I am about to leave Gwalior, which is a town about 2 hours south of Agra. I left APK on Wed 7 March, and while there was no gnashing of teeth or tearing of hair, I did feel quite sentimental to be moving on.
Last time I wrote I was in Chandausi in a cardigan. That much maligned garment - and the waterproof which I had squashed into my bag and resented when I was holding it aloft on the bus - turned out to be manna from heaven when we left the internet place and started walking towards lunch, only for the heavens to open. We cobbled a passing rickshaw guy who was looking pretty keen to get to shelter but was no match for two English lasses who were getting wet (one of whom was wearing a white tunic and therefore within minutes of offending the sensibilities of every passing man, woman and child with her loose and wanton demeanour) (not me, I hasten to add) and once aboard covered ourselves with my waterproof and preserved our modesty. It was a close-run thing. Could have had a diplomatic incident.
In the afternoon we went to Puja beauty parlour, which was brilliant fun. As you will see from the photo, they offer `different kinds of Fracials, Cuttings and Make-Ups in the Right Way`. Keen to prove their claim, I opted for a fracial and was liberally smothered with face cream after face cream, a facepack (applied with a paintbrush), shoulder and upper back massage, and emerged after 40 minutes looking shiny and about 20 years younger. The beauty parlour was equipped with old-fashioned dentist chairs which were very comfortable but obviously designed for patients under 5`2" (an admirable height): every time I had to sit up or lie down I had to scooch a foot back or forward to be able to hinge from the right place.
The main event for the last week of my time at APK was Holi (I am afraid to admit that I was wrong to assume that it was in fact called `Holy`: the Indian newspaper had indeed spelt the name of one of the four major Hindu festivals correctly: it is called `Holi` after `Holika` who as far as I can make out was a very wicked woman who for various reasons sat in a fire with a magic baby: she was burnt to death but the baby survived). I went with another of the group to Bilari to buy paints. This was a pretty complicated exercise as our Hindi is limited to numbers and colours, and the guy we decided to buy from had no English at all, it required all our miming and Hindi to convey that we wanted water-soluble paint powder for supersoakers, not powder for throwing - throwing powder! bah, that`s for girls - and enough to make 10l of each colour. I never imagined that my ubiquitous water bottle would play such an important part in stockpiling weapons. Not only did we leave with enough paint to daub the firth of forth all colours of the rainbow, but we provided 20 minutes of free entertainment for passers-by.
Holi was spread over 3 days: on the first day was the lighting of the fire (like true tourists we insisted that we wanted to witness this event, although Aarti (the project visitor co-ordinator) was slightly confused as to why, given that it as basically someone putting a match to a pile of dry twigs no bigger than two fridges on tope of each other and takes place at 4 in the morning). As it happened it was rescheduled this year due to a lunar eclipse so the lighting happened at about 19:30 - we made 3 trips through the village to see if `it was happening yet`. I feel we might have been a bit of an overhead that night.
Now that I`ve mentioned the lunar eclipse, I should warn you that on no account should you i. approach feral monkeys when a there`s a full moon and ii. bare your teeth as them. This might sound obvious but I had a very near miss from a rabid and bloody demise when I was heading back to my room one evening, and would like my friends to learn from my narrow escape. The monkeys had been out in force all day, littering the terrace, gardens and roof, playing and nosing about the dining area and being far bolder than usual - I sensed a demonic air about them which apparently was due to the full moon. (By the way, monkey in Hindi is `bunder` and the stick you use to scare them off is a `dunder`, so I was advised to carry a `bunder dunder` with me when I was leaving the terrace. I liked that). I was heading back to my room one eveing and encountered a monkey on the ledge outside. I was going to have to walk within under a metre of it to get past, so I thought (per my last post) `this monkey will not be interested in me, I have no food and wish it no harm, I may pass in safety`. I was a little alarmed therefore when the monkey fixed his beady eye on me and got up onto all fours when I was gliding past. So I stopped, fixed my beady eye on him and bared my teeth. Whereupon he opened his mouth very wide so I could see all his fangs, made a hissing sound, turned his eyes a fiery red, and got into a jumping position aiming directly for my throat. I screamed like a girl and two men rushed out of the room I`d just come from and bellowed and threw stones (at the monkey) until it ran off. I was trying to remember why I had thought it a good idea to bare my teeth, as this was clearly the thing which had antagonised my would-be attacker - I think that Claire (girl I shared room with) had mentioned it as a possible way to scare monkeys off. I have since concluded that nothing scares monkeys off. I also learned that Claire had discovered this method of `defence` when she was brushing her teeth one evening and therefore had toothpaste foam around her mouth. The monkey probably thought she was rabid and did a runner. I had no toothpaste foam around my mouth and therefore presumably just looked quite absurd and possibly a little threatening. My fangs were certainly no match for the monkey`s.
Paint throwing was supposed to start at about 9am on Sunday 4. Ha. The PVs met at 8am to prepare our paint and load our supersoakers, and by 8:15 I had had my first jug of paint thrown over my head. Happily it was a cold morning as the sun wasn`t out, and the water used to mix the paint was also cold, so this was a lovely start to the day. It all went a little nuts after that: some bright spark started to use buckets, so I was soon absolutely dripping and regretting my decision not to wear a vest under my extremely lightweight and not remotely water-resistent tunic and trousers. I fear I was not decent. Another high spot was when the local lads who were `playing Holi` with us whipped out some cans of spray foam (someone later said they`d seen the label of one of them come off and underneath it said `Insect Killer Spray`) and I had to leave the field when I got both eyes filled with the stuff and couldn`t see anything. Trying to clean out your eyes when your hands are covered in paint is a bit like trying to get egg yolk out of egg white. I retired completely after about 40 minutes, freezing cold, and stood on the terrace in safety and took pictures of the others. It took 3 showers to get all the paint off but there was something very inclusive about walking around for the next couple of days with hands, hair and feet stained - everywhere I looked other people were stained the same: even mules, dogs and cows had spots on them.
About half an hour after the throwing stopped, we had chai and kheer (sweet rice pudding - absolutely gorgeous) and then the band arrived again and we went down to dance / watch the dancing. It was brilliant - the drumming especially was really powerful and energetic - and the dancing (men only) seems so full of joy and passion and arrogance, it`s fantastic to watch.
The following day was a festival of dancing: groups from the surrounding villages arrived in Amarpurkashi to sing and dance in a contest. There was a market and a ferris wheel thing (about 10 feet high with four tiny carriages which I would have had trouble getting into myself), and lots and lots of noise. We were the only women in the whole crowd, and were the source of much fascination. I noticed that the intent and unabashed staring doesn`t really register any more; there is certainly nothing malevolent in it which makes a big difference. If someone stares at you at home, chances are they are trying to start something (says Lyds with her enormous experience of street fighting), but here it is simply massive curiosity. (Claire and I went shopping on our last day, and I counted 35 people crowded around us at one booth. They must be fascinated by the number of biscuits we buy, and probably quite shocked at our poor nutrition). Some of the dancers were dressed up as women (one even had fake breasts!) which apparently was representative of the `beautiful temptress` or something, although I also heard that this was a ploy to attract the biggest crowd. The songs were all basically the same, telling the story of Holi I think, and the dances consisted of lots of jumping, clapping, trotting around with hands joined in a chain, all with the band in the middle playing drums and various other percussion instruments. It got pretty mental later on, basically because a lot of the men were drinking and getting a bit rowdy. Craig, one of the PVs, had some trouble extricating himself from the clutches of one guy who was cross-eyed from over-indulgence and wanted him to join their dancing group. I don`t think he would have come back in one piece had he joined them.
The last day came as all days come, and I spent a very happy 2 hours in the school with Mr Sandal talking about Emma. It was very sad to say goodbye to him - I really enjoyed our talks and he is a really engaging, thoughtful, passionate guy who is quite frustrated with resolving the question of `what he should be doing with his life`. This sets him apart from a lot of the other local people that I met, who don`t seem to question their situation and wonder about how they could improve their lot - or even conceive that their lot could change. I am not being naive here, I know that for some people there is little to nothing that they could change. But there is not the logical thinking pattern in Amarpurkashi which we are used to - are trained in - in the UK. We are taught to question, discuss, imagine, challenge. The kids in India (at least in Amarpurkashi and places like it) are not. They take dictation, they learn the answers for their exams by rote rather than learning the reasoning, and they learn the opinions and analysis of their literature papers by learning the equivalent of York Notes by heart. I wonder what the impact of this on their real lives is - can they conceive of a life other than that they can see in front of them, being lived by their families and friends? Can they see the things in those lives that they can change or influence, by imagining something better or different? If you are told what to think and what to write throughout your whole education, when do you develop the skill to form your own opinions, or conceive that such a thing is possible or desirable? Without reading, whether it be novels or factual books or newspapers, how do you learn what could be or gain the objectivity to look at your own life to think how it could be different?
[Lyds climbs down from her high horse, which is having trouble balancing on the small soapbox she has provided, adjusts her chunnee which has flopped over one shoulder pulling the front of her kurta askew, and leaves the stage