Hello world. Long time no see…
The walls are closing in. It was only last week that I
thought there was nothing worse than the lack of freedom and close friendships.
I’ve changed my mind now. I would like to add Foucauldian power networks to the
list. Orwell’s Big Brother, if you will.
So you weren’t expecting such a dark beginning after such a
long wait. Well, shit happens. I thought for a second that I should probably
wait. Wait to be in a better mood. Wait till I’ve guzzled down a good dose of
rum. Maybe I should have. But I think it’s time you got a good dollop of what’s
going on here.
Essentially, we’re thinking. Locked in the house, locked in
our own personal existential conundrums. Forbidden to look out, we’re forced to
look within. So we ponder. We ponder about what we want to do, who we want to be,
who we are now and what we might be capable of. We force ourselves into some sort
of necessary postmodern self-decomposition, before we can begin to recompose
and reconstruct. Jess and Alizé, 2.0.
I can feel the new parts starting to fall into place. I was terrified I
might be losing my essence, my itty-bitty-je-ne-sais-quoi for a second, but I’ve
come to realise I’ve still got it. I know this because of this last week’s
events.
And so, the story continues:
It’s now been two Saturdays that we’ve been up at 5am, riding
through the empty streets of Punjab, off to our next diabetes and blood
pressure victims. Sitting in the freezing cold fog, needle in hand, waiting for
our guests to come. It’s not a particularly exciting experience, but it is
absolutely worth the village breakfast we get in the end. Roti (wheat
chapatti), filled with onion and potatoes, cooked on an outside stove fuelled
by cow dung with whipped buffalo butter melted on the top, it’s absolutely
delicious. And you get to eat it in a real Punjabi home, at the heart of the
community. If only it wasn’t so cold.
But we have God’s light to keep us warm. We had the
privilege of being invited to a homemade Hindu temple last Tuesday. We squeeze
into a small room on the roof of a neighboring house, where our caretaker is a
“Godly student”, or rather a Godly teacher, or maybe Godly reader. She sits and
reads long stories to illiterate women, from what I suppose is a Godly pamphlet.
I wish I could tell you a little more about what it was about, but I couldn’t
understand a word. So there we sit, Alizé and I, in silence, letting ourselves
be lulled into dreamland by this woman’s slow and deliberate voice, allowing
our minds to drift. I soon begin to understand that house arrest hasn’t sucked
all the life out of me. I remember
only too well having gone to see Chris play in a Church a couple of years ago,
and not being able to suppress my laughter as the choir heartily sang “I’m a
trainnn”. Well, I found this context just as funny. There’s something about
religious places and religious followers, something about the way they take
themselves so seriously, which makes it all seriously amusing. To make it all
the more serious, this temple has a red electric light with “Supreme soul”
written on it, which gives off red streaks of light meant to represent God. This
light is turned on when it is time to meditate so that with the Godly music
playing, all the women sit in the dark facing the light and praying in silence.
A young girl whispers to us that if we look into the light we will get God’s
powers… oohhh ok. When meditation is over, the light is switched back on again,
and the slow and serious lecture commences. Sat there pondering over the seriousness
of it all, I can feel my smiling mouth twist into a devilish grin, as I come to
the realisation that God is staring at me through an electric light and I am
finding it absolutely impossible to place a clean and respectable thought in my
head. So I’m still me. Still tainted with what I have termed the Warwick
library syndrome. The more you attempt to force your mind into what Mill’s
wrongfully termed the “higher pleasures”, the more it rejects it by thinking of
the “lowest” possible pleasures. It haunted me during exam time, but then and
there, I found it incredibly refreshing. But time to Snapple out of it, we have
to sit on the floor now; it’s personal lecture time.
A Godly brochure is handed to us, and we are shown an
illustration of the topGod, symbolised by light, I didn’t catch his name, so we
shall call him supremesoulman. He is inside absolutely every one, whether you
believe in him or not, he is stuck somewhere between your eyebrows (as per the
white speck Hindus sometimes draw on their forehead). And then there are the
underGods, who represent our future cosmic existence. First, comes Brahma the
creator, whose role it is to create a new beautiful Godly world, then comes
Vishnu the preserver, and finally Shiva the destroyer, who destroys the old
ugly manworld. The Earth is depicted held down by a dirty hand characterized by
the 5 human vices: ego, lust, attachment, greed and anger, which prevent our
world from attaining its Godly form. On the following page, we find a cartoon
drawing of a man sitting in an old school American car. When we enquire as to
what its religious signification might be, we are told that it symbolises the
way humans need souls in the same way that cars need motors. Oh. Ok. We are
then shown a photograph of a beautiful mansion, sat on the top of a hill, which
is apparently where their guru lives. Doesn’t seem much different to many other
religions then. A religious leader leads a rich and comfortable life while his
poor followers starve and go to temple everyday. To add the cherry on top, we
are given the Guru’s assistant’s skype and facebook details, so that we can
contact their God. Once again, we witness tradition and globalisation using and
abusing of each other in mysterious ways.
It’s later now. After a film and a couple of drops of the
Old Monk, I’m back for the last chapter of our story. We’re now late Monday
afternoon. Alizé and I go upstairs to our room for the umpteenth time, sit down
at our respective electronic devices and begin to stumble, facebook or gmail,
while exploring the web for the perfect degree, tattoo or travel destination,
when two women of about our age walk in. We are told that they are the big boss' granddaughters, that they had had exams earlier on but were now on holiday and
were here to be our friends and take us out at night, even tonight. So be it.
Within ten minutes our routine movie night turned into a jeep race through
Punjab. We had been joined by a brother and two cousins, and for the first time
ever, we stepped out into the Bassi Pathanan night. I can barely describe the
excitement we felt as we piled into the car, the smile we had plastered on our
faces as we sped through the night at a life-threatening speed, driven by a 16-year-old
boy who had a mind to become the first Indian formula 1 driver. The evening was
truly intense, continuously punctuated by family teasing and big arguments. On
the way back, we stopped off at McDonalds for the boys to get a Mc Maharaja and
at a local shop for Alizé and I to get a bottle of our babaji Monk. Finally, we
got to have a taste of the Punjabi youth’s lifestyle. However, it soon became
clear that we were solely dealing with the Punjabi middle-class youth, who may
long to be Westernised but still have certain values which we have a lot of
trouble sharing.
To begin with, they were absolutely flabbergasted by the
fact that we clean our flat, and especially our own toilets, when we should be “making
the most of India and use the servants”. Then, as the night went on and
conversation flowed, India’s bleak territorial history starts to seep through.
We slowly come to discern the daunting black paws of nationalism and the
darkened, frightened face of ignorance, as we commence our discussion on the
Muslim religion. It’s at this moment that I realised I still had it, I haven’t
made that step between youthful hope and adult hopelessness just yet, I haven’t
grown numb, I’m still me, I’m safe. I can feel my veins throbbing with the
desire to argue, I can sense my breath quickening with my own personal branch
of religious fervour and I can feel that brutal shudder down my spine as I
understand the importance of what is being said within this particular
socio-political context. Luckily, it remains a contained discussion not a war, and finally we agree to disagree. Nothing to worry about then, even if I said
something wrong, or they noticed we could do with a little more butter or that
our flat is freezing, they’re friends now, what could possibly happen. Or so we
thought. Indeed, it was made fairly clear the next morning that our supposedly personal
conversation had swiftly trickled through the MBCT web of authority. My
opinions may or may not be safe, but we were presented with heaters and butter the
following morning, when we asked for neither. Welcome to India. It seems, all
methods are permissible if the ultimate goal is to please the guests. While
intentions were good, we are now left a little dumbfounded as to what we should
or should not say, what is private and what is not, and what could potentially
be held against us one day.
Most of the time still, we sit around, holding each other
up, sat on the couch watching old films. At night, we lie in bed like a good
old married couple, Alizé reads Wettgenstein in the candlelight while I very
slowly make my way through War and Peace on my Ipad. It’s quite nice I guess,
to have the time to watch films you ought to have seen ages ago and read books
you’ve never even had the time to open. But I think we can safely say that we
would both be ready to give it all away, if only we could go for a walk, just
the two of us, hand in hand, off in the Punjabi sunset.
This brings me to the end of my story, which happens to be
the beginning of a new one. We finally get to make our first toddler steps into
the wilderness of India, a New Delhi Christmas Carol: four days to escape the
Mehar Baba Big Brother. We may not have a Christmas tree, stockings and mince
pies, but we have Santas in turbans, freedom and each other. So really, what
more could two girls ask for?
On that jolly note, Alizé and I wish you all a very very
merry Christmas and I bid you good night!
Lots of festive love,
Jess and Alizé
