Here it goes.
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Letters in the Indian Sand: A notebook by Sam S. Chereskin
When a friend handed me this notebook, it was a gift. I mean for it to stay that way. The subjects of delivery will surely change, but the object, this object, will stay the same. It is my gift to be passed forward, on, over, backward, under and so on. Read it please. It is my newest three months.
The twenty-eighth day of June, 2009
When a friend knows a friend it is possible for one to make the other cry. When Alex handed me this notebook in her bedroom I started to pleasurably tear. There was a not with it in both English and Hindi that explained that it was hand made. I felt its weight and marked its marbleized cover. It wasn’t until I shuffled through the pages that I swooned though.
I saw the thick textured quality of this book’s ruby-salmon leaves, and I was instantly brought to say, “I love the third world!” Alex laughed. She had spent some collection of dimes on a present that caused her good friend’s eyes to glisten. I think we both enjoyed the moment.
She purchased this notebook in India, though I know not exactly where, and now it is going back. It is in new hands—the hands it was intended for, but I do not think she expected me to fill it directly above soil contiguous with those collections of ground on which she walked. She has told me some of the ways in which India is definable as a land of contrast, though I am sure I will discover many more. These are the things I plan to fill this notebook with.
I told several friends that I am excited by the prospect of my new experiences. I put great stock in relationships. I am fully cognizant of those connections, old & blossoming, that I left behind. But, I am even more mindful of the interpersonal links that are now within my power to engender.
I put great stock in relationships. They are the things that make me the happiest. Accruing new ones is my rush; it is my drug. I realize that this, by its very nature, makes me expansive. And, I realize in turn that this can make me difficult to live with. It cost me more than I knew I could bear once before. She called it an issue of boundaries. This is not wholly the subject of my writings here, but I bring it up because I am still running without care for boundaries. I know I break some, stretch others, and set up new ones all the time. I like boundaries, social ones, because they are a test each and every time. They are puzzles where new connections are the prize. They are new challenges where I get to see how far I can push the limits. I am intoxicated.
I go to India with this mindset. The cultural and working dynamics I will encounter are my difficulties now. I hope to earnestly and passionately engage these new strata in order to find new faces, new hands to be shook, new favors to be given & received, and new good times to be had.
These things, as well as the letters that I scribble, are the lines I will draw. They are the lines that I am always drawing. They are the lines that I will, this time, draw in the Indian sand.
I am currently on the plane. I have a little under an hour before we land. It has been my longest leg to date, but it has also been my most enjoyable. My parents, in their unwavering generosity, provided me with a first class berth. The sights, sounds and amenities were all agreeable. I ate a second dinner while aboard. It was served in five courses, and I began and ended the meal with sherry.
I think I have a taste for fortified wine. This time around I ordered it on a whim, but its amber color, nutty mid-levels, and subtle viscosity proved to be exactly what I wanted. I was instantly transported back to Crete and last august. Transported back to a dinner table lined with faces, and adorned with frittata. I had encouraged those around me to purchase leeks that day. They looked at me through humoring eyes, but thanked me only hours later. It was my suggestion, the cook confessed, that solidified the entrée’s standing as great. I remember the compliment fondly – as well as my accompanying smile & blush – as parts of a wonderful evening. My then current company rewarded me by allowing me to be the sole consumer of the fortified wine they had purchased. It came in a reused, unsealed water bottle and cost as little as would be imaginable for a homemade wine to cost. I believe they bought it at a gas station. They scoffed it after their first glasses, and seemed perplexed that I kept sneaking servings as they moved on to finer fares.
It too was nutty, and it made the night equally so. After dinner, my ex-girlfriend and I retreated to the lowered yard outside our basement room. We snuck a cigarette and Looked out over the Mediterranean and the mountain on which Zeus was purportedly born. The sky hung low with fullness and the unabashed stars that I remember. My seat on this flight folds down into a bed. I slept for twelve of the fifteen hours. This is what I thought about.
I told a friend that the first thing I am going to do upon disembarkation is feel some patch of unadulterated soil. To know its weight, color, and feel. Twenty minutes until we land, I figure there is an hour until I get my first chance to do just that. Hold for real-time commentary: we’re in line to land. We’re circling. It may take a little longer.
As quickly as it began, my life of luxury has ended. I am outside of my residence. It’s almost midnight here whereas my friends and family back in the U.S. are probably sitting down for their afternoon meals. My residence, the building, is austere in a way only middle-income buildings can be. It is entirely made of formed concrete. Tope & Ivory. The interior is a lead-based sky blue on the ground floor; the rest is a monotone beige that alternates between flat and high-gloss. The “Indian Social Institute: Residence.” Home.
I have no A/C in my room, but I got the stamped aluminum ceiling fan to work. It is, at first impression, not pleasant. IT seems palatable however. It is my base of operations—my only space in the world—and I am sure it will grow on me.
The building is 300 yards removed from the main street that my driver and I came in on. In that distance, traversed by vans small and upright, we passed a pitch’s worth of players – 30 deep a side. People were congregated by the main street. Their conversation far less impoverished than themselves. Then the sides of the streets quieted down, and those there were mostly asleep. They lined stoops to gated properties, the ground with blankets, and seemingly homemade cots. It is very hot here at the moment – 80 degrees at night and over 100 during the day – and I wonder if those asleep three to a cot are under the street lamps to escape the heat of some of the low-lying, semi-permanent homes that are about. Some seem to have such refuge, others do not.
It is very quiet out here as I sit on the ground. I changed out of slacks and into shorts and my England jersey. The only sounds are those of the night-time bugs, a distant motor bike, and the hushed conversation of a family to my left. I take that back, a stray dog is barking at me. It won’t go away, and its low moan is probably distributing those around. It finally walked away. Seemed like two minute. It kept up its half-hearted speech even as its tail rounded behind the peeling trailer to my right. I wonder what’s next for it. I hope the people to my left, the family I spoke of above, is not worried or harried by my presence. The man sat up, but I doubt he will say anything to me let alone come nearer. I don’t see him leaving his cot.
It is a mix of florescent and sodium light here on the ground. I am sitting in a pool where the white and deep yellow mix, and I can see my four legs cast as shadows on either side. I want to fill these pages with contrasts, with thoughts, I told myself. I am seemingly lost in exposition, but… Five dogs just ran by – the same one stopped to sound of at me again, but this time he was easily assuaged. He absconded bounding silently away, past the light and to where I cannot see him.
The drive to the hostel, I think, was elucidating [Jagged line on the page with note: dog just barked and scared the shit out of me] of what I think this whole trip will be like. The road was full of cars. The sides of the highways adorned with flashing LEDs. There was no clear pattern. Trucks were adorned with hand painted notifications, “Please Honk.” They seemed not to be able to see around themselves, so instead rely on the audible announcements of others to get bearing. The notifications seemed hardly necessary as car, truck, SUV, motorcycle and auto-rickshaw all added to the chorus without prompting. They traffic flowed as a nebulous, interweaving channel out of the airport and into the city. The lines demarcating lanes were visible, but not observed. My driver most often drive directly over one, moving left and right as he pushed around and forward. It was not scary, but I feel it was an allegory for the place. It is a place of rough parameters – even when they are finite. It is a place of guidelines more than rules. A place where those-who-can speak up.
I am back inside now. It is still my first night. The large ant like things were getting to me. I never liked bugs. I have told my boss I will be into work at 9:30 tomorrow morning. I spoke to her on the driver’s cell phone. I couldn’t understand much of what her rapid fire inflections directed, but I understand that I will catch an auto-rickshaw to work on the morrow. She had delivered a letter with directions to my non-English speaking driver. He gave it to me when I got in his van. They have paid for my room through July 5th at the moment. I will take a Nyquil and put my jet-lagged ass to bed.
I figured out exactly how indulgent my life in the states is. I took a shower using a bucket and a large plastic cup. Wet, lather, wet. Save the soap. Push it around with your hand to conserve the gently exfoliating dove bar. Practical concerns.
Ever try to play cricket with two young Indian children in a dingy Delhi side street? I recommend it, but bring the Neosporin. I was wearing my dad’s dodgy foam flip flops. They were still wet from the shower, and they made soft moist noises to those who cared to listen. Young Boy A, slightly older and more clad than Young Boy B, hit a gettable grounder to my left. I broke, my sandal broke, and I broke. My right foot slipped past my sandal’s tong and I fell straight into a puddle to my left. How little lateral motion I achieved I think was a noteworthy physical phenomenon in itself. I seemed to rotate 90 degrees in the air and fall straight down. YB-B roared with laughter. I had mud up and down my left calf. YB-A wouldn’t let me go to bat after that display, and I had passed up pitching on my first go. His bat was homemade, and had a plastic big dollar sign on the hilt. It made me smile. I adjourned smiling while still cursing their laughter. It was pretty funny. Where the fuck are the antibiotics? I would bleed in an alley on the first day. I would.
“What’s next?” – President Josiah Bartlet
There is a line in a movie about writing that I keep thinking of. An old Sean Connery asks why it is that the words we craft for ourselves are so much better than the ones we write for others. I have been pondering this line’s logical extensions for days now.
Whenever I write I am on the edge of a knife between being my own greatest audience, and writing for another that is equally great but ill defined. When writing for others I exercise constraint – I self–regulate the breadth of my expression. I do not share dirty secrets, I do not say everything that comes to mind. I try to say what others might want to hear. I tray to say what it is I think might make them, those I might present a work to, like me. Fuck it. Let them understand me instead. Let them know the weight of my collection, not just my mind’s razor’s edge. This book is to distant from a story that could make me friends. Not for seven thousand miles and three months. Instead, this book, right now, is my only friend. It is a tangible extension, and reflexive exercise of my own self-reliance. For three months, my words will be for me. I am summoning the courage to do that.
For me to be writing this, and saying the about, I think it is apparent that I am feeling the pressures of my solitude. I don’t think that there is a substance, living or otherwise, in this world that does not bend, shrink, contort, or break when exposed to enough pressure. I do not hear the sounds of my own voice often. But I am not close to breaking. Far from me to suggest that I am the stuff of diamonds, but I am currently exposed to enough heat and a rising number pf pressures. [Line omitted] My skin is shinier here than it is at home – with sweat, rain, and what salves I may need – and I have only been here a day and a half. Time as always will be the ultimate judge of the fruits of transformation. I’ll continue peering into the looking glass to see what reflections I may gleam.
There are choice revelries to be had that can only truly exist while alone. Social bearing causes you to up-end reflections that should have been longer, or to justify your interest and why it exists at all. I LIVE IN A LAND WITH NATURALLY OCCURRING GECKOS. I was in church of this night’s water bottle. I walked outside my residence and stopped in rigor at the sight of two ghostly bodies below me. Three steps down were two cream colored geckos, six inches long a piece. They scurried as I took a step. Off the green granite stairs and back into a tope world they ran. Past the yellowing line of potted plants and up the beige cement of my building. They stopped about seven feet up, a foot above me, and I found them again once I had rounded the shallow entry-way corner. Pure cream with domed dinner plate eyes of reflective black, that’s what they were. Eyes like the glossy undersides of dishes one would eat pasta from. I do not know if they were a profound albatross- beneficial at the first line, detrimental by the last – but they were whips that crack me to realize that New Delhi id not just a different place with different social constructions and rules. They helped me realize that, on a deeply personal level, Delhi, the difference, is more fundamental than that.
Pause. Let the profundity seep in; because I’m about to flippantly take some away from the pathetically small stores that I have conjured. Sure the cows and the bats could have tipped me off that Indian fauna, and whatever cockamamie fundaments it may speak of, would be different. Maybe it was the fact that I saw the lizards in a place and at a time when I was sure to be the sole audience. Maybe I appreciated them in much the same way I liked the Shins before they were a thing. Profound reflections, deepness in solitude blah, blah, blah… My big question of the night: If everyone stopped to admire the Indian geckos, and I could see them do it, would I still hear volumes resounding in those deep black eyes? (Best if last clause is uttered with a southern flavor, and a black-lunged dash of Marlboro Man ® age 50.) I thought about trying to answer that question. I think I can, but it seems an unrewarding venture.
I had my first day of work yesterday. I finally have some bearing on what it is that I’ll be doing. I have one week to familiarize myself with, broadly put, Indian Labor and the issues there in. The two weeks after that will be filled with meetings as I meet with representatives from all the major central trade unions and local unions in Delhi. I will then to into ‘the field’ for three weeks. I will gain on the ground perspectives about labor struggles in five areas. These I believe will be selected by my boss. I already know the cities, but have not been told which struggles I will be looking at in each place. I’ll come back to Delhi after that, and have two weeks to compile case reports before leaving for another fortnight’s field work. My tenure in India then closes with a three-week stint back in Delhi where I will generate my final comprehensive report. I have my concerns, but I will save voicing them until later.
Work was fine. The people were nice, although variously pronounced language barriers left me wanting conversation. I’m developing a crush on my boss. I’ll tell you about that and the coming of the monsoon later.
And so it continues. More work, more laughter.
Pallavi has a wonderful laugh. She closes her eyes, and smiles wide. Her face seems to shorten; its oval closes towards a circle, and her eyes loose some of their vertical dimension. Shorter. My distance to her, physically unmoving, too feels the condensing, collapsing, pressures of that laugh. I’m unembarrassed to confess that I want to close that distance. Until then, I’ll continue enjoying the sensation of proximity. Her laugh creates a causal circle, witnessing it inadvertently has made me want to cause it.
She is smart, personable, and attractive. I want to describe her full black hair, her defined but soft cheeks and the infectiousness of her smile. I cannot do them justice however.
My infatuations characteristically find voice quickly, but things are different here. I am reticent to simply ask her out as I would back home. I do not know what sexual or romantic tension even feels like in Delhi. I wonder why she keeps smiling like that. Doe she lean in to talk to me over the desk because…? Does she doe that with others? I do not know how to proceed, so I just don’t. Forgetting other considerations, she is my boss after all.
She took me in her car yesterday. It was only a short ride to the phone store down the street. Mandicandan came with. While he has proven to be very nice, at the time I was wondering why he joined us. It very well could have been that he accompanied us in order to provide Pallavi a dark skinned male escort. He did not say much, nor did he come in. That said, he is the one who offered me a place in his home. I brought up the excursion because it was on this trip that the Delhi skies opened up for the first time this season.
It was the type of prelude that would have startled any American I know. The wind played its section with bursting gusto pushing high notes past our ears, and lows through the dust and trees; and the horns of cars found a trailing dissonance arrhythmic as Schubert or Davis’ “In a Silent Way.” Sand played the strings’ staccato. One, two, three, in my eye. Each note built the pressure and then…
I could tell you that the rain then started. I could try to describe the several hours of pea colored skies and the gallons that fell on everything. I could tell you how I was wearing the exact wrong pair of shoes for such a day. All of that, on its own, is unremarkable however.
Delhi had been waiting for the monsoon. It was a week and a half late, and temperatures were well above 110 for a week. I was in India for only 20 hours before news that it was going to rain started to bounce around the office. The idea of a monsoon, a big word to unknowing western ears, was intimidating. You could see the muscles in the others cheeks tensing though. Like capacitors charging and discharging the excited birthday like anxiety crescendo-ed with smiles in the prelude I described above. The weather was awesome, but the combination of natural and social climates was more impressive. Most people got out of the rain, but no one was afraid of it. People got wet and kept going in a way that far more tempered than the frantic suited man or the giddy lovers dodging through rarity. I was next to a mother and young daughter for a while. It was explained to me that this was her first rain. Oh how she screamed, and threw herself; oh how she smiled and danced in her mothers arms. I look back now, and think that that was a tremendous first day.
Mandicandan had me over to his place Wednesday night. We drank cheap Indian whiskey and talked about women, our lives, Indian labor, and Marx for hours. He gave me my first ride on a motorcycle. He has offered me a place to stay in his home while his wife is away for several months. He is a Ph.D. student at JNU. I’m glad I’ve read as much Marx and Engles as I have. I might have convinced him, just barely, to accept that its possible to challenge Marx as a guiding social philosophy. No small feat, I guess, over a half liter of drinks. I ate with my hand in unabashed Indian fashion for the first time. I took my whiskey warm as to avoid the ice cubes. He messed up while cooking – he poured so much pepper in that we had to vacate the house for some minutes. We ran out sneezing, coughing, and laughing. We stayed up too late for me to be able to safely get home that night, so I slept over. I caught an auto back home early the next morning. I don’t know if I will live there.
I called one of Adtnu’s friends today, Thursday, after work. I’ll meet up with her and a group of her friends either tomorrow or Saturday night. It should be very nice. Adtnu forgot and said I was 22. I won’t correct him. I talked to her on the way to a national garden on Lodi Rd. near where I am staying. It was magnificent. Pampered yes, but not corralled by pavements and their invisible boundaries. You were welcome to walk through the trees. You were welcome to explore the 600 year old buildings. Families were everywhere. I saw a young child take its first 30 foot journey to her waiting mother. The grandparents were ecstatic, but looked at my smile wearily. I didn't mind. I saw a few young boys ineffectually playing cricket. Old men jogging. More people simply sitting and talking.
I explored an 15th century mausoleum and adjoining mosque. The base stones were iron rust red, decorated with carved sandstone and slate. The koranic inscriptions on the mosque to the right were breathtaking. The geometric intricacy of patterns uniform and sprawling. The swirling of scripture and floral designs. All carved sandstone and in the walls. I'd seen things like this before. You see something new each time. They were carvings that provided ladders with rungs just large enough for one's digits to fit, and the fingers of one's mind easily climb the thirty feet to the sparrows nests above. My eyes were drawn around as if by a string. It would have been hard to stop had I not been interrupted by a man asking for money for his school for the deaf and blind. I stepped back out under the sky.
I put my stuff down where the stairs came up. It was a 15-foot drop to my left, and the stairs trailed off in an L, down and left, below my legs in the near distance. I wrapped my backpack’s strap around my right leg and laid down. I closed my eyes. After a couple of minutes on the warm stones, knowing the sun was setting, I looked around once more. The moon was hanging low over the dome. The building seemed like it was mine for the next couple minutes. There were birds everywhere.
I wrote these silly things while thinking on a girl back home.
“I’ll explore other places tomorrow,” the boy said to moon.
“I’ll climb other mosques tomorrow,” he said through thronging sparrows’ swoon.
I’ll enjoy other purpling skies, and the aftermaths of sun warmed dreams soon.
But right now, I’m only thinking of you.
The moon peaked over a 15th century temple dome. Hawks, sparrows, Indian magpies are all loudly sharing song. Families are leaving - shame its just as the park really came alive.
The dynamism of those remaining can be seen to be self-sustaining as the human tide is waning. This old Mosque. The park is alive.
I came home after that. I bought a water bottle, and walked straight into bed. I was exhausted. I had been drifting off all day.
