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.