one more for the road

Pig Fever

Unfortunately this is the first chance I've had to write in two weeks. But things have not been quiet. Since the last time I posted, Pune has become the center of India's imaginary swine-flu "epidemic".  If you believe the hype, no one is safe. The newspapers have barely covered anything else for two weeks now, and everyone has taken to walking around the city wearing flimsy cotton face masks that would be so pathetically inadequate if this were really the deadly outbreak everyone thinks it is that I'm not sure whether to consider them an under- or over-reaction. It's especially comical watching people ride by on motorcycles with a cotton mask and no helmet on. The actual numbers behind this epidemic are pretty simple: a few people have the sniffles and a whole lot of people are hysterical. Across India, a country of almost 1.2 billion people, the death count remains around 20 (20!). I myself was almost certainly infected at the beginning of the summer, as was almost everyone else on my program, and we, like the other 999 out of 1,000 people who get swine flu, survived. You have more of a chance of choking to death on a samosa than you do of succumbing to swine flu.  For that matter, you have more of a chance of dying in any one of the other many, many ways people die young in India. But it's a little hard to get these statistics across to people when Pune newspapers do things like publish the headline "MUMBAI'S SWINE FLU HELL" in flaming letters across a black background on the front page, and then bury an article about how doctors say the swine flu is actually no big deal on page 7, behind the advertisements. I guess that's how you sell newspapers.

But if the reality behind all this is benign, the reality in front of it, so to speak, is less so. The government, in what I have to assume is a frantic attempt to prove to the world that India is a "modern" nation that can handle a "modern" epidemic like swine flu, has been behaving like a regular old pain in the ass, and being quite counterproductive in the process. Not only are they doing nothing to curb the mass hysteria that is already disrupting life and hurting the economy here, they are actually exacerbating everything by telling people to stay out of public places and doing things like forcibly closing all the schools and colleges in Pune for 3 weeks and sending the students home. I went down to the big shopping district yesterday to get some things, and half the businesses were shuttered and the streets were half empty except for a truck full of worthless, aggressive police officers who were wandering around with their lathis harassing innocent people, and who angrily scolded Sam and me for not wearing face masks. I have no numbers on how badly local businesses have been hit, but it must be significant.  Our teachers, fearing that our little Sanskrit program was about to get shut down as well, decided last week to switch the schedule around, administering final exams and collecting final projects a week early in case it was the last chance to do so. Thankfully, the mayor or commissioner or lieutenant or whoever it was decided not to bother with us, or else forgot about us, and we are having classes until this Friday as originally planned, and now without the stress of looming exams. But the change in schedule meant last week was unexpectedly, exceptionally busy.  So that's why I haven't written in a while.

Even though the city is sort of dead and Independence Day celebrations on Saturday were all messed up, I still managed to have a couple adventures over the weekend, including being fed a communal lunch by a bunch of young Muslim guys in a gigantic mosque that I wandered into. (Quick summary: best dal I've had yet in Pune; I was wearing a little plastic Muslim yarmulke that they gave me at the door; little kids were straining to get a peek; the Muslims had an I-told-you-so field-day with the swine flu epidemic; I had to decide whether or not to admit to them I was Jewish when they asked what religion I was [I admitted it. Everything was cool. I think]; one sanctimonious young zealot tried to give us a fire and brimstone routine; and on the way out they gave me some foul smelling medicine decorated with a caricature of an African man with big lips holding a spear.) (Also, fact check--India has about 154 million Muslims, by the most trustworthy estimate. That's 13.4% of the population. The Muslim population of Pakistan, by contrast, is about 170 million. Pakistan is home to about 3 million Hindus, or 1.8% of its population.) But the most interesting part of the weekend was when I found a little tiny synagogue in a small corner of the city, on a tiny street called Jew Lane. I noticed the sign and stepped into the courtyard on Saturday afternoon and found a little old Indian grandma wandering around, and I wasn't sure if she was a care taker, or a shabbos goy, or if this was even still a working synagogue, or if she had any idea why there was a six pointed star on the door of her building. And the Indian grandma spoke no English, but eventually she got me to sit on a bench and sat down next to me, presumably to wait for a maintenance guy to open the door so I could see inside but really I wasn't sure what was going on, and we sat there together for a while in pleasant, alinguistic cameraderie, enjoying the day, and then after some time she turned to me and said, "Jews." And I smiled back and agreed: "Jews." And then I said, in the tiny bit of Hindi I know, "I'm Jewish." And she nodded and said back in Hindi, "I'm Jewish too."  Not what I was expecting.

So what I find out, later, when I have come back at 6:30 for the evening service, is that this synagogue was built in 1912, and its congregation consists of a population I have read about and have been looking for ever since I got here: the descendants of Jews who wound up on the Western coast of India in 200 BC, in the wake of the Babylonian exile. I'm not really sure how their history worked, or how much of a Jewish identity they maintained in the two thousand years before European Jews found them and taught them how to do Judaism European-style, but I think their identity, theology, and also their population, were bolstered over the years by contact with Persian and other central Asian Jewish trading populations, who set up trade routes and built communities in the coastal cities here. In fact maybe they are mostly the descendants of these medieval traders. I really don't know. All I know is that before 1912 they didn't have a synagogue in Pune and just had services in private homes, and that attending the service there was one of the most identity-bending things I've ever done. Imagine going to the weirdest place you've ever been to in your life, spending a few weeks there until you just start to adjust to it, and then suddenly finding a part of it that is intimately enmeshed with one of the deepest parts of your childhood. These people were Indian--they looked Indian, they spoke Marathi, their body language was Indian. But they wore yarmulkes and chanted familiar Hebrew prayers and talked to me about Israel and the Torah. (Actually they didn't look entirely Indian. I swear there was a moment when the Rabbi looked exactly like an Indian uncle Franklin.)  There were only about five old men at the service, but halfway through a young Indian couple walked in, the woman in traditional Indian clothes, and they got the rabbi's blessing during the service and said some prayers in Hebrew and walked out, and I found out later they were recently married, and Jewish.  Do I have anything in common with these people?  Should I feel anything in common with these people?  Do I feel anything in common with these people?  I don't know the answers to any of these questions.

And I guess that's sort of a poetic way to wrap up my time here in Pune--bringing it all full circle and still being kind of confused.  This will probably be my last blog post.  Friday afternoon I take the train to Bombay, and early in the morning I fly to Calcutta for two days (Live goat sacrifices at the Kali temple every Saturday!  Be there.) and then I come home.  There are so many things I still want to do in Pune, and there are many places across India I still want to visit, but I guess they'll have to wait for other trips.  For this week, I'm posting two small photo albums I have been putting together over the summer.  The first is a collection of random shots from around Pune and some of my trip to Bombay.  The second is an album of some of the hilarious signage I have seen while here.  If I get a chance I may post about my time in Calcutta, but probably I will just see you all in New York or Boston in the next week or two.  Thanks for reading!  

Click here for some Pune living.  Click here for some Pune signage.

The Shakedown or Cop Calculus

Today is a holiday in Maharashtra and our classes are cancelled for the day. Yesterday after class I went home and got a little work done, and then I went to meet up with Sam and Cary to hang out and figure out what we were going to do with our free night.  We talked about a lot of things, and eventually fell to talking about all the music we like that we haven't heard in a while, and we suddenly had the great idea to ditch all of our more ambitious plans for the night and just get some beer, go to Sam's porch, play some cards and listen to some records, which idea we were all very pleased with.  So with our decision made we headed back to my house, grabbed a little to eat, and then headed to the liquor store to get some beer.

There are plenty of liquor stores within a few minutes walk of here.  Liquor is much more taboo here then it is at home, especially since we live in a Brahmin neighborhood, but it's not illegal (the way it is in Gujarat, for example) and the liquor stores are all legitimate, well-lit, well-established stores.  Still, for the sake of discretion, the liquor stores here give you your purchase in a black plastic bag, and the idea is that no one will be able to see through the bag and know that you are carrying something dirty and shameful.  The only problem is that no one needs to see through the bags, because liquor stores are the only places in the city that have black plastic bags in the first place.  Walking around with a heavy black plastic bag dangling from your hand basically feels like having a neon sign flashing above your head that says: "I am a dirty white degenerate with no morals!!!"  On the walk back to my house we realize we didn't really think this out well beforehand, and we notice we are drawing attention from a lot of the people we pass, and we start to feel very uncomfortable.  We have the right to drink, and I personally don't think there's anything morally wrong with drinking some beers and playing some cards, but walking through this neighborhood I am definitely starting to wish we had at least brought a backpack or something to conceal our black plastic bags.  Sam and Cary strongly agree, and just as we get near my apartment we are in the middle of talking about how we will never do this again without a backpack or larger bag, and suddenly I hear someone say, "hey".  The someone turns out to be an Indian police officer sitting on the back of a parked motorcycle with a chubby older man who isn't in uniform but has that dull, lazy confidence that marks him out instantly as a cop or someone very used to authority.  The uniform strolls over and says in broken English, "what's this?" and peers into the bag.  I decide not to piss him off, and to just play it open and honest, and I respectfully say, "oh, it's just some beer.  We are going to my apartment to have a quiet night sir."  And he says, "Beer?  Where is your license?"  Um, what?  "Your license, permit, to carry beer," and after a little confusion we realize that he is asking to see--not our proof of age--but some sort of license allows us to legally walk down the street with closed containers of alcohol on our way somewhere else.  All three of us look at each other, and in an instant we all come to the same conclusion.

Under the circumstances, here is what we assume: we are foreigners walking down the street at night in a Brahmin neighborhood with visible alcohol--something perhaps suspect and a little inappropriate, but by no means illegal.  The police are bored and have found what they think is a great opportunity to have some fun and hopefully make a little money by harassing some white kids who are on shaky ground.  The "license" they are asking for is a code word for the money that we will have to pay them to "buy" the license and continue our walk home without problems.  And there is a chance they are making all of this up on the spot.

This is what we all think, and it's a little bit scary, but there are a number of options open to us yet, and we decide to start out slowly.  The first trick we try is to fake stupidity.  We pretend we don't understand, and when he insists I hand him my driver's license and Cary gives him his passport, as if that's what he was asking for.  This was our first mistake.  Not only is the cop not placated, but now he has our IDs and won't give them back.  Okay, lesson learned.  Now we are one teeny, tiny bit older and wiser.  Next move: we try to give the cop the beer.  Here, you take it and we will just walk away.  We're sorry.  We don't want it anymore.  Nope, uniform is not having it and neither is his mentor, to whom he seems to look often for guidance.  Then we try: look, we will leave the beer here on the sidewalk and just walk away.  Nope.  That's not it either.

So next we trot out the good old fashioned, American, one-white-guy-to-another routine, the one where you say, "Oh, gee whiz officer, I had no idea.  Really, I didn't know.  I'm really sorry," and unless you are unlucky or doing something serious or aren't white, the cop thinks about it and says, "All right you knuckleheads.  Run along and be safe, and don't let me catch you out here again."  It doesn't always work in the States, and even if the Indian officer could have understood our English well enough I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work here.  And it doesn't.

Now it's the cop's turn.  He says, "You come to station.  Okay?  You come to police station," and he hails a rickshaw for us to get into.  Now things are getting more serious and we are getting pretty scared.  There is no way I'm going to an Indian police station unless my other options are seriously exhausted.  I don't want to think about what it will be like if we follow them to the station.  The best-case scenario probably involves mountains of forms and bureaucratic wastes of time and money and possibly drags on for days.  Plus there's a fair chance we'll have to spend the night in a cell until it's "business hours" again, and meanwhile they'll be thinking of all sorts of ways to screw us and take our money.  No, we are not going to the police station, and we don't even have to look at each other to agree on that.

Then Cary, in a stroke of tactical brilliance, tries out a new approach.  He says, "A permit for carrying liquor?  That doesn't sound right to me.  Are you sure?"  And when they say, "yes yes, come to station," he just says, "No.  We're not going to the station.  Nope."  The cops are unarmed and have no radio, and Cary is trying to feel out how serious they are about this and whether it's a bluff.  And surprisingly, we see the cops flinch and get a little sad, and we can tell they aren't quite sure what to do now.  They just meekly insist again that we come to the station, and Cary, sensing the advantage, pushes it further.  He says, "No.  We're not going to the station.  Either you let us go, or you take us to the US Embassy.  We want to talk to the US Embassy."  At the mention of the US Embassy the cops flinch more.  Cary's message is understood by everyone involved: 'Okay Mr. Police Officer.  You can play a game with us, but we're not going to make it easy.  We want you to know that if you go through with this, we are going to make this a serious bureaucratic and legal pain in the ass for you.  Plus now you have to know how the US Embassy works.'  So we come to an impasse.  The cops keep insisting that we get in the rickshaw they have hailed and come to the station, and we keep insisting that we want to get the US Embassy involved immediately or no deal.  There are moments when everyone stands there quietly looking around, waiting for something to happen.  No one knows quite what to do.

Late that night, after all this is over, Cary and I sit around parsing all the angles of this encounter as we remember it.  The cops had a big upper hand, not only because they were on home turf, but also because they knew the laws and we didn't, and moreover, they knew that we didn't know the laws, and we knew that they knew, and they knew that we knew that they knew, and all this compounded their advantage.  And in fact, it turns out that they had an even bigger advantage over us than we realized, and this is that it actually is illegal to carry alcohol in Maharashtra without a special permit, even if it is sealed.  So they had legitimate grounds to detain us.  They knew this the whole time and we didn't, and it sort of gave them a rock solid foundation for harassing us.  

However, we were not totally helpless; we had our confidence that we weren't doing anything wrong (misguided but useful to us), and our obstinacy, and our US Embassy ploy, and whatever else we could come up with before the situation ceased to be manageable.  Cary, examining all the angles in retrospect, came up with an interesting question.  What if we had just walked away?  The cops had no weapons, no radio, no hand cuffs, not even a club, and it was dark, and we were three tall young men and they were only two.  Would they have chased us down?  Would they have tried to tackle us?  Cary proposes that the cops would quickly have seen that forcing a violent confrontation with three white guys over a tiny infraction is not worth the risk or the time, and they would have let us go.  It's an interesting possibility, and one that I am very happy to leave completely hypothetical for the rest of my life.  Because the fact of the matter is that we were in a game with the police and we didn't know most of the rules or what was at stake for us or for them.  We didn't even know if we were breaking a real law or not.  Maybe the cops would have let us go because that would be the better decision for them.  On the other hand maybe hurting an Indian cop's pride and challenging him to save face would lead him to do things that weren't strictly "worth it" for him in cool, mathematical terms.  Moreover, there's a good chance that any cop who is accustomed to patrolling and confronting people without weapons and without radios has thought about this possibility before, or maybe even dealt with it, and has already come up with plenty of ways of handling it that we couldn't foresee.  I'd be very interested to know what they are, since I can't imagine them.  Any parents reading this are hereby assured that experimenting on this hypothesis was not ever at any point close to happening.  It's just good conversation.

Back on the street the situation is not resolved and we are getting pretty shaken.  And actually, the cops seem a little shaken too.  They are starting to get embarrassed that they don't speak English very well and have gotten themselves into this situation that they can't really handle, and they are probably starting to worry that this is going to be more trouble then it's worth if the US Embassy gets involved.  I would guess that they are small city cops who have never confronted Americans before and probably don't really know how the US Embassy works or what it can and can't do, or how much trouble they can get in for denying us access to it.  Of course, we don't really know this either, but this is a bluff that seems to be working for us because this time we have the advantage that they are the ones with something to lose if the embassy gets involved, and plus they don't know much about the US Embassy, and we know that they don't know, and they know that they don't know, and we know that they know that we know that they don't know, etc. etc.  

And in the face of all this pressure, the cops soften even further.  They say, "No Hindi?  No Marathi?"  And we say, "no, only English," and they say, "Come to station.  Translator. For Hindi.  Come to station for translate."  So now their game is that we should come to the station to get a good translator so we can sort this out easier.  But we still don't know what's going to happen at the station, and we don't trust them, and we still assume we weren't actually doing anything wrong and that this is just a shakedown.  So I grab a local guy walking by and I ask, "do you speak English?" and when he says "yes" I enlist his help as a translator.  I do this for two reasons.  One is that I want to disable the cops' attempt to get us to the station for language purposes.  The other is that I want to get the situation plugged into the local community's gossip circle.  I figure that since we are foreigners and we are alone we may have seemed at first like some sort of anonymous free zone away from normal rules, and this may be exciting the cops to try and pull off more than they normally would.  I figure that if the situation becomes more public it can't hurt us, it can only keep things the same or push the cops closer to the law.

Our translator has a friendly little chat with them, and then explains to us again what's going on and that they want us to go to the station.  Again we turn down their request, and after some more chatting the magic word finally comes up.  "You will just have to pay some fine," the translator tells us.  Now we are down to "brass tacks" as they say.  This is where the conversation was heading the whole time, and all the back and forth and move counter-move was probably just an elaborate way of evaluating what this will cost.  Cary wants to keep arguing and insisting that this is wrong and our rights are being violated, but I see that the game is now drawing to a close.  All the cards have been shown; it is now clear who stands where and what's what.  We have no more tricks up our sleeve and neither do they, and we are not going to the station.  So the only question left is, "How much is the fine?"   The cops have now to name a price that is high enough that they are satisfied, and yet not so high that we decide we can't pay it and they lose the money, or so high that we feel backed into a corner and decide that we are better off trying to create a huge, gigantic legal headache, which we have shown we are prepared to do and the cops have revealed they do not want to deal with.  And so this elegant calculator, this subtle social abacus of power and disadvantage and value that has been clicking and rearranging itself all through this confrontation, gracefully and finally arrives at its precise conclusion, and the answer comes back through the translator: "1,000 rupees."  This is about $20 dollars.  I make a halfhearted attempt to bargain, and propose that we pay 500 rupees, but the cop brushes it off and stands his ground, and I suddenly realize that this is not just futile, but naive as well.  I was still under the impression at this point--and this was really foolish--that bargaining is what it looks like on TV, where one person simply says a price, and the other simply says a lower one, and they meet in the middle; and I thought that now that the issue of a "fine" was out in the open it was time to bargain.  What I completely failed to recognize was that everything we had just been through was the bargaining; that that's what bargaining is and it had already run it's beautifully logical course and was complete.  What was my silly little proposal in the face of this well-oiled and fine-tuned machinery, which has been balancing power and exchange value for God knows how long now?  Sacrilege, that's what it was.  The cop had no reason to take it seriously, and he didn't.  We paid the 1,000 rupees and left quickly, still shaking.

So were we taken advantage of?  I submit that we were not.  If you want to be pedantic you could call what happened "corruption".  But it's not exactly corruption.  If you want to be realistic and precise, you could maybe call it para-systemic justice.  The actual system, the official system, doesn't really work.  The courts are back-logged for something like 200 years in most of the major cities here, and the police stations don't really receive enough money from the federal government to run themselves properly.  So a practical system for handling these kinds of problems has been hammered out, and it exists alongside the official system--a para-system.  We were introduced to it last night.  Although it has many problems, it is at least somewhat predictable and stable, and that goes a long way when you are just trying to get by.  It is also more efficient than the official system is, in certain respects.  Of course this kind of system isn't always fair, and I'm sure people get screwed by it in terrible ways all the time.  It's not hard for a cop to take money from people who have done nothing wrong at all.  But name me a system that doesn't screw people unfairly.  At least this time, this way was quick and easy, and everyone got what basically amounts to a fair deal.  The police could have taken us into the station and put us through all the legal proceedings, and in the end we probably would have had to pay a fine anyway, but what good would that do anybody?  It wouldn't do us any good, because we would have to pay the same fine with much more hassle, and it wouldn't do the cops any good since they would never see any of that money and these kinds of exchanges are probably how they support their families, given that the salary of an average policeman here is not very high.  Plus there was the unknown US Embassy variable.  So under the circumstances I actually think this is about as well as it could have worked out for everyone involved, and I was very relieved.  We learned some important lessons, we practiced some valuable skills, and in the end we only lost a little bit of money.  

And we got to keep the beer.