cow dung (and Tamil jokes) can be injurious to health

Tonight as I was walking home from the parotta stall up at the bus stop I noticed a big conflagration out in front of the cow shed/dairy. I stopped at a local family's house to inquire as to the cause of this Sunday's disturbance. The dairy folks were on one side of the road and other residents were on the opposite side of the street and they were shouting back and forth. Basically the dairy has become a sort of Superfund site here in Meenambalpuram because they don't clean up the cow dung and the poor cows are standing in several inches of chaani (dung). Now that it is monsooning, the dung is running all over the place and the neighborhood stinks to high heaven. People are saying that their kids are getting fevers because of this, and they want the family to clean up this dung problem. I actually don't think it stinks anywhere near as bad as it did back in the hot part of summer when that dung was getting baked in the 107F sun and the smell was wafting in here all day long (I live across the street from this cow shed).

It is a source of consternation to some folks that this dairy family prospers despite living in a veritable pig sty. In this country cleanliness is absolutely next to godliness, and it doesn't seem fair to my friends that people who bathe, practice proper hygiene, pray and act godly would suffer in poverty while these dirty people are rolling in rupees. I did notice that they don't seem to wear very clean clothes. But it wasn't until today when I saw the grandpa using a cow's tail as a hand towel that I realized exactly what my friends were getting at when they accused these people of inferior hygiene. I think henceforth I will be buying my curd elsewhere.

So as I watched the fight taking place from the front stoop of the neighbor's house, I made a Tamil joke which was really something of a victory for me....until the older lady of the family started laughing so hard she began to choke! Stop me if you've heard this one already....I said, "English-le naarrukkizhamainnu Sunday. Aanaa, ingee naarrukkizhamainnu sundai!" Basically it translates, "In English "naarrukkizhamai" means "Sunday" but here "naarrukkizhamai" means "fight." " Basically it is a play on words because Sunday kind of rhymes with sundai (fight), and of course it isn't funny in English! So you will just have to take my word for it that people here seem to think this is a pretty funny joke. And everyone seems to agree, Sunday is a day for fighting around these parts. (As I write this I am under attack by enormous flying cockroaches. The monsoon creates rivers of dung, but it also ushers in my most hated creature on this Earth!)

local cow dining on scraps from the parotta stall

a rare moment of peace...

nothing some jungle cat juices can't fix

Just when you think you've pretty much touched all the bases of your dissertation research topic, out of left field will come something completely unexpected. Something that will likely take your breath away or, in rare cases, really turn your stomach. That's the beauty of doing research in a place like India. It's not going to be boring, and there is a seeming bottomless well full or unique rituals and gods and beliefs that you have never heard of or imagined before. This keeps things interesting, but it also sometimes give you the feeling that you can never know enough. You could study one small corner of this place your entire life and keep turning over stones with unbelievable things underneath.

Yesterday I made the "mistake" of wearing a nice salwar. It's a few years old but new to the folks around here. One neighbor told me it was so nice it will make your head spin; this is because it's black and I'm white and she thought it was a nice contrast. So yesterday I got some compliments on this thing. Then this morning I wake up and my middle fingernail on my left hand was infected, swollen, and very painful. I had a hangnail there that suddenly got really infected. Chellapandi took one look at it and said it was "kanneeru" or evil eye, a classic case. Suddenly it was all being pieced together, starting with the salwar from yesterday.

So she recommends that we go downtown to this sandalwood/puja supply store run by a Muslim gentleman. He would do mantras and cure my hand, she says. (Naturally I really wanted to check out a Muslim manthiravaathi, as I just interviewed three such Muslims ladies the other day who do mantras. It's very interesting to see the overlap between Hinduism and Islam in India, as far as "black magic" is concerned. Noticing that I had a cold, one of the older grandmas took my water bottle and did mantras over it and then blew into it three times. She told me to drink it in three gulps. Her daughter is basically a professional manthiravaathi who diagnoses and does evil eye cures and prophylaxes for Hindus and Muslims alike.) Before we headed downtown to visit the Muslim manthiravaathi I attempted traditional cures like iodine ointment and bandaids but it kept getting worse. I figured this witch doctor was worth a shot. Besides, it would kind of be like donating my (living) body to science.

Needless to say it was a very interesting trip. He diagnosed my finger right away as an evil eye problem. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see how much attention a white girl like me gets around these parts; so if there is a such thing as the evil eye, I'm going to be having constant problems it seems. He applied some ointment to my finger and then splashed me with some blessed water from a small vessel that contained lots of very intricate Arabic inscriptions from the Koran. The ointment was the consistency of petroleum jelly. We got to talking to him about the evil eye, and it wasn't until shortly after the ointment application that I realized we were standing right next to three cages, each containing a sleeping jungle cat of some kind. Turns out that this ointment is milked from the testicles of these jungle cats! When I realized this I felt very ill. But not as ill as I felt once he reached for a jar full of hairy jungle cat testicles that stunk to high heaven. I wasn't quite clear on the Tamil but it would seem that these are gleaned from the forest areas from dead jungle cats that have been killed by foxes. These attractive items fetch Rs. 150 a piece on the black (magic) market. If you are looking for a new line of work, this may be the ticket. And for a bargain 20 rupees you can get this stuff smeared on your hand and also a little carry tin of it to take home with a nice crescent moon and star design on the front. Very classy.

This gentleman was very helpful and knows a lot about drishti, needless to say. And I am going to go back and interview him in the near future. But next time I am going to avoid the jungle cat juice as it is certainly a non-vegetarian treatment.

Purveyor of fine sandalwood paste,
incense, rosewater,
and jungle cat juices.

Does anyone know what this animal is exactly? I feel sorry for him, whatever he is.
Fortunately there are only three such jungle cats currently being squeezed in Madurai.

when being excluded becomes a sort of data

What do you do when the thing you are researching is an impediment to your research? This is the problem with researching something like the evil eye. When people want to hide things from the public eye, it's not like they're just going to invite you into their homes to gape at their private affairs, etc. I really wanted to check out some Saraswati/Ayudha pujas on Saturday. Some neighbors said they would let me know when the pujas were going on so I could watch. Well, it turns out that they did the pujas in secret and then claimed they "forgot" to tell me. And then I ended up feeling pretty hurt and left out, not to mentioned discouraged since this is my fieldwork after all and Ayudha puja only happens once a year. Tamilarasi told me that people don't usually have outsiders into their homes for such things, unless those outsides happen to be children. I suppose that this is because the gaze of children is considered benign, whereas the gaze of adults is not. Of course this is a useful piece of information for my project, but when you are being excluded by the people that you have been living practicially on top of since March, you tend to take things pretty personally for a minute. Now I am being excluded NOT because I am unmarried, but because I am a not a child! So what am I? Some sort of unclassifiable being.

My past experiences in Madurai have been mostly with upper-middle class and higher caste host families. This is a self-selecting group of people who have chosen to open their homes to foreigners, allowing Americans to be part of an Indian family to the greatest extent possible. But now I'm living in a different community, and I'm being treated like a community member, not a child. It's different, to say the least, and sometimes access is more difficult. Not surprisingly, individuals who are more used to foreigners are going to be more likely to throw open their doors to them.

Just this past week, I went with some of the neighbor ladies to several houses to look at the golu displays. Golu is a display of dolls done at Navaratri. But it's almost always higher caste families with financial means who are able to put on these displays as they require a lot of money and leisure time to put on. A golu display is expensive not just because of the dolls involved, but because you are also expected to give the women in attendance free things like sari blouse material, flowers, sundal (a kind of dal), and things like small puja and food vessels. During Navaratiri people like me and my neighbors roam the Brahmin neighborhoods looking to score some booty at their golu displays. It's fun and the free stuff is nice. After leaving the golu, women compare all the families, pointing out whose doll displays were better and who is a miser and who isn't, etc. Golu is actually a very nice way of redistributing wealth and everyone knows this. It's probably the only social and religious occasion that you will find Dalits visiting and eating in Brahmin and other higher caste homes. There were some interesting interactions that took place, particularly when higher caste guests unexpectedly stumbled in upon our rather rambuctious party from Meenambalpuram. But the families who put on the golu hosted us very generously. And hopefully this wasn't just because a white girl was there.

Despite being excluded from some of the Ayudha pujas on Saturday night, I did manage to impose myself on the Ayudha Puja going on at the cycle shop next door. They also "forgot" to let me know that it started at 10pm, but I stalked them until it started. I wasn't invited to stand up top, inside the shop, where the innocuous children were, but I did get a good view from the bottom. They tolerated my presence at least. Then later in the evening they sent their children over with a big bag of prasad for me. An unexpected and very nice gesture, certain to effectively buy off any bad drishti on my part. Ironically, once I got home Chellapandi told me that I was the one who got the evil eye at the puja, because people were watching to see how the white girl prays, etc.. So she rotated some camphor around my head three times, had me spit on it, and then she burned it in front of the house. While we were doing puja at the cycle shop, the neighbor had secretly rotated some burning camphor around his cycle rickshaw to remove his own post-Ayudha puja drishti and then locked himself up in his house before anyone noticed. I was also advised by a friend to take the drishti lemon from our own Saraswati puja that evening and (secretly, in the middle of the night) throw half of it over the back of the house from the roof and the other half in the three point intersection. Lots of "secret" stuff going on that isn't the least bit secret. In such a close knit community people try to be secret about evil eye prophylaxes because it's basically like openly accusing your neighbors of being envious/destructive.

Speaking of neighbors being destructive, I think I committed a faux pas on Sunday. I was hanging out with the neighbors when I somehow, like a good American, ended up complimenting a neighbor's kids for lack of anything else better to say. Well, that was a stupid idea. She told me, with her son standing right there, that he is a complete imbecile who cannot read or write a single word of English or Tamil. He just stood there expressionless and I really had no idea what to say. This was clearly an evil eye prophylactic behavior because according to all available data this boy seems to be quite smart. I clearly made an error, because even the neighbor's aunt who was sitting there was astounded at the extent to which her niece went to slam her own son. I felt pretty helpless then. I might know how to say speak, but it doesn't mean I always know how to speak appropriately. Americans are expected to compliment other folks kids, but that's not the case here. At least you don't compliment them verbally. There really isn't a country on Earth where they love kids more than in India, so you really are expected to be completely taken by kids -- just so long as you don't say so. You are expected to coddle them, pat them, hold their hands, make the same funny sounds people make to their bullocks, carry them around, and basically fawn over them and engage in all sorts of other doting behaviors that don't come naturally to me but do to seemingly everyone else in India. But don't say the kids are smart or cute or you are going to seriously offend someone like I did.

Navaratri is a time for prayer, reflection,
and wracking up plenty of free sari blouses.

Happy Saraswati/Ayudha Puja!

It's time to worship your books and iron tools, folks! Today is the last day of Navaratri, a festival of nine nights with three days each devoted to the worship of God in the form of the goddesses Durga, Lakshmi, and Saraswati. In south India the last day of Navaratri is celebrated as Saraswati Puja and Ayudha Puja. Saraswati puja involves asking God to help you in your studies and other intellectual or business pursuits. Books, ledgers, and other such written materials used by students and business folks are worshipped today. Ayudha puja is for the worship of iron tools, or other implements you use to make a living. I'll be checking out Ayudha pujas at the cycle shop next door and the auto stand down the road tonight. We've decided to include my ailing computer in the Saraswati puja this evening; there was some debate as to whether it constitutes an iron tool or a book. Tamilarasi says it is a kind of book, so Saraswati puja it is.

My computer could definitely benefit
from some puja action this evening.

unmarried women are actually children cleverly disguised as grownups

Today was a very nice day, mainly because there was lots of hanging out around the neighborhood which was interesting, informative, and fun. This morning went over to Sumathi's house to look at the dozens of new saris she recently received. Her mother-in-law died last week and the tradition here is that female friends and relatives give saris to the female relative of the deceased. Then all her friends come over and dig through the mountain of saris critiquing each one and looking at how much people paid for them. Each sari still had the price tag and a name tag attached telling the name and address of the person giving it. Then the next time someone has a death in the family, the woman will go and give a sari of the same or similar value. Watching everyone judge the saris was especially entertaining, and I got to know what is considered ugly, what designs are considered too busy, etc. This is particularly useful information considering that Deepavali is coming up next month and I am going to have to buy saris for people. I learned that saris "lighter than a bun" are bad, as are saris which are "so thin they could be used as fish nets"; you'll have to take my word for it that this all sounds way funnier in Tamil than in English.

After the sari critiquing took place, I ended up going to town with Tamilarasi and Chellapandi as T. and I still needed to buy saris for Sumathi. As we were shopping I noticed that C. and T. were picking out saris which I considered completely hideous, but the same could be said for how they felt about my selections! I seem to go for way too much hot pink in their opinion, and they are telling me to at least go for black or some dark color sometimes. (Speaking of dark colors: after shopping we went to the temple and I had to wait outside the inner sanctum because non-Hindus are not allowed. C. and T. emerged from the inner sanctum with a plan: if I would just dye my hair black I could put on a sari, a bindi, some gold, and braid my black hair and walk right on into the inner sanctum disguised as a "north Indian"! They were super excited about this plan, convinced that it would work. While I don't want to put the equivalent of shoe polish on my hair, I am sure people would be happy as brown hair is considered to be inferior/ugly here).

We were downtown for 5 hours and only now just got back. I've only got one sari for Sumathi and an inskirt for myself to show for all that walking and haggling. There were some other things I needed to buy, like a container for sandalwood paste and an incense holder. We were quoted a total of Rs. 17 for these two items which I thought was a steal. But C. and T. assumed we were being cheated because I am white and they summarily rejected these items at every juncture. I came home empty-handed.

I was excited to come home and give Sumathi the sari, but the local ladies said I shouldn't give her a sari because I am an "age attend pannap ponna" (girl who has reached puberty; DUH, I am 28) and I am NOT MARRIED. This actually really hurt my feelings, even though I know I shouldn't take this personally. There are times when you are treated as an extra-social and extra-cultural entity as a foreigner, which can sometimes be good. But then there are times in which you really want to be considered part of the community and you are refused access because of criteria that people here take for granted but that foreigners like me might take personally. I know that I shouldn't take it personally, but it's how I felt. Now this sari is sitting here and I don't know if I will give it to her tomorrow. I don't know if it's considered unlucky for her, or unlucky for me if I give it. But I have the feeling that in this situation I am considered inauspicious and it's not a nice feeling.

The fact of the matter is that people here feel that a woman becomes an adult, and indeed a whole person, only when she is married. Before that she is merely a "teenage ponna" (teenager!) no matter her age. Even though I am 28 years old, make my own money, live alone, and travel the world by myself, none of this matters in terms of my being considered an adult and a full member of the community simply because I am not married. It's just the way it is, but it still stings sometimes. And it could be worse: I could be a widow or a divorcee.

pul irunthaalum purushan
kal irunthaalum kanavan

Better to be married to grass than have no husband at all.
Better to be married to a stone than to have no husband at all.

-Tamil Proverb.

taking the guesswork out of marriage

A couple of months back the Dinamalar (Tamil daily) ran an article "The girl who is going to live in her husband's house...", roughly translated. Incidentally this is also a very popular song that is played at weddings. It really takes the guesswork out of being a wife and daughter-in-law. I thought it might be helpful for those of you women who are thinking about getting married, are recently married, or have been married for a long time and want to try a new approach to things. Also for husbands, you might want to print this out and give it to your wife. Once you finish reading please vote as to whether or not you think these were written by a man or a woman. Unfortunately there is no byline!

"...It's really up to you whether your life is going to be sad or sweet. Housewives, this is for you...

• Always think that your life is good; don't allow other thoughts to grow, or else your peace of mind will be shattered.
  
• Set aside a time for husband and wife to talk.
• Always move about with a smiling face.
• When fighting with your husband, don't use bad words. Think before you speak.
• If you give respect to each him, problems won't present themselves.
• Always be modest. If you don't have an ego, you will be able to be more close to one another.
• Don't be always calling your mother and complaining about your problems at home. This is for your mother's own good.
• Before you get married, try to get to know things about him. Get to know about his likes and dislikes.
• Thinking you are going to make jokes, don't compare his character with that of his relations.
• If you husband is yelling at you, be completely silent and don't give a response. After a minute of silence, tell your opinion very calmly.
  
• While in your husband's house, don't always be boasting about your parents and relations.
  
• Don't leave the house without your husband's company or permission.
• Don't be self-willed and make a decision on any issue without consulting your husband first.
  
• Don't ever compare others to your husband, saying they are better than him.
• Be hospitable and gracious to your husbands' relations when they come to visit.
• Don't always be nagging, "I want this, I want that."
• If you husband gives you some money for house expenses, be very thrifty with it. When he is having a difficult time with money, give him the money you saved aside and shock him.
• On his birthday give him a gift and make him happy.
• The moment your husband comes home from the office, don't start up complaining about the household problems. Immediately give him his coffee and tiffin (dinner).
  

Tips for how to interact with your mother-in-law will be added tomorrow.

parrot astrology is expensive

Yesterday I was supposed to go out to a village and interview the local astrologer/priest/black magic practitioner. Sadly, his older sister died. Because of this he won't be doing horoscopes for sixteen days (during this time a family member of the deceased is thought to be impure). It just so happened that yesterday afternoon the kili josiyam (parrot astrology) man happened to be going through the neighborhood offering his services, so we called him in for a reading.

The cost for a reading is 5 rupees. He first did a reading for Tamilarasi, who wanted to know her husbands fortune. He asks the name, age, and star of the person and then starts to chant. The parrot then comes out of the cage and stars pulling cards out of a stack. Finally it settles on one particular card and hands it to the man. Her card was Mahalakshmi, a highly beneficent and lucky goddess.

When it came time for my fortune, I'll be damned if that parrot didn't pick the absolute worst cards in the pile. First it was "HOSPITAL" - a picture of people sick in beds with IVs in their arms and nurses roaming around frantically. He then threw the shells and six of them were pointing up. Analysis? I had crossed the path of a widow and she had cursed me. The next card was a COBRA. When my friends saw this, they gasped. Not a good sign. Cobras are holy but sometimes they are bad. In this case it was bad. But by this point my friends started to get suspicious that this astrology was fixed. I also got over my initial panic, so by the time that COURTROOM and POLICE STATION were drawn, I realized this guy was trying to pull one over on us.

I had to tell him my favorite god and I said Shiva. Then he said he would pick one card, Tamilarasi would pick one card for me, and the parrot would pick a card. If "God decided to show up and help me" one of the cards would be Shiva. If not, I am in big trouble and have to pay him 4000 rupees to save myself!!! And here is how people get cheated by the parrot astrologers.

Call me crazy, but I bet you 4000 rupees

that parrot wasn't going to pick any Shiva card for me.

bad teacher

Now that I've got my computer back, I'm back to blogging again. Hopefully more frequently. I was going to post some pictures from Luke's and my travels around South India. Unfortunately every single one of those pictures is gone now, since my computer crashed and hit the tile floor. It's like some kind of karmic punishment that these pictures are the one thing they weren't able to salvage.

On Sunday I got back from my second trip to Chennai in less than a week. On Saturday I left Madurai at 6am by train, arriving to Chennai at 3pm. Immediately retrieving the computer. Getting back on the night train at 9pm and arriving in Madurai the next morning at 6am. 24 hours of near constant travel punctuated in the middle by several hours of roaming the city in the worst, loudest, most insane traffic on planet Earth with the meanest, most cheating auto drivers in India. The good news is that my computer is back and in working order. Wireless connection is not working. I haven't determined if this is a computer problem (hope to God not) or a modem problem. One main problem seems to be that the "g" key is malfunctioninggg. Hyperfunctioningg, more like. But if this is the only problem I am left with aftger this computer disaster, I'm happy.

Last week, before I left for Chennai, I went with a friend of mine to try and get her 16 year old son in school. You see, they won't let him in the school and they won't let him in the classroom. Why, you might ask? Good question. Did he do anything wrong? Touch the teacher's hand? Act wild in the class? Harass a girl outside the school? Cuss? Nope. It seems to me that the reason they won't let him in is because he is either the wrong color, the wrong class, the wrong caste, or all of the above. My friend was basically at the end of her rope, and was even calling reporters at local newspapers tryingg to figure out what to do. The papers have been reporting a lot on the Collector's schemes to keep kids in school, talking about how the Collector is having posters hung up all over Madurai saying, "Send your kids to school! Don't send them to work!" ETC ETC. Well, that's all fine and good, but when the teachers in your government schools are nothing but thugs and criminals, all the posters in the world aren't going to changge a thingg.

I went with my friend to the school. Because a white girl accompanied her, my friend and I were seen immediately and the headmaster said he would put her son in the classroom the next day, no problem. Keep in mind that when my friend went alone with her son, they were made to sit in the sun for hours and were never attended to. The teacher is a fat rowdy thug of the sort that probably has people's knees broken in half for pissing her off. She talked down to my friend and called a liar and all number of things in Tamil, thinkingg I didn't understand. I came back at her in Tamil which surprised her.

After the headmaster gave the go ahead we left happy. The next say she sent her son to school. Well, it didn't turn out so great. They beat him and humiliated him, made him go out and buy tea and a bun for the math teacher (man) who then threw the tea down and said he didn't want it. Then he started to beat the boy screaming, "What work does your father do? Is he a coolie (laborer)? You're just as worthless as him and there is no point in educating the son of a coolie!" and "Your mother came here with a white girl! You think I'm scared of that white girl? You can call the police if you want, and the Collector too, it's no use because I'm not scared of anyone!" Meanwhile, over at another government school, the 8 year old daughter of my other friend was being beaten by her teacher for playing with a necklace in class. She comes home with her hand swelled up three times its size and cannot sleep, much less do her homework. Further, at another government school, my friend's 10 year old son is beaten and made to sit outside the classroom every day because his mother cannot afford his school fees.

We take it for granted in the US that school is free for kids. Just like some folks in Europe, Canada, Brazil, etc., probably take it for granted that medicine there is socialized. In India your parents need to come up with about 10,000 rupees a year AT LEAST to keep two kids in a good school, and that doesn't even include uniforms, books, school supplies. And if you are poor there is NO WAY you are going to afford this. Furthermore, if your kid is the wrong caste, class, and/or color, how is he or she going to be properly educated and come up in life when they are being beaten and humiliated by a thug masquerading as a teacher?

I'm happy that we have socialized education
in the United States of America.

drishti attack!

It's been quite a while since I posted, the major reason for this being that I have been suffering from a major case of the evil eye. This resulted in my computer being destroyed last week. (I will explain later how exactly it was destroyed. And by later I mean when the computer is safely back in my hands and there is no risk of me being charged for anything). The next morning after the computer was destroyed my friends explained to me that this was a clear case of amma kan ("mother's eye"), an incredibly dangerous kind of drishti which involves someone putting the evil eye on their own property. You see, just a few days before my computer was destroyed I was admiring it, saying to myself "Wow, this computer is really working well after three years. There are so few scratches on it, and it looks great!" ETC ETC. So what happened next? It was destroyed. Clear cut case of the evil eye, folks.

Fortunately there is an antidote to the evil eye destroying one's computer and in this case that remedy is a valid international warranty. Because there isn't one single person in Madurai who can fix Mac laptops, I had to get on a train to Chennai and go to the one Apple service center there. They diagnosed a hard disk problem and agreed that the cause was amma kan. Apparently evil eye is covered under the Apple warranty, in India at least. Thank God this happened to be here and not the US, otherwise I'd be paying for a new hard disk. Hopefully by Saturday I will be back on a train to Chennai to pick up my computer.

In order to avoid putting amma kan on your computer I recommend repeating to yourself, "My computer sucks, my computer sucks." If you have a PC (especially a Compaq), this mantra will no doubt come easily to you.