Exploring Pune

It's Sunday morning in Pune, and it is starting to drizzle outside. The rain is a good thing. The monsoon is late this year, and people in Maharashtra are starting to worry. It's really only rained once or twice since I have been here, whereas it should have been raining hard at least once a day for two weeks now. When the monsoon is late, life here gets more difficult in all sorts of ways. Crop planting is disrupted, food prices go up, and drinking water rations get reduced. Our apartment already only gets about three hours worth of drinking water a day, in the early morning, out of our special drinking water tap. Water rationing doesn't affect us so much, since we can't drink the tap water anyway.  We just take the water from the washing water tap and put it through a heavy duty water filter system that we have. But for the average Indian it's just one of many problems. Even the cost of electricity here rises because the output of hydroelectric plants slows down. It's not so bad yet, but it could get worse. Hopefully this is the beginning of more rain. With the rain will come mosquitos--lots of them--but this is a small price to pay.

Mostly I have spent my week doing large amounts of homework. And since I'm still in the stage when going out to buy soap is an exhausting adventure, I haven't had too much free time. But I'm starting to settle in and learn my way around, and this weekend I managed to get out and explore the city a little bit with my friend Sam, who is also in the program with me. I know Sam from Harvard, but he graduated a year before me and went to Chicago, and I hadn't seen him for a year. It's just a nice coincidence that we are on this program together.

After getting some errands done in the morning, Sam and I set out walking southeast through the city. Our goal was to get down to a large Ganesh shrine in the south of the city, and from there to a temple to the goddess Parvati that is up on a hill and which we were told had great views. It took us about an hour to get down to where the shrine was, walking in the crowded heat, and when we got there we found that it was on a little island, in the middle of a lotus pond, in the middle of a public park.

Despite the fact that there is litter, trash, and general decrepitude all over this city, for some reason the parks stay immaculately clean. They are also, for some reason, one of the few places where couples show affection in public. Generally husbands and wives don't touch each other in public, and you never see couples holding hands on the streets here. It feels a little prudish to us Americans, but the positive side is that men here hold hands with their friends in public all the time and there is no stigma, which I think is nice. Since public affection is kept as a strictly non-sexual activity, the men are not ashamed to show it for their friends. It also has the affect of giving parks a distinctly romantic atmosphere, especially in the evenings, when groups of lovers line the benches. It's all very innocent: the parks are pretty public, and the couples don't do much besides hold hands and sit close together. But you can tell they feel like they are doing something special.

Anyway, the park was beautiful, and the Ganesh temple was too.   I'm just beginning to be able to sight-read the Sanskrit inscriptions in the temples, so it makes it more fun to visit them. Back in the park, a woman walked up to Sam and grabbed him and smeared a dot of red paste on his third eye and then demanded 100 rupees for the service, which is an absurd amount of money here. He complained and then gave her five rupees and rubbed it off as quick as he could. He has no interest in posing as a devotee, and neither do I.  I know now to watch out for ladies wandering around with bags of red dust.

From the park we could see Parvati hill rising up in the distance, with the temple on top. It took us another half hour to walk there, and the steps going up the hill were really steep, but it was worth it. Parvati, in Hindu mythology, is the daughter of the Himalayas, so of course it has to be a little difficult to climb up to her temple. The top of the hill contained a whole complex of little shrines and temples to various gods, with smooth flagstones and little gardens. No shoes allowed inside, so it was all very clean. It was also the tallest hill around, and this gave the sound up there that peculiar empty quality that you only get on top of a mountain. At the highest point was the shrine to Parvati, inside its own little courtyard. You could pay two rupees to climb up onto the walls of the courtyard, and from here you could see all of Pune, and the mountains in the distance to the East. On the peaks of some of the bigger mountains far away little gold flecks shined with the promise of even cooler and more remote temples, but those will take a little more planning to get to.  You could also look down and see the rooftops of the slum that is nestled at the foot of Parvati Hill.  The temple was full of groups of teenagers who looked like they were just hanging out after school and messing around. Behind one of the big shrines we found a bunch of graffiti, with so-and-so loves so-and-so and stuff like that written all over. Sam remarked, half joking, "It's good to know that no matter where you go, nothing is sacred." And I think he's right, actually. Somehow it is good to know that.

The highlight of the weekend, however, had to be on Friday night, when Sam and I, also walking around in search of adventure, wandered far from our neighborhood and suddenly noticed that the streets were getting narrower and the houses much smaller. We weren't in a slum exactly, since the one-room houses were made of concrete rather than corrugated tin or other less desirable materials, and that means the residents are doing alright, relatively. But it was a poor neighborhood. Up ahead we started to see some lights and hear music, and pretty soon we came upon a gigantic party in the middle of the street that turned out to be a wedding party. There was a small painted truck with a marching band out in front of it and the English words "Mangal Star Band" written in Hindi letters at the top. They were playing some really great, thumping drum music with horns. Behind that was a gigantic multi-colored chariot, covered in Christmas lights and pulled by seven fake plastic light-up stallions, and inside that were the bride and groom, decked out lavishly. Between the music truck and the chariot half the neighborhood was going wild, dancing and jumping around, little kids and old people, and then whole procession starting moving down the street, and we followed it. It seemed like we were quite an odd sight in the neighborhood--we could tell that from the stares we were getting. But we could also tell that we were definitely welcome oddities, rather than unwelcome ones, which was a big relief. People were smiling and coming up to shake our hands, and someone grabbed us and brought us up to the chariot and introduced us to the groom. We shook his hand and said congratulations, and the bride sat cool and elegant, looking straight ahead in all her jewelry and not deigning to look down at us, which was all for the best, since faux pas are pretty easy to make here, especially when gender is involved. We walked up ahead of the procession and found an alley with a gigantic 8' x 8' wall of speakers blasting some really good Indian wedding dance music, right next to a small Shiva shrine.   This was where the procession was clearly headed.  We wanted to stay, but decided that unless someone explicitly invited us to stay, we probably shouldn't gawk too long.  Eventually we left.  It probably would have been fine to stay, but it's better to be sure about these things. My overall impression of the event was, "Damn. These people really know how to have fun."

Our reception at the wedding was pretty typical for this city. We stick out like crazy, since white people are a rare sight here, but people are generally very happy to see us and talk to us, and they like to ask us where we are from and show they know where New York and Boston are. Yesterday someone even waved with a big smile and yelled "Hello! Hello! Hello!" as he went by on a motorbike. Of course we do get dirty looks and cold treatment from time to time, but in general people seem to get a kick out of us.  It feels a little odd at times, but it's far, far better than if the attention were negative, so I am not complaining. It's even better when they hear we are studying Sanskrit. People seem pretty happy about that. Even if they aren't interested in it themselves at all, they seem to feel a little pride on hearing that Americans have come over to learn about it.  

Of course, there's a class and caste aspect to all of this as well--the young, upper class Indians that I have met generally play it cool, and talking to them is pretty much like talking to another American, especially since they speak flawless English.  But the whole interaction of class, caste and wealth in this country is still totally bewildering to me, and I haven't caught on to how it works yet, so I can't comment on it.  It is signaled all over the place in the way people dress and carry themselves, where they live and what their jobs are, but this is a language I often can't even notice is there, let alone decipher.  I have caught on to certain things.  For instance, if you see a woman in a bright sari during the day, she is generally working class, especially if she's young.  Upper class women wear a garment called a salwar kameez during the week day, and a sari only on more formal occasions.  Or else they just wear western clothes.  And when they wear saris, they are of longer fabric and are tied more intricately.  A certain style of wrapping a turban for men signals a farming caste, and a different style signals a service caste; women who have a ring in their septum are generally from Rajasthan, and women who have studs in both nostrils are generally from some sort of tribe.  Then there are the Hijras, the "third gender", a self-selected caste of transvestites who are generally oppressed and live at the margins of society, but who have a traditional social role, however low, and are sometimes called on to perform certain religious ceremonies at weddings and births.  Needless to say, Hijras are easy to recognize, though I haven't seen many of them in Pune.  The social semiotics here--and by that I mean the way a person's social status, role, place, and origins are signaled through their clothing, adornments, bearing, and speech--are totally fascinating, but really difficult to learn about, since they are all so subtle.  I'm sure it's similar in the U.S. too, but I'm so used to it I don't notice it.  Imagine trying to explain to someone why specifically you can often pick out a European teenager in a crowd of American teenagers on sight, or tell the difference on the subway between a midwestern tourist in Manhattan and a Manhattanite.  It's usually easy to see, but difficult to put your finger on why.

Pictures of most of this are posted here, except for the wedding, where I didn't have my camera, unfortunately. One final, random observation before I go: ketchup is a big deal here. It's brought out separately from the other food, sometimes even without being ordered, and it's served in a bowl on a silver tray, and the waiter announces it is he places it in the middle of the table for everyone to see: "Tomato ketchup." The little things are endlessly amusing.