Fish Porn

We had to ask around to find the first shop, my Norwegian friend and I were informed this afternoon that there was indeed a store that carried what we were looking for. “Go down the stairs,” we were told, they have what you need. Indeed, I thought, indeed. So down the stairs we walked, only to find out we came to the back door. A brilliant combination of aromas emanating from the establishment was intoxicating. No, they couldn’t help us. But they did have chicken, mutton—and pork. This last word he whispered, truly, and looked behind him to see if anyone had quite stealthily crept up to the front counter while his back was turned.

“Pork?” I asked, also in a muted whisper. Yes. He provided a one-word response that belied the severity of such a product within the confines of such a contentiously religious state. No thank you. Not because I am adverse to the pork product- much to the contrary- but I have seen what pigs eat in this country. I haven’t seen what pigs eat back home. “Mai ‘pish’ karto hou.” He looked back to the street and pointed in a direction, “go to big building opposite construction site. ‘Pish’ inside.” We thanked him and graciously exited out of the store, this time through the front door.

The way this adventure was going I half expected to see a store with blacked out window, a wiry neon sign with the words ‘Live Fresh Pish” blinking on and off. What we found was the cleanest fish and chicken market. Cleaner than butcher shops and any fish market in NYC. I would want this guy in my neighborhood back home. The order was simple, but glutinous. Could we make it home before the ice melted. Could we afford to buy more than one kind, a full kilo – hey- what kind of fish is that one?

As we ordered a crowd of young men gathered around us. They watched our every move. Clearly pure vegetarians- all of them. Entranced by the foreigners buying the flesh, they spoke to each other in muted voices. Were they tempted? Had our act of non-veggieness prompted a coup among the religious masses? Would they ban the sale to future shoppers?

Grins on our faces we were clearly enjoying the rush of doing something that felt so bad- so dirty. As we walked with our fish porn it hit us how visible such a bag would appear, the whole world would know by the look on our faces and the tell-tale black plastic porn bag in which our fish flesh was wrapped. We quickly opened my companion’s satchel and hid the evidence, crossed the street and went home by a different route.

I Got to be in Chennai For Our Anniversary

I love my wife. She is pregnant. She is beautiful and I got to be with her for our 4th anniversary. I am happy. This is her belly. There is a cute baby inside.

Two Sadhus, Three Autos, and a 4 PM Deadline

The following story is true. Should you choose to believe it, please forward a copy to as many friends and family as you can. It won’t bring you luck, Microsoft will not send you a check, come to think of it— it really won’t do you any good one way or another.

Accosted on the streets of Ahmedabad! Victim of Clueless Auto Drivers and Gujarati Extortion Conspiracy!

I needed to research something for work. As they only have a dial-up modem on one computer, I grabbed my laptop and headed for the nearest A/C WIFI café—Mint. A bit of a pricey joint, but conveniently located by my favorite shoeshine boy. (see earlier post)

It should have only taken me six minutes by auto to get there; it was 2:45. I had enough time to get there, get the info I needed and get back by 4PM for a meeting with my boss. (Who needed the information I needed the internet to procure).

While crossing the street, I spy with my little eye the first sadhus I have seen in Ahmedabad. They are large, wide and tall men, long beards, sun-faded orange clothes, one even with a walking staff. Wordlessly they make a bee-line for the one guy on the street who won’t understand a word they say; me. I zig, they zag. I cut and roll only to get snagged by the large hands of the taller of the two. He has me by the arm and bellows something I can actually understand.

“You are a man of size. (thanks asshole) You must have been a sadhu in your last life. Share with us everything you can!”

If only I knew how to respond I would have said, “ yeah- I was a sadhu in my last life- that’s why I am back here again to make up for being such a lazy, self-indulgent asshole.”

A nice young man was walking by- I looked, no implored him with my eyes to come and help me. He walks over, “Sadhu-ji, this man is from England [sic], he cannot understand your speech. If you let him go, perhaps I can help him understand what you are saying!”
“BAH!” says the Sadhu. But as he says “Bah!” he pulls his hand from my arm to gesture his disgust as being rebuked, just enough for me to step out of his way. My helper and I break for the end of the street leaving the sadhus yelling at the top of their lungs. It is now 3:00PM.

I thank him profusely and get into an auto. “Crossword Bookstore. Mithakali Circle.” “Yes Sir I know where,” he responds. If I said Mint, he would have said he knows where. If I said Lexington and Fifth he would have said he knows where.

Two minutes into the drive I notice we are heading somewhere, not entirely wrong, but definitely not the fastest way to Mint. I try to correct him. He says “it is shortcut.” He makes a turn, goes around the roundabout and pulls off to the left. “Here sir.” Where sir?

This is wrong I say. He says “No sir, CG Road.” Ummm. Yeah.
He then proceeds to demand 15 rupees for a ride worth no more than 8. I pay him 8. He starts to yell and grabs for my hand. Out of nowhere I pull my hand back and bellow. It is the best way to describe what came out of my mouth. “GO! GET OUT OF HERE!”

He pulls off, knowing he was trying to cheat me and I turn to this other auto standing right beside me. “Crossword Bookstore. Mithakali Circle.” “Yes, sir I know” where should have been my first clue. 10 minutes later I ask, “Where are you going?”

“Here sir.” Where sir? “University.” The University? “Yes, sir.” No sir. We head back literally to where we started. 10 more minutes go by. He says, 25 rupees. I pay him 7 rupees. He starts to yell at me. I…yes, bellow. [Where I picked this ability up from I have no idea]

He peels out, difficult to do with a two-stroke engine and three wheels. A third auto driver is staring at me, laughing his ass off. I ask him what’s so funny. Well, more like “Kya Hai?” He says “where you go?” I say “Crossword Bookstore. Mithakali Circle.”

He says… “Get in.” He charges me 7 rupees for a 12 rupee ride after I explain everything that happened since leaving the office. I say thanks; he smiles. The time is now 3:35PM.

I go inside, ducking past my favorite shoeshine boy, order a coffee, get the information I need and get back to the office at 4:03PM.

The Comma

When I was in sixth and seventh grade I had a teacher, English teacher, who hated my guts. Every chance she got, she would carve up my essay, poem, prose, or paragraph. But in those two years, it is safe to say, I learned nothing of grammar, let alone about the crusade against the comma. “Your paper is rather insightful Mr. Gupta, but you have far too many comma usage errors. Please note chapter five of your grammar text on the ‘comma splice’.” I read the chapter. I counted four commas on the first page. All sentences were short. The next page seemed like one consecutive run-on sentence as if the author forgot to taking a break take a breath and see the breadth of damage one long sentence could produce on any given page in a particular grammar textbook that was supplied by the school district in the hopes of winning the war against taking pause…

I mention this only because I have been trying to teach myself basic tourist level Hindi with extra vocabulary. I really just don’t get where I am supposed to pause, inflect, rest or imply an end to my sentence. An English correspondent once wrote a book called “No Full Stops” all about the fact that Indians operate with implied commas, pauses, tied more to the rhythm of what is being said than particular grammatical requirement. In the end, it is the grammar. Mrs. Shaver would have croaked.

The Old City of Ahmedabad

On another day, I was taken to the ‘Old City’ (more stories from the Old City later). As we crossed the Sabarmati river from new to old, I looked out to the left of the auto (what we call autorickshaws) and saw the patchwork of a river settlement. It is a slum quite like no other in the city. It is a place where auto drivers drive up to their blue-tarped dwelling and switch on the television. Two women cooked a stove, and there was even a refrigerator behind them. Whether it worked or not, I will never know. Perhaps it merely provided a safe place from the ants to store food. But here there is no road, only the dirt of above a levee overlooking the floodplain and river.

I asked a few residents if they knew why there was such a distinction between the street dwellers in the west of the city, the shoe shine boys in front of bookstores, and color television watchers along the river. Why they seemed to be clustered by ethnicity and by trade; how intentional it felt, though probably by personal preference to be with your own rather than outsiders. I also asked why it was that each neighborhood seems to sell the same exact merchandise. They don’t seem to have an answer.

I asked some people working in the microfinance world- the world I had originally intended to be working in here in India, and got an answer I don’t much like. There is this entity called a Self Help Group (SHG). They apply collectively for a loan from a bank, microfinance institution (MFI) or through a NGO. Some of these operate with more care than others. It seems that it is just easier for a loan officer or equivalent to sign over money if it goes toward similar services (or products) A shopkeeper selling school supplies is merely selling next door to his buddy in the SHG. In order to minimize conflict, competition becomes less about business viability, as in selling these products in other parts of the city, but more or less letting the bargaining begin between shopkeepers.

But there is something else to note here. This is pretty much the same trend in any given neighborhood. Jewelers by jewelers. Tailors by tailors. Caste by caste. Religion by religion. Ahmedabad more so than Chennai or Pondicherri. The only semi-equalizer/unifier is this amorphous being called the middle class. Well over the size of the population of the United States, India’s middle class makes nearly 7 times more than the next rung down in society. The gap is growing, but at least Hindus, Muslims and the rest seem to be all up in the mix.

Go to a restaurant in Chennai or Ahmedabad and there will be hejab, dupata and blue jeans. But more or less people stick to their own- whether by choice or by design. The SHG explanation can only be useful so far as the microfinance/credit options are concerned. The rest is borrowing from relations – family, friends or caste. This puts your shop right smack dab in the middle of shops just like yours. No great insight here, just finding it interesting.

Settling Down

I am starting to wonder if I need the assistance of motion to keep my eyes open and mind clear. In traveling across the country, I came to realize that there are many questions that one can ask and answer rhetorically on one’s own. Then, the very simple act of moving your belongings into a drawer and onto shelves, getting up in the morning and going to work, the mind begins to accept the passing of faces and disturbing images as quickly as a two-stroke engine autorickshaw will take you. Until you are snapped out of the equivalent of a nine-to-five mental shroud and brought mistakenly back to reality.

A few days ago a kind, youngish Muslim auto-driver took a wrong turn. Wrong only because it was unintended. We snaked through a few side streets of one of Ahmedabad’s many slums. Tucked behind and between larger apartment complexes, storefronts and houses, the slums don’t spread outward as they do on the edges of Chennai, rather they sit bundled and apparently illegal, between yet another Tata-owned complex and that Chitra advertising billboard. These slums receive electricity through jumper wires that draw power from nearby circuit boxes. The water from a few taps here and there. These are the neighborhoods of NGO’s, like the one I work with, a physical representation of why we do the work, and why young corporate types here in the city think we have over-inflated senses of purpose. They feel we think too highly of the work we do, while their daily engineering of software is better for society. I have yet to see more than one computer in a slum in India. And that machine was put in place by an NGO a year or so ago- they held a few training classes, but then abandoned the project when their international donors pulled the funding.

It is the same as I found in the United States. Foundation meets NGO. NGO woos foundation, foundation falls in love with an idea, idea becomes reality. Foundation afraid of commitment, runs to the Swiss Alps, and changes wardrobe a few times. NGO left alone and confused in Ahmedabad’s streets. Foundation sends Dear John letter. Foundation takes credit for the idea and pulls the plug on funding. NGO- feeling used finds rebound love with a new suitor while the computer sits idle, but connected to the internet.

So my driver began to apologize. Over and over again as he sped up and nearly clocked a wayward cow. As we sat there for nearly an entire second waiting for the animal to move its tail end, I quickly put my hand on his shoulder and said, ‘slow, aste’ He spun his head around. The first word he understood perfectly well. The second he just didn’t expect out of my mouth. The third word, not spoken by me, but by him was, “why?” ‘Safe only,” I replied. With that he drove through the remaining two blocks at a normal auto-driver’s pace. (Which many will realize is still rather swervy, jerky and nauseating enough.)

As we pulled back to a main road- name unknown because Ahmedabad’s city planners don’t believe in placing a sign with the name of a street where it is visible if at all anywhere - a group of young children smiled and waved. “Hello” said one of them. I waved back, smiling. These kids didn’t have the sun-bleached hair of others living in slums in other parts of the city or in makeshift encampments leading up to Shivranjini Crossroad. In fact, they appeared comparatively quite well fed. Their skin was less tanned, not dusty from car exhaust and sand. They wore shoes- mostly.

As we turned onto the main road I spun my head around toward the kids and something amazing caught my eye. I immediately asked the driver to stop, ‘ek minute’ I told him, got out of the auto and stared at the seven foot papier mache standing Ganapati. Next to him was a seated Ganapati, who, if he stood would equal the height of his neighbor. All around the ground were smaller versions the God, seated, standing, laying down, one reading a book.

I watched as a dozen or so men and boys dipped what appeared to be some sort of woven paper, much like canvas, into vats of white sludge and applied in steady, rhythmic motions to various statues taking shape. The only sound I heard was the honking of horns. These sculptors appeared oblivious to the noise, which by my standards was overbearing. They were focused, not even looking at in my direction as I stood there gawking at them.

The auto driver got out of the car and stood next to me. In broken English he said that this was the only place that people throughout the city came to purchase statues for Ganapati Puja and other festivals. Some he said, pointing to more statues sitting inside the hut that had been constructed out of corrugated metal, blue plastic tarps and a mile of rope, were painted in the most garish, outlandish colors of red, orange and green.

This slum apparently makes the majority of its money off of this trade. They have secured a place in the workings of city holidays, religion and commerce. And for that, the siphoned-electricity and ‘illegal’ water connections are ignored by officials.