Manu

Manu was always beautiful. When she was little, she played among the flowers on the hills around her house, chased chickens and danced with goats, and sung carols with her friends during the fall festival of lights. Her family then was very poor---her parents were unskilled laborers on a sericulture plantation, spending their days collecting the glistening threads of silk from the trees where the tiny precious caterpillars inched and crawled. Despite their lack of money, however, the family managed to scrape by and send all of their eight children to school. Except Manu.

As the eldest daughter, Manu had to stay home and take care of her younger siblings while her parents went to work in the plantation groves. She cooked and cleaned, cut grass to feed the cows and goats, collected eggs to eat and milk to sell at market, and, when they were old enough, saw her little brothers and sisters off to school every day. It wasn't that Manu didn't want to go to school---she did---and she was as bright and sharp as any of her siblings. But the work had to be done, and though she wished that she too could go, could learn to read and write, she stayed and did the work, sacrificing her future for the sake of her siblings.

When Manu was eighteen a woman came. The woman had a son---an educated man who taught at a school in Kalimpong, several hours away. "My son is not yet married," the woman told Manu's father. "Give me your daughter." Manu's father knew that money was tight and the dowry this man's family would pay would do much to help put his children through school. So, things being what they were, and the groom being educated and respectable, Manu's father said yes.

Manu is eighteen years old and has plenty of experience doing housework, but she doesn't feel good about this. She knew that arranged marriage has been common practice in India for centuries, but she'd never thought it would happen to her, and not like this. Her new husband is half-deaf and nearly twice her age. She had only glimpsed his mother, the head of their new household, and she had looked ill tempered and mean---a fat old woman with teeth missing, and when she laughed it was a harsh, cackling thing. Her new husband had a good job, and the dowry was generous, but she doesn't know him, she never loved him.

Now fast forward to the wedding night, or not long after, and try to imagine Manu---brilliant, beautiful Manu---waiting in her tiny room for her new husband, a man she neither knows nor loves, to come up from watching TV and fuck her for the first time.

Oh how the stomach turns at this thought. Oh how one's bile must rise. For Manu never wanted this. She didn't want to stay home, to grow up illiterate and uneducated. She didn't want to get married. But she had done these things because she had to, because her family and culture had told her to. And now she had do to something else, something else that her family and culture tells her she must do. But how can she? How can this, of all things, be expected of her?

A year later she has her first child, a beautiful baby boy that her husband names Ujjual. A couple years later she has a daughter, Uma. They are smart and kind kids, and she cares for them more than anything else in the world.

Every day when I come home from class or the bazaar, Manu smiles at me. She is thirty-seven now, and a few wrinkles are starting to show around her lips and eyes, but she is still beautiful. Every day when I sit down after washing my hands, she brings me a plate of daal bhaat and smiles. When I sit and drink my tea she asks me about my day, and when I ask her to tell me about hers, she smiles. "Maile kaam garnuparyo," she always says. I had to work.

You see, though she loves her children as much as any mother could, and even loves the American students who come to live in her home for months at a time, she still doesn't love her husband or his ill tempered mother. And she isn't happy. Every day, from four or five in the morning till after dinner, Manu works. She cooks roti and daal bhaat, mixes nutritious slop for the cows, cleans, tends the fields, and makes the long walk an hour down the hill to the jungle to chop firewood and cut grass for the cattle and goats. When Ganess goes to his real home on holidays, she gets up even earlier to milk the cows and take the milk and cream into town to sell. Manu works harder than anyone I have ever seen.

Her husband is charismatic and successful, always chatting with relatives and neighbors, telling stories, and showing off his English, but he doesn't care about Manu. He does little work around the house or fields, preferring to stay up late watching cricket and American movies on television, and does even less to make her life easier. When she calls him for dinner, he often doesn't come for an hour or so, or runs in and takes a plate back to the TV room, or asks to be prepared something different. And when this happens, Manu has to sit and wait, for in Nepali culture the cook has to wait until everyone is served and almost finished before starting to eat.

I asked her, once, if she would like to learn to read, but she just smiled sadly and shugged. "Kaam garnuparchha," she repeats. You see, it isn't that she doesn't want to learn, but when would she have time? How could she possibly find time or energy amongst her exhausting daily chores to do anything to extricate her from her often frustrating and intractable lifestyle? She is too busy shoveling out water to fix the leak.

And despite all this, she still smiles, still laughs and jokes with me, still dances and plays with the goats when they are let out for exercise, still sings while she works.

Ansel tells me that my distaste of arranged marriage is just a western cultural assumption, that love marriages aren't any more or less likely to be happy or successful than arranged marriages. Given how commonplace divorce is America, not to mention broken homes and domestic violence, in some ways I am sure he is right. But I just can't get past the sex. In the West we may sleep with more people than Indians or Nepalis, but in general we only sleep with people that we know, people that, at least at that moment, we choose. So when I try to imagine what it must have been like for Manu---brilliant, beautiful Manu---to wait in that room for her new husband, my stomach turns and something feels distinctly not right.

My Australian friend working in Bangladesh has similar feelings. In Bangladesh, she tells me, American movies are generally considered sinful depravity, but since it is already all sinful depravity there really isn't any difference between watching a Hollywood flick and watching pornography. Thus, for many Bangladeshis, their only perception of American women comes from porn, and this combines with the Eastern arranged marriage value of having sex with strangers to give many men there the belief that western women will sleep with anyone. Obviously my friend has had some frustrating experiences.

It is getting late here, and I have to go. I don't want to get home to late, to make Manu worry. And I want to go home, because I know that she will be there to smile at me. But what I am supposed to do? I think about her situation, about the fact that she is trapped into a life that she didn't choose, and my gut fills with a cool rage. It isn't fair, I think. It shouldn't be this way. Of all the things in India that I expected to see, all the poverty and lack, I didn't really understand that the most intolerable things are the most subtle, the ones that you can't see in National Geographic pictures or the nightly news. But what could I do? Just like with Ganess, even if I could give her money or whisk her away to America, there would still be millions of women just like her, whose situations are just as intractable.

So I'm just going to go home, and thank her for all her work, for the food she cooks and the time she gives me to listen to my day. And for her smile.

Strange White Folk

"England batta? Ko?" I asked, confused. It was the day after getting back from Labdong, a tiny rural village in Sikkim, and I had just returned from a trip to the bazaar. My hajuraamaa (grandmother in my host family), who is pushing eighty and has one tooth, had babbled something about people from England. I managed to get a few more details past her slur—they had phoned before, had been here that morning, and apparently they were going to come back—before she gave me a cup of tea and a pancake and wandered off.

I sipped my sugary drink confused. White people? Here, in my home? We occasionally see other westerners in the Internet café or on the streets around Kalimpong, but with a few exceptions it has been our habit to avoid contact with them. This is has been my experience everywhere I have been in Asia. No one wants to feel like a tourist, and other white people wearing similar clothes and taking the same pictures with the same kinds of cameras all serve to kill the sense that one is an adventurer, an explorer in the Mysterious Orient. Deep down, every travelling westerner wants to be Marco Polo, even me. So for the most part we all keep our distance, not wanting to break the spell.

But over time, as I have gotten used to things here and no longer feel so out of place, I have developed the same sort of staring curiosity towards white people that many Nepalis exhibit, albeit to a lesser degree. What are they doing here? Where are they from? What kinds of lives have brought them to the same place as me, here on the other side of the world? And, now, why the hell were they coming to my house, the very last place in the world that I expected to have to deal with other white folk?

They showed up again right as I was finishing, a whole pack of them. Heavy set mother in a hideous blue suit-dress, embarrassed fifteen-year-old son and shameless twelve-year-old daughter who poked at the dogs and chickens. They also had a middle aged Nepali man with them, who upon seeing me and the last of my tea called out "An err are oo um?" It took me a second to realize that he had actually spoken in English, but broken by a thick Welsh accent. Another second later and I had pieced back together the slightly accusatory question: "And where are you from?"

"America," I said. "New York."

"Ow are oo lick init ear?" How are you liking it here?

"It's great." I cast around the yard, hoping to spot some help, but there was no one. So I stood there, feeling more awkward than I have since my first days here when I didn’t speak any Nepali, and listened to the man explain that he and his family were from Wales, and that they are here in Kalimpong visiting family—which apparently included my hajuraamaa, his aunt. My hajuraamaa came out of the house and asked me to go get some chairs from inside. When I responded in Nepali, the father of the clan said "Oh look, he speaks Nepalese!" and leered at me as if I were a laboratory specimen. I got the chairs. We sat.

"How are you liking the food here?" I was doing better at understanding his accent now.

"It's great." Great.

"I ran the New York Marathon, you know. When I was in the army. And the Hong Kong Marathon. That was when I was in the army."

"That's great," I replied, grinning weakly. He chatted for a moment in Nepali with my hajuraamaa while his wife and kids looked at photo albums. It was a weird feeling, being one of the only ones to understand both sides of the conversation here---though their accents meant that I managed to pick up about equal amounts of Nepali and English. When his daughter showed him a page from Julianne's album, the student who stayed with my family last semester, he broke into a sudden and horrible rendition of "Country Road." The embarassed son gave me an embarassed look.

"It's important, inn'it, seeing how the other side lives?" The wife was talking to me. "Makes us realize how loocky we are. We have refrigerators and washing machines, and they have so little." I fought back a cringe. I had thought such thoughts before myself, but coming from her, talking about "the other side," they sounded wrong, dirty.

"Still a bit early in the day, inn'it?" She was talking to me again.

"Er, no. Is it? For what?" It was midafternoon.

"For brandy, of course!" the father said, and dashed into the house to find brandy.

At that moment my bhaai (younger brother) Ganess arrived home from school, and I quickly walked over to his room above the cowshead. I poked my head in, and Ganess nodded towards the house with a questioning look.

"AnauTho seto manche," I said by way of explanation. Strange white people. We stood there for a few seconds, not really wanting to go deal with them.

"Ghass katna man laagyo?" my bhaai said, his face brightening. Feel like cutting grass?

"Laaagyo," I agreed with a grin. At that moment cutting forty kilos of plant matter to feed the cows and goats seemed much more normal and much easier to face than chitchat with my host family's long lost Welsh relatives. We grabbed a pair of sickles and the large doko (basket) and headed out before we could get roped into further conversation.

Ganess isn't actually a member of my host family. He is sort of adopted. There is a practice in India and Nepal where children of poor families—and Ganess's family is very poor—will be sent to work for a somewhat wealthier family who can afford to feed them, house them and send them to school. How these servant kids get treated varies greatly, but from what I can tell Ganess has it fairly good with my family. My aamaa (host mother) and two siblings mostly treat him like a member of the family, albeit one that has to do more than his share of work in the house and fields. Of course, Ganess still loves his real family, and is always bouncing with anticipation when he gets to go visit them on holidays.

As we squatted amongst the weeds, grabbing handfuls of cellulose and cutting the stems with the battered sickles, Ganess t0ld me that he might be leaving the Karki's residence in a couple months, when the school year ends. He sounded excited at the prospect of living with his real family again, but it is a mixed blessing. Ganess is twelve, and around this age school starts getting expensive. If he goes home, the chances are good that this will be where his education stops. He has five siblings, and his family just can't afford to send him to school past his current grade or even feed and house him if he isn't spending most of his time helping keep the family afloat. I told him that he should continue going to school, that education is the most important thing, and he agreed. He likes school and wants to keep going as long as he can, but unfortunately it isn't really his choice.

On the way home, carrying the basket packed full of grass and leaves on my back, I got to thinking about the Welsh people, and what the heavy woman in the hideous blue suit-dress said. She was right, of course: it is important to understand how other people live. But not so that we learn to appreciate our washing machines and refrigerators. Don't get me wrong I think those things are great, and every day I see how much easier my family's life would be with them. Still, the way she said it felt slimy, intolerably judgemental. If there is one thing I have learned from living here, it is that there is no "other side." Us-and-them paradigms are never very accurate. For all the differences in culture and lifestyle, people everywhere are all pretty much the same, all just people.

But there is a reason to come here and see how the people live, a better one than coming back feeling warm and fuzzy and grateful for our wealth and our appliances. And that's because it sucks: it sucks that Ganess's life is not his own, that he is so limited by conditions he did nothing to create. I don't want to be preachy, but it is hard to know that I have so many opportunities and resources at my disposal and still feel helpless to do anything to help Ganess. If I started an NGO, got a job in development, what are the chances that my efforts would reach Ganess in any meaningful way? And if I could just give him money, found a way to put him through school or take him to America, there would still be millions of great kids just like him who would be left behind.

The white folk left not long after we got back, and my aamaa set down to cook a second meal for her, Ganess, and myself. It was late by the time we got to eating, and as the three of us chewed our food under the dim light bulb, we got to talking about gifts. To meet the Welsh relatives my aamaa had worn a dress that Julianne, the previous student, had given her. She loves the things that the other students have given her—clothes and jewellery, pretty things—but prefers to keep them safe and clean and rarely wears them. I asked what our visitors had given today. Money, she said, and smiled sadly.

Ganess grinned at me as he got up to wash off his plate. "AnauTho seto manche!" he cheered.

My aamaa grinned too. You're Ganess's favorite student brother, she told me fondly. None of the others talked with him much.

I felt a brief surge of pride as they both beamed at me, but I still couldn’t help but feel a bit sad and helpless. Ganess's situation still sucked. Even if I had been nice to him, went to cut grass and chat with him, it didn't change anything. Ganess's future was just as uncertain, and his situation just as intolerable. But it was something, I suppose, to have been a friend or a brother and not just another strange white folk.

I sucked it up and gave him a brotherly smile. "Ekdham raamro," I said. That's great.

Magicians of Labdong

The shaman tossed another pinch of wet herbs onto the rock plate of hot coals, and for a second I think I see green sparks in the smoke. My new host mother has been feeling sick since before I got here, so today they brought in a dhaami, or witch doctor, to perform a work of aruvidic medicine. The dhaami, who happens to be another student's host father, came in, chatted for a while, drank a cup of masala tea, and started the ceremony. He chants methodically over a woven bamboo tray of little clay figurines, some of which are probably human, others quite positively alien. With a steady rhythm he waves a few grains of uncooked rice over the tray and in front of my host mother and then throws them over his shoulder. After a while one of my daajus (older host brothers) starts lighting short lengths of string on fire and draping them over the clay figures, where they fizzle or flare or burn steadily down the backs of things that look like slugs or vague cthulhus. About the time the dhaami starts to chant "Om," I find myself having one of those "Holy shit! I'm in India!" moments.

Labdong is a tiny town in rural North Sikkim. There is one road that snakes down the hill, and four shops which sell mostly the same things: candy, foodstuffs, lightbulbs. No one really comes to Labdong (except us, twice a year). Ideas don't really make it here, either. There are two TVs (one of which doesn't get channels), no phone service, no internet. The nearest bazaar is about four hours away. There is a school, but even today most children don't go past the fifth grade. Even then things are weird; some ten year olds in first grade, some twelve year olds in sixth. Labdong has produced two college graduates in its history. Plenty of people in the town don't go to school at all. Testing is coming up, so everywhere we hear the little kids reciting rote memorized English phrases in robotic, singsong voices. "Ay pee pee el ee. Aypal."

The town is inhabited almost entirely by members of the Gurung tribe who migrated to Sikkim from Nepal. Gurungs have there own langauage, but the people here don't know it. For decades the people of Labdong practiced the Hinduism of the closest neighbors, but sometime in the mid-80s the idea came to convert to Buddhism, the traditional religion of the Gurung tribe. Most people in Labdong claim this was because the ritual purity rules of Hinduism are too difficult to follow in the rural basti. The real reason, of course, was politics. The people of Labdong want to reap the financial benefits of becoming a scheduled tribe. For years there has been competition among various groups to see who can be the most "tribal," the most "backwards." For some reason Buddhism is seen as "more tribal" than Hinduism, so the people of Labdong decided to return to their cultural roots. This meant that they had to figure out how to be Buddhist. They put up Buddha posters, built a gumpa, and started praying to Buddha Bhagwan instead of the traditional Hindu gods. This isn't that uncommon; plenty of Hindus pray to Buddha as just another deity, and Jesus, and Sai Baba. If there is one thing I have learned here, it is that Hinduism has historically never been a cohesive religion in the same sense that Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism has. For that matter, India was never a single nation in the Westfallian sense until the British left. "Civilization" is a better term than "country" or "religion." For most of its history Hinduism was merely a vast collection of vaguly related practices, traditions, beliefs, and philosophies. In recent times the drive to create a national Indian identity has turned it into a sort of superstructure into which other religions can fit without much change to the basic local practices. The people of Labdong worship Buddha, but ask them about what he taught, about the eight-fold path or enlightenment or anything like that, and probably they will just look at you.

There have been a few real changes, though. They dropped the purity rules, mostly, but they still don't eat cow meat. While they say that as Buddhists they aren't supposed to drink, use tobacco or smoke marijuana, that is all most of the villagers seem to do. Though it took a while, Labdog has started to produce its first generation of lamas---little kids running around in the red and orange robes. Nevertheless, people still trust the traditional shamanism of the region as much or more than they trust Buddhism or western medicine. When the first round of jaadoo dubai (magic medicine) didn't make my host mother feel better, they called in a second shaman, who performed a much simpler ritual of chanting, herbs, and rice tossing (minus the clay figurines). When I started to come down with a cold, my host family told me that I should take some dhaami medicine, and waved a bottle of sketchy brown liquid under my nose. I told them I had already taken medicine, and hid in my room until my sniffles cleared up.

My first night in Labdong a bunch of kids came up to me and asked if I knew karate. I said I did, and their second question was if I could do a backflip and clap someone's ears with my heels as I soared over their heads. The fighting in old Hindi and new Nepali films is all assisted with crappy wirework and all grossly unrealistic, but it is the pretty much only martial arts that these kids have been exposed to. My fifteen year old host brother is creepy. A few days into my stay he watched me intently as I brushed my teeth, and as I am just finishing up he reaches out and strokes my head. "Sundar kesh," he said ("beautiful hair") and then asked if he could carry my toothpaste for me. My sisters run around playing with a tiny flashlight that shines a dim image of Osama Bin Laden's face on surfaces about a foot away. This place is fucking weird.

When my host mother isn't feeling better a few days later, the second dhaami (who turns out to be my maternal host uncle) comes back to give it another go. I'm sitting in my room when my host father comes in and asks if I would like to see the shaman jump. Giggling, he bounces up and down on the balls of his feet, holding his hand in front of him as if shaking dice. This particular shamanistic practice is apparently hiliarious to most people, even those who believe in it. I come down a few minutes later, and the drums are already going. The jumping doctor is holding a traditional handled drum and banging on it with a curved stick, his eyes closed, mouth forming words and sounds somewhere between a chant and a moan. Nearby one of my uncles slaps a brass plate with a stick, producing a jarring gong-like noise. His eyes are glazed and his head is tilted at a weird angle, but this isn't due to the ceremony. Labdong is full of genetic abnormalities: extra fingers, cleft lips, distorted hands and faces, mental retardation. Most men don't go more than a days walk to find wives, if that, and over the decades a serious inbreeding problem has built up. My daaju asks a couple times if you can marry cousins in America. His keen interest in the topic is worrying. Still, he says it doesn't happen here (if you do your families will throw you out) and is quick to claim that Muslims do it.

After what must have been at least an our of chanting, the jumping doctor starts to bounce up and down where he is sitting in strange convulsive motions, his body swaying from side to side. This, I realize, is the true trance state, the real deal when it comes to old indigenous magic with authenticity that modern day occultists lust after. Meanwhile a dozen or so relatives have crowded into the kitchen and are taking this opporunity to get really fanastically drunk. I see one person pour a glass of warm Hit Beer, but mostly the air is thick with the smell of raksi, a sort of Nepali moonshine. A pair of aunts smoking homemade cigarettes squak at me to go get my camera. I return with a pocket full of high-speed film and am immediately pulled around the room to have take pictures of relatives or have my picture taken (not that they know how to work an SLR). When they find out that the camera isn't digital and doesn't show the pictures after they are shot, the aunts, shouting to make themselves heard over the jumping doctor's moaning and drum playing, tell me to send everyone here ten copies of these photos from America. On the other side of the room an uncle sits next to the dhaami, heckling or shouting encouragement as necessary.

I wander out and find another dozen people watching a Nepali martial arts film on the family's makeshift DVD set up. When I return, the witch doctor is just starting to stand up. Eyes still closed he just sways and convulses for a second while he gets his balance, and then starts to jump---little hops, with feet turning one way and then the other as he continues to play the drum. I snap some pictures. My family gives a little cheer and goes back to their drunken chatter. After a couple minutes someone realizes that this is where my host mother is supposed to get involved, and she comes and sits in front of the oblivious dhaami while a relative slowly lifts a weird potted plant and feather apparatus and waves it over her head. When this is done, she returns to her seat on the bed, nursing a mug of raksi with palpable disinterest.

The dhaami eventually sits down again, still in a trance. Then, unexpectedly, his eyes open. He is still convulsing, but his eyes are wide and unseeing. He starts shouting shouting things out in Nepali. I can only make out a few words, but for the first time the audience starts paying attention. My host father stands in front of him and shouts questions. The heckling uncle heckles even louder. This is the nearest thing I've ever seen to channelling or possession. I sort of gathered that the jumping doctor was channeling the ghost that was causing my host mother's illness, and was now telling the family how to banish it. Eventually the shouting fades, his eyes close again, and he goes back to drumming. After a while, though, this too fades. The drumming stops, the shaking slows, and a few moments later the jumping doctor opens his eyes, wipes his face with a cloth, and starts cracking jokes.

I go to bed. By now it is nearly eleven---practically the middle of the night by bedtimes here. I'm just drifting off when the drumming starts up again. They aren't finished, apparently, but I am too tired to go watch. Sometime around 2 AM someone goes around the house ringing a loud, heavy bell. An hour later the witch doctor comes in and crawls into the room's other bed, and, half-awake, I have another one of those "I'm in India!" moments.

Pictures

So many buildings go unfinished. They build up as they get the money, and in a good year will be able to afford a whole story. But if business has gone badly they may get a floor, support pillars, maybe a staircase. How strange they look. How visually addicting. These half completed structures draw my eye in ways that temples and monasteries fail to do, just standing there outlined against the misty gray curves of far off hills--stairs going to nowhere, thickets of rusty rebar thrusting out of concrete and into the open sky.

And then there are the people. All those people in all colors and styles of dress and manner. Monks with cell phones, grizzled old cullies in 50 Cent t-shirts, priests in their male kortas and pajama pants, women in modern variations of traditional garb, beggars with shrunken stubs of limbs or street children with small deformities of the face, Tibetan wanderers strung with heavy wooden beads and thick leather caps, children dressed like westerners, foreigners dressed like natives, teenagers dressed like teenagers. All walking contradictions, odes to the strangeness of the modern world.

Trying to do photography here is at once so easy and so hard. My photo professor once told me that in many cases all a good photo needs is interesting people in interesting places doing interesting things. And here I find that plenty. The whole landscape leaps with color and texture, and all the people speak of stories. But if every person holds visual fascination and every place is strange and beautiful, what then do I shoot?

The weeks have passed punctuated by bursts of frantic photography. Most days my camera sits at home, but on trips or holidays or weekends I'll sling it over my shoulder, stuff my pockets full of film, and venture out to, as great photographers have said, see what things looks like in pictures. This was mostly how I worked in the states, but here, without a darkroom or the money to develop every roll, it is mixed with an extreme delay of gratification. I won't see most of my hundred and twenty rolls until I get back to the states and begin the long process of developing and printing. Months, no doubt, months of reliving those manic days of pictures.

The change in setting and in process has been forcing upon me much reevaluation. Having shot as many rolls by now as I did all of last semester, I am trying to force myself to go beyond the images that we see everywhere hear which, while unique and unknown to foreigners, are simply scenes of normal life to most natives and, increasingly, to myself. I want to take pictures that Nepalis will find equally compelling, that will be as good in India as they are in the states. It is hard, though. I think I feel myself improving, but I can't see it. I haven't seen the pictures that I've shot; I have to imagine them and evaluate my technique blind and in the moment. Everyone else brought digital cameras, and can send their shots to friends. I would post my pictures here if I could, but film does not afford me that luxury.

I think it will be worth it, though. To come back and see it again--to travel twice to this strange place of decay and creation, if only visually--is a privilege that few receive. At the moment my pictures are as unfinished as the buildings. One day they, in a couple months, they may be built up higher still, but until then they remain just bones, outlined against my mind.

Of Singers and Security Guards

So Prashant won, of course. After the power went out, my host sister started making frantic phone calls to neighbors and relatives, while the rest of us ran outside, listening for the telltale sounds of celebration. About twenty minutes later the fireworks started and the phone calls came, and siblings squealed with glee. I stayed and watched for a while, but eventually I went to bed, lulled to sleep by the sounds of distant singing.

The next day was a holiday. Even our program took a day off, though most other schools took four. I went to the bazaar to watch the celebrations. So many people were in Kalimpong that day, with thousands crowding into the Mela Grounds for a huge program. From the bleachers I could see the whole thing: mostly students, clumped together by their school uniforms. There were bursts of singing, and an arrhythmic clamor of drums and cymbals. Occasionally there would be a loud crack as kids tossed M80s into the air or scattered crowds with larger fireworks. No one seemed to mind, and slowly the air was permeated by the smell of gunpowder.

The crowd in the Mela Grounds gradually spun out into a procession that took over the streets and ran through the whole town. Everyone seemed to be singing and chanting and waving banners. But not just for Prashant. Sure, his face was still there amidst the flags, and here and there rowdy groups would shout his name. But it was nothing like the parades of support before the finale. Most of the songs were Nepali songs, most of the chants were chants of Gorkha pride.

There is a very different mood now that Prashant has won. All the talk has suddenly turned to bigger matters, and one specific idea that has faded in and out of Nepali consciousness for decades is again resurfacing: Gorkhaland. For a long time the Darjeeling District has felt alienated and neglected by the Hindi and Bengali speakers on the plains. Development programs initiated at the state level from Kolkata just don't seem to make it up to the hills. But the bureaucratic desire and ethno-psychological need of the Gorkhas for their own autonomous state in All India is one that has thus far been ignored by the rest of the country.

Somehow, however, the Prashant's run for Indian Idol became inextricably linked, either consciously or subconsciously, to the idea of Nepali vindication and of Gorkhaland. Everyone seems to think that, now that Prashant is Indian Idol, full statehood for Darjeeling is more possible than ever. This sort of talk is new to us, and so far we've been incredulous. But there is an energy to Kalimpong these days and a strange belief that one just naturally follows the other. "Do you really think," Tanya's sister says, surprised, "that we would spend so much money and time for a person? We only did it because it means we get Gorkhaland."

The reasoning seems to be along these lines: a) if Prashant wins, it will show the rest of India that Gorkhas have talent, and b) if Nepalis can show the rest of India that they are numerous enough to dictate the results if a show like Indian Idol, they will no longer be ignored. And, so far, they aren't being ignored it all. You see, it isn't over.

On Tuesday, during the second, more relaxed day of celebrations, an FM radio DJ out of Delhi made a comment along the lines of "Now that the watchman has become an idol, who will do the job of watchman?" Due mostly to their stereotypical portrayal in Bollywood films, most plains Indians believe that Nepalis are all khukuri wielding thugs who mostly get jobs as watchman and security guards. This goes back a long time, to the British use of Gorkha army units to control protests during the Indian independence movement. And for a while, because of their reputation as fierce fighters, many Nepalis who moved down to Delhi or Bombay or Bangalore, far from the majestic Himalayan hills of Darjeeling, were able to find jobs mostly as police or private security guards. Not that this matters, however, compared to the meaning of the remark. It was a Don Imus sort of thing. Imagine a radio DJ in the states saying "If we let the Mexicans get uppity, who is going to be our maids?" That's how the Nepalis took it.

The next day the whole district held a strike, and people came out for a proper protest. I wasn't there, but everyone said it was pretty big. They even burnt an effigy. The DJ claimed that his comments were misinterpreted, and apologized.

The strike was over the next day, but plenty of people were still pretty upset and continued to protest throughout the region. Then last night we started to hear rumors of violence erupting in nearby Siliguri. Nepali protesters attacked by vicious Bengali mob. Nepali protesters attacked by police. Army called in. Curfew in place. Nepalis being run out of town or forced into hiding. Four dead. Dozens dead. Five hundred dead.

This morning the newspapers give conflicting accounts. Still, things seem to be pretty bad. My host mother's oldest son lives in Siliguri attending flight school, and she has been on and off the phone with him all morning. Last we heard the violence had stopped, but the curfew was still in place. She tries to hide it, but I know she is scared.

There is something incredibly surreal and postmodern about all this. It is so strange to think that it all started with a reality TV show, a talent contest. But then, that wasn't really where it started, was it? The roots of this run deep within the basic cultural divide between people in the hills and people in the plains.

And what does Prashant, the boy from Darjeeling, say? He urges people to end the violence, saying that it will spoil the moment. He is worried that such agitation will distract him from his work on his new album, will break his concentration. There was a time when Gorkhas hung on their hero's every word, but now he seems hopelessly naive. After all, this was never really about him. It has always been about bigger things, more important things than singers, or remarks about security guards.

There is so much tension in Kalimpong today. There is a sense that something has started. No one seems to know if the end will be a successful bid for Gorkhaland or a replay of the violence from twenty years ago. Whatever really happened in Siliguri, things are happening now. I can't shake this feeling, and I can't help but suspect that the TV show's grand finale was really just the beginning.

Grande Finale

All week it's been building. The signs everywhere, the dozens of free voting booths manned all day, the constant discussion and speculation. Now and then off in the distance you'd hear loudspeaker snippets of him singing, and a couple times at night I was woken by the unsettlingly near chantings of some faceless mob: "Prashant! Prashant! Prashant!"

Prashant Tamang, the kid from the hills, made it into the top two, along with his best friend Amit Paul, and Darjeeling went ecstatic. This time, however, the voting period was not a mere 24 hours but a whole week, transforming a weekly ritual into a movement of obsessive fervor. "How many times have you voted?" became a hungry addition to the standard daily chitchat, or, more often, "how many hours did you put in?" And yes, they do mean hours. People talked about the kid at school who voted a thousand times or the police officer who took the whole day off to vote. There are whispered rumors of a man in Sikkim who voted 100,000 times. Money poured in from Darjeeling and Sikkim, from Nepal, and even, we've heard, from Nepalis living abroad in the United States and UK. Kalimpong's local goverment, along with the rest of the city, made Prashant's victory their top priority, cutting money from schools and delaying employee's paychecks. "Indian Idol sakiepachi, sabai manche Darjeelingmaa garib hunuhuncha," my host sister joked: when Indian Idol is over, everyone in Darjeeling will be poor.

Practically everyone has voted dozens of times, and some wealthy citizens have donated tens of thousands of rupees towards the cause. How often or for how long has became, for one week, a major factor in one's social standing. No one seems to care that there will be no return on this huge investment, that the money being spent could go to school art programs, to repairing decimated roads, or to improving the economic standing of the Gorkhas. No one seems to mind that a win will do little to change the disadvantaged position of hills in within the tangled Indian polity. For them, Prashant's victory is a goal in and of itself: to have a Nepali be the face of Indian Idol.

In nearby Assam, Amit Paul's territory, the excitement was said to be just as big. We heard stories of Nepali speakers being turned away from voting booths and polling stations. Here in Kalimpong, they will let anyone vote, just so long as you vote for Prashant. There was a rumor about a girl going to a voting booth and voting for Amit a thousand times. When she was discovered, they dragged her into the street and hacked off her hair. This is a rare occurance, however. Amit supporters usually got away with simple beatings.

As the fervor built, I could feel some people start to get nervous. There was a sort of threat to it, a possibility of violence lying just beneath the surface. What would happen, a few of us wondered, if Prashant lost? My host sister claimed that Kalimpong and Darjeeling would riot, and I was inclined to agree. Others claimed that people would just forget about it, tuck their tails between their legs and go on like it never happened. Coming home on Saturday two teenagers stopped me on the path. "Have you voted for Prashant? Where? How many times?" "Twenty times in the bazaar," I replied. A lie. I gripped my umbrella tighter, holding it like a club. There was a sort of fanaticism to these kids. I could tell they had been wandering around for a while, making sure every passerby had done their part, looking for enemies and nonbelievers.

Finally the big day came. Yesterday the voting closed at six o'clock, and from then on the evening was punctuated by the occasional bang-crackle of distant fireworks. When I came downstairs at nine, our living room was packed with neighbors. The grand finale was being broadcast live from Delhi, from a huge stage and arena that had been built just for the occasion. Prashant and Amit came out in traditional and expensive looking robes. The production values were pretty impressive: every performance included elaborately costumed backup dancers, stunning lights, and pyrotechnics. First Amit and Prashant sang, and then throughout the evening a wide array of solo and group acts including: all the other finalists, in varying combinations, Hindi pop stars, the previous two Indian Idols, and two of the judges (I thought Alishia Chinai and her solid metal bust-lifting corset stole the show). I'm not usually into these sorts of things, but I couldn't help but be entertained. We were all anxious to find out who would win, but each performance seemed to be bigger than the last. It seemed to be building, both in suspense and in the feeling of just how huge a phenomenon this actually was. One hour went by, then two. Who would they bring out next? How long would it go? Probably till midnight, we all said. Another forty-five minutes. We could tell it was close.

And then the power went out.

Friction

You learn so much from walking on mountains. Just little things, like how rocks look when they are slippery or what kinds of soil are likely to give. In Manhattan I can just swing my legs forward and, if it's night and I know or don't care where I'm going, let my thoughts slip into somewhere far away and nonexistent. Here on the hills, it is completely different. Walking, more than anything else, becomes an act of concentration. Every step has to be considered and calculated, at least half consciously, because every step is different, every patch of ground unique. It trains your eyes and feet and balance, gives your legs a sort of precision to their swing and kick. And, if walk the mountain long enough, I expect you come to know the path, feel the softness of the dirt and the shape of the stones in your muscle memory. Then, perhaps, the mountain lets you look away, frees you to think of other things. But not before, and not for a while. The mountain takes some learning too.

Every day I make the long trudge straight up the hill to the program house, next to and over streams, up tall makeshift steps, and along the narrow winding paths that cut through rice paddies and backyards. If it is sunny out, or if I'm in a hurry, I'll arrive soaked through with sweat. If it is raining hard, or if it rained last night, the stream will be too deep to cross without soaking my shoes and pants, so I'll go on a bit further up the path and leap--literally leap!--from boulder to boulder, like Mario or Indiana Jones.

Little girls giggle and namaste as they pass me on their way to school. Some days they'll hold up their hands like a camera or pinch their fingers to their ears, and if I've got my iPod on I'll take our my earbuds and let them listen for a few seconds. They giggle some more, and their friends will run up to ask what I'm listening to. The first time this happened I had on Public Enemy, and the tiny girl, half my height, turned to her companion and made crude gangster-y motions with her hands. Everyday since then that girl has stopped me and done her little hip-hop dance, endlessly chanting "waka-waka-waka-waka!"

Going down is easier, but takes just as much concentration. Friction is the key. I find myself remembering high school physics classes and wondering at the wisdom of the body, to be able to calculate so quickly and so accurately the coefficients of every rock and tuft of grass and mud puddle. At night or, worse, at dusk this becomes infinitely more difficult. In the dark I can't distinguish textures, and my depth perception becomes a mere suggestion. When I leave early, however, and walk home on my own, I try to go fast, and suddenly it all becomes a game. How much easier it feels when I don't try to stop and secure my balance, but let my momentum fly me forward and down, hopping from stone to stone, so light on my feet. And, thinking about those physics classes, I realize that it really is easier. If I'm constantly moving forward, I tend to put less weight down on sloping surfaces, and am thus less likely to slip. I can make better use of the friction when I don't cling to the apparent comfort of careful balance and slow steps.

This isn't a "and that's a lot like traveling" post. You can decipher your own meanings and metaphors. Suffice to say, a certain momentum can useful, if you are willing to sacrifice a bit of feeling grounded.

Sometimes though it is best to stop. Not just for balance and breath, however, but to stare at the textured greens and browns of the mountains across the valley and the complex fractal curves of the white billowed clouds. These are times I can't help but laugh, grunt that maniacal chuckle that comes from low in the stomach and deep in the soul. What wonders lie beyond those peaks? What kingdoms must be hidden in those clouds? The mountains have so much to teach us, and the skies, I think, even more. All we need to climb them is a little balance and determination, and perhaps a little friction.