleeping off their jet lag, playing cricket with villagers, and eating their first tastes of Indian food, they headed our way. When Matt and I picked them up in Madikeri, they had just come from a local bar, where Taylor drew some stares, I’m sure, over her glass of Kingfisher. This was very Philadelphia of them, and it warmed my heart. I still haven’t worked up the gumption to sit and drink in one of those Madikeri dives.

After excited hugs and a true feeling of displacement (Michael and Taylor in INDIA?!!), we jumped in our friend Charlie’s auto, four-to-a-rickshaw, and climbed up the hill to the Retreat. Up in the rainforest we spent a few quiet days hiking, dining around campfires, and catching up. We even put them to work a bit:  Michael helped Matt out with the new Rainforest Retreat website, and Taylor enthusiastically helped harvest the latest crop of green tea.

Soon enough, we decided to split from Mojo Plantation, and head to Mysore. After checking in at the brand new Hotel Ritz, we set about exploring. First there was the Mysore Palace, home of generations of Mysore maharajas, and embodying the inclusive spirit of India: Islamic spires coupled with Hindu temple architecture and topped off with a Catholic-inspired dome. Belgian and British floor tiles cozied up against solid silver doors, and dozens of optical illusion maharaja portraits rubbed shoulders with hand-carved stone elephants complete with moving parts. When I asked how the Palace was built, in other words, who paid for such opulence, our guide replied that they found a gold mine not far from Mysore that paid for the entire thing.

Next we set out for St. Philomena’s church, where I bought a few unexpected Christmas ornaments from the adjoining liturgical store. After that, we were off and walking through the streets of Mysore, for essential oil extracts and sandalwood, musical instruments and saris.

Our greatest find of the trip was undoubtedly the bright and bustling Dasara Fair that we happened upon later that evening. Now, Dasara is the biggest annual festival in south India. Schools close down, temples go nuts creating outlandish electric floats depicting religious stories, and Indians of all faiths pour out of their homes in the dead of night to dance in the streets on this Hindu holiday. But Dasara happened nearly three months ago, in the very first month of our culture shock. So it seemed a little odd that the Dasara Fair would still be in full operation as we approached the end of the year. Undaunted by this calendrical fact, Mysoreans of all ages and occupations flocked to the belated festival on this balmy Friday night, like any American schoolboy to the county fair. And like a county fair it was. Dozens of shops lined the entranceway to the store, and we immediately stocked up on gifts for Christmas and beyond. We were the only foreigners in the fairgrounds, and happily gobbled up the Indian prices on pashmina scarves and elephant print bed sheets before the vendors could figure out that we expected them to quote a much higher price. After that we explored the food court, with its giant pooris and unknown curry dishes. There was even a temporary Cafe Coffee Day set up inside, the Indian equivalent of Starbucks, stocked with microwaveable chicken rolls and thick slices of death-by-chocolate cake. We couldn’t resist.

We moved on to the agricultural exhibits and educational booths, which included odd collections of taxidermy and tourism. At one, we witnessed the month-by-month progression of bovine fetal development through square portals of preservatives and glass. At the same booth, we also got to see the objects most commonly found inside an Indian city cow’s stomach (loads of unidentified metal objects, to say the least), and we had the opportunity to purchase a live emu egg for just 1500 rupees (about $30). We considered bringing it home as a gift for the farm, but instead carried on through the truly gigantic fairgrounds.

For some time we had been eyeing a gigantic tiger head built up at the back of the fairgrounds. Now we walked toward it, until we stood under its gaping mouth. After paying a 25 rupee entrance fee (the fair itself cost us just 10 rupees, so that’s saying something), we walked through the tiger’s mouth and found a mountain to scale. But first, we had to deposit our shoes, which meant something holy was coming.

Here is what we found along the mountain:

First, we waded through a Himalayan river. I assume this was a cleansing ritual before our ascent up the sacred peak.

This is how I knew we were supposed to be in the Himalayas. We must be somewhere in or near Kashmir for turbaned Indian army officials to be planted at strategic points to guard pilgrims.

One of several small shrines along the way. This one, Matt felt particularly drawn to.

After the final ascent, we walked through another holy river, and then on through a dark cave.

I had known this was coming ever since we had deposited our shoes a whole plastic mountain ago. But Taylor didn’t, and she entered the shrine laughing. We were all caught a little off guard after the hilarity of the climb. Perhaps even more exciting than the 25 rupee “ride” we had just completed was the view we got on the other side.

Although we did much more in Mysore that night and the next day, the Dasara Fair wowed us with its peculiar mix of the agricultural, the scientific, and the religious, with both its joy and solemnity. We wandered wide-eyed in this serious and silly microcosm of India for several hours, through the “Scery House” and past the Om Shakti bouncy slide. When we finally left the fairgrounds, we had been over-stimulated and impressed, and we found ourselves exhausted by the fun and the reflections it provoked.

The next day we continued to explore, rising early to beat the crowds at Chamundi Hill, and spending the early afternoon seeing tigers, elephants, and apes at the Mysore Zoo. While we found some interesting things during our explorations of the city, it was the company that made it really special. After spending three quiet months very far away from old friends and family, Michael and Taylor rejuvenated me, reminding me that life goes on at home, and when we return States-side, our old community will be there waiting for us.

After one final lavish lunch, the four of us jumped into a rickshaw and directed the driver to the Mysore bus stand. Matt and I pushed our way through the madness of the city bus stand and delivered Michael and Taylor to a deluxe Volvo bus headed straight to Bangalore. From there they would head on to Nepal to visit some other old friends, where I was sure they would work some similar magic refreshing and rejuvenating in a far off land. Amidst hugs and hurried goodbyes, we promised to see them in six months back in Philly. “I can’t wait to see you there!” I shouted, and they were gone.

Character (and Cultural) Sketch: the labor problem, and one energetic Indian

Farm life isn’t always easy, and it’s certainly not lazy. As Americans, we feel the long workdays and the lack of regular weekends acutely. The Indians around us almost always work longer, harder days than we interns do, and we rarely hear them complain. So it came as a surprise to me when Kumar, our closest neighbor and the most happy-go-lucky of all the Indians I know, announced to me that he was leaving the farm for good, today. “Erin acha,” he hollered to me between our open doors. “I’m going to Mysore!” I came out of our room and peered into his, where he stood packing the last of his possessions into one stuffed duffel bag. “When will you come back?” I asked. Not coming back, he told me with a grin, and continued to fold and stow his remaining t-shirts. I was taken aback, not quite believing Kumar but having no reason not to. The last time he went to Mysore, to help his family hang a door on their new house, his 4-day trip turned into a whole month away. The farm struggled while he was gone, shuffling day laborers from the farm to the guesthouse to fill his shoes. When he returned, we were all happy to see him, not just because of the extra set of hands, but because of his energy and positive attitude.

Kumar is a man who runs. He is not a tall man, but he has strength and stamina. One of his tasks on the farm is to ferry the food cooked in the kitchen in big white bags holding big silver tiffins down the hill to the guesthouse dining area. When you’re sitting at the dining area, or walking down the path toward it, you know it’s Kumar coming because you can hear his steps falling fast on the earth before you see him. When you finally do see him, his face is painted with the biggest smile you’ve ever seen, his happy eyes framed by a stylish mop of shiny black hair.

He was smiling even as he told me he was quitting his job. “Too much work,” he said. “Too much problem.” He doesn’t speak flawless English, but I understood enough to make out that he had been cleaning the floor of one of the cottages when his supervisor scolded him for not doing some other job quick enough. As a recourse, he had packed up his bags and intended to march up the hill to the main house and quit. He would catch the evening bus to Mysore, back to his family and the big city. “Talk about giving notice,” I said to Lauren as he started up the stairs.

Kumar is from Mysore, but he’s been working the guesthouse circuit for a few years now. He came to Rainforest Retreat from Turtle Bay, a low-key resort on India’s west coast. I went to Turtle Bay about a month ago, and could picture him jogging lassis out to visitors lounging on the beach. Now, he was dressed in his best city clothes – black jeans and a black t-shirt – and I could tell he was looking forward to a return to the city of his youth. He, the only single man working at the farm, lives a relatively solitary life here at the Retreat. While the other two or three extended families live in a connected house down the path from our place, Kumar lives in a single room adjoining our double intern cottage. He dines in the kitchen after the food goes down for the guests, and otherwise hangs out with the farm staff. He has friends here, certainly, but his family is elsewhere, and word on the farm is he is soon to be married.

Twenty minutes later, Kumar came hopping down the stairs carrying two solar lanterns meant for the guests staying far out in the farm at Plantation Cottage. “Still working?” I said to him. His face, still smiling, belied defeat and satisfaction at the same time. He had been convinced to stay.

Labor is a problem out in rural India. Farmers’ kids are getting good educations, and running off to the city to work in IT or architecture or any number of industries. Their families proudly see them off, and rightly so. But then the farm blanches, and the farming community falls to its knees. There is cardamom left unpicked out in the fields, and tea plantations whose tender green shoots are becoming overgrown, and the tea bitter, for lack of manpower to pick them quick enough. So I can imagine how Kumar’s statement that he would leave the farm evoked dialogue among his employers, and compromise. The new deal, he told me, would give him two or three hours of off time every afternoon. If he didn’t get it, he said, he would go to Mysore, and be gone.

We feel it too, this desire for time off, for personal time and space. But on a farm in India even that feels excessive. As I thought about Kumar’s predicament, I realized how circular the problem is. As more and more farm laborers leave for the cities, the few that remain must carry a growing burden of intensely demanding farm work. This in turn burns people out, stimulating a second exodus away from the farm. We were seeing it on a personal level, but it exists all over India and the developing world, I’m sure.

When Kumar came down the hill, I was sitting on our front porch pulling cardamom off the cut panicles that make up the very last of this year’s harvest. I was doing this because we don’t have enough labor on the farm. Five or six burlap sacks full of these panicles, severed a dozen each from the base of every cardamom plant on the farm -and there are hundreds- sat waiting for someone to sort through them and pull off their fruits. Two women who work on the farm, and one guesthouse volunteer, had been sitting for two days pinching the fruits from their stems. I sat down to get a little more done before the sun went down. Kumar came and sat with me, grabbing a bundle of panicles himself, and then Muttu joined in. The three of us sat for an hour, chatting and pinching the shiny green fruits into a wooden basket. Kumar and Muttu went back and forth in Kannada, gossiping about farm work, and the need for rest (I caught that much), and the pros and cons of working here (I guessed). I interjected now and then, but mostly just marveled in the moment. And in that dialogue I let go of my desire for more time to myself, solid weekends to revel in, and free time to read, write, and relax. I’m in India after all, and with such a labor problem, it’s just as important to keep busy as it is to relax.

Celebrations of Thanks and Harvest

Matt and I celebrated our anniversary about a month ago, and because we couldn’t remember the exact date that we met, and because we had to work on what we thought was the actual special day, we decided instead to celebrate Anniversa-week.  This took the pressure off a bit, a good thing when you’re living in India.  Holidays are tough; they require creativity and dedication, or else they’ll likely float by half a world away and a day behind.

So when Thanksgiving rolled around, the holiday surprised me by stretching itself into a week of harvest celebrations.  It began with our own small American way of celebrating, with pumpkin pie and stuffing, and then six days later took on the form of Huthari, a local holiday in praise of the coming rice harvest.

We three Americans had a hard time explaining our coming holiday.  “It began back when the European colonists had just arrived on the shores of America.  They were starving, and the Native Americans took pity on them and shared their food with them.  They had a big feast, and Thanksgiving was born.”  One of us interjects – “And then the next day, the colonists forgot all about it and started killing the Native Americans.”

But it’s about family, we would say, and relaxing, cooking together, and sharing food.  We called it a harvest festival, and that got across, because India is a country of harvests and festivals, and soon enough the local Coorgs would be celebrating their own version of the same thing.

We were a bit wary of what our beloved holiday would look like in India.  We already knew there would be no turkey, even though our farm is home to two very ornery turkeys.  We would have to be creative to make pie happen, and without a random assortment of family, what use is Thanksgiving anyway?  Despite all of this, I couldn’t let the last Thursday in November pass without at least spending some time in the kitchen.

In an attempt to discourage a twinge of homesickness, I spent the day in the field.  I wasn’t doing just any kind of farm work, but focused on digging sweet potatoes out of the ground.  It’s not quite sweet potato season around here, and because the sweet potatoes were an afterthought last year, allowed to grow between a thick planting of mango ginger, they were long and skinny, and buried between a bountiful crop of ginger.  We got three baskets of mango ginger out that day, and about 20 scrawny sweet potatoes.  But the satisfaction of harvesting our own Thanksgiving meal overcame the quantity.

Later on, Matt helped pluck a plump pumpkin off an overhanging vine, and I used my mom’s recipe, with a bit of improvisation, to make a pie.  In the absence of evaporated milk, I stirred a thick chunk of jaggery (unrefined sugarcane juice) into a saucepan of warm milk.  The pie went into the toaster oven, and I prayed that the electric current wouldn’t switch off, which it did.  Still, after two hours of attempted baking, out emerged a beautiful representation of home.  Lauren whipped up some tasty sweet potatoes and stuffing, and we brought our version of Thanksgiving down to the dining area to share.  Along with Anurag, Sujata, and Maya, we ate with a mother-daughter pair from Holland, and a pair of Indian guests.  Matt toasted to Thanksgiving, and we all tucked in, ending our holiday around a roaring bonfire.

A few days later, Sujata started telling us about Huthari.  Linked to the lunar calendar, Huthari marks the beginning of the rice harvest in Coorg, and like most festivals in India, it involves all kinds of firecrackers and fireworks.  Because we don’t grow rice paddy here at Mojo, Sujata arranged for us to visit some friends of theirs who do.  Lauren, Matt, Maya, and I set off after dinner, walking the kilometer to Vimmaiah and Meenakshi’s in the startling moonlight.  When we arrived, two little girls greeted us with a show of sparklers, and we settled into a spread of snacks and sweets – milk halwa, pakora, and banana chips.

After some time, we were ushered into the family’s shrine room for a puja, and given our first-ever bindis – that little dot between the eyes.  As it often happens in a foreign country, we were swept into the ritual without knowing what exactly was going on.  Vimmaiah’s family left the shrine room in a small procession, and we followed along, all the way across the farm’s drying yard, over a small stream, and into the edge of the rice paddy.  With limited flashlights, random fireworks, and the full moon sending off light overhead, we picked our way to the paddy and into a kind of magic.  The Indians ahead of us started hollering, shouting boisterous “Polydeva”s to the gods of rice and harvest, and waving thin machetes over their heads.  By the light of a small oil flame, Vimmaiah then reached into the paddy, grasped a large handful of the dried-out rice crop, and cut it at its base.  After gathering an armload of the holy stuff, we all turned and walked back to the house.  The young men of the family continued to set of fireworks, and small explosions of light and sound burst around us and the cut rice.  The short ritual was over, the offering of rice was divided up, and we went home with ten stalks of rice wrapped in mango leaves to hang on all the doorways of our homes.  Though quite different from our own feast of thanks, Huthari closed our week of thanks-giving with a bang, and with a nice memento to hang over our door.

“There’s nothing like following a man with a rifle into the jungle”

Trip to Kerala, Part I

Last week, Matt and I took off from the farm for a week’s trip through Kerala.  Known for its backwaters, its communist government, and – to some – its literary prowess, Kerala is India’s southernmost state to the west.  The state meanders along the Arabian Sea, connecting Karnataka to India’s southernmost tip at Trivanduram.  Apparently, Kerala attracts 90% of the 10% of tourists who choose to visit South India over North India.  I had been eager to visit the place since setting foot in the south, mostly because it is home to the story and the characters that once entranced me in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.  So when I heard about an agriculture and export conference in Kochi, Matt and I jumped at the chance to take our first big trip through a new part of India.

Our first impressions were of motion and comfort.  We had taken a bus from Madikeri three hours south to Wayanad, to spend a few days looking for wildlife before heading toward the coast and down to Kochi.  As we passed through Kutta, the last town in Karnataka, and headed into Kerala, our rickshaw suddenly sped up, and Matt and I stopped bouncing into each other.  Well, we thought, the roads are certainly better in Kerala. 

We were greeted by breakfast and coffee at the guesthouse we had booked, and ushered up to a tree-house bungalow.  Wooden walls! we noticed happily, after months of cement rooms necessary to withstand the hefty rains of Madikeri.  The bungalow was built on wooden stilts, and attached to a real live tree.  It was raised, we mused, in case a wild elephant came crashing through the coffee plantation. 

We wasted no time, jumping at our first opportunity to explore the Tholpetty Wildlife Sanctuary across the road.  We did it safari style, piling into a covered jeep with two French tourists and two Indian guides, one in front and one behind.  As we entered the reserve through a big iron gate and drove through the first towering stands of teak trees, I imagined I could hear the wildness of India breathing huge sighs of relief.  Here was a natural place thoroughly protected by the Indian government, in a country that is hungry for space for its bulging population.  Not only is it a fairly large wildlife refuge, but India has done well in connecting it with several other nearby national parks to create a massive, continuous habitat for the big and small animals that desperately need it – elephants, tigers, giant squirrels, deer, and monkeys, to name a few.  Helping to cement its longevity, India also uses the area to create several streams of revenue, such as tourist dollars and profit from carefully sustained teak “orchards” grown within the reserve. 

Our experience confirmed the wildlife’s relief.  Almost as soon as we were 100 meters into the reserve, our safari driver slowed down.  “Spotted deer,” he whispered, pointing to a herd of fifteen or twenty deer, full grown fawns to my North American eyes.  And then, “Hanuman langur monkeys,” as he pointed up into the trees.  Within another ten minutes we had spotted the elusive luna moth, a trio of bison, a sambar deer, and a malabar giant squirrel.  And then, as we rounded a bend and headed deeper into the jungle, our guide in the back of the jeep called for the driver to back up.  He cut the engine and we all leaned out the open windows, listening.  There was crashing in the brush just beside the road, and I could see young stands of bamboo waving wildly against some mighty force.  Elephants, the guide mouthed to us.  And we all leaned a little further out the windows of the jeep, straining to see the cause of all the ruckus in the brush. 

Soon another jeep pulled up behind us, and we moved on.  Hearing the elephants was powerful in itself, perhaps even more than seeing them right away, as it made me begin to understand the vast appetite of the animals, and the sheer power of the lumbering beasts.  They pull whole trees down when they’re snacking, and make no effort to quiet either their footsteps or their munching. 

Partly because of our unrequited encounter with the elephants, and partly because of a longing to connect with the reserve in a more personal way, Matt and I splurged the next morning, and hired our very own guide and guard to take us, on foot, into the reserve.  This is a rare privilege, and to do it you have to pay for these two men, one a local tribal guide, and the other a man touting a rifle, to personally walk you through the place.  The duo in serious brown uniforms added some clout to our small entourage, and as we stepped past the gate, rather than rumbling past it in a jeep, I immediately felt a sense of adventure overcome me. 

We walked along the road for a while, spotting an isolated langur monkey here and there, and marveling at tiger prints and bison droppings.  Soon enough, our guides pulled up short and stopped to listen.  Silence, and then a muffled crushing of sticks and leaves and bamboo.  We looked for the source, and there, not 50 meters away, a tall, skinny bamboo stalk wavered and fell, and was shortly dragged away into the undergrowth.  This time, we knew what stood behind the brush.  Matt and I walked back and forth along the road, testing views from every angle, and getting short glimpses of a fanning ear, a dusty gray back, and a tail whipping back and forth.  After a few minutes, our guides motioned to us.  They were looking for openings in the brush to creep into, and one of them, the man with the rifle, Anu Kumar, said to us, “we go in, behind them.”  Through this shortened sentence, I assumed this meant that Anu Kumar was going to circle behind the elephants and flush them out so we could get a better look.  This seemed somewhat risky, but feeling grateful for our gutsy guide, I said, “okay, good luck!”  But then he beckoned for us to follow. 

Looking back at me, Matt said, “there’s nothing like following a man with a rifle into the jungle,” and we plunged into the brush.  The guide cut a quiet path with his machete, leading us through a swampy area and around the backside of the elephants.  We emerged on raised ground covered by trees and shrubs, and looked across a small stream to a herd of four wild elephants.  They hadn’t noticed us at all, or maybe they simply weren’t concerned.  There was one huge male, with long white tusks and two massive humps on the top of his head.  Three smaller females, not three quarters his size, stood around him.  All four chewed slowly at the pile of bamboo they had pulled down, first shaving off the bark and then sucking out the fiber within.  They waved their giant ears, and curled their wiry tails back and forth along their bodies, and it was a perfect display of elephantine calm.

Shortly, Anu Kumar started pulling on our sleeves, beckoning that it was time to go.  He was worried that a jeep would drive along the road and spook the small herd our way.  It was a valid concern, but after a minute of entrancement in the company of such calm wildness, I didn’t want to go.  He continued to coax us out, and we turned to backtrack along the makeshift path only two or three minutes after finding our view.

That was only the beginning of our trek through the jungle, but a description of each and every moment would hardly be blog-friendly.  We spotted dozens of tiger prints and even a pair of leopard prints, and encountered a half-dozen malabar giant squirrels.  These creatures, perhaps the most beautiful to be seen in this stretch of rainforest, are reddish-orange and nearly as big as a German Shepherd.  They run along the rainforest canopy like the most adept monkeys, and when they turn to look at you from their treetop lookout, their faces are circled like a raccoon in whites and browns and blacks.  Their bushy red tails follow them like a final flash of brilliance as they disappear into the forest.

Thankfully, Anu Kumar did not need to use his rifle even once during the trek, although we did get attacked by a hoard of wild beasts.  The leeches, my personal bain of the rainforest, finally got the better of me, devouring both Matt’s and my feet during one particularly moist stretch of trail.  Their ferocity would leave their mark for the rest of our week-long trip to Kerala, as their nasty little bites swelled up and had me itching for the next six days.  But it was worth it – for the elephants, and the squirrels, and all the other creatures we encountered, and for the experience of walking absolutely vulnerable into a wholly wild place, except for the presence of a guide with a gun. 

Photos: 1- Entrance to the Tholpetty Wildlife Sanctuary; 2- Luna Moth; 3- Entering the jungle with our guides; 4- Elephants!; 5- Sweet relief from the leech bites

Character Sketch: Farm Foreman, Kannada Teacher, Serious Spitter

In the morning, Anurag leans out the door of his house on the hill and shouts, “Muttupandy!”  It has a lilting ring to it, the second half tumbling over itself and rising at the end with a British twang so it becomes Muttupanday.  I hear it cascading down the hill, received by a short “eh?!” in reply.  Muttu is the able-bodied foreman of the farm, and is responsible, among other things, for helping Anurag and Sujata’s young daughter make it to the school van each morning.  He rises early, I know, to wash his treasured vehicles, the school van itself and a blue Maruti scooter, and then strides up the hill to begin his work day.

Muttu is a spitter, in the best sense of the word.  He does it out of habit, leaning to the side and sending out three or four tiny bullets of saliva every minute or so.  They become punctuations in our conversations about local farmers, the work to be done on the farm, or (his favorite subject) American cars.  They are small sunflower seed spits through his teeth, and it’s a conversation in itself. 

A few days ago, he guided the creation of a new compost pit – cow dung, then diluted cow urine, then green biomass and a half-bottle of Effective Microorganisms mixed with water.  Then more shit, watery piss, and weeds.  He leapt around, pulling bags of dung from our hands to sprinkle it out evenly over the pit, or he squatted off to the side directing us. 

He taught us a few words in Kannada, too.  Eenu beeku neeru means simply, more water is needed.  Nannigey eenu neeru beeku means I want more water.  We ferried water back and forth from the nearby rainwater collection barrel, filling bindigays (green plastic big-belly buckets) and scuttling back with them perched precariously on a shoulder.  The local women we work with walked off with machetes in their hands and returned with a head-load each of weeds:  ferns, grasses and leaves they tied neatly into a bundle the size of a small refrigerator.  I couldn’t wrap my arms around it if I tried.  Three times they brought a load each, and we dutifully unwrapped the grassy knot and distributed the matter across the dung.

Muttu is from Tamil Nadu, but he’s been living in these hills of Karnataka for twenty years.  One son lives with Muttu here, and with his two aunts, an uncle, and two small cousins.  Muttu’s other son lives with his wife in their village in Tamil Nadu.  When I ask him why he likes it here, and why he stays, he says it’s the cooler weather in Madikeri, and the quality of the work.  Rather than doing the same thing every day, here he gets variety:  one day he’s up in a tree shade-clearing, and the next he’s laying a foundation for a new cottage.  I marvel that it’s enough to keep a man from his family, but then I remember that his family is here – sisters and brothers, son and nephews.  In a sense, a spouse is just the icing on the cake. 

Muttu is the guy who’s been taking me around on these farm visits every few days.  He knows most of the farmers in this area, and for him most of the “interviews” are like casual visits to catch up with friends.  When he likes the family we’re visiting, he’ll spend the first hour chatting in Kannada, asking about their farm and family members.  At one farm, we spend at least thirty minutes ogling over a small black kitten that is tumbling around and around the room chasing a ping-pong ball.  After a banana each, and a cup of coffee, we get to business.  ‘Okay,’ he says to me finally, ‘you have some questions?’  He is always direct and to the point.

In ten days the compost pit we helped create will get its first stirring, and in two or three months the multi-layered pile will be a sunken mass of dense, powdery nitrogen.  I look forward to sinking my hands into it then, and helping to lay it under the coffee trees that cascade down the valley on the edge of the pit.  I tell Muttu, “in ten days, you tell me when you’re coming here to mix it, and I’ll come too.”  He wags his head from side to side, grins, and offers an okay. 

Kodagu’s Agricultural Landscape – Clips from my first report

Beware, this is long!  

Because I’m getting graduate school credit for my time in India, I’ve been writing papers from time to time.  Here are some clips from the first of the series, a brief background about agriculture in India, public policy, and the local environment.  Let me know what you think!

Although India embodies a great diversity of livelihoods, languages, and cultures, it remains predominantly an agricultural country.  According to the last census, over 72 percent of India’s population lives in rural areas, and up to 50 percent of income generated in those areas is from farm income.  India was a key player in the Green Revolution in the 1960s, when several developing countries greatly increased food production by adopting new technologies.  Not all of these technologies were sustainable over the long-term, and pesticides and fertilizers introduced during and after that time have degraded soil quality to an extreme level.  As a result, India now faces a complex problem of food production in the face of severe environmental conditions.  In India, there are stories of mass suicides of farmers in Andhra Pradesh who can no longer coax their crops to grow, and of soil in Punjab that can no longer absorb water at all. 

In Kodagu, a region in southwestern Karnataka that is host to one of India’s only tropical rainforest belts, the farmers are many and diverse.  Amongst the large coffee and spice plantations, there are small landholders growing vegetables for home consumption and fruits for the local market, coffee for their breakfast tables and spices for their kitchens; organic cooperatives, research farms, and self-help groups diversify the agricultural landscape.  The NGO I am working with, Worldwide Association for the Preservation & Restoration of Ecological Diversity (WAPRED), has developed an organic research farm near Madikeri, in the hills of Kodagu, and has helped establish two organic growers cooperatives in the region – one locally within the town of Galibeedu, and the other a collection of large organic growers in southern Kodagu.  My placement with WAPRED involves me in a local effort to reverse the harmful effects of “conventional” nonorganic farming by encouraging organic cultivation through education and marketing assistance.
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With a growing population and diminishing open land, India is struggling to meet its own food needs while developing its agriculture sector to compete in the global market.  Scholars have shown that Indian farmers tend “to apply excessive fertilizer” to their crops, and to spray pesticides to such an extent that natural predators of pests are wiped out as well (Swaminathan 2006).  It is well known that this model of agriculture is unsustainable due to soil degradation, falling water tables, and the harmful effects of the chemicals, which include pesticides banned in the United States.  In contrast, research has shown that growing crops organically can boost farm incomes and at the same time improve the agricultural environment.  In Karnataka, politicians have given lip service to the need to develop sustainable means of agriculture in India, but often these organic pilot projects have fallen to corruption and misappropriation of funds.

In Karnataka, the issue of corruption in the face of good intentions is especially pronounced.  The Karnataka state government has enacted several schemes to improve farming methods and markets over the years, some that specifically attempt to encourage organic farming.  In 2008, the Karnataka state government allotted 100 crore rupees (about 21.5 million US dollars) over the next five years to encourage organic farming in the state.  Meant for the farmers themselves, the money was distributed to 29 NGOs in the 29 districts that make up Karnataka (MeriNews 2009).  Despite many officials in government lauding the program’s success and asking for additional funds to continue the program next year, others have called for a probe into the project.  One spokesperson, A.N. Mahesh of the Chikmagalur District Congress Committee, explained that the funds have gone directly to sympathizers of the majority government, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).  The national newspaper, The Hindu, writes,

Displaying a list of beneficiaries from Chikmagalur taluk, [Mahesh] said most of them were rich farmers and sympathisers of the BJP. He said Rs. 38,000 had been provided for office expenditure each month although most of the organisations did not have an office. He said lavatories were built under the Ashraya housing scheme were being included in this scheme.

In this environment, real progress on agriculture issues has been severely stunted.  Although many farmers voice interest in using organic methods for economic reasons, they continue to receive mixed messages from the government.  Despite the official movement toward organic agriculture, the bulk of outreach and extension services promote the same high-input practices that have rendered Indian agriculture unsustainable.

In Kodagu, a hilly region of southwestern Karnataka, concerns about organic and nonorganic farming are amplified because of the unique ecosystem that the region inhabits.  Kodagu makes up a portion of the Western Ghats, a long strip of rainforest along the western edge of the Deccan plateau extending from the border of Maharashtra and Gujarat through Goa, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu, and into Kerala, India’s southernmost state.  The Western Ghats has been labeled one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, and several NGOs and research stations have been set up to document and preserve the area.  At the same time, pressures to expand agricultural usage in the area conflict with any widespread conservation efforts.  Kodagu is home to several Tata Coffee and Tea Estates, one of India’s largest private companies, as well as a plethora of small and large farming operations.  With coffee prices climbing internationally, and the region known for climatic abilities to produce distinctive coffee tastes, it is difficult if not impossible to slow the spread of the farming operations.  While good in some ways for development, the environmental toll could be devastating for the ecological balance and long-term agricultural sustainability of the strip of rainforest known as the Western Ghats. 

Locally, agricultural activities range from large commercial landholdings to subsistence farming of one to three acres.  The main crops are coffee, cardamom, and black pepper, although many farmers also grow a variety of citrus fruits, garcinia, pineapple, and vegetables, either for home use or to sell in the local markets.  The nature and extent of the agricultural activities depends largely on the elevation and rainfall of the area, of which Kodagu has a great variety.  During my time in Kodagu, I will focus on two very different areas for my project work.  The first is the immediate area around the research farm where I live, near the small town of Galibeedu.  This area is located in a high rainfall zone of around 200 inches per year.  The rain dramatically alters the landscape by creating dense jungle valleys interspersed by grassy hilltops.  Because the region sees so much rainfall, yields of coffee and cardamom are generally lower than in other areas of Kodagu, and some crops that are prone to fungus and disease, such as black pepper, are not quite as common.  In this area around Galibeedu, most farms are small, and the markets are local.  While farmers generally do not use heavy inputs of fertilizers or chemical pesticides, they are also not growing their crops strictly organically.  Because the farms are small and the farmers are largely uneducated and impoverished, they have no way to access large or diverse markets that could help them realize better prices for their crops. 

WAPRED has begun to work with this community by reaching out to individual farmers and sharing organic farming methods, and by helping to start the Galibeedu Organic Association (GOA).  GOA is meant to support subsistence farmers in the immediate area as they develop their farms and adopt organic methods.  GOA could be an important link between local farmers and wider markets, especially because many of the local farmers are already growing their produce organically.  If these farmers can access higher prices for their goods, through a cooperative such as GOA, it will help boost farmers’ livelihoods and encourage more farmers to grow their crops organically.  GOA has been slow to start, largely because of a disconnect that exists between the research farm and the surrounding farmers.  In order to address this issue, part of my assignment will be to visit each farmer in the nearby area, discuss their methods, problems, and the markets they use, and begin a systematic outreach initiative. 

As a contrast to this local work I will be doing with small organic growers, I also hope to help develop a new organic cooperative formed by larger, more dispersed growers in Kodagu.  The farms that make up the Organic Association of Kodagu (OAK) are all certified organic farms, and most are located in southern Kodagu.  Southern Kodagu is warmer, drier (seeing 55-100 inches of rain annually), and flatter, and is consequently more productive and generally better connected to state resources and wider markets.  In this region, several farmer cooperatives have already been started and are actively supporting farmers’ access to sustainable inputs and wider, more profitable markets.  OAK was formed in 2008 as a resource-sharing network, and the farmers meet every two months to discuss their methods, problems, and potential solutions. 

At the moment, the OAK members do not formally share market networks, but there is potential for doing so.  Many of the farms sell their coffee in international markets, and receive premiums of 15 percent or more for their organic produce.  They are limited, however, by the difficulty of finding suitable coffee roasters or exporters and by large export minimums of 1,000 bags of coffee, or 50,000 kg.  This is where a strong cooperative could greatly assist the farmers, and potentially set up a way to connect the large and small growers.  Over the long term, these two projects could overlap, in that the small farmers in Galibeedu could eventually access the market networks that WAPRED sets up through the OAK network.  This, however, is most likely beyond my 10-month tenure at WAPRED.  The most I can try for is to lay a foundation for the NGO, and perhaps its future interns, by expanding WAPRED’s outreach initiatives among farmers, by documenting and mapping the local farmers, and by investigating and developing market networks. 

Photos: 1- One of the OAK farmers' coffee, about to be sold;  2- New coffee leaves on a Kodagu plantation