"I like your nature!"

Hi. My name is Jessica. And I'm a pornstar.

(hiiiiiii Jessssssssicaaaaa)

By "pornstar" I mean I like to play badminton in a tee-shirt. A high-necked and half-sleeves, but not high enough, not long enough and not-sleeved enough. Turns out, my lower back was showing as I went to pick up the "shuttlecock", and this was a highly erotic moment for Bassi Pathana. Most of the people looking at us were kids meant to be playing hockey. But a few men were now all suddenly sitting the wrong way around on their benches, a young teenager thought it cute to take "a snap" with his phone, and more and more of these gentlemen seemed to have come play badminton. On a less sexy-time note... I could breathe! My Punjabi fag-rationing is allowing me to do fairly energetic exercises for 30min or more. Same girl who couldn't jog around the block a few months ago..... oooo jaaaaa! 

And yet, we're maybe not doing such a good job of rationing the smuggled-in Rum. We first had it in honour of my late-deceased grandfather, with buffalo milk and tea. I somehow had an inkling that this was the way he would have wanted me to do it....The tea for his life in England, the 50% rum for his Irish ancestry, and the buffalo milk.. well it's just pretty distasteful on its own. And yet this is a cocktail recipe  I intend on importing to Europe (although fresh un-pasturised buffalo milk may be hard to come by...). After that, we drank a little every time there was another huge party outside. So, I would say …approximately… every goddamn night. We have resorted to sitting outside on our terrace bench to watch the fireworks and listen to the music and the drums

We complain like grannies that the music is too loud and that they should really be turning it down by 2am. And then we moan and grumble like kids that we would rather be grounded. At least, when you were grounded there was some leeway for negotiations. If your chores were done, and you poured a few drops of wine down your mother's throat, or threw a few good grades on your father's desk and theatrically spat back a good old "work hard/party hard" moto at those who made the mistake of teaching it to you all those years back, you were good to go! Here... not so good. Still on hard-core house arrest. And unless we had a make-up kit worthy of Mrs. Doubtfire, some henna died extensions, some bangles, plastic gel-type shoes and a good old punjabi-suit we could not step out without being sent right back in. And this is assuming we have managed to bypass the "spy" who sleeps in front of the front door. We made the first step today by going out and choosing fabrics and designs. However, by the look the charity's designer gave us, we really have absolutely no taste in punjabi suits and would not last a second trying to "blend in" at any one of these so-called "religious processions".  This is not a religious procession. This is not a bunch of bold men swaying slowly down a street groaning. This... this is different. This is MC punjabi-style beats, M.I.A voices and the clink of bangles and bojangles sounding through the streets. Religion is sounding pretty awesome to me.

Indeed, religions here have nothing to do with their Western counterparts. I would like to call Hinduism and Sikhism "socialist" religions (in the Indian custom-limited sense of socialism). By socialist I mean that all religions are not only tolerated, but embraced and encouraged. They say that "God is light, God is one, God is everywhere". In other words, God is not this outside entity that you can question. And as such, there is no room for this Westernised paradigm war of to-god or not-to-god, because god is within you, not outside of you. It's an energy that you don't really have to accept or disaccept, it's just…well… there and everywhere. And God is a socialist energy. Not a protestant-save-yourselves character. Not a catholic-confess-yourself-my-child being. Not an Islamic-pray-to-me-morning-noon-and-night man. And not a Jewish-jealous-you-like-someone-else-and-shouldn't-you-feel-guilty-you-don't-have-a-country kind of God. God here is inside of you. He's the voice telling you to help the poor and give an education to those who need it. He's the force which makes all these people voluntarily work at "lungers"(community kitchens), cooking food 24/7, doing millions of dishes and boiling gallons of hot water for tea for the thousands who come everyday. God is a guide within you who makes you do the right thing and be true to yourself. This allows for all Gods to be accepted, as they are seen to be some sort of inside light to do good.

This, first off, shows how limited Punjab's knowledge is of some religious people (as far as I am concerned). And second, poses a problem for all those of us who do not have God inside of us. Ultimately, the Punjabis we have talked to cannot even fathom that we (or I) could not believe in God and do not feel him moving in our godless bellies. That we might actually believe, that the beauty of science and the wonders of nature may have bumped together in mysterious ways. And yet they see that we are here. For free. Always on time. Always helping. Always smiling. That we may not be religious, but the force is still within us. 

It is as volunteer Jedi-knights that we were summoned at 5am on thursday morning for a village roadshow. If you are picturing a huge parade, full of bright lights, with wild animals and women who can fit in boxes, then snap out of it. We got in a  plastic-topped jeep in this freezing foggy mysty air, so compact it felt like you could slice a slit through it like Will in Northern Lights. We roll down the empty streets with Indian rap blearing through the speakers. And we end up in this tiny little stone enclave, where we put up a big poster: Diabetes and Blood Pressure Roadshow!"And we wait. We wait for the old and the young, the healthy and the sick, to come pouring in one by one. And thanks to my god-given height, I was assigned to "weighing and measuring" villagers, while Alizé satisfied her genuinely sadistic tendencies by pricking people in the finger and pressing their wounds to make blood ooze out. I also reluctantly stepped onto the weighing machine and under the measuring stick to get my BMI calculated…found out that out of the 150 people who came that day, I was in the bottom 3 "underweight". Give me a few more months of chapatti bread and I’ll soon be tipping into “normal” I’m sure. All in all, the villagers were so kind, with that now familiar wide-eyed curious look stuck on their faces at our (very) pale skin and our pigeon Punjabi. And it was good to be out of the house. Although way too early for my liking.

We came back and went straight to class. This consisted of returning the dictations we had given the night before. Good times. We made a "Priceless mistakes" paper (I have always suspected teachers of owning one of these). This document includes afro-American sounding words like "Queezeens" for "cuisines", or "all ways" for always (wonder where they got that one from). Then "Italy" might become "Litly" and "Alpine lakes" might turn out as "Alphens legs". From "high art" to "hey art" and, best of all, "Southern Europe" could be mistaken for "Sadam Urope". Epic. We also had the most minimalist charades game in the world, so minimalist you aren't actually doing anything. Tired was depicted by standing with your hip a little bent. Singing was portrayed holding a whiteboard pen by your side. And crazy was acted out by throwing that same pen at someone in the classroom with a nonchalant look on your face. And yet, they all guessed it. Minimalism is in.  We need to get with it.

We also need to get used to the compliments. I would lay odds Alizé and I have heard some pretty odd compliments in our time, but neither of us were prepared for the level here. We collect comments like "you have a beautiful person", "you are very very beautiful maam teacher" or, best of the best, “I like your nature”. Awkward? Not at all….Worst of all these are genuine and sincere, but also imply that you have just become a potential wife (funny. I've only just rarely been a potential girlfriend back home). And yet, if you were to smile and say, I like yours too, you might be seen as trash.

There is also a quite different conception of sexy here. Our new friend who comes nearly every night and calls us dear at the end of each sentence admitted to us that she eats a lot because she wants to put on more fat. She needs more curves and so she used to take medication to make her breasts grow. Right, so I will not go into detail on my ever lasting big-bosom-reality-check campaign. But chest-growth hormones are just plain right stupid. But then what can you say? People back home starve themselves (on purpose. As opposed to this country), pump steroids and cosmetically "enhance" every inch of their body. But here, "au naturel" and slightly plump is sexy. And we have given them the hormones to induce it: a fairly sizeable pill of pharmaceutical globalisation to swallow.

However, gender expectations for men are quite the opposite. I could go on for years as regards the gendered nature of Indian custom, law, education, religion and tradition. But let's just stick to MTV for a second. Homosexual may be out. But homosocial is so in! The majority of male singers have mafioso sleeked back hair, rock the tanked-topped Boyzone look and dance like Michael Jackson on X. They might just be singing up on the wing of a moving airplane with their "homies" wearing turbans or with darker skin (read Muslim) singing a chorus of "My brother from a different mother", with vanilla iced rap breaks and all. And the girls? How come my lower back is so exciting when the saris on tv are very seriously sexy. With beautiful women belly dancing their way through clubs with the  lights shimmering off the glitz of their fabrics and the gloss stuck to their lips. As for Cartoon Network: amazing. The bad guy dresses like a Hindu God to dupe the people. There is a blue genie boy, who fits right into the secular humanoid primary school. And to top it off, Ben 10 is dubbed… in Indian-accent English! And so are all the American ads! Crazy... Just crazy....

This whole trip is.... We're finding ourselves buried neck- deep in a culture clash. But a wonderful one. Like Alizé said, you never ever feel like you don't belong here. Like you are not accepted. You are never ever looked up and down. You are just accepted because you are human, and because the God inside of them likes all humans. And that, is just revolutionary. I've said it many times before, and I will say it again, human interactions should always be a two way street. Our students come into our class with big smiles on their faces, screaming "byyeeeee maaammm" as they walk out, feeding off our knowledge and our differences. On the other side of the room, Alizé and I devour their religious customs and reluctantly get a taste of some of their gendered ideals. We've been here 2 weeks now. And this is already the experience of a lifetime. 

I hope I have managed to describe even half of the trip we're on ......

Yours truly, 
Jess and Alizé