Do Lucknow

My favorite is duckling versus puppy.

Dear friends, merry Christmas and happy new year!

I went to Cambodia over our two week break, which was so beautiful and exciting. These were the new things for me: flying four hours east from Delhi but seeing more reminders of the west, like currency in dollars, miniskirts, SUVs, bars, normal size coffee mugs, and beef on the menu.

It was also interesting (and terrifying!) being robbed at gun point by well-dressed young men, eating dinner of crabs, frogs’ legs and watercress with John’s old moto driver friends, and seeing reminders of thousand-year-old-India in Angkor Wat and in words (gulab is rose, sukun is peace, Buddhist monks say namaskar) and the story of Rama and Sita and the battle of the Mahabharata engraved.

Christmas day was with John’s friend Jane and thirty of her friends at her apartment by the river in Phnom Penh. It was a huge feast with the best baked beans made by someone who had neither made nor eaten baked beans before. I still missed my family, and I tried to go to church, because I missed the Lucknow Christians. The first place we were taken to was the New Life Church, set in some kind of performance hall, and I couldn’t handle it. When I try to articulate why , it uncovers the truth about why I like religion – for culture, ceremony, and history. New Years eve was first with Jack Kneeland, a friend from SAIS, and his aunt, and then at the stroke of midnight in the Bangkok airport. We celebrated several time zones’ new years, and then my flight was delayed 14 hours and I slept in the airport hotel for ten of them and woke up to call California and usher in theirs.

Someone said (I can’t remember who) that traveling is like reading a book, and if you never go anywhere then you’ve only read one page. The thing about reading is that the more you read the more you realize how much you don’t know, up to a point, and then you start to feel like what you don’t know is for someone else to know, not you. But the thing about traveling is that you can suddenly have these insights into your own culture in a way that isn’t possible if you are from outside of it, and maybe isn’t possible if you have never left it, and probably isn’t possible from reading a book. This is mine, for today: Indian social customs are so strong, and, in a positive and negative sense, formulaic, that they can and often do replace love. American society is so weak that the attention placed on personal relationships is magnified. Love matters more. A marriage in India can proceed perfectly, and be perfectly love-less. Not possible in America. The success of Indian marriages isn’t only because divorce has such stigma, it’s also in a positive sense that the wedding carries so much transformative weight in society’s eyes. Positive and negative, but from a feminine perspective more negative because the burden is on the women to make the marriage work. Love in India exists mostly in films, poems, glances and text messages.

It also made me wonder, did Cambodia used to have strong social traditions that got broken? Or is it simply a more laid-back, less busy-body society? The question is why do Cambodian and Thai women go to work sleeping with western men? That just wouldn’t cut it here; those sex tourists would be cut up in little pieces. Dan Engber’s friend’s fiancée got beat up in Lucknow just for going out with a Desi girl. When the Sufi disciple at the Nizamuddin Dargah told Sadaf, when she made up the story about her being married to Chris, that it made them feel angry and want to beat him up. But, being a Sufi unconcerned with worldly things, he just laughed. In contrast, there wasn’t a day that went by in Southeast Asia that I didn’t see elderly white men with young prostitutes at the bar, on the beach, in taxis, walking down the street. In Sihanoukville we saw a westerner strolling by the ocean in full day-light hand-in-hand with a twelve-year old. When I showed my pictures of Cambodia and Thailand to my teachers and talked about the sex work there, their first question was: how do Cambodian men feel about it?

The insight was supposed to be about the weakness of ceremony in the US, and how that has maybe shifted focus to the inner life of partnerships…

The best part of my vacation was remembering what it is like to have a partner in everything. Lucknow is going through a cold snap, but I’m getting back into the swing of things. I’ve seen five bollywood movies in the last eight days. I’m tracking the rise of Abhishek Bacchan. Bakreid is day after tomorrow, and there are three goats outside my window waiting to be sacrificed in memory and Abraham and Isaac.

I hope you are all doing well, and I miss you, every one of you.

rose