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

dear fellow passengers

voyage is fractal. every space ship in every compart ment holds a flotilla of no-less-spaceships. and you’ve known all the pilots, or will.

I find myself wrapped up in interstate bus travel, enjoy the wilds and snows of connecticut and new york, the surprising springtime in boston, ahead of schedule and surely asking for a stern rebuke, and comfort and glory of travel itself, that precious time to ourselves, wherein we can discover whether we truly

enjoy

the company

we keep.

nothing like the metro north trains up the harlem line to the western tip of new york state, connecticut, and massachusettes, passing schoolchildren sledding and frozen swamps, whose barren trees poke out of their icy skirt, willfully demonstrating, it seems, that we have no idea how deep and tall they actually are. as a guest here, and a farmer, I wonder what people eat, if agriculture is possible in such climes, why – if indeed those scarred cones were once hale and productive apple trees – there aren’t still farmers coming out every wednesday to sell a new variety of apples they had been storing for

just

this

moment

winter apples and storage apples that don’t even ripen towards february. as it is, all the humans I know insist on shopping indoors, at big corporate organic supermarkets, where the apples come from washington or chile or new zealand. what ever happened to buying bulk in season? storage and preservation? shouldn’t there be a warehouse full of dirty local beets and cabbage and potatoes and carrots from earlier in the season, to buy 20 pound boxes of? isn’t that how we’re going to train people that you can always eat locally and of the land, that it’s not such a boogie fashion trend to breed new slivers of identity? are we talking about food or just another commodity?

the answer, of course, that the god’s always throw to us in times of need, is

MAPLE SYRUP

during my estancia with lizzie and baba (www.lizzieandbaba.com), the best music on either side of the mississippi, as far i’ve been concerned, we went out daily to harvest and drink the sweet coconut-water of the northern climes, cold as the driving snow, right from the tree. raw, unpasteurized, innocent of refineries and rbgh, non-gmo or anything but divine.

and then you can boil it, down down down to the 40:1 recommended ration (that’s 2.5 gallons to the cup) to get the hot sticky syrup that contains (I swear to the gods, all of them)

vainilla, butter, caramel, pine, butterscotch, rum

in every warm mouthful. maple syrup. it must be what these strange northeastern native survive upon for the winter season, because god knows there’s nothing else around but snow and firewood.

anyhow, back to the voyage at hand. fellow sojourner and truth-seeker

(responsible for these photos of our bicycle trip through india: http://mangolandia.org/photos/twopass/

)

TOMAS WERNER

TOMAS WERNER

(www.tomaswerner.com)

has departed his native slovakia and temporary asylum in mexico to run rough-shod over the north of amerika, by bus and photography, through the following states of the union:

NY-DC-VA-NC-SC-GA…..all the way to San Francisco

(which is a state)

He is a consummate artist and (easter) european. You will not be disappointed. Please host him on his travels, or at the least, send the modern de Toqueville a message of support (not more than 160 characters, please).

His phone number is: 347-574-6862

As for my own self, I’m in Boston for the week and entering the fog thereafter. Perhaps a weekend in DC in mid-march, and totally lack of clarity for April. I’ve started working for The Man again, a few hours a week, in the material form of two cool Michigan dudes based in San Cristobal (I can’t imagine a better look for The Man), so I may head back down there for a spell.

As always, tomorrow never knows, but the idea of actually living out a season on a farm calls to me deeply, and it’s unclear how long I can, or should, resist.

one love

many instruments,

ankurbhai

]]> http://www.mangolandia.org/archives/326/feed http://www.mangolandia.org/archives/323 http://www.mangolandia.org/archives/323#comments Sat, 20 Feb 2010 16:36:54 +0000 ankurbhai http://www.mangolandia.org/?p=323 feb 20 / norfolk ct / usa / 2010
dear(est) friends

It’s an eventful life. The book reading in philadelphia went really well, with beautiful conversation around the book. I’m growing more comfortable with the idea of talking about this thing I did as if it has some interest to others. A dangerous comfort, perhaps.

Anyhow, I’m doing another reading here with my friends Lizzie and Baba in CT. It’s tuesday at 5-8 at their home. If you want to come, let me know, and I’ll give you the address.

If you are not in Connecticut for some reason (why? it’s where the action is. if by action we mean snow and lack of fresh fruit), then there is actually some kind of

LIVE (free or die)
TELEVISION
INTERNET
SHOW

that Lizzie and Baba do every Sunday. It’s called This Abundant Life, and I recently found out that I’m going to be on it, with or without a haircut it seems, this Sunday (tomorrow).

check it out here:
http://tiny.cc/W2UB8

(special guest ankur shah)

The fact that’s it’s LIVE (free or die) means that you can’t watch it later, I think. 7pm Eastern, 4pm Western. Fill in the blanks, Australia.

Apologies for the events-oriented nature of this email, more storytelling and some photography from Mexico lindo y querido coming next week. But I’m really delight for some measure of rural stability after the last three weeks in north american megapoli, and here I can wake up to the meditation, music, and woodstove that do me well.

one love
ankurbhai

ps never stray from the funk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHE6hZU72A4

There is book reading in Philadelphia at 7pm at Wooden Shoe Books this Thursday February 18th. They contacted me after the reading at Bluestockings last summer, and I’m excited that we finally organized a day together. If you happen to be in or near Philadelphia, it would be great to see friendly/known faces in the audience, or if you think somebody might enjoy the event, please let them know.

Usually with book readings I try to get everybody’s name and a sense of what people want to hear about, there’s no predetermined sermon or anything. Although, sometimes, true to the name, I will read. And I take requests.

After that, I’ll likely be doing some other readings in Connecticut and maybe down in Baltimore next month, as part of my East Coast estancia. As they say, the hacienda must be built. Mexico was three trips in one and I have old napkins and Gandhian cotton paper full of stories and ruminations that I may or may not put together in the coming times.

It feels like I’ll be on the East Coast until May and I’m excited to visit the Beautiful people, so please send me an email if you’re down. And if you want to organize a reading in your hometown, that’s a great excuse as well. And I have a phone. And if I haven’t called you yet, it’s entirely my fault.

All love

Ankurbhai

We’ve past the ides, the valentines, and the presidents. February remains, and I am in New York, with the snow. I am here to organize a coming-out-of-retirement party (for myself), which may or may not happen. But the stars above the clouds and swirling flakes indicate I’ll be on the east coast for a while, a few months, between New York, Connecticut, and Boston.

As always, open for business. 361 . 265 . 8710

Ankurbhai

Too many to name of course, as are the gifts and gratitudes always, but there is some writing, some painting, some producing and some publishing to be done. I’m hoping to have some our writing and photographs from the pilgrimage up to the ganga organized by the time I’m out of here, to have written a children’s story for a dear young friend, to be producing and offering Max’s pamphlet on the Apple, to plant dozens of trees on this tender piece of land (the lost mountain observatory), to have enough cash in my pocket to walk the earth for a few months more, to be inspired by a showing of Andy Goldsworthy’s _Rivers and Tides_, so I can walk through these woods with new eyes.

Thanksgiving was, as always, a grand success. We had nine people in the house most of the week, and every meal was a holiday splendor, full of delicious food (mostly from Nash’s) and music. Recipes and songs. Songbooks and Cookbooks. Blending together with our energies and smiles.

And what I’m really hoping for, personally, for this season, is to put together some sort of capstone, some sort of project that encapsulates much of what I’ve been seeking and finding across the world in the past few Whiles and Years. An offering to all those who have taught me, guided me, and supported me, an homage to that underground economy of the gift that lifts us all, without which the songbirds and clouds would refuse to inspire us, without which precipitation and evaporation alike would withhold their magic. Details to come as I work further, but as of now, I see it as both a conclusion to how I’ve been exploring, and a foundation for how I want to continue to explore.

There. And here. Yesterday, also, I went to the ocean, took a camera and some words with me. I’m not too accomplished with the movie-lite software this gentle computer offered me, so smile kindly when you watch it. And you might have to turn up the volume. It’s inspired by a song, Hold Me Now, by Matt Coffman.

the movie attempt:

http://www.mangolandia.org/video/iwentotheocean.wmv

overflowing gratitude
and
december sunshine,

ankurbhai

details and marketing:

a) now is a great time to buy lots of cookbooks and travelogues for your holiday friends. ten books are 101 dollars (shipping included). i leave town on december 24th. email, or call 360 683 5398

b) i will be in asheville, nc from dec 24 - 30, and in mexico thereafter. i have no plan fixe from mid-jan onwards, but am aiming to visit el salvador and mexico df.

c) there are some pictures of people and places around here

http://www.mangolandia.org/photos/late-november/

http://www.mangolandia.org/photos/december-one/

the link is here. the link is now.

http://wmucradio.com/stream_ripper/tue/Naansense_800_1000.mp3

i think i was on around half-way through, 9am eastern time. and, though it hasn’t finished loading yet, she asked me to request a song at the end, and i went for anything by Bootsy Collins, so that’s certainly more worthwhile than whatever i had to say…

love

ankurbhai

in an effort to make the cooking com bigode website more intelligible to all living beings, i have decided to add a page housing photographs of the general public cooking with moustaches.

now, let it be said that i am _Well Aware_ that some people don’t have moustaches. the moustaches in the photos do not have to be real. they can be, alternately:

: other peoples hair
: your own hair but not from your face
: dill or fennel greens
: rabbits feet keychains
: anything else

but what i am asking for is for _you_ to have a picture taken of you with a moustache AND one of the following

: cooking
: pretending to cook
: a pressure cooker
: a robot
: a knife
: a copy of the book

and most importantly for staying warm in a temperate climate…. if you don’t have a copy of the book, you are dearly invited to get one.

www.somethingconstructive.net/bigode

and, i know the holidays are approaching, and everybody loves giving cookbooks for the holidays, so do not hesitate to order 10 (ten) copies of the book to give away to everyone you love, at the incredibly discounted suggestion of $101 (the final one is for goodluck; shipping on big orders is still free)

nb: if you have an authentic and outrageous moustache, photo response to this email should be considered MANDATORY. send me an email of a picture of you with a moustache. horn. okay. please.

love
and
carrot/apple/ginger-juice blended with whole spinach and parsley to provide goodness and energy almost all morning long,

ankur

Krishna and Jesus are both pretty into this idea –

“For the soul there is neither birth nor death at any time. He has not come into being, does not come into being, and will not come into being. He is unborn, eternal, ever-existing and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain.”

“He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it to life eternal.”

I’ll let you figure out the who’s whom, but the point is that many tribes and cultures have come up with elaborate rituals around the Leaving of the Body. Some are to gather together, some are to forcibly extract grief (mandatory wailing), and some are in the spirit of pure celebration.

In Mexico, Dia de Los Muertos is celebrated every year, on November 1st and 2nd, to pray for and remember our dead. I’ve been working with a group in Sequim for the past few years, to put on a Dia de Los Muertos fundraising dinner for the last few years. Last year, we served enchiladas.

Now it’s all beginning to come together. You see?

Fellow and erstwhile tripper and professional Reed Aubin recently informed me he is working with a group of students from El Colegio to build Day of the Dead altars for the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts. In the spirit of inspiration, I suggest to everybody in the family that we do the same. Maybe we could work on it over the next few weeks, or maybe we could have a party the day before Halloween, make some enchiladas, build offerings together, remember, laugh, and cry over our dead.

You’ve got to do this thing. This idea of memory and creation: the holding and releasing. It happens one way or another. There’s no other way. The skeletons and enchiladas and dioramas are just a tool to help you get on with it.

I think it’s important for those of us still in the body. Ask you family floating around you. They know.

And if you do, or don’t, you might want to try these awesome enchiladas I made for my mom today:

PUMPKIN ENCHILADAS

woke up to 22 degree frost on the grass i scythed this morning and it’s very clear that fall just ended. probably can still get some more blackberries before the rain returns, but it’s basically time to turn towards that pumpkin.

* filling

double-hands-full of chantrelles we picked last week, brushed lightly to remove dirt, and sliced into quarters, or until each piece achieved the volume of a baby carrot.
1 small leek, chopped into thin rings, up to the beginning of the light green section.

saute the chantrelles on low heat until they sweat out a little water. ours have been pretty dry so not much comes out. and, really, you can use any mushroom. they don’t have to be chantrelles and you didn’t have to pick them. but you’ll enjoy it more, likely, if you did. add the chantrelles to the bowl with the leeks, squirt some olive oil (from your fancy ex-relish bottle full of olive oil you keep next to the stove to be cool), and return the shrooms with the leeks to the pan. saute on low head until the leeks are sweet and tender enough to eat. the mushrooms should be plump and tender. if you’re worried about difference in cooking times between your mushrooms and the leeks, you can do them separately and combine at the end.

(salt)

* rice

i did plain white rice today. it was sweet and delicious.

* sauce

i used half of a pumpkin about 2/3 the size of my head. try to measure that. hah. you can cut it roughly into slices and steam it until the peel comes off easily, then (you guessed it) easily take the peel off and boil it with an inch of water and some of the tougher green tops from your leek. you can also add an old carrot, some celery, half an onion, and a clove or two of garlic. basically, you’re making a sort of pumpkin soup, but a watery, lame pumpkin soup. the reason it doesn’t matter if it’s slightly lame is that you’re going to blend it and it’s going to be awesome.

while you’re heating up the pan for the filling but the mushrooms aren’t clean and chopped yet, deposit enough pumpkin seeds to cover the bottom of the pan and let them toast on medium heat until they tell you (really, they will speak) they are done. trade the seeds out for the shrooms, and add the seeds (”pepitas”) to the blender. blend. add the pumpkin soup after everything in the broth is tender, and a bit of salt. blend again. check the consistency. the goal here is to be able to pour the sauce into a pan, grab a tortillas, and dip the tortilla into the hot sauce so it coats the tortilla as it slips off. if it’s too thin, you’ll just be reducing the sauce on the stove again as your friends chop cilantro and avocados, impatiently, receding into the distance. if it’s too thick, you add water, stock, a little cream, white wine, whatever.

taste, add salt, taste, question the salt, taste.

* goodies
avocado
finely diced onions
cilantro

* assemblage

dip the tortilla in the sauce
Almost burn yourself
Jump in excitement!
Flick the soaked tortilla on a ceramic plate
Have someone spoon the filling,
then the rice,
then the avocado,
And roll it yourself to seam-side-down.

Repeat twice, drizzle more sauce on top,
paint with cilantro and chopped onions
if feeling artistic.

Note that these enchiladas were described as “absolutely delicious blend of delicate with spicy with warm and savory.” by a human thousands of miles away. So they must be good. And they are.

delight,
ankurbhai

p.s. if you do this offering thing, as i will, send me a note or picture about it. i think that will be good.

83 lost meadow
sequim, wa 98382

just when i thought i was getting ready to

(famously)

“settle down”

i painted the following picture for my stewardess

from newark to seattle

and then failed

to give it to

her,

because i liked it.

- ankurbhai