http://www.somethingconstructive.net/upa

The directory has them both in screen form (the order makes sense) and publishing form (the order does not)

Due to a request from some compadres in CEDICAM (Nochixtlan, Oaxaca, Mexico) I could be translating them into Spanish soon. Either way, Ill try to put the Srcibus files online soon so other people can have their way with it.

Please let me know if theres any other adjustments you need for your work

- Ankur Delight

All I need is for
everybody I have ever Loved
to be here
with me
Right Now

Running off the far end of the day
Twilit surf hard hitting the striated sands
at 20 degrees

The cascade of scrambling crabs
diving into the wreck
one after another

Even as their sandy canvas
In its patterns of tan, beige, and charcoal
Watches the salt water wick away,
shade out into lightness.

Of course,
You’re already here.

In the hanging gibbous moon
the imprint of each footstep
each knee high over the surf
and the cheap love of Brasilian sandals
in my hands, I hold you.

It’s as clear as night
that I couldn’t have woken up without you.

No, I would never stand for such a thing

And yet,
every moment that remembers me
who I truly am,
pushes me
to share.

[ ankurbhai delight / congo town / monrovia / liberia / west africa ]

one love

- ankur

*

Dear Friends,

I have been living in India with my brother Ben for almost a month, and only now have caught up with myself enough to write to you all.  I am in the small southernmost state of Kerala, proud and tropical, and anyone here will tell you that Kerala means “Land of Coconuts” and that there is no place better.  In fact, it is the land where the Gods themselves reside: “God’s own country” is spread across billboards and brochures far and wide.  In the frequent temple rituals at this time of year, a man will dress in the outrageously gigantic red black and silver tradional costume of a god, and in turns he will dance ecstatically to the manic beat of the temple drummers, roll his eyes about as if possessed, hand out turmeric powder for anointing one’s forehead, play with fire, and walk over hot coals.  It is believed that when someone takes on this costume, they are no longer human and actually become the god.  The ritual is of man turning into a god.  It is serious business, and the Malabaris crowd neck to neck inside the temple grounds to watch, sweating and waiting to receive their individual blessing from the god with solemn intensity.

I am on the Malabar coast, the dazzling region Columbus dreamed of when he ran ashore in the Bahamas in search of Indian spices.  I was here six years ago, when I stepped off the bus in a town I’d never heard of simply because it was so beautiful, I felt I need go no further.  Drinking chai on a streetcorner later that day, I, Jess the younger, befriended Jijo, a local boy my age who I decided to take a chance and trust.  As a 21 year old white girl traveling alone, making friends in India was extremely difficult for me.  The men generally had obnoxious motives and the women rarely talked to me.  So Jijo was unique, and I looked him up last week when I found myself back in Kerala.  He was so thrilled that I remembered him that he adopted every waking moment of our lives for the next five days. This became very frustrating by the end, playing polite at the house of every ever-more-distant relative, posing for photos with strangers who wanted to show their friends they’d seen a foreigner.  And this brought back into focus one of the most pervasive themes of my experience of India.

I have adoped Indian dress and mannerisms here and taken to heart as many of the cultural eccentricities as I am aware of.  I do this because I want to blend in as best I can, to not offend, to learn, and to be able to walk between worlds.  I did this continuously the first time I was here.  But India is a particularly difficult place to travel, despite the widespread use of English, because your foreignness is constantly, poignantly reflected back to you, no matter how well you attempt to blend in.  When you are white, you are treated as a freakish anomaly.  Everyone wants a piece of you while seeming either uninterested or unable to learn who you really are.  I was trying to figure out the reasoning behind the phenomenon of strangers asking to have their photos taken with you.  To Ben I mused, “It’s like you’re walking through a forest and you see a bear, and the bear is friendly and doesn’t want to kill you, so of course you want to take a picture of yourself with the friendly bear so you can go home and show all your friends.”  It is exactly like that.  Exciting, weird, alien.  As a foreign visitor in India, you have two options:

1- You can go to all the famous tourist spots, where you will meet other foreigners, and you will relate primarily with foreigners, most of whom you easily could have met in your hometown, and you will get taken advantage of by the Indians, or they will be your servants.     OR,

2- You can be a complete alien, and will be treated as such.  There is no way you can appear any more of a freak than you already are, Indian dress or no Indian dress.  So you can sing gaily down the street at the top of your lungs and people will stare only just as much as they already were.  Six years ago, sailing on this freak status, I rode a bicycle across Tamil Nadu, a state where it is unthinkable for a lady to ever ride a bike.

So yes, there is a freedom in this anonymous casteless status, but it also means there is nowhere for you to fit in the fabric of society into which the Indian is elaborately woven from birth to death.  And here is the paradox.

At 21 I was more flexible, more enduring, and more full of wonder.  I took it all as it came, with gratitude, because that trip was my initiation and for it I’d offered up my life, praying all the while, half believing I’d never come back.  Every experience, good or bad, was a flake of divine grace communicating with me.  I became aware of backpacker culture for the first time, and as a pilgrim I was offended and humbled by it.  I had believed I was unique.  On a pilgrimage, I was searching for that carnivorous, dangerous edge beyond which one may catch a glimpse of the sacred.  I was devastated to find myself reflected in so many who came to this place for vacation, whiling away the days drinking mango lassis, smoking hashish, and playing chess.  Now I have softened.  These people have probably become my friends.  But then, nurturing a dream of wild magic haunted India that I’d cherished since childhood, I could not bear it.  I set off for places uncharted, and spent six months as Alien– very, very alone.  And India was extremely kind to me, aided and protected me, as it has done for true seekers for longer than all my lifetimes.

Now I am completely different.  I seek real friends, lasting connections, a place of my own, and the peace and time to focus and work.  I am here to hang out with Ben and to design my new clothing line, with the added bonus that I can drink fresh grape juice and eat coconut chutney every day.  Vast mysterious gaudy outrageous playful odorific hot dirty India is a royal distraction, and I realized almost immediately upon arriving here that I did not want to travel.  Yet here we were.  Ben and I weighed our options.  Either we could join the ranks of other tourists and expats who peopled the known hotspots or we could strike off for unreviewed territory and attempt to settle somewhere off the tourist map.  Of course, die hard individualists that we are, we opted for the latter.  Which, we discovered, is harder than we thought.

Indians are familiar with the meme of the itinerant foreign traveler passing through on a grand India tour.  And in the well trodden places, there is an understanding of the long term visitor kicking it for a month on the beach.  But there is no blueprint for the foreign pair who want to rent a house for a month in a town no one’s ever heard of, where the only residents are families that have lived there for 8 generations.  We asked Jijo, our Keralan ambassador, and rather predictably, he invited us to stay at his uncle’s house.  We didn’t want the burden of being guests, and Jijo couldn’t think of another option, so we turned to Google.  Google gave us one option with a phone number, which I called, and in lightning Indian style, a man shows up at our door half an hour later with photos of his available rentals.  He interviews us: who are we, what is our business, what do our parents do, why do we want to stay for a whole month?  He explains that there are many other houses available at much lower cost, but that no one will rent to us because we are white.  There is a great distrust and suspicion regarding foreigners.  They will think we are spies. Oh.  Spies.  Ben and I crack up over this after he leaves.

The only house within our budget is a little one room cottage by the ocean with an open air kitchen and bath.The closest neighbor is a local police officer, so there is some concern that if anything went wrong, it would reflect poorly upon the police.  Today we went to see it.  The neighbor, who introduced himself as “Sargent”, wore a lungi and a t shirt and grinned at us amicably, laughing when I shrieked at the sight of a spider the size of my hand dashing across the kitchen floor.  Again we got the friendly interview, why do we want to stay so long?  what is it that we do?  Ben tells him he was a student at Delhi University, studying international relations.
“What?”
“Politics.”
“Hmm.”
And me? A clothing designer.  “Here, here’s my card.”  In a classic instance of brain lapse, I hand him my business card.  My business card has the image of a woman on all fours wearing a voluminous fur coat and very obviously nothing else, flexing a naked leg as far as public America would allow. He glances at it, still smiling, but pauses to carefully look me over.
“Hmm.”
Ben points out that he hopes he will still rent to us, the pornographer and the spy.  We think this is hilarious.  We ponder that the only way this house thing is working out at all is because we have each other.  Ben alone would surely be a spy.  And me, a lady alone for so long, would be unthinkable here.  But brother and sister, ahh, well that makes sense.  We want to make matching shirts that say, respectively, “Brother” and “Sister in Mallayallam (local language) on the front and “Spy” and “Pornographer” in English on the back.  Ironically, the Indian steriotypes in our case are not so far off.  Ben, a political major from Brown, was interviewed extensively as a candidate for recruitment by the CIA.  And I, well, I have partaken in some naked photos in my day.  But for now, the pornographer and the spy are merely American tourists, a clothing designer and a graduate, seeking the solace and solitude of the sea.

The house is quaint and so close to the ocean I can hear the waves crashing from my bed.  There are a number of young boys, who I have dubbed the Coconut Boys because their first question to me was whether I liked tender coconuts.  They climb the trunks of the palms that canopy my front yard and bring me green coconuts every day.  We have started to become acquainted with the neighborhood.  Late tonight we heard drums outside our door and got up to watch a procession of people with flickering lanterns and long curved swords passing by Sargent’s house.  They bless each house in their sub-caste in turn, throughout the night, even hours later I could hear the drums in the distance.  Ben was out on the porch, watching.  I join him a minute later. “Did you see a god?” I ask, without a trace of irony.  We look at each other and smirk.  When you can say “Do you see a god?” seriously, you must be in India.

I love you all,
Until soon we meet again,

Jess