If the World is Flat, Why am I on Edge?

Ex-Letterman writer and me

When a male boss spreads himself under the sheets with female colleagues (and these women are excelling for reasons everyone–including the office janitor–can explain), should the underlings in the group (1) tut-tut in annoyance, gnash their teeth and try to do their job anyway, (2) feign innocence, become political monks and reside above gossip, (3) get circumstantial evidence and snitch on them to the biggest boss or (4) just plain move on?

 

Ex-Letterman Writer Nell Scovell, according to her essay published yesterday in Vanity Fair, shrugged and took route 4. She decided she couldn’t do anything to upset the banana cart steered by the Big, gap-toothed Banana, probably figuring that one day she may have to come back to the Big Banana to give her a leg up (oh, grow up, people).  Instead, she focused on what she loved, which was her genre of writing and moved on to yet another writing job where, she says, “the atmosphere was respectful”. 

“I stayed for several seasons. Since then, I’ve racked up a long list of credits as a TV writer, series creator, producer, and director. In short, I moved on.”

Scovell’s essay, written with zero defensiveness, got me on her side very quickly.  At first. By the time I reached the end of her story, however, I felt something was wrong with the picture.  Why?  Scovell, I felt, had taken the easy way out.  I commend her on her pragmatism, her focus on what would get her mileage in the short and the long term and her sense of priority (as it related to her career, her family and her peace of mind). But I was disappointed that a woman wielding such an obviously fluid pen didn’t care to use it to dice, mince and squish out the Big Banana–along with his Nilla wafers–when she had the chance.

 

Publishing her essay now–many years later and for a very tidy sum, no doubt–long after the fruit is mottled and limp doesn’t get her any brownie points from me. For one, her non-confrontational stance didn’t further the fight against sexual harassment of women and the intimidation of women in a male-dominated workplace. Secondly, what did she do to garner the respect of her gum-chewing, fart-joke writing male colleagues? When things didn’t work out, she simply shrugged and left. That’s all. She didn’t show the men in her writing group–men who must have sisters and mothers and grandmothers–that almost every member of the fairer sex ultimately wants fairness even if one among them may prefer to strut sexy. 

 

By sneaking out of the Letterman den without a squeak even when Letterman asked her why she was leaving (Oprah might say “Gurl, what were you thinkin’?”), Scovell dragged women back several decades to a time before the sixties when Gloria Steinem and Betty Freidan began fighting for fair treatment of women, at home and in the workplace.   

 

I’ll sign off with Steinem's 1971 Address to the Women of America which addressed the issues of sexism and misogyny and racism and class.  

“This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race, because they are easy, visibledifferences, have been the primary ways of organizing human beings  into superior and inferior groups, and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen, or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.” 

Timber!

In Saratoga, the town where I live, you need a permit to breathe. When I realized it was time to chop down a blue spruce tree in our front yard which had been dead awhile, I was warned about needing to get a tree permit.

“Wait a minute,” I said, to the fourth man who dropped by with an estimate for dead tree removal. “Who needs a permit to fell a dead tree?”

“You NEED a permit,” he shrugged.  “You can call the city but this trunk spans over 10 inches in diameter and in Saratoga you need a permit if any tree that’s over four feet tall measures 10 inches or more in diameter.”

 

That was not all. There was, I found out, a price to pay to fell a dead tree. To chop a tree on our property for which we already pay property tax–a hefty sum that might pay for many vacations on the French Riviera–I would need to cut a check for $75.

So I called the arborist of the city of Saratoga, a pleasant lady, and asked her if I could, as a special case, be excused from paying up for a tree that was six feet under even though it was almost forty feet over.  Her voice turned sharper than the edge of a tree-saw.  “Ma’am, if the city decided to not charge for dead trees, you’d be surprised how many dead trees there’d be in Saratoga day after day,” she flung back. Her answer summarized the potential for human deviance against the face of  the law.

Speechless and defenseless, I scribbled out a check addressed to the city. A day or so later, the pleasant but steely arborist drove by the house and hovered around the driveway for what amounted to some 13 seconds, her engine humming while she checked something on a paper about a fir tree that stood like a brown lighthouse beckoning eager tree removal specialists from as far as Washington DC.

 

The next day the permit was in the mail. Why couldn’t she have saved a few trees by just dropping off the permit in my mailbox while she hung by our driveway? Aren’t arborists grafted with the tree hugging spirit at some point?  I marked it off as yet another irony in the drama of life in the United States.

Why do we need a social life?

Some life questions like “Why do we need toilet tissue?” or “Why must you brush your teeth every morning?” don’t come up at all in daily conversation because the answers are self-evident. The subject of why anyone needs a social life came up somewhat unexpectedly in the context of my children and even though the process of addressing such rhetoric makes me sound juvenile, I ended up pondering over why I, my daughter, my son, my husband, my aging father or anybody, for that matter, needed a social life.

 

I thought about my dad in India and his contemporaries, many of whom, he says are tipping over, dead, like wickets in a game of cricket. But dad still has friends, a bunch of younger cronies with whom he walks daily at sunrise. Jeeva park in the T. Nagar suburb of India’s Chennai is really not the kind of place anyone would want to walk in. A cracked concrete walkway contours the park, bridged in places by gnarly weeds.  The rest of the park is lackluster. The few gray benches that aren’t painted pastel by crow droppings are warmed by intense lovers who meet at the worst park in town because it’s one of the few successful venues at which to conduct a clandestine affair in Chennai without being found out right away. The city’s municipal corporation sends out its men to spruce up the place twice a year but year after year the cleaning committee finds that there are too many hangers-on to get any work done, and, anyway, the traffic is so heavy in this place nothing’s going to grow. So the plan to plant canna, jasmine and hibiscus flanking the walkway is put off again until next June when the monsoons conveniently postpone all plans.

 

In such a park, my old father has found friendships–lasting over 20 years–to sustain and nourish him in the twilight hours of his life. Since the morning that my mother passed away (just about five minutes before he was to depart for his morning walk), dad’s walking friends have fussed over him.  If dad doesn’t turn up for his morning walk two days in a row, one of the walking friends will call. Some may drop by just to make sure all is well. A few months ago, the walking gang organized a three-day trip to a resort three hundred miles away. When dad made much ado about going because he was ‘too old’ to travel by a tour bus and thus would be a burden to the younger gang of 60-somethings and 70-somethings, he was dragged, kicking and screaming, into the bus. It must have been a trip of a lifetime. Dad laughed a lot that weekend because he forgot to say, “I wish your mom had been there.” Every January 1st, Dad, being the Octagenarian of Jeeva Park, gets to give away a token gift, as a blessing, to all the walkers and hangers-on. When dad talks about his walking gang of loudmouths (with strong opinions on American power politics and Indian bureaucracy), he’ll shake his head and smile at their aggressive tactics. “But I feel needed, somehow, and I enjoy their company,” he says.

 

I reflect on my own friendships over the years. One goes back four decades to a time when we lusted after each other’s lunches in kindergarten. We talk everyday. We badmouth our husbands (rarely). She tells me to deal more gently with my teenage daughter whom she loves like she were her own daughter, adding that just because the visiting daughter hasn’t made the bed for the last ninety-one days of summer doesn’t really make her irresponsible or insensitive. When my friend’s arthritis–an early onset because she and I are still on the tender, soft side of forty–squeezes the last bit of energy out of her, I try to remember to call and find out how she’s doing. On our bad days, a brown bag of food waits outside either of our front doors.  Then I have other friends, from high school in Tanzania, who never forgive me for not calling enough but visit me often even if I haven’t visited them back. One of them keeps saying she has written me off because I’ve never once visited her at her home in Toronto but she’s so mad about me she wants me go with her somewhere exotic and cheap on her silver wedding anniversary. She’s crazy because she doesn’t understand that exotic and cheap are oxymorons but she is a bit of a frogface and that’s how frogfaces think.

 

Then I have my friends of the last two decades, those with whom I shared stories of dirty diapers, engorged breasts, violin lessons and college admissions.  Last week, after dinner, I visited one of those friends, with a dozen others, and a small group of us stayed back to talk about our mothers and what they have meant in our lives and how our children will never quite comprehend, until they experience it for themselves, the tragedy of the slow vanishing act of their parents.

 

I came home that night feeling that, in some small way, I had made a difference in the life of a friend who is watching her mother bend and buckle to cancer. I came home feeling that, on the worst day, the best (and even the not so best) of your friends will make you reckon with your fears, will tell you it’s perfectly fine if you’re average because they stink anyway, will beat you at a game of Pictionary and then tell you that you’d have won if only your donkey had looked a little less like a turtle on Galapagos Islands.

 

I came home that night to a daughter who, for the millionth time that day, was chatting on Google Talk with the same friend.  Her face clouded over as soon as it saw Me, The Enemy with Botox-Raised Eyebrows, hovering outside the room. She slammed the door shut.  I lingered by the door for a few seconds and then shuffled away, letting a friendship grow.

 

Gay Times in India

Today, as I read about the Indian court decriminalizing consensual gay sex, I was reminded of a conversation between my aunt and me in 1986.  My aunt, then about 55, was visiting me in the Bay Area.

 “What’s all this homosexuality-kemosexuality business? I think there’s a big problem in this country,” she said, referring to the United States, the icon of all western debauchery. “There’s absolutely no homosexuality in India!” she stated matter-of-factly.  She was watching television at the time and she wouldn’t take her eyes off the screen where they were discussing the events surrounding a gay parade in San Francisco.  Aunt was well read, very well spoken and worldly-wise.  She watched the news, was into fiction in a big way, read the daily newspaper and was fluent in English, Hindi, Malayalam and Oriya.

 At the time I told my aunt that she was entirely wrong and that, of course, there were homosexuals the world over, and that just because we didn’t know any personally, it didn’t mean they didn’t exist in India. My aunt, like all aunts who defy their nieces, wanted proof and statistics which, of course, I couldn’t give her right then and there since there was no Google to prod and rev me into action. So I safely diverted the subject of discussion to food and we began debating whether we should use basmati or long-grain rice for vegetable pilaf for the evening’s dinner. But that evening’s conversation stuck with me as my own opinions on the gay rights issue evolved and molted over the years.

 Ritu Primlani, the founder and executive director of Thimmakka's Resources for Environmental Education in Oakland, California, who happens to be a lesbian, sees where my aunt comes from. “TALKING about homosexuality is a Western phenomenon,” she clarifies, adding, however, that PRACTISING homosexuality is very much an Indian preoccupation. “It goes down to the times of the Kamasutra.” 

Today I regret not having had better comebacks to my aunt in the eighties. Wasn’t my aunt aware of the Hindu deity Ardhanari, an androgynous deity composed of Shiva and his consort Shakti, representing the synthesis of masculine and feminine energies? Hinduism, I could have told her, was full of many religious narratives with stories of sex or romantic affection between figures of the same gender. Wasn’t Ayyappa the son of Shiva (a male God) and Vishnu (another male God but in the incarnation of an enchantress)?

Primlani and others like her are excited that the Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code was repealed in the Delhi High Court. “The progress or civilization of a society is not measured by GDP or how 'hip' you look.  It is more to do with wisdom and allowing for diversity.  My uncles and aunties in India have more than surpassed the kindness and love with which they have supported me.  I wish for everyone in India to realize that the freedom to choose is true freedom - as long as it doesn't hurt anyone.”  

There is enough evidence in the animal kingdom to support the theory that homosexuality is natural.  The pairing of same sex couples had previously been observed in more than 1,000 species including penguins, dolphins and primates. In June 2009, two scientists wrote a review of existing research and published it in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution. They found that the phenomenon is not only widespread but part of a necessary biological adaptation for the survival of the species. On the Hawaiian island of Oahu, a third of the Laysan albatross population is raised by pairs of two females because of the shortage of males. Through these 'lesbian' unions, Laysan albatross are flourishing. 

Homosexuality in India has long been synonymous with a sense of shame and repression. The Indian Penal Code, of which Section 377 forms a part, was drafted in 1860 by Lord Macaulay as a part of the colonial project of regulating and controlling the subjects of British and Indian origin. After 159 years, the overturn of the ruling has been long overdue even though it may not make a dent on the minds of religious fundamentalists.  

“India as a country needs to know the difference between rapists and homosexuals. As to it changing anything, social reform is often disjointed from legal reform,” says Primlani.  "And gay people are certainly full members of society, and deserve the same respect that other people do.” 

Two decades later, I wonder how my aunt would react today to several of my very smart and accomplished friends and professional acquaintances of Indian origin being openly gay or lesbian. 

This evening when I call my aunt, who is well into her seventies,   I will tell her to read Minal Hajratwala’s exquisite book titled “Leaving India”.  I won’t tell my aunt that, towards the end of the book, Hajratwala discusses her inner battles with her sexuality, her “coming out” and how her parents finally came to terms with it like one would a corn on one’s foot. (It’s there. You can’t really fix it. You’ll learn to live with it and, most of all, you will tread gently.) Then, I will point my aunt to the Reuters India article. 

If the Reuters photos and video of two men kissing don’t convince her that approximately 20% of Indians are homosexual, what will, I wonder?

Diamond in the rough

Dave, the goldsmith at Jewels in Style in Sunnyvale, looks serious when I watch him through the glass doors of the store. He buzzes me in and peers at me with all four eyes of the magnifying lenses over his forehead, his real eyes beady and stoned from staring at glitter all day.

 “Please sit, Mahesh will be here shortly,” he says in a brusque manner, and goes back to the lady at the counter, his mind on the job of carving a perfect ring for his customer whose daughter wants to have a stunning ring designed and ordered by her mother.

 At the interview about Indian-Americans directed exclusively at Mahesh Nihalani on the premises of Jewels in Style, Dave, his business partner,  get ticklish and ends up fielding random  questions (pretending all the while to work, of course) intended for his friend.

 Dave turns out to be a hybrid of creatures in the Panchatantra. One minute he’s a wily fox stealing lines from an interviewee’s mouth. A half hour later, he’s roaring like a lion over nomenclature.

 “Go out there,” he says. “When they talk about Asians they don’t include Indians. Why can’t they call you guys Indian-Americans? That’s only fair, don’t you think?”  Nihalani gently reminds him that, yes, we’re now called Indian-Americans, no problem.

 A while later Dave is monkeying around again with another semi-precious line or two.  Nihalani tells him, tongue-in-cheek, to not mess up or the ring he’s working on will end up several sizes too big.

 Are Indians model immigrants? Dave, once again, wants to get a word in edgewise. “Uh…,” he begins what’s potentially a layered, weighty sentence loaded with punctuation, bullet points and bullets. But Nihalani gives him the look and turns around to answer me with a firm “Yes”.

 Soon we’re talking about the cultural impact of Indian-Americans and the Hindu temples that have come up in the area. Dave is bristly about calling a temple a temple when it really isn’t one. For instance, the Balaji temple on Cypress Ave in Sunnyvale isn’t a temple.

 “It’s just a house, you know,” he shrugs.

 But Nihalani argues for the temple priest. “Oh, no, it’s a temple. It has all the deities. Vishnu, Shiva, Parvati…”

 “No. It’s just a house.” Dave maintains.

 “There’s a feeling of peace in there.” Nihalani says.

 “It has a LOT of shoes outside. But it’s just a house. A house. A house.” Dave has stopped working and may pounce on us unless Nihalani and I agree that temples born inside a family room are, merely, single family residences.

 “He can say what he wants. But, really, he goes to the temple, I mean, the house,  for the food.” Nihalani mentions the magic word and that sticks on Dave who smiles just at the thought of it.

 “This guy’s an Indian at heart,” says Nihalani. “He loves Indian food.” 

 Dave’s nod is grandiose and I can hear a “You betcha!”

  “Arrey tho, Dave eats karela, bhindi, lotus  root, you name it. I bring food from home everyday. And he wants everything. All the Indian vegetables. And the dhal. And the pickle. Everything!”

 To be entertained while picking out a rock for your friend or lover, stop at Jewels in Style at 505, South Pastoria Ave, in Sunnyvale. Dave (who explicitly asked to be written about when I wished to speak to his dynamic business partner) takes your money and is a treasure trove of fun.

 “I want to be written about. Now which paper’s this thing going to come out in?”

I’m told Dave also makes excellent masala chai so ask for a cup while selecting the stone. Diamonds are forever. But a chai is for now.

A Smell called Mother

Smell can be a powerful sense. All mothers smell good, without exception.

The loss of my mother isn’t in the voice I do not hear anymore when I call home. It isn’t so much in the small gossips and the petty he-dids and she-dids that only a mother will whisper into your ears that a father somehow always forgets. The loss of a mother–which has loomed larger with every year after her passing–has been, strangely enough, in the absence of her smell.

 This absence spells the complete eradication and annihilation, from my personal cupboard of perfumes, the faint but powerful scent of Cuticura powder commingled with a faint whiff of coconut oil, Chanel 5, Vanilla potpourri, fresh jasmine, holy ash and sandalwood. You can handpick all these, boil them all together, stir the pot and pour the concoction into a flacon. You can press the mix under my nose and tell me to breathe deep. But she had just the right proportion of scents. How could you ever bring back my mother in a bottle?

 “I don’t have a problem anymore if you want to give away all her saris and blouses,” says my father, who has hobbled along since my mother’s passing in July 2005.  My sister and I have rarely discussed the opening and the giving away of the contents of our mother’s sari almirah. We believed the subject was taboo if dad did not choose to bring it up. But now that he has, how should we do this? Let me rephrase. Can we get around to doing this?

 On every trip to India, we open the almirah, linger by the shelves, admire the precision of the folds of the saris, each one aired elaborately after wearing and ironed just before it reentered the alcove reserved for graceful aging.

 “Don’t ever fill up your life with more you can handle,” my mother would tell me as I entered my thirties and struggled with raising two children. “And what you do, you must do to perfection, with attention to every minute detail.” She worried that I spread myself too thin and packed my day with so many frills that somewhere I would inevitably begin cutting corners.

 Inside the wooden almirah, the petticoats press with knife-edged precision against one another, in a range of colors from white and black (most often used) to varying shades of peach and pink (least used, but critical to good grooming). Her sari blouses are to the left on this same shelf, stacked by gradations of color, the crease lines and folds matching exactly as the day they were ironed. This, we know, is a monument to the order and discipline of our mother’s daily life: there aren’t so many that the cupboard is overflowing and cluttered; and every shelf has at least eight inches of breathing room so you can move things around in a snap if you want to rearrange anything at anytime. 

 “The problem with our mother,” my sister observes, “is that she never gave away her old saris as she got new ones.” Our mother, we used to whine in her presence, never had the heart to give things away. Today, however, we realize that in her hands, everything stayed as good as new and as good as the day she acquired them.

 We admire the perfection of how she maintained and hovered over her things. We marvel at the calm and comfort of a very small life, cherished and well lived, which reaches us today, in small whiffs, from objects that stayed close to her skin. Long after I’ve begun my journey with bifocals, long after my ears have stopped hearing the hummingbird chip at my office window, long after I’ve cracked under the brittleness of a waning bone density, I will continue longing for that certain smell called my mother.  

The Brown Frown: So Where’s your kid going to College?

"I wanted to ask you for your thoughts,” says an Indian-American friend whose family is devastated by the state college admissions results last Friday. “My child didn’t make UC Berkeley or UCLA.  But he has top grades.”

 “I know your child is very bright," I told her. "Don’t do what we did. Put your ego aside and appeal to the colleges. You must!” I knew exactly how she felt, having been there only a year ago last spring.

 Spring is a thorny time of the year on many counts and I don’t understand why the roses pout. Tulips burst into this mellow season of stressed parents and distressed college applicants, marking the end of the March once again.

I recalled my own season of disappointment. I was the Indian-American parent whose social destiny would ride on where, at last, her daughter would go to college.

 Outside, in our yard, daffodils and hyacinth swayed in yellow and blue, cheering for the newborn bud. But inside our home, we went about a barren routine. Our harsh winter–one that began with an early rejection from Columbia–had just about begun. Our noses were bulbous and red, from collective crying over colleges indeed very much deserved in the eyes of this honorable family committee, yet, seemingly undeserved, in the opinion of the dishonorable, biased and clueless college admissions committee.

 Friends chose to ring the doorbell with telling leaves from their notebook of college experiences. The phone rang more often last March. Friends who rarely called decided to call ‘just to chat’ and the conversation gently plowed into the landscape of college admissions.

 How many times, I wondered then, had I been unknowingly insensitive in the previous years when other parents were grappling with their child’s emotions and their own dreams for their children? Had I ever come off as nosey? Had I overstepped my bounds? Had I seemed condescending? Had I, may be, doled out unwanted words of wisdom?

 When it was my turn, I got my earful of solicited and unsolicited advice from friends and acquaintances. I listened, nodded, smiled, laughed and commiserated, remembering to prune, shear, weed out, and trash. Some advice resembled manure. Some I’d sow for another admissions harvest four years down the road.

 “How many ‘B’s’ did your daughter have?” Parent, whose kids didn’t have a single ‘B’.

 “Didn’t you think of talking first to the department you were applying into? You HAVE to establish a relationship, you know.” Parent who believes that pimping and networking is the only way to guarantee any admission.

 “What? Your daughter didn’t make UCLA? What was her GPA? You know it’s harder to get into than Stanford.” Parent whose child is in UCLA, the best college in the country.

 “Okay, so you’ve done a lot for your own self-improvement. How much did you give to others?” Great advice from our school guidance counselor who felt my child simply didn’t have enough community service hours.

  “You mean you didn’t work with a college counselor?” Parent who donated $3000 to a counseling service only to be told that college admissions have become a game, you know.

 “You mean she didn’t have a sport on her application? The best kids have a sport.” Parent, whose kid, apparently, was courted by every coach in every college he or she applied to but hasn’t been seen holding a ball or a bat since.

  “I’m sorry. Your daughter does not have a shot at any in her first list of colleges.” College counselor who, after taking a look at my daughter’s application, tells me her honest opinion.

“Colleges X, Y and Z are a reach for your daughter. Here, try these others instead.” College counseling service–referred to by dad’s company–which plugs in a bunch of numbers and spits out a boatload of safety colleges, match colleges and reach colleges.

Our daughter, like all kids, did finally make a college that has turned out to be a great fit for her. Her experiences in her first quarter of being on her own are documented here. Reading them today and watching her during the week she spends with us at spring break, I realize I’ve a lot of things to be proud of: her tenacity, her high work ethic and her deep maturity about people and relationships. 

In my mind, however, the questions haven't begun to end.  Did I make life miserable for her by ferrying her around to music, dance and violin lessons from the tender age of four? Could I have made her life many times easier in high school so she could have focused harder on her coursework? Should I have forced her to work towards an advanced violin accreditation when she was inundated with homework and tests in four tough AP courses and juggling the other requirements of high school’s junior year? I wince every time she dredges up the details of her intense extra-curricular life.  “Did it really matter–that I killed myself over classical dance and violin for 14 years? Where was the payoff? College admissions committees don’t look beyond one’s grades and test scores anyway.”

 And thus, even a year later, many questions about my parenting skills and self-styled decisions linger, like pollen in the air, unseen by all but wreaking havoc on the inside.

Spring is a riot, both inside and outside. 

July in Chennai

July in Chennai, India, is wet and dry. 

First the monsoons pound the ground until you can’t tell feces apart from sandalwood paste on the roads of old Triplicane by Marina Beach. Then, about the middle of the month, the rays of the sun spew forth like magma from a latent volcano. Puddles vanish. Potholes crack into view. Over by Chennai Central Railway Station, the murky waters of the Cooum flinch. The river smells less and less like moss and more and more like the filth it breeds.

 Freshly married non-Brahmin couples wilt in this month. From July 15^th begins the Tamil month of Adi.  Sex is taboo. Young wives slip away into their mother’s homes for a month. A new bride knows that when she reenters her conjugal bed in mid-August, she’ll begin the night with a strand potent jasmine flowers in her hair and six yards of a silk sari draped tight enough to fool her mother-in-law and loose enough to lull her husband.

 In such a restless month, Nalli nullifies the scorching July sun. Inside this 200-year-old sari institution, the frosty blasts of a hidden air-conditioner carry the smell of fresh-dyed silk and starched handloom.

Scissors rip through disrobed rolls of 2 by 2 cotton.

Clerks scan 1000 Rupee notes for counterfeits.

Cash registers jingle open.

Rubber stamps sink their teeth into bills.

Paid.

Delivered.

No returns.

Only exchanges.

Sticky brown tapes seal brown bags hiding customer purchases from unsuspecting husbands.

 Sari clerks line the wall, unpleating sari after sari from their tight folds until a customer picks one. From time to time, their hands, inadvertently, brush a woman’s luscious breasts as they drape the sari palloo around her torso and over her shoulder: “Let me show you how this design becomes you, madam, please step forward.”

 Precocious women like me don’t step forward and hand over our breasts, in a cup, to lascivious salesmen.

 Mine are power tactics learned from years of guarding nipples from being crushed by the hand of fate. If you’ve had your breasts pinched in Tanzania while running to catch a bus, you learn to create makeshift nipple-guards the way cricketers in India wear genital guards, the way American football heroes pad their basement area with insulation pads carved from granite.

 At Nalli’s I always say “No, thanks, give me the sari, young man, and I’ll take it to the mirror to see how it drapes me.”

Communing with nature ain't in my nature

Our family wanted to savor the last bit of summer sun and fun before the schools reopened.  We signed up early when a friend wondered if we wanted to be part of an eighteen family camping bash under the redwoods at Big Sur’s Pfeiffer State Park.  Finally, our family was going to commune with nature. 

We set about pitching our tents in the sunniest spot on an open meadow.  As we unfurled the green and white nylon tent from its dapper carrying case, my husband said something he has said everyday since I married him.

           “Now read the instruction manual.  Tell me the first step.”

           “It says take the tent out of the bag,” I began.  But for the sound of gnashing teeth and gurgling brooks, all was quiet in Big Sur. “Cross the rods as shown in this diagram.”

            “Which rods?” My husband grabbed the manual away from me.  “Now I’ll read it and you do it.”

            “Here to do the dirty work, as usual,” I grunted grumpily.  “Okay, so which rods?” I barked, looking around the way a woman does when she is lost, the way a man never does when he is lost. “Let’s ask one of our buddies to help us.”

            “Are you crazy? This is simple. Insert the rods into the pins at the four corners!”

            “Which four corners?” I couldn’t see any corners but I could count at least a hundred pins.

            “Don’t tell me you can’t see the four corners?” His voice had an edge to it, the kind of edge that knows it’s cornered, once and for all.  We were going to be hammered and nailed for being the slowest to pitch a tent. It didn’t help that we hadn’t even brought a hammer. Asking to borrow one would be like being caught at Customs at Singapore’s Changi with a suitcase bursting with slabs of Wrigley’s spearmint. When you’re outdoors you want to show that you’re an outdoors kind of person, that you’ve done this just about all your life.

“Reading the manual, you guys? Don’t even bother!” jeered a friend's voice from the far end of our campsite.

           “Where’s your tarpaulin?” asked another  friend’s ten-year old son who wandered in, watching in awe as we tried to drill in the stakes into the unrelenting ground with our sneakers.  This kid was probably born at a campsite.

          “Tarpaulin? What tarpaulin?  Whose tarpaulin?”

          “The thing you need to lay out before you bring out your tent. You know. So the base of your tent won’t tear.” No, we didn’t know. All the list had said was to bring a tent.

           Pretty soon I found out that not everyone in our group was a happy camper, after all. Not everyone liked to sleep in a tent under the stars where every howl of the wind pummeled and lifted you up high above the trees, where every rustle of the trees was like the pounding rhythm of rain, where every tiny sound wave impinging upon our nylon barrier reached the ear-drum, magnified a thousand times. 

          “For ten thousand years my ancestors have worked hard to bring me to where I am today.  Why would I want to go back to where they started?” said a late arrival into our campsite.  This was a friend who liked camping only by day. By night, however, he retired to his plush suite at Carmel Highlands Inn where a Jacuzzi soothed him from the rough ride of a bad hair day on a warm meadow.  He dreamt on a tight spring King-size Sealy Posturepedic while we thrashed about on a four square foot bed of rocks and gravel, with just a borrowed, ripped tarpaulin for protection from the forces of nature. The only thing he heard after his head touched the pillow was the blare of the alarm clock at 8 am.  The rest of us, all seasoned adventurers, retired on Medusa’s head with gregarious critters for company.  We listened to the tireless teeter of blue jays fighting over crackers, the cranky chirp of crickets acting crummy over campers’ crumbs, the slow snarl of a mountain lion stalking a lowly creature on a forgotten trail. Yes indeed, our alarms went off through the night.

          Dawn ambled in at long last.  Our fears melted away as fast as the nocturnal raccoons fled with their share of strawberry fruit rolls. We didn’t dare balk at the idea of a three-hour hike that someone suggested to work off a hearty breakfast of pancakes and scrambled eggs. The most we walked in civilized San Jose was when we took out the weekly trash from our side-yard all the way to the curb.  Returning hikers were encouraging.  “Watch out for rattlesnakes.  I saw one as I started out on my trail!” a young man warned us as our huge, noisy group began our hike up to Pfeiffer Falls. 

The smell of pine rose from the forest floor as our feet crunched dried brown leaves in our path.  Rattlesnakes, mountain lions, blue jays and acorn-woodpeckers throng this wooded park where it is twilight even in full sunlight.  Tall California pines weave a lacy network of leaves and filter in just enough of the sun’s rays to keep the place damp, cool and mossy all the year round. At a tiny museum en route, a mountain lion lies in wait at its perch, its eerie stillness the only giveaway of a stuffed personality.  Rattlesnake skins, raccoon fur, the remains of a dinosaur’s jaw and other artifacts are on display in this little tribute to the park’s wonders. 

 The hypnotic scent of the California Bay laurel, a close inedible cousin of the Turkish Bay Leaf, egged us on deeper into the trail where poison ivy twirls innocently around verdant ferns.  Lavender daisies with bright yellow middles peeped out prettily from rocks. We could have climbed on forever. Camping in the wild had rekindled my spirit of adventure, a spirit that had lain dormant under  suffocating folds of motherhood and drudgery.  No arduous trek seemed beyond me. Nothing seemed impossible that afternoon - until the icy waves of the Northern Pacific Ocean licked my feet.

   As we sat at Pfeiffer beach, huddled in jackets and shawls, some in our fearless herd began to contemplate climbing a gigantic rock promontory rising from the ocean bed.  Treacherous, frothy waves crashed and bored in through gaping holes in the rocks below.  Above, brave hearts climbed the steep, jagged rock surface for a spectacular view of the coastline. “Climbing that rock is not for the faint-hearted!” said an intrepid female companion. “The last time we were helped up by five men.”  

 As the wind steadily picked up grains of sand and hurled them angrily into our faces, I longed for the comfort of my van where nothing, not the water, not the sand, not even the wind could get at me. Throw caution to the winds?  Heavens, no, I yearned to go home and let my body sink into a soft, reassuring bed buttressed by ten pneumatic layers of goose down mattress pads.   

 

The Brown Frown: Don't get caught in the nude in the Appenzell

When I happened upon what a big huff and a puff the New York Times made this morning about nude hiking in the Swiss Alps I felt denuded, sheared, of my veneer of innocence much like sheep in Auckland. If Arab-Americans fainted at the sight of two pale rumps against the glare of Alpine snow, Indian-Americans around the world are presently banding together, even as I write, over how stories like this encourage exclusionist tendencies.  

So I, on behalf of the Indian-American community, shall declare, proudly, that this tanned group isn’t all that much of an outdoorsy type.  So will the Times stop its cliquish swagger and begin catering to the sensibilities of its always-overdressed, well-educated  (even if a bit stuck-up) readers from this minority?

And now I touch upon a few reasons why hiking in the nude generally won’t work for most groups and how, most definitely, it will not work for Indian-Americans. Several websites such as this one dedicated to hiking in the nude refer to extra precautions from poison ivy and bugbites. 

But my points are not merely skin-deep.

Do you want to see clearly What Men Want versus What Women Want? 

When you and your partner are worn down to the bone on your hike in nothing but a backpack and your hiking boots, and trekking up an icy bluff and Uma Thurman and Daniel Craig are coming at you from the other side in nothing but a Hermes Scarf and a Nike cap, respectively, will or won’t your bodies betray you, ladies, and (especially) gentlemen? 

Remember, people, that the only cover you can run for is, unfortunately, on your back. Rest assured, somebody in your group is bound to be a Dead Man Walking.

Consider this - comparisons don’t happen when you don’t have a stitch on:

“When two Indians meet as strangers, the encounter is often a duel to ascertain the ‘auqat’ of the other.” Like the author of  Being Indian, Pavan Verma, says, ‘auqat’ doesn’t have an exact equivalent in English but at its simplest, ‘auqat’ means status. When my fellow Indian-Americans don’t have a way of brandishing their material possessions–an iPhone, perhaps a Rolex, a visiting card may be–what will they use to help size up their ‘auqat’? I leave the rest to your powers of imagination.

Caution-Nude hiking may spark unwelcome religious debates:

Calling all Indian-American Brahmins: hiking threadbare invites comments on the white thread against the brown skin of your chest, such as: “Aha, a Hindu Brahmin, I see?” And then, look how a casual remark flung while clothed, explodes into a loaded observation while stark naked: “A Moslem, I presume?” 

As Dr. Amartya Sen says in The Argumentative Indian, “we do like to speak”, and chances are that Indian-Americans will end up arguing with everyone in a tour group about ideology and dogma.  And one small misstep in the nude in the Alps could become a giant misstep for Mankind. 

Danger, Rocks and Close Encounters of the Worst Kind :

In No Full Stops in India, Mark Tully lays bare the hang-ups of Indians with respect to caste and creed. I quote out of context here but, men, look how nude hikes add another layer of complexity to your already beleaguered lives. 

 “But although all men may be equal in God’s eyes, they can never be equal in the eyes of other men, and because of that basic flaw in the doctrine of egalitarianism we in the west now talk of ‘equality of opportunity’. "

Finally, to the New York Times, telling Indian-American readers like me about nudist sightings on the Appenzell is tantamount to my requesting a nudist to please slip my car keys into his pocket for the duration of our hike.

You can’t find enough holding places when you’re in the buff and forcing things into tight corners could have disastrous outcomes.