Ma ma and Albino Geckos

It seems I have not been able to sit myself down and write any sort of coherent chronicle of my past week in India. So here is an attempt at a skeleton.

For the first 5 days here I was in a barely contained fugue state of panic at the heat and humidity. It was almost all I could feel or think about. Thankfully, that has passed and my body has acclimated. My mind has also acclimated to being in a near-constant state of dripping sweat. And I don't need to worry, as I would at home, about insane body odor, as being olfactorily aware of other people in this climate is the unavoidable norm.

Monday through Friday, I have three hours of class in the afternoon, one hour of one-on-one yoga and two hours immediately after of one-on-one Carnatic singing. However, after a few days of sleeping way past sunrise, I finally decided to start hauling out of bed for daily yoga class at 7:30 in the morning. About 13 to 15 of us practice crammed into a space which is basically a large cement floor walled in on 3 sides. The yoga feels sooo good, and the relative breezy quiet of the morning, along with the exertion-induced calm, help my mind sit more easily and lightly.

After an hour of this, I feel like continuing to sit, but if I do this, I'll miss breakfast and be starving by lunch. So I run to breakfast with the rest of the class. There are about 20 students here, all women (or as a friend put it, the V** squad) all sitting at one long table, with the embarrassingly attentive staff sitting at two smaller tables on either side of us. Taking every meal en masse is a bit exhausting, and I find myself wishing almost daily that the format were a bit more like a meditation retreat, with some or all of the meals being taken in silence. Going from yoga to group chat is a rough transition, especially given my extreme non-morning-person-ness. But the folks here are good to great, and I'm letting myself sit in silence when I feel the need.

After one week of eating with my right hand, I think I'm getting the hang of it. The first week, I was basically picking the food up, lifting it up above my head, tilting my head back, and kind of dropping the food into my mouth, with an inevitable 1/6 to 1/8 falling past my mouth down onto the banana leaf we use as plates. Oops. I'm finally realizing that I just have to use more of my hand and kind of shovel the food into my mouth. I've gotten a few explicit or silent lessons from a few of the Indians, so by the time I leave, I should be able to get all the food directly in my mouth.

Speaking of which--the food rocks!!! So much so that I don't miss meat. The occasional lust for a hamburger or burrito does wander through the old brain, but really, it's alright. It's difficult to imagine that it will be me, 7 weeks from now, who will be providing the hopefully delicious vegetarian meals for hungry students at the center in France.

But back to the food here. I had no idea there were so many varieties of bread in India. In the States, I've only seen naan and dosa. Yummy delicious bread and fruit in the morning, with one chutney and chai. Lunch is the main meal, consisting of rice, bread, curry, a number of chutneys, and usually some sort of vegetable salad. So so good. Unfortunately, I have my one-on-one yoga class directly after lunch, so I really should not eat at all, but this is impossible, both due to the quality of the food and the fact that I would keel over if I didn't.

Chai again at 5 with some snack that is usually gone by the time I arrive. Then dinner, again, bread and more chutney. There have been 3 birthdays in the week since I arrived, so we have had tiny bits of cake and ice cream/coke floats a number of times as well.

The only thing missing (other than meat and red wine) is coffee. Coffee. Coffee. The chai almost makes up for this, but......It seems there is coffee in Chennganur, the nearest large town, so an expedition is pending. I was there this weekend for some clothes, and the music store is also there, so a good browse is in order.

Anyway, morning is yoga, breakfast, then back home for singing practice for my afternoon class. Then lunch, another hour of yoga......the teacher is amazing, or so I hear/suspect/experience in the morning class. But somehow, most of my one-on-one class has been the teacher and I talking about anything and everything. Well, ti started that way. The first day was fine. Life philosophy and such. The second day I asked him about his past and his studies. This was good and interesting but somehow diverged into his personal life, his thoughts about marriage, etc. I gradually fell into silence and by the third day, he was talking, entirely of love, marriage, girls in past classes who had wanted to marry him, his willingness to marry, etc. By this point, I was no longer enjoying our conversations and just felt mightily uncomfortable and squirmy. This is the only dark spot on my experience so far. I think my swami has a crush, or wants me to have a crush, or something. So I'm trying to figure out what to do about this as I desperately want to study yoga, and he is the only teacher here. We did do yoga Thursday and Friday, though he talked through all my asanas, making it difficult to focus only on my breathing. You'd think he would know that, as a teacher and swami and all.

Then, after yoga (listening), my voice teacher comes out and we have class outside in the yoga area. Singing is great/exhausting/challenging and many more things. Two hours of singing fairly non-stop, the pedagogy being teacher sings, student repeats, faster and faster, then with longer and longer phrases. I have now been given 3 songs in 3 different ragas (which correlate roughly to modes, or more simply but inaccurately for the non-musical out there, scales).

Then dinner and home for more practice, reading and sleep.

That is the outline of my days here. I will tell you more about the feel of being here next time. The banana, coconut, mango, papya and jackfruit trees, the temples, candles and incense, the new birds who are always singing marvelously, and all the other sounds I don't know, the geckos who continue to startle me every night when I turn the lights on and see their sudden movement on the wall out of the corner of my eye.

As for people here, overall, they are friendly to neutral, which is a welcome change from my experiences in East Asia, where people ranged from friendly to outright staring and yelling, which was still usually friendly but in a really awkward way that made me want to crawl into a hole. But the second flip-side to this experience is that we are extremely sheltered at the school, and even though I go through the town every day, the language barrier and cultural separation (which is very gendered), as well as the fact that I know my stay here will be short, are limiting the possibility for any sort of meaningful interaction with people. It seems most interactions will be limited to transactions.

But all is well and I am happy, if not confused at times, both practically and existentially. :)