Raising Eyebrows

For more than a year now, we have been living close to our farmland, near the small rural town of Athimanjeri. Like in all small places, here everyone knows everyone else. Through close marriages, most people are either related or their families have known each other’s for decades. Caste boundaries in marriages are strictly observed. People know and remember great details about their fellow villagers’ lives.

We are told that typically people don’t move into any village, but people do constantly move out looking for jobs in nearby cities. Thus when we came to live here, there was a lot of curiosity among the local people to know about us. There were questions from all kinds of people, and even after more than year of being here we still get tons of them.Here are some questions and conversations that ensued from them.

***

Before we bought our land, I went into a nearby household hoping to find out something about the land’s history. I was invited inside by an old couple and their daughter-in-law. Before I could begin, the lady of the house gestured to her daughter-in-law something to the effect that I had to be questioned first. And so I was:

“Are you married?”                                                                                   

I nodded.

“Are you bai?”

Wthout knowing what exactly “bai” meant, I said no because I thought I was not “bai”, whatever that was. Only later did I come to know that she actually had meant to ask “are you Muslim?”

“Are you Jesus?”                               

(Who, me? Of course not!  Can’t you see?)

I was struggling hard to not laugh out loud and to understand what she wanted to ask. I quickly realized that she must have wanted to know if I was Christian and said that I was not.  

“Are you Australia?”

(Identity Crisis! What am I? Who am I?)

My answer was no.

She then asked me why I didn’t wear the accessories that married women typically do. I didn’t feel like talking to her in detail about my thoughts on such matters at our very first meeting. So I ended up saying that I don’t like wearing such accessories. She simply gazed at me.

***

A curious tenth-grade girl approached me shyly when we went to meet her father who was a construction worker. She asked me if I was a foreigner. I said, “I am not!”, and just to drive home the point desperately, “I speak Tamil, just like you do.” She refused to agree with me. She said that I looked different from the local people and that I was white skinned. I went close to her, put my arm next to hers and asked her to compare our skin colours. Mine was only a shade lighter than hers. She was not convinced. She raked her brain for the next few moments and announced happily, “But you can speak in English! So you must be a foreigner”.

***

Dev and I were riding to the town on our bicycles. We were wearing wide-brimmed hats for protection against the strong sun and must have presented a strange sight. On the way, we got stopped by two motor bikers.

They: “Where are you going?”

Me: “To the town”

They: “Our local police department wanted to know what you do here”

Me: “We have a piece of land and we are trying to farm it”

They: “But then why do you ride bicycles?”

Me:  “Why not? And why do you ride motor bikes?”

They: “Oh! We are going to the town. We have got some work there”

Me: “Same story here.  You are on your motor bikes and we on our bicycles”

They: “We thought that you travel around the nation preaching”

Me: “No! We don’t have the time for that. We have a family to take care of”

They: “Sorry Madam! It is your attire, your hat and bicycle that got us suspicious”

***

For certain groceries we end up going to the larger town of Sholinghur. The town has a lot of narrow, old-world bazaar streets, brimming with people and temples. Despite the crowds, it is still not unpleasant to get around on foot, not in small measure due to the fact that there are still few cars here. In a narrow by-lane we like to stop at a small coffee kadai with a split personality. The back and side walls of the shop have on display rows of slippers and shoes, and then just to complete your sense of incongruity, there sits a sewing machine in a corner for small tailoring jobs. So while you are sipping on your hot coffee or tea, another customer would be trying on the latest polyurethane VKC-brand sandals.

One afternoon when we were there, we found the small space filled with the owner’s three kids doing their homework, while waiting for their father to fix them cups of hot milk or tea. We got our drinks, and when his kids had walked out, the owner turned to me to ask what my relationship to Dev was, gesturing at Dev as if he was a piece of luggage (Dev’s broken Tamil often makes him invisible). Once he understood that we were married the next question was obvious: “But then why don’t you wear the accessories?” I said that we didn’t believe in that and also that we didn’t want to buy gold.  He must have felt sorry for me because his reply was, “Well, although you are poor at least you both are fair-skinned, so you look rich.” And then he gave us a two rupee discount on the coffees.

***

A land related issue recently took me to a Government Office in the bordering Andhra Pradesh. All the signs here were in Telugu. Not knowing Telugu made me understand how intimidating it would for an illiterate person to enter such premises. I was sent back and forth from one office to another when I asked for some publicly available documents.

As I was walking down a corridor, a man in his fifties asked me where I was from, followed by the usual set of questions. Once he figured out that I was married, he scanned me for the forehead mark and other accessories. Since nothing matched his expectations he got a little wary. He paused, made sure that there was no one in the earshot, and then lowering his voice conspiratorially, finally asked in English, “Love marriage?”

I didn’t have the heart to disturb him any further, so I lied, “No. It was an arranged marriage. Parents were involved in the process.” He left the place with a sigh of relief. 

- Hema

Spell-ing-bound

Aparna asked me how to spell "use". So I did. Surprised by how it was spelt, she said, "Oh! I thought it would it be 'yuos'. Strange!" She moved on with her play and I started thinking about how she would have arrived at that spelling. She must have added ’s’ to ‘you’. I have noticed her swap letters often when she writes and since her way of spelling “you” is actually “yuo”, “use” becomes “yuos”. It never fails to tickle me that she reads a “the” just fine and yet writes it as “teh”.

Three years ago when Aparna started writing, like many children, would draw mirror images of several letters and numbers. I wondered about what caused this and why she could not tell the two versions apart. Since I did not understand how her mental model worked, I thought I shouldn’t correct it either; so I simply let her be.

She once enthusiastically showed a story that she had written to an aunt. The well-meaning aunt immediately started pointed out all the “mistakes” – the reversed letters and the misspellings. Aparna felt embarrassed and rushed to me and said angrily, “Why did you not point out my mistakes?” I remember saying something like, “Well, I could clearly read and understand every word and sentence in your story. And that is what matters.” She must have understood that I was being honest and instantly stopped being bothered about her aunt’s remarks.

Now, when she looks at her stories that were written a year or two ago, Aparna is amused to notice how she had drawn some of her letters (and yet fails to notice that some other letters continue to stay reversed even now). As the instances of her unusual penmanship come down, as parents we feel nostalgic.

⩤⩥

We were at a restaurant with the kids and a friend. Since the wait was long, our friend started playing a little math game with Aparna (6 then). He wrote the following on a piece of paper and asked her to figure out the answer. 

 

This took Aparna unusually long and her answer was an unbelievable ‘48’! How on earth did she arrive at that? Our friend, a sensitive parent, must have decided not to put Aparna on the spot. He quickly moved on to the next problem on his list. Dev was curious to know Aparna’s logic behind the answer. He started out by asking her what the first number in the above problem was. Aparna’s reply was “66, of course!” That explained the answer; because that is the way her reversed ‘66’ would look like. Our friend was apologetic about the way he had written his ‘22’.

A really exciting rocket stove project

Recently my buddy Aditya and I built a Winiarski Rocket stove at our neighbor's farm to get a temporary kitchen setup going. (If you don't know the term, a rocket stove is just a more efficient wood-burning stove). There is nothing original about our design -- you can see this design well documented here, along with other designs. I thought I should share our effort anyway to inspire you to build your own. You will see the exciting part soon enough.

We picked this up at our local kabadi-wala for Rs 20. It is fairly easy to cut out the top and the round hole at the bottom with a sharp, pointy knife.

We had also picked up three smaller cans like this for Rs. 5 each. From two of these we removed the bottom as shown. Notice also the flattened edge where the lid used to fit.

We then used this metal snip (easily available in most hardware stores)...

to cut strips into one end of the same two cans.

Then we cut out a hole (same diameter as the previous can) in the third can.  Clearly not a neat job but good enough for our purposes.

 

 

Here are the three pieces assembled. While we were busy with this, I heard a rustling noise from the left edge of the room. I turned around to see a fleeting glimpse of a fast moving snake that instantly took cover behind a broom standing in the corner.

There was no further sound so we assumed that it had no intention of moving out from its new location. With hair literally standing on end, we gathered enough wits about us to pick up the camera and a proverbial 10-foot pole to knock down the broom. The result of the effort shows a clearly panicked creature here. At that point we had no idea whether this was a venomous type.

Finally, after failing to scale the wall, our reptilian roommate was able to see the door and was gone in a flash. We later found out that this was a non-venomous tree snake called the Common Bronzeback, known for its fast movement.

The previous excitement ended up affecting my documentation efforts somewhat and I forgot to take as many pictures as I would have liked. Here, the L-shaped assembly we built earlier has already been lowered into and fitted inside the the oil can and Aditya is giving it an adobe (clay + sand mix) cladding. We expect that after a few weeks of cooking, the tin internals will start to break down but leave behind a nice hollow of baked clay.

Here, the cavity between the Adobe and the outer container has been filled with wood-ash, which forms an insulating layer to keep the heat from escaping sideways. The stove is ready to use.

- Dev

Ain’t About A Simple Bag.

It all started when Mr. Z walked in with plastic bags containing groceries for the day. He is a close relative who I have known all my life. I was visiting his family. I tend to take liberties with them and so asked why they continued to bring plastic into their house, in spite of all the conversations we have had before. Their spontaneous response was that they needed plastic bags to discard their garbage!

This is the story of most households in countless places – people bring plastic in and throw plastic out. I asked the couple to think about the world that their ancestors left behind for them and questioned if they can justify leaving behind a planet filled with non-biodegradable plastic trash for future generations. They said that they didn’t have the time to ponder over such questions and instructed me not to waste my time either. It was quite clear that they won’t take a deeper look at the issue. I decided to prod further since I was not fighting for a personal cause. What baffled me was that, this was a couple who mostly lived waste-free just 30 years ago. Indeed, I often draw inspiration from how they lived back then.When I told them this, they said: “We didn’t throw plastic away because there was no plastic to be thrown away in those days.” So, it was not a matter of choice, and hence there was no value attached to their earlier waste-free lifestyle.

I spent the next few minutes talking about the poor people that sift through garbage, the great pacific garbage patch, the companies that make money selling millions of these plastic bags, the time (thousands of years) that plastic would take to decompose, the toxins that get into the air when plastic is burnt etc. I was curtly told that there was no need for me to get so emotional over a simple plastic bag. But it isn’t just one bag. Their own household, I know, has been throwing away 7–10 plastic bags/wrappers every day, adding up to 2500–3700 plastic bags/wrappers per year! When I mentioned this number, I am sure the enormity of it caused them to flinch a little. But still there was no commitment from their side.

I had no idea how to get past this invisible wall they had constructed around them. All I knew was my heart was racing, my frustration was mounting and  my anger was taking control of me. I was unable to connect with them effectively.. When I became mindful of my current emotional state, I realized that I could ask them to do some mindfulness practice too. I asked Mr. Z to try running an experiment on himself just for one day. I said, “Please carry a few cloth bags with you and use only those. Please indicate your preference to the shop-keepers and if possible let them know the reason. Since you know that your choice is helping the earth, you are likely to feel a certain way about your choice and your action. Please observe the feelings and emotions that get evoked within you”.

Maybe this couple will start seeing garbage with a new pair of lens. If not, I will have to devise another way to reach out. I can’t give up, can I?

-- Hema