Food Grade Silver

Waiting for the mail

2009-10-16T18:04:00.000-07:00

Morning sunshine through a second floor window
9:30 am, post coffee, already dressed
Talking with my father about
the day. How to make a day.

I am waiting for a cheque in the mail,
he says. The mortgage is due tomorrow.
Unemployed four months, the
insurance covers mortgage and groceries.
Stops the hemorrhage, he says.

I calculate how much cash I have on hand.
It’s not enough. Can I get a
wire transfer from my bank in
New York? Is that possible from away?
Half a life ago we sat in
this southern-facing sun and
counted twenties. Handing over
babysitting money for the house.

10:30 passes. The mailman is on the street,
dad says. I am unable to type, to read.
I put my head down on my knees.
11:00 and he passes the house.
No mail. Dad leaves.
Comes running back. I met him
on the walk! Spotted with sweat
he bikes off to the bank.

Travels and travels

2009-06-07T18:23:00.001-07:00

A point on the circle.

The season of expecting.
Delicate excitement, precise plans. Burning
things and counting hours. Smell
approaching peak for
youness, candle just before the start.

The season of arriving. The days
of here, of time and stories
Unreturned calls and proper meals.

One next, not lately
blush of coming turns to
being, and the season opens
spaces. Other people, sleep
at different times.

Then again season of leaving.
Rapid pack and run for planes.
Calmness shaped
hole in the universe.

Soon resigned and calling
friends. Season of running,
waking early, working late.
Hidden rites of girly grooming.
Wondering on civil war,
Watching news of airplanes
lost over the sea.

This is the most familiar season
secretly suspecting I am
better far away.
Deep reserves of waiting
day by day following
you moving back and forth
and far away.

public in transport

2009-05-17T10:40:00.000-07:00

You take it running
The M 13 is artery and vein
Home, garden, tea
stolen toilet paper from
convention space mid route.

The M 13 has a heart beside the numbers
Painted red, most likely.
Five men in the driving cabin, one driving
Two reading a paper,
One yelling the stops
One sitting in his lap.

One woman in window seat
Turns from breeze and gestures with her arm

A handspan from elbow
Her forearm bones in high relief
Take quarter circle turn
Bone meets bone improbably
Blue against her brown, tattooed numbers

We watch the milk stands,
Carts of grapes and wedding lights
A bus above it all

In Bombay the trains breathe
Sighing gently dripping people
Sitting knee to standing knee.
One women in the middle
Sways alarmed. Quiet face
Not joking in this world
Of women before dinner.
One hand overhead
Grips rail and single cauliflower
White against the din.

The seven taxi cabs of DC

2009-05-17T10:38:00.000-07:00

Georgetown bar has green beer
Not on St. Patrick’s day
Tasting of water and full of
Fresh-faced boys with salmon shorts
And blue polo shoulders.
Sweet lonely gay boy sits beside
Tall girl in expensive, ugly dress.

How many balls are they coming from,
We ask ourselves.

2 am in the streets
String of cabs drop them off
First cab won’t unlock his door.
Where are you going, he asks.
Where are you going.
I turn around and walk away.

Second one opens his door
Says he won’t take me.
Slow second pass. I’m not sure
You’re allowed to do that, I say.

His car is running hot, he points.
Don’t you drive? 94828 is his tag.
If you see him in the street, tell him
He does not poo gold.

Third taxi takes me in and nods.
Sliding over, I find some girl with the
brain power of a Roomba has left everything
on the seat. I hand keys, card, licence
to the driver. He apologizes as I get out
He turns around to find her.

Fifth cab just behind the fourth
won’t unlock the door. I have a pick up,
he says. I cross the street and stand
On the lighted stretch just off the bridge.
Thinking of how I ride to work
Every day this way, free and powerful
On my bike beating buses up the hill.

Sixth cab opens his door and I sit down.
Same guy as the fifth! You had a pick up
Says me. I’ll drop you closer for free, says he.
Out I get and almost out loud tell the world
I am too old for this.
Suddenly thankful in my weary cells
To not be too drunk, and to have known
Greater taxi driving assholes than he.

Seventh cab this afternoon
All my worldly (three month) goods
waiting in the front room. Won’t pull over
to the curb, asks just how much stuff
I’m talking about. A lot, I nod,
But all packed up nicely.
No trouble at all.
“My laundry is still in my trunk.
God bless you.” And on he drives
into darkening sky of storm.

One month by the numbers

2009-04-19T11:37:00.000-07:00

So many varieties of not like yourself

So you’re staying away
A month or more

One month with lots of time
Reading about the Lebanese civil war,
Making bread that takes
Three rises, all different temperatures
Maybe meditating
Maybe working just too hard

One month by the numbers

Two episodes of frozen pipes
2 million people on the Mall
2 chinese food visits
5 fire trucks out last night
1 package of hashbrowns eaten
1 fall from a bike
1 cycle past a presidential limo (confirmed)
1 L of beer consumed at Saloon. Classy
17 min average a day spent in procrastination, v 13 min a day for news
2 grapefruit eaten. I forgot how good grapefruits are
4 hours in skype video. All at once
$11 owed to friends. Probably more.
30 seconds on my head

Learned
Where water comes from in DC
What sunrise looks like over the Capital
Rumi is really a good poet. Really good
Bread takes a long time, but it’s worth it.
They still make rolling pins out of trees in Vermont
Spanish. None, actually. Got mixed up with the French and neither went anywhere
How to teach people how to treat me. Not really.
Oliver Schroer is lovely
I get things ready to mail, and then I forget
Not all jumbo slices are created equal
I am finally bored of beans

Life progress in park

2009-04-19T10:33:00.000-07:00

Dog park then small kids
Playground, sandbox, to big kids
Climber to beer hall

what can we do

2009-04-06T18:37:00.000-07:00

The calls came late, and I thought it was from her so I didn’t pick it up. After the second I turned off the ringer. Over morning coffee I listened to the three messages, all from Gavin, saying there wasn’t anything specific to say, but call him back as soon as possible in the morning. The third message was from the landline in Toronto; in the archeology of misery going back to the house is the deepest muck of danger.

The backstory. While my grandpa was having a heart valve replaced, my father went to Halifax to take care of his mother. While he was out my mother slipped on the way to the liquor store and could not get up. 3:30 pm on a Thursday, give or take. The people in the park called an ambulance but she wouldn’t go to the hospital. The police took her home. She gave them my brother Owen’s number in Guelph, who called Gavin, who actually lives close enough to meet the police in the house.

The middle of the story sounds like Rice Krispies, or maybe bubble wrap. Rice Krispies is what your skin sounds like when you have punctured a lung and air is leaking into your body cavity. The doctors told Gavin that if he hadn’t come home on Saturday night she would not be breathing right now. They didn’t take her seriously at first at the hospital because she is a drunk and she has been there many times before. Now the medical students have each, one by one, lined up to feel what a floating two inch piece of rib does to a body.

What it brings out in us is beautiful and shattered. Owen cleans the kitchen and writes an exam on philosophy of the mind. Gavin has a birthday in a hospital, and wrenches his back coughing. Aileen smiles at people at work and tells them it will be OK. Call the dentist. Write the cheques. Make a lunch. Don’t look too sad in public. Don’t forget how to remember what you’re here for, for when you’re able to remember.

inauguration

2009-01-21T20:44:00.000-08:00

It turns out it doesn’t hurt that much. To lie on the frozen ground at 5 am, on top of a blanket from Afghanistan on top of a cardboard box. Other people formed what looked like an old fashioned cuddle puddle, except with more clothing, no drugs, and no movement. By 3:00 am I was hearing voices walking by on Columbia Rd. When we got on the train at 4:15 am the platform was moderately full. When the train stopped at Shaw-Howard, people were calling out ‘coming in!’ as they forced the crowd. We all felt pretty smart at that point, thinking of the millions still to pass through Metro doors.

If the election was celebration, the inauguration was work. We didn’t want Obama to make it warmer. We didn’t want him to fix global warming, Guantanamo, green jobs, and pick a puppy in 100 days. We did have a million people on the Mall who wanted to believe. If you had asked a million people to stand in the cold for 12 hours because they believed in themselves, what would have happened? So we believe in someone else for a while, and hopefully do the work.

The cold started getting alarming after sun rise. My toes went from chilly to frigid with sparky bits. The jumbo tron had advice for the elements, including the first, ‘stay dry’. Other than that, your warming station opens in 2 hours and is 300,000 souls away. The five of us sat with our knees together and our feet under a blanket. A guy from Ohio asked us, what are you guys doing under there? “It’s how we make babies”, we replied.

Maybe at some point we’ll forget shivering with disgust at Bush’s speeches. Obama told the world it is a false choice between security and values. He asked America to be a place that created opportunity, with individual ingenuity and collective wisdom. What would it mean, to live your life for your grandchildren instead of the next election, promotion, protest, poem. For me it would mean, what do I want them to be unable to understand. How will they say, “I don’t know how it could be that bad”. It’s what I would say to my great grandmother who couldn’t vote. To the Irish who starved. To the redheads who were burned at the stake. To the Egyptian mummy in the Royal Ontario Museum who died of an abscessed tooth. Time to dream big, everyone. Time to take some risks.

Medical decisions in America

2008-12-20T22:22:00.000-08:00

One Sunday in early December I felt a bit off. A pain with a trail of alarm, a visitor bringing awareness to the brilliant functioning of every other day. On Tuesday I was truly ill. I called the doctor’s office, the physician I had chosen from my insurer’s website. They were between my office and my house and I needed them urgently.

The receptionist asked me whether I was a new patient, and which insurance I had. Ah, she said, we don’t accept that company. I found you listed on their website, I responded. We’re a provider, she said. A participating provider, but not a preferred provider. You need to select a preferred provider, she explained. But you are on their database, I repeated, more slowly this time. I never had an option to choose, preferred or participating. We get this all the time, she said. Their list is wrong. I don’t understand, I said. I broke down. You need to call your insurance, she said. I’ll book you for an appointment today at 5, and you check with them. But make sure, because sometimes people come in your situation and end up with bills. The receptionist was calmer and more sympathetic as my voice cracked and silences sprouted between my words. Bills! I thought. Half of American bankruptcies are due to medical bills! What’s happening? You have our address, she said. Yeah, you’re at 1700 17th St. Oh! No, you want the DC location. You called Virginia. But…this is your address in the website, I replied. Well, she said kindly, you need to call your insurance company.

I hung up the phone and broke down some more. I was desperate, and the person who I was told could take care of me was turning me away. I called the insurance company, and a very understanding young woman offered a name in the District. The office picked up the phone. Yes, we accept that insurance company, they said. But no appointments are available until mid-February. They hung up.

The fever inched up, as judged by a medical student friend, an unlicensed foreign doctor, a RiteAid thermometer. On Friday I woke up with a pain in my left lower back. It hurt to move and I was nauseous. I stood and stared at my bureau, poking under my ribs. What are you deciding? I reminded myself. $25 copay and a trip out to Virgina, or stay at home? Another poke, another pain. $25 copay and train and train and bus or stay at home. Another poke. It took a long time to decide. I packed my bag and collected my papers.

The clinic was clean and kind and right where it was supposed to be. The doctor thumped my back where I said it hurt. Her eyes widened and she started writing. Take two of these a day for ten days, she said. Lots of fluids.

Waiting for the bus back I felt a vague euphoria. I’m going to get better, I’m better already. I rushed the prescription to a pharmacy, and went to get my first food of the day. Ah, the pharmacist said when I returned, you have prescription for 20 pills. Your insurance company says you can have 6 pills every 30 days.

On Friday afternoon the insurance company computers decided that I wasn’t as sick as the doctor said. Or, the company doesn’t care. With the clear medical danger of cutting off antibiotics mid-course, and a written request from a doctor, they refused. We could expect a response in three to five business days, they said. The cost to them of the additional pills? $34.

When I’m ill, I’m not good at making decisions. I bought two boxes of dry cereal and tried to put them in the fridge. If a friend asked me, can you pick up my kid from school, I would say, I probably shouldn’t be driving right now.

Choice about health decisions is an impossible expectation. First my employer picks the insurance company. I try to pick a doctor from a list full of errors. When I am sick, the company decides how much medicine I can take. The same corporation that can’t keep track of the location of its doctors tells me I get three days of pills instead of 10. If a car company sold brakes that stopped 30% of the speed, and told us to wait three to five days, maybe, for the remainder, it would be hauled over the coals when the first person plowed into a tree. And yet the health insurance companies hide behind layers of disclaimers and lobbyists and tell us we chose it. Well, I have sat in fear and confusion, and I want something better. Where is it? Who do I talk to?

rainy day

2008-10-26T10:15:00.000-07:00

Sept 6, 2008

I’m trying not to be drowned in the rain storm hanging over DC, the tropical storm named Hanna that we’re delighted to fear, screaming like children being tickled. On Friday night at exactly 7:05 it started to rain. The air smelled of burnt dust, newly thrown from the pavement. I walked through three people in two separate groups being arrested. They sat quietly on their steps, looking at passersby and the Park Police. I had noticed the Park Police cars on my street a few minute earlier. The scene had a calm and quiet that was confusing in that corner of sporadic violence, almost as if they were being arrested for picking flowers in Rock Creek Park. Tuesday, a drive-by occurred one block up from my house. The previous weekend I heard gunfire while walking home late at night, and the weekend before a shoot-up between multiple cars spun around an intersection at the top of the hill. There is still a bullet hole in an electronics box.

By now the rain has made a lake under the spigot of the apartment building out back. I look at their lot, fully three feet higher than our backyard, and wonder where the water goes. Where, in general, the water goes. Walking home with my sopping boxes of cereal at 10 am, I started following the streams. Noticed the drains at 11th and Columbia blocked by a metal guard, watched the leaves at 11th and Sherman. A river moving south along Sherman met the sheets coming east down Columbia, forcing the flow south; only a slim stream clinging to the sidewalk found its way into the drains on the north side. I lifted an election poster from one drain and thought of the autumn days in Toronto when my father would go out into a storm with a rake to remove dead leaves from the sewers.

thoughts in between

2008-10-26T10:14:00.000-07:00

Twenty three percent
uploaded. I could try harder
Document complete.

sept 6, 2008

America Town

2008-06-15T08:38:00.000-07:00

drink – zapatista coffee with soy milk
music – A.R. Rahman

Washington DC, USA

DC and Delhi, two months and a half months in, seem properly different worlds. I live in a row house five minutes from a Starbucks in one direction, and Chinese food/subs/cold beer in the other. On my first weekend here we took a walk towards Georgia Avenue. We walked into a massive police operation, possibly a hostage-taking. There were police cars and flares blocking the road in one direction, and people with small children sitting on street corners because they couldn’t go home. One block from my house, I saw a police car stop and let a guy out from the back seat. He walked away fast, tucking his tags into his shirt. Perhaps the definition of the border of gentrification is where the undercover cops start their beat.

On long slow mornings like this, I let myself notice things. The garbage trucks on the street, the fire trucks the night before. There are no more skinny boys who collect bags of trash and sort through the bins at the end of the street by the stinky nala. I have many fewer personal interactions in my daily foraging for food and transportation. In Delhi, I had to talk to people to arrange my auto rickshaw, or pick tomatoes, or buy hot parantha for breakfast. The parantha wallas knew that I only wanted two hot paranthas in a newspaper pocket, no pickle or plastic bag. If I didn’t show up for a few days in a row, they asked me where I had gone.

There is less anxiety with a metro pass; the price is the same whether I’m sick, it’s late, or I’m wearing a t-shirt. I don’t steal myself before I leave the house. For lunch I may have beans from Michigan, carrots from Ontario, an apple from Chile, and salsa from a dozen places. Now there are no nights with no good tomatoes left in the Mother Dairy stall. I used to stand for an hour, listening to podcasts, peeling and dicing cloves of garlic smaller than a baby’s fingernail. It would take an extraordinary effort to find out what is being harvested now. In Delhi, the season’s fruits would follow me down the street on a handcart.

With such an expectation of certainty, it’s hard to feel the force of the reports on the global food crisis. It felt more real the week that eight bombers struck Jaipur and an earthquake destroyed Sichuan. I have stood in front of the Hawai Mahal in Jaipur’s old city, and I have sent visitors along the Golden Triangle. I carry an admission slip, eight years on, from the panda zoo outside Chengdu, unhurt according to the BBC. A picture of bangles shattered on the ground felt like someone had shaken my kitchen drawers out onto the sidewalk.

autos and right relation

2008-03-18T22:33:00.000-07:00

[song – young galaxy, searchlight, Sophie Ellis Bextor, and Les Breastfeeders]
[drink – Kingfisher strong. Decided to bring back the leftover duty free. Too much Glenlivet to drink in eight days]
[picture - Emperor Ashoka renouncing violence at the feet of the Buddha]

My hands smell like chlorine, and my nose is itchy from Delhi in general and the henna chemicals specifically. It’s warm and close, and for some reason there are no international lines available on Airtel. You’d think in the age of outsourcing a message like ‘all circuits are busy’ would be no more. On second thought, perhaps that’s why there are no lines out at 2:30 pm EDT.

With just a week to go I’m loosing patience frequently. I don’t appreciate auto drivers who say they know where they are going, only to start asking direction as soon as I’ve sat down. An auto driver had asked for 1.5 times what we’d agreed on, and wouldn’t let me close the gate. He came up to the door and said he was going to call the police. I had made the mistake of telling him that no one was at home. The school across the street was dark for the night, and the lot beside was under construction. I put my Rs 70 ($1.75) back in my bag and said I wasn’t going to pay him anything, and tried to close the gate again. He motioned ‘fine, give me the money’. I gave him Rs. 50, then Rs. 20 more. He grabbed the strap of my bag and plucked it towards him. All the blood left my brain. I stepped back, spread my arms wide, and yelled ‘Eh! Come on!’ He was a good five inches shorter, dark and balding, but round in the middle, and still inside the gate. A flicker of fear crossed his eyes. He took a step backward into the shadows. My shoulders square, feeling taller and taller, I had beaten him in my mind. Facing him down, not breathing, I saw him already out the gate and me beginning to feel it.

Just the day before a friend had sent me a note from the Hopi Elders about being in right relation, among other things. I had been very short with some rickshaw drivers when I didn’t trust directions like ‘Ali Aska Rd – its’ parallel to Cunningham Rd’ or ‘Do you see a green truck coming down the street?’ At the time I thought I hadn’t done anything worse than be rude and selfish in my demand for information in a familiar way, in compass bearings and intersections. That night I sat down on the toilet and cried. How was I supposed to be in right relation with people grabbing at my bag? Was it weak that I had to threaten to fight, and believe it, in order to get inside my home?

16 days to go

2008-03-10T20:24:00.000-07:00

Obligations of those who are about to leave the country. You shall gratuitously mousturize, and dine on good gin and fine chocolate.

• alcohol to drink: 0.5 L Havana Club white rum, 0.9 L 15 yr old Glenlivet single malt, 0.9 L Bombay Blue
• mustard oil cooked: 0.8 L
• hair oil applied: 1 L
• length of hair growth, in inches: 6, at least
• spices used: 200 – 500g each, minus a bit
• raisins consumed: 1.2 kg
• opportunity cost of seven months, in cans of black beans: 150
• cost of most expensive meal, in days at median Indian wage: 25
• cost of soy latte, in days at median Indian wage: 2.5
• ratio of toilet rolls purchased to toilet rolls procured by some other means: 2:1
• number of bird eggs disposed of: 2
• signs stolen: 1
• months without a mirror: 3
• days exiting apartment with large black mark of mascara on cheekbone: 1
• mosquitoes that have died of old age or cold in apartment: 2
• number of propositions in streets: 4
• number of times followed home: 2
• momo wallahs within a ten minute walk: 7
• age of oldest fridge item, in months: 7
• gratuitous pairs of underwear purchased: 3

New Years again

2008-03-09T21:55:00.000-07:00

Today is Balinese New Year
5th New Year in recent months
for me. A few more inches of hair,
some freckles, what must soon be
called a scar from nighttime
fight with closet door.
It takes a lot to
remove freckles.

In Bali it is customary
to observe the New Year
in Seclusion.
Other religions stay
indoors in respect. A man
from Eritrea once told me
the goats they would share
on Muslim feast days, a man
from an old Christian sect
who ate to keep talking.

He gave me coffee his
mother had picked from
before they fled.
Eating keeps us talking.

summertime in delhi

2008-03-05T20:54:00.000-08:00

[drink - youngberry Ceres juice and gin]
[song - Amy Millan, Honey from the Tombs]

March 5, 2008

I hear today that it is quite likely that there will still be snow in Toronto when I come back in three weeks. There is another 15 cm due today, which will soon turn to freezing rain. Meanwhile in Delhi, I’ve turned on my fan for the first time in months. It only starts spinning at the highest speed. At slower speeds, it goes for a while, then petters out. The fan probably knows I detest it, and is being purposefully difficult. Right now it is taunting me to stand up and turn it on again. Instead it started again on its own, at full blast, as I stared at it. Papers are flying and the ceiling mount swings like a metronome.

I can’t sleep under fans or air conditioners or any noise at all really. I blame it on camping as a child. The fan on my face feels like a hole in a tent, the sound like a rainstorm approaching through the trees. I lay there nursing adrenaline, wanting to get up and put bags under tarps. I’ve seen men in India sleeping cross-legged on the back flap of a truck moving at full speed. Three women shared a nap on a commuter train in Mumbai last Thursday, as I lost track of my knees and a woman clutched a single cauliflower in her hand above the crowd. Maybe I’m genetically mal-adapted in more than just melanin.

Summer has come to Delhi. It’s 33 C in the day, bright hot and dusty. Clouds of little flies have hatched in the mandir lane, and we’ve all been sick. Two weekends ago we wore scarves gratuitously because we knew it was the last time we’d be able to do so. My computer is hot on my lap, and probably deserves a break after toiling through an entire CBC Ideas podcast. Utopias are misplaced and ignorant, I’ve learned, and the pot of lentils is finished, cooling in the kitchen. Perhaps the true sign of summer is that I’ve splurged on the youngberry from South Africa and moved onto gin and juice from absurdly expensive whiskey (a product of an exhaustion-induced Euro-dollar miscalculation in Paris, luckily for my pride not denominated in rupees on my credit card bill).

I’m listening to the fan come and go, iTunes on shuffle, and wondering if I can fall asleep. In the new warmth the street dogs wake up angry. At 6 am today the street was fiercely noisy. I see the mornings for the next three weeks, sitting in a suggestion of clothes in the wicker chair, reading or wondering whether I’ve done anything useful in seven long months.

Another valley of flowers

2008-02-24T20:28:00.000-08:00

When you look at maps printed in India, there is a growth off on the top left. It is shaped like a cauliflower perched on the upside down triangle of India. Gulmarg (powder to the people) is 60 km southwest of Srinagar in the Kashmir valley. Srinagar itself looked dirty and grey, full of half-melted ponds of plastic and mud.

The slopes to the west of Gulmarg are steep and treeless, and off to the east the land drops away then rises into another range and on into Tibet. The Kashmir Valley is on a different axis from the Himalayas, which form a ridge from east to west between India and the north. In Gulmarg it was hard to tell which direction was which. The sun sets steep and cold. The mist rises from the river beds at the slightest provocation and the clouds dance up and down the tree line like notes on a musical score.

It would have been enough just to hear the snow crunching underfoot, the sound of properly cold. The new snowfall added to the six feet of snow pack. One lamppost was still functioning with its lightbulb peaking up at ankle level. As we waited to rent our equipment, we asked if any avalanches had occurred. ‘Sure, look behind you, there’s one right now.’ said one Australian. I am a dangerously incompetent skier. I hadn’t slept for days. I secretly hoped they would close the slopes and we could jump in snow banks and then come inside to drink sweet tea and tell stories.

Instead of teaching me how to shift my weight between skies so as not to cross my tips, we spent the first morning learning how to locate avalanche beacons on fallen comrades. They said the average depth you are buried is 4 m, and it sets like concrete after 30 min. They said the best thing to do in an avalanche is to get going really fast and aim for a ridge, and at that point I tuned out. Later that morning I hit a tree, albeit in slow motion. I lost my cool, and cursed the mountain. The second day, after a sleep, I fought myself out of riverbeds and around buried sheds. I didn’t even notice the unpadded gondola pillars where I was hitting the moguls. I should have noticed the wires, barbed and electric, under and over my erratic path.

The old Kashmiri men were doing much better. They wore one piece snow suits that must have been from the eighties or earlier. They sat on benches and smoked cigarettes as the Canadians, Australians, and Russians passed. Some pull toboggans that they offer to tourists for Rs. 100, uphill. When the tourists have gone indoors, they take themselves for yelling races down the bunny slopes. There were as many Kashmiris skiing as tourists, as far as I could tell. Kashmiri boys crashed into each other on the slopes. One village between Gulmarg and the road head, was 3000 years old. Kashmiri as a language sounds nothing like I’ve heard before. It was at times like Portuguese, like Arabic, or Hindi. The guides and Indian visitors spoke Urdu, and the local people spoke Kashmiri amongst themselves. The son of our guesthouse owner told me that he speaks five languages, none of which is English. Kashmiri, Urdu, Pahari, Pashtun, and Arabic. When I asked where Pakistan was, he pointed west and said, ‘this range, then the next range, then…’ ‘Pakistan!’ I said. ‘No, Kashmir’ he replied.

It is a land under military occupation even before you arrive. At the Delhi airport, we had to identify our bags before getting on the plane. They check boarding passes getting off the plane to make sure we were the same people who had got on. Soldiers were stationed around the plane in a circle, 20 m apart, guns pointing out at the camouflage bunkers. The soldiers were Sikhs from the Panjab and darker people from the south. Clearly the British left not a few things behind in their erstwhile colonial empire. Our passports were checked twice in 60 km as boys with guns strung out on the chilly road.

That weekend, people were mostly bitter about the funding for the National Winter Games, taking place in Gulmarg just after we left. Rs. 6 – 8 crores were allocated to the games, but general consensus was that this money was going to government officials’ homes in Delhi and Mumbai. The state government didn’t want the fighting to end, they said, because they could perpetually ask Delhi for money in the name of security. The militants didn’t want to win or lose, as they’d lose their only reason for existence. At home men told of fighting not 20 km away. They smoked hash as their children made tea, and said that if they left Gulmarg and the presence of foreigners they would be killed.

On the last night we sat by the Bukhara and a police officer asked us how to set up a home for women and children orphaned by the fighting. We had bargained a room down from Rs 2000 to 300, drinking tea amiably with a crowd of men, waiting for them to call their friends whom, they assured us, would say such a thing was impossible. The room had no running water, and the bed was planks at multiple heights and distances from each other. But at the end they wouldn’t let us pay for our tea; there were worse places to be. They also wouldn’t look me in the eyes after I completed the arrangements for the room and food in Hindi. At the end of the day, entirely exhausted, I was content to slip into the gender roles, order more tea, and let my friend do the talking about politics.

Legal aliens

2008-02-07T23:00:00.000-08:00

When you arrive at the Ministy of Home Affairs in Delhi, the man in khaki in the road points you in a direction. It sounds like you’re supposed to get a card, but he points towards a tea stall. At the table beside the tea stall a man stands handing out cards with numbers on it. Good so far. Inside the reception room, they are on 70, as displayed by the electronic board on the wall. Very good sign. When I ask for a form, they tell me to wait for my number. I’d like to fill out the form while I’m waiting, I say. Sit down, they tell me. No one in the room rises to my defence, and I sit relatively out of the way. The man who was giving out number cards sits beside me, and drinks some tea. A distraught European lady comes in, and asks for a visa form. They point her back outside and tell her to get a number. No one rises to her defence either, so I try my luck again with the form. I had only found out about the Ministry of Home Affairs requirements and responsibilities by waiting in line one chilly morning at the Foreigners Regional Registration Office. The Tibetans monks were pleasant, the Afghans were very well behaved, and the Russians cut in front and passed up wads of cash. The staff yelled at the Tibetans and ignored the Pakistanis.

When my number comes up, I sign a book with my purpose, give my number card, and get a larger slip of paper. There is a photocopier in the ground floor of the building, underneath the hanging strips of chips bags. Truly superlative! The sign for the visa facilitation office points towards an open courtyard, where broken chairs are abandoned under dripping spigots. Two men drinking tea respond very slowly and point back out where I came from. I wondered if they had also broken my phone at the office, hung up on me, and cut the internet cable off Dubai to make it impossible to get any information over the past week. Upstairs in the visa office a man sitting under precarious piles of paper pointed me towards another desk, unoccupied, where I would get forms. The lady who showed up with the forms told me to go to counter 7, and pointed to the men and their leaning towers. Their desks were numbered 3, 4, 5, and 6. After a few hours of waiting, one man wrote something calmly on a new slip of paper and told me to come back at 5:30 for my letter. No local objection. Unbelievably good news. By this point my head was thrumming with anxiety. I was scared and dazed, paying attention to each passing task, short of temper and ready to be attacked. When 5:30 came and went, and a room full of people hadn’t received letters, I was ready to get deported.

The American states took the next chunk of my life, but in mocking detail. I gathered the next bouquet of papers and started on my taxes. Some are physical slips that were mailed to me in India, some are scans of papers that are hopefully in Toronto, some are my estimations of what may have been mailed to New York, if the dog hasn’t eaten it. Somehow New York State wants many, many rupees from me. Enough to hire someone for a year as a driver. Enough to buy 5600 bags of street popcorn, which would fill… something big. This could be less, they tell me online, if only I were eligible for the soybean oil fluid transformation credit. Or were a member of a registered New York State militia. It could also be more complicated; one customer in the FAQs started, ‘I met and married my husband in prison…’ It could also be not as serious as it seems. At the end of it all, a bureaucrat validated the newspaper eight or nine times before he got the stamp to work to let me remain in India. Battling for legal status is absurd sometimes.

Rickshaw miracles

2008-01-31T06:16:00.000-08:00

Jan 22
Love, India

If I had asked for miracles
I would find a rickshaw
even late at night, and cold
who would converse kindly
and take me right to
where I wanted to be.

And when, my cell phone dead,
I said the wrong address
the house where we asked for directions
would be familiar somehow,
not in any particular way
or anything to call out afterwards.
recognized nonetheless
and I would practice the past perfect,
‘It’s here! My mistake…I said…’
and we would laugh.

Delhi is cold cold cold

2008-01-27T21:23:00.000-08:00

Jan 25, 2008

Week night wish: May I
Always drink scotch more than half
As old as I am.

Not a vegan bird

2008-01-21T19:56:00.001-08:00

Jan 13, 2008

When I came back to Delhi after one week, six flights and two countries, there was a pigeon sitting in my kitchen. There were twigs carpeting the floor, and dirty bird footprints all over the counter, the sink, and the window ledge. It had knocked all the dishes off the shelf. It looked fat and baleful;, and with four hours before my next trip, I let it be.

The last time I chased out a bird was such a traumatic experience for both of us that I didn’t have the stomach for it. The pigeon had flapped and pooed around the phonebooth sized kitchen; I screamed and waved a broom. I closed the door for a minute, then went in again with the broom swinging and the light flashing. After a few rounds of this the bird became too scared to move. No wild animal should let itself be poked by a broom handle. I felt like I had broken a rule I was going to have to pay for by coming in that close.

After one more week, two more flights and assorted boats, buses, and auto rickshaws, the bird wasn’t there. More dishes in the sink, and more twigs on the floor, but no irate pigeon. So I stashed my traveling clothes downwind, and went to sleep alone for the first time in forever. On Tuesday my work colleagues told me the bird was most likely trying to make a nest. Of course! Why else all the twigs and affronted looks?

By the time I got back from our workshop there were two eggs and no bird. One egg, broken by the sink, trailing yellow yoke and shells across the shattered teacups. The other, white and oblong, tucked on the shelf against the wall. Cleaning up the broken egg was bad. The liquid parts wouldn’t come up onto the scrub. I pushed it around, and it picked up black streaks without losing its sloppy coherence. The dried parts were caked onto the dishes, the colour of a desert when the monsoons fail.

The unbroken egg was briefer, but worse. It was too heavy, and not cold. I held it on my palm, in between breaths. I feared it would start to hatch then and there, and I’d have to face the mucky plaintive baby whose home I had dismantled. As I bent to listen I think it was silent, but a white noise filled my head, so I’m not sure. I dropped it into the garbage bag on top of the twigs, a broken blue tea cup and a tumbleweed of my hair. It felt like the least vegan thing I’ve done in a long time.

When I’d scrubbed the bird droppings as much as I could and burned them off the butane cooker, I closed the kitchen to the fumes. Even though it was dark and cold by then and I was tired I filled up the shower/laundry/scrubbing bucket. I washed the floors, on my hands and knees on the linoleum, listening to Vinyl Café story podcasts. I scrubbed backwards until I reached the bathroom drain, then brought out my lavender oil.

Before leaving New York, a friend had given me the vial. She had explained that a friend of hers, who had worked in many parts of Asia and Africa, had brought it with her to every hostel and apartment and scrounged up bed. The oil brought home with it, made each place the same in a clean and proper way. When my apartment was robbed in October 2005, we felt the same urge to banish the invaders by cooking things with lots of garlic and listening to music very loudly, as we sat in the cold breeze of the open window, waiting for the police to come and take the fingerprints off the glass.

With the kitchen clean and the floors shiny, I sat in the wicker chair by the window, poured myself a bit of scotch into an unharmed teacup, and took out some of the store of fair trade dark chocolate I’m hoarding in the fridge. Lavender oil on my light bulbs felt like done, like nothing left to see here folks. It felt like washing up in the ringing-ear silence after a party well thrown. In the darkness beside the chair I knew there was a plant I turn once in a while, just to see it find the sun again.

Port cities

2008-01-21T04:18:00.000-08:00

Jan 16, 2008

Chennai, Tamil Nadu

Western man, kurta.
I thought: trying to fit in.
But he wore no pants.

Cyberabad, Asbestos Centre, packs of dogs

2007-12-14T09:25:00.000-08:00

The inflight magazine of Spice Jet, one of the many domestic airlines to spring up in India in the past four years, tells me more about Christmas than I’d ever known. The article explains that what we now call Christmas used to be a Roman pagan holiday celebrating victory of light over darkness; it moved to Dec 25th about 336 AD. India is more multi-religious than secular, and the author goes on to explain how Christians have been celebrating for over 300 years. In Kerala, mango and banana trees are decorated with Christmas ornaments. In the North-East, it’s a month-long affair, and their choruses are famous. In the magazine ads families of no more than four are enjoying water filters and resort weekends and cholesterol monitors.

Flying in India is an immersion in the frantic fervent explosion of the consuming classes. India is not catching up with alacrity somewhere on the historical course of Western nations. The domestic airport is a taxidermist’s creation of animals extinct, powerful and imagined. The check-in is computer-scanned, and at least one fleet of planes say ‘turn off electronic devices’ instead of ‘no smoking’. The men crouched on the airplane body giving it a wash are wearing shoes, which have become less of a rarity on construction sites since the Delhi Metro set a prestigious standard. Outside the arrivals terminal, a man working away on piping holds a welding mask, definitely still a rarity. On second look, the piping is being braced by the flip-flopped foot of another man who looks away as the blue-white flame fires up again.

When the pilot comes on the intercom, North America all of a sudden feels very far away. He’s clearly from somewhere in the Caribbean, his voice low and precise as he tells of temperatures and which runway we’ll be using. I wonder if anyone from his family was originally from ‘the Indes’, brought by the British the replace the first Indians and work on the cane plantations. Now he’s back, flying into Cyberabad, Coimbatore. Maybe the forced flows between colonies and colonials are being replaced. People and ideas again follow the rivers and oceans and plains of Asia to more natural trading partners, enemies and religious converts.

Street Food for dinner

2007-12-07T00:35:00.000-08:00

picture: India, I for Irony
Songs: Ella Fitzgerald, First Lady of Song CDs

Someone gave the homeless dogs clothes. They got them stitched out of sacks of flour or rice, something hard to make out. The dogs sat by the stinky nala, rather proud of themselves for once. They walk around a bit, sit down, look at each other sideways.

The dogs and the village across the street, and the seemingly infinite methods of tying scarves around rickshaw-wallas, are all part of the flowering of Delhi winter. The street sellers have carts of roasted peanuts and sweet puffed rice, and best of all, popcorn roasted fresh and hot on the fire at the end of the handtruck.

Three nights this week I’ve had street food for dinner. The first night, I was feeling disappointed in myself. I can’t speak Hindi, and I was getting anxious about getting anything done at work. So I came home, put down my stuff, and walked back across the road past the plywood and nutritional supplement stores. The initial darkness quickly gave way to a whole lane of excitement. Piles of puffy jackets for Rs 250, shiny shoes, orange and pink sparkly sweaters, watches in water buckets to demonstrate their water-proofness. Shirts five for Rs. 100, socks, and some pots and buckets and kitchen things. All lit by a single bulb fitted to the top of a butane canister. Looking at these silent burning orbs, I felt like I should know how they worked, and that it had something to do with the camping lanterns we thought were so exotic. Most exciting for me was the food. More popcorn, and roasted sweet potato that would be served with salt and chaat masala, and finally at the end a stand set up selling the largest parantha I have ever seen. They gave me two in a bag, and I rushed home happy.

The next day I found myself stuck. I knew where I was, but it wasn’t an area were people were rich enough to take rickshaws; consequently I had no way to go but to keep walking. Soon enough I came upon a lighted strip with promising traffic. In front of a shop that advertised improbable Chinese Food a man was putting the finishing touches on an aloo tikki. This one was covered with not just chutneys and dahi, as the ones we get at work, but fresh ginger and pomegranate seeds. It was steaming hot and smelled divine.

He was handing it to a young woman and an older woman, and I figured there are worse ways to wait for a rickshaw than eating Indian poutine with some ladies. We spoke in Hindi about how they never listen when you tell them about ingredients, and how nice ginger was in the winter. Many many people in India speak some English, and the ones I work with speak it as a mother tongue. There has been public education in English in India for longer than in Britain. Still, I find I use English like rope bridges through the jungle. It is direct, and available, and gives its residents a way around the morass of hundreds of languages in a country of billions. But sometimes, when you’ve got nowhere to be and the food smells good, you can step off the bridge and hang out in the intimate, dark mysteries of the trees.

The village across the street

2007-12-07T00:33:00.000-08:00

When I first moved onto this lane there were two holes. One across the street, and one at the corner. The one at the corner first became a forest, as bamboo poles sprouted thicker and thicker. One night floodlights appeared, and thirty men worked pouring concrete floors. Now it’s back to a few skinny men, carrying loads of bricks, working in clean sweaters and flip flops.

The house on the other side of the road will have much more stories to tell. At first it was an undifferentiated hole in the ground. Then the walls of became straight, the hole wide and deep. Dirt piled up in the day, carried out by men gliding up a steep path in the far side. One morning, they started mixing concrete out front. They make a pile, dig a depression, and pour water into the middle, mixing more material in from the sides with a shovel until it’s the right consistency. Soon after, metal lengths sprouted from the basement floor at irregular heights into the sky, looking like frayed electrical cords. A first floor skeleton appeared on top of another forest of bamboo, none of which were straight, but nonetheless seemed to add up to horizontalness.

In the beginning, the men had slept by the road on metal blanks or boards. Once it was finally cool enough to sleep with sheets, I would come home silently past the sleeping row, willing them to stay in their cocoons. The scary nights were when they were sitting up, men laughing from behind the tarp that blocked the site from the road. By November, three women and a chai-walla had joined the men. The women wore saris, a circle of cloth on top their heads, and bricks on top of this. They looked at me and chatted, as they piled bricks six, eight, ten high and set off down the path.

The women brought some civilization to the growing village. The neighbourhood security guards set up their fires beside the bamboo forest, and didn’t seem to mind the noxious fumes coming off the paint chips and debris. Now they were up playing cards at night, not so interested when I passed; most comforting, they’d taken down the tarp. The first floor had joined with the concrete pillars, hiding the steel spindles, making the inside dark and casting an appropriate house-like shadow onto the street.

This week, walking out to catch an auto rickshaw to work, I noticed the children. The piles of bricks had turned into proper shacks, with poured concrete floors, even and solid, and electricity, and plastic bags of worldly possessions. The kids sat around a fire set up between three sides of stone and a pot. They pointed at each other and yelled, generally amusing themselves. I wondered where they pee, how the families knew to come at this time, how many babies and stories it took for my house to be built. As I walked to dinner last night, one solemn little one, wearing no pants, sat cross-legged on top of a pile of wooden crates. In the taxonomy of VS Naipaul, he was a country child, as country children cover their tops and expose their bottoms, while poor city kids do the reverse. I turned around every few steps to make sure he was still there. I thought of baby gates, and lawsuits, and outrage over lead in paint in children’s toys. Three feet off the ground, watching dinner cook, and I wondered what we are really entitled to.

talking lentils

2007-11-28T20:50:00.000-08:00

Picture: Sadhu says, these aren't even the fun kinds of drugs! Tourists never give good tips.
Song: things by Dizzie Gillespie
Drink: gin and Whispers of Summer juice

This past weekend I traveled to Pushkar, to the camel mela. Camel sadles, brightly coloured ropes, kitchen knives, these are all the things I remembered of the dusty aisles four years ago. Now the falafel and Israeli signs and oddly shaped pants are encroaching. I needed to buy some blankets for my bed, and they were very amused by the ones I picked; ‘no Ma’am, those are for camels, not for humans’. After being grabbed once too often by skinny Rajastani village boys, I was glad to hide away in a Tibetan restaurant, ordering tofu from a menu printed in Manali. It felt very far away from India, and yet very much the same as restaurants for foreigners from Kanyakumari to Kashmir.

At sunset, the tourists line up like game hunters. Their cameras reach absurd proportions, sprouting off chests and tripods, pointed at the people bathing at the ghats across the lake. Pushkar, at that full moon, is originally a place to pray. I had just finished a book called ‘The Battle For God’, about the origins of fundamentalism, and I wondered at this religious voyeurism. Why were we watching other people pray? Would we ever go somewhere because God said so, and if not, why was it quaint to see other people do so? I wanted to have ceremonies I didn’t have to decide, a time of the year in which to forgive and be forgiven, a time after which it was forbidden to expect fresh peppers.

I had all sorts of plans for what I would do tonight. I was going to change money, make dinner and snacks, translate some Hindi, read, write, etc. etc. Instead I ate my weight in fried potato flour, spilled juice on the floor, and spent an hour and a half looking for a lost document. I wanted to know why the lentils I cook here never taste quite right, and whether I should be worried about the noises coming from the butane cooker. Instead I’m on my second gin and juice, and despairing of my discipline.

Tofu notwithstanding in Pushkar, I was more delighted by the onion pakora I discovered in the lane outside my office, a place with remains a constant source of fried wonders. These days the rickshaw drivers wear their scarves all up around their ears, and the children in the lane have metallic sparkly orange sweaters to ward off the cold. In the Ajmer rail station, I was reminded that men holding their wives purses, anywhere in the world, look pretty much the same.

Conversation on train from Ajmer

2007-11-25T06:14:00.000-08:00

Aileen sits with young couple, orange Swami, and Tata IT consultant on train. Young couple appear to be actually in love, which although probably a development post-marriage, is very endearing. IT consultant starts to make conversation. Aileen is not trying necessarily to be difficult, and is ready to respond to any question except 'which country' or 'where are you from'.

Him: “What MNC do you work with in India?”
Me: “I don't work for a MNC.”
“You are posted here by your company?”
“No, not a company.”
“So why are you here?”...

A bit later
Him: “You must like Bryan Adams?”
Me: “No, not really.”
“Isn’t he Canadian?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“So you don’t listen to music?”

“Do you watch movies?”
“Yes, I’ve seen Om Shanti Om, and Chak De.” [Hindi movies out in Delhi]
“Oh. There is one in English you must have seen, 'Goal'?”
“No.”

“Do you read books?”
Aileen turns to talk to young couple.

Hot Little Rockets

2007-11-11T19:43:00.000-08:00

The 3rd song on the CBC Radio 3 podcast from some weeks back is called ‘Hot Little Rockets’, and I don’t appreciate the verisimilitude. The Supreme Court in India has banned the use of firecrackers, so they are everywhere. The ones called ‘aloo bombs’ you throw at people’s feet, the flare guns you hold in your hand, possibly with a small infant in the other, the larger ones I don’t know about because they sound like an aerial attack. The city has been smelling like Froot Loops for some time now. Now it’s going to smell of exhausted gunpowder, diesel fumes and sweets. The lane outside my office is covered in garlands. The pakora-walla only sells ladoo, and the rice sacks are covered with dry fruit trays.

I asked a woman from my office today about the Hindu gods of this occasion. Diwali is basically a festival of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, except in the East, where it’s a festival for Kali, the mother of Lakshmi and other very important gods, and in Kerala, where it isn’t a big deal at all. In the mela, with candles and shawls and other traditional things a gauntlet of skinny men with brochures tries to get me to buy vacuum cleaners and water purification systems. I would like a mosquito killer and some airmail paper, which seems to be impossible to find.

For our office lunch on Tuesday I had to wear a sari. Six metres of fabric, a petticoat and a blouse, and nothing to hold it together but gravity and a prayer. My friend’s cousin says ‘you’ve never done it til you’ve done it in a sari’. I’m sure that much silk has more uses than as an emergency parachute. Apparently the prospect of twirling a woman around like a top is very attractive. Legs and collar bones must be hidden under this delicate arrangement, but women show a foot of belly. Used to one concept of femininity, I find it hard to feel the breeze across my midsection and maintain modesty with my ankles. The aesthetic of covering up, leaving it to imagination and the shifting afternoon light, I do appreciate. The difference between home and outside, loved ones and strangers, gives protection to a richness in internal life.

Even with a sari I’m not quite local. Maybe especially with a sari. My Hindi sounds like yelling, even in my head. The auto rickshaws start in Hindi and let me get by with a 5 or 10 Rs tourist tax. It’s still not the same as knowing people in the streets, knowing when the music starts and where the buses go. I want to figure out how the supposedly progressive Defence Colony waste collection works. The well-combed children who sort through the garbage don’t need to go through my banana peels on the way to the tinfoil. There are precise signs in Hindi on the garbage collections points, but that doesn’t help me. I want to organize tours in old Delhi led by local boys, and use it to fund the arts and drama programs they run for themselves. I may need an alarm clock with a snooze button if I’m going to wake up in time for all of this.

fence posts

2007-11-04T20:28:00.000-08:00

24 Oct 2007

Roz once said that you don’t lose
your virginity, you grow out of it.

There are parents you
talk to in this world,
and parents you love
who exist only in your head.

With depression and
perhaps other wasting diseases
you don’t get to pick.

By a thousand little deaths
you grow out of your parents.

The Love Laws are broken.
You want to trust, or perhaps not,
but your judgment on this bet
is too often wrong.

I am at worst a refugee tonight.
Fed and housed, employed and scared
thinking of a perhaps still standing house
where they used to trace the circles
silent, screaming, up and down
the stairs, bed to bathroom,
sometimes stopped midway by
urge to hurt herself. We got in the way.

I look more like her everyday
and I fear again I ate
her breath, being born, again.
Again baffled by the sacrifice
our bodies have interrupted
between her body and the floor.

She taught us first to catch
bread dough, tossed through
chilly light in winter
kitchen laughing hours.

Despite my new-found self-
preservation, I want to ask.
Why are you punishing yourself?
Do you really like burnt toast?
How much do you have to yell
and how exactly did you try
to hit him with a fence post
on a Monday in late October
to rouse the old Italian ladies
next door from their gardens
to call the cops.

MAD gatherings

2007-11-01T21:19:00.000-07:00

Drink – Kingfisher strong, alcoholic content between 5.25% and 8%.
Music – Verve remixed albums 1 and 2
Proud declaration – two different meals cooked, with sprouted mung beans, garam masala, and lots of garlic
Not proud declaration – what looked like a sandal tan was just dust. Lots and lots of dust.

It’s finally the season when we can turn off the fans at night, and the rickshaw drivers are wearing scarves in the morning. Some parts of the city spell suspiciously good, and some smell suspiciously like Froot Loops. I’ll take that any day over the eau de nala that normally accompanies my morning. The bread in the bakery has been replaced by gifts for Diwali; raisins from Afghanistan and almonds from California vying for shelf space with Kurkure octagons and pallets of Schweppes tonic water labelled in Arabic.

This past weekend I helped organized a conference for the McKinsey alumni in Development. The hotel staff asked us whether we really were the MAD group, and we assured them it was correct. We talked about climate change and financial inclusion, business models for social impact and the future of India. We drank spring water and ate buffet everything. The McKinsey cost curve for climate change was shocking, as it demonstrated that carbon emissions could be emitted with almost zero net cost to society, if only we could incent and distribute the benefits from those of us insulating our windows and those of us replanting trees.

At the last minute, I was asked to present Ashoka’s Hybrid Value Chain work. It was the first time I’ve ever presented with a radio mike, shadowed by a 15 ft powerpoint of my creation. When I arrived at my office at 11 pm on Saturday night to retrieve the presentation and the computer I had blithely left at my desk, there was a gapping hole in the wall where the wireless router should be. Not heeding the signs from the universe that I wasn’t supposed to talk, I plugged in directly and put down the most specific words I could find.

I’m excited to be here these days despite my confusion about what I’m supposed to do, exactly. The weekend offered so many moments of nerdy excitement. Maybe we could finance cow dung biogas with carbon credits! Maybe we could put returning NRIs to work for rural companies! Maybe I could do this forever.

Lost items

2007-10-21T21:26:00.000-07:00

Found: The Macarena, long thought
lost to history, in a Delhi Café Coffee Day.
A lot can happen over Coffee! As long
as it doesn’t presume dangerous
adjectives, filter coffee or love marriages.

You gotta lick it so we can kick it
and Jimi Hendrix looks down from the walls.
‘I’m better when I’m drunk’
says the Muslim shopkeeper’s shirt
in the tangled bangle-aisles of Old Delhi.
Salt’n’Pepa doesn’t want want want.
Still the cycle-rickshaws ply
‘Abortion by tablet’ between the mosques.

Once upon a time there was light in my heart,
and now there’s only love in the dark:
Anthropologists trace exactly the moment.
The release of Michael Jackson’s Thriller
marked the last ship into Havana
carrying the music of counter-revolution.

Another night, another dream,
but always you. So they say
planting gardens in Laos:
Chillies grow best in casings
US 920378 or bigger.

We Shall Overcome, they sing
in the hills of Nagaland.
In Jaipur, a young boy,
almost to himself
No woman No cry
No chapatti No chai

Plagiarized poem

2007-10-17T23:42:00.000-07:00

It was written by C.J. Boland, and plagiarized by me

The Two Travellers

"All over the world," the traveller said,
"In my peregrinations I've been;
And there's nothing remarkable living or dead,
But these eyes of mine have seen.
From the land of the ape and the marmoset,
To the lands of the Fallaheen.
"Said the other, "When’s the last time you ate
Purple sticky rice at Vientiane.

"I've hunted in woods near Seringapatam,
And sailed in the Polar Seas.
I fished for a week in the Gulf of Siam
And lunched on the Chersonese,
I've lived in the valleys of fair Cashmere,
Under the Himalay's snowy ridge.
"Then the other impatiently said,
See here, what of sunset off Walnut Bridge?

"I've lived in the land where tobacco is grown,
In the suburbs of Santiago;
And I spent two years in Sierra Leone,
And one in Del Fuego.
I walked across Panama all in a day,
Ah! me but the road was rocky."
The other replied, "Will you kindly say,
Have you wined in the streets of Old City?

"I've borne my part in a savage fray,
When I got this wound from a Lascar;
We were bound just then from Mandalay
For the island of Madagascar.
Ah! the sun never tired of shining there,
And the trees canaries sang in."
"What of that?" said the other, "sure I've a pair,
And they can’t beat the songs out at Green Line.

"And I've hunted the tigers in Turkestan,
In Australia the kangeroos;
And I lived six months as a medicine man
To a tribe of the Katmandoos.
And I've stood on the scene of Olympic games
Where the Grecians showed their paces.
" The other replied, "Now tell me James,
Where have you put your bike through the races?

"Don't talk of your hunting in Yucatan,
Or your fishing off St. Helena;
I’d rather see anarchists racing a bed
Down the hill past the ‘beer and pizza’
No doubt the scenes of a Swiss canton
Have a passable sort of charm,
But what of a warm fire in Houston
And a walk home without alarm.

And I’d rather be sitting in Ortlieb’s Jazz Haus,
After a dinner at Dahlak,
Than watching young dancers in Cuba carouse
Or mining out in the Outback.
And I wouldn’t care much for Sierra Leone,
If I hadn’t seen Clark Park in fall
And the man that was never in dear Crimson Moon
Shouldn’t say he had traveled at all.

Flyover work under Prrogress

2007-10-10T01:39:00.000-07:00

7 Oct 2007
Ranikhet, Uttaranchal

And when it was red on
one side, green on the other,
blue on the final two.
The dogs of this valley
called the dogs on the
other side of the hill, where
perhaps they dry their chillies
differently, and the
monkeys are not yet in heat.

Underneath my shawl
my collarbones burn my resting
fingers, frigid and forgotten
paused in writing
drowned in colours
slowly turning
Himalayan night.

Tombs of these colours
built by people of the farther
Hills are fed by waters
These careful waters so
described to the men today
who sat, crosslegged, days
and days, and learned where
water comes and goes, and how
a heart pump is like a water pump.
And while we have you here,
why the earth turns and how an
eye works and what
methane makes.

Until yesterday, I had never seen
a ginger plant. I didn’t know
mountains rocks are really
water, ancient and newly
gathered by barefoot engineers.

Lights through the valley floor sit
safely lacking the water
kept in trees up here.
An old man sorts lentils by a
single bulb.
As I watch the blue take over
sneezing, shivering, hoping for chai
wondering how to put
into a poem both
cow dung and colonialism.

This tree brought to you by the Delhi Metro

2007-09-22T01:15:00.000-07:00

Song – Kandahar by Creature, and Raconteurs Broken Boy Soldiers.

Drink – cranberry & kiwi juice and duty free gin.

Pictures – clothes in Udaipur

Hindi in many ways is an easy language to learn. Most things invented in the past three hundred years have only an English word, and no Hindi translation. It’s perfectly fine to say “Bank kahan hai?” Or ‘Mere pas hotel hai.” I love living in another language. I wake up in the morning with things to learn to say in Hindi. I talk to auto drivers, and practice the future tense, the conditional, and the general sense of impending affront that is the camouflage of Delhi survivors. Hindi is also in many ways stubborn, just like any language. For example, ‘kal’ means yesterday and tomorrow. A bus that is stationary is male, but a bus that is moving is female. I had a language lesson over bowls of spices in Chandi Chowk. I’d like to imagine that the seeds and powders and twisted roots smelled much like they have for thousands of years. I imagine that middle-aged women are pawing through bowls of raisins from Damascus to Kolkota.

I’m starting to meet people, or at least to feel like when I’m alone it’s marginally intentional. It is still hard. I walk into a bar, and the waiters try to direct me to the other white people. Now that I have a phone, I often look at it as if it’s going to tell me something important. My friends from before are full of joy, and ladies nights, and advice like “You’ve never done it until you’ve done it in a sari”. The foreigners listserves also have useful information about finding gynecologists (hard to do), sex toys (illegal in India) and someone to take care of your children/dog/yoga posture.

I’ll not take personally the street signs that say ‘Say NO to Crackers! Delhi Police Department’. I tried to register myself at the foreigners registration office last week. The giant sign on the wall said that foreigners on research visa have to register. After three hours in line, the first clerk said I didn’t have to register. When I pointed out to him that his wall said I had to, he let me run outside, photocopy everything, and run back in. He was distracted by the rainbow of humanity besieging him. Imams from Nigeria, broke American students, Russian fashion models, and most recently Burmese and Afghan refugees circulate around the airless room, waiting for the centrifuge to determine their fate. The man directly in front of me was from DR Congo. He was on a student visa, but was taking rather long to finish his engineering course. Wouldn’t you? India attracts these lost souls from all sides. Some of them have the blue laminated cards from the UNHCR, some of them have the shadows of mountains in their eyes, some of them sit with bright eyed children covered in healing scrapes. No one has plans for the afternoon.

Often it’s confusing and terrifying. I’ve been followed home once by a strange car. Tonight, I had convinced myself I wasn’t being trailed by an Indian guy. Then he stops in front of me at the end of a metal bridge 3 ft wide, 40 m long, and suspended over an open sewage drain. After you, he says. Normally self-protection reflexes stick to me like 13 year olds on family vacations. I’m just going to have to overcome the allergy. Otherwise there will be no gram flour pancakes with stewed tomatoes and garlic in the mornings, no channa for lunch, no sprouted daal and lemon salad for dinner, no triple fried pakoras in between. I’ve still got to take the Northwest Passage and build my own canoe out of duct tape.

On a side note/shout out to my nerds: I learned that the language spoken by almost all of this region 60 years ago, according to the census reports, was ‘Hindustani’. Since then, the census reports show 90% self-identifying as Hindi or Urdu speakers. Needless to say the language hasn’t changed much in common usage. The Hindi newspapers, however, are replacing all Persian influenced words with Sanskrit, and the Urdu papers are removing Sanskrit in favour of Arabic, with the result that few in either country can understand anything.

Good chicken costs less!

2007-09-22T00:24:00.000-07:00

Song – oh! how you used to know me well, the superfantastics. Castles! by Forest City Lovers
Drink – cranberry & kiwi Ceres juice and duty free gin.
Picture – Aileen’s giant new pants. Definitely room for another

It’s sort of raining, sort of silent outside, in the dubious transition of a Delhi September. Lightning lit up the sky today as we were driving back from the India team retreat. When we reached Delhi, traffic was blocked up for miles around. After an hour listening to Bollywood tapes with the delighted driver, it appeared that the traffic was emerging exactly from my colony. The silt from the flash flood was inches deep, and there were square blocks that looked important for someone else in the middle of the road.

Just another part of the adventure of living in Delhi. It gives a new-found appreciation for safety warnings. My 5 L butane gas cooker says “Winner! Super quality!” and finally “O.K. tested”. Today on the road I saw a shop informing “Good chicken costs less!” Yet, some things are absurdly precise. The ‘English wine’ shop sells only wine from Maharastra with the ingredients ‘water from grape juice, ethyl alcohol produced by fermentation, yeast’. I suspect these are the ingredients of every bottle of wine, but I’m not sure whether to be comforted yet. It was hard to concentrate on the shops tonight as the road we were driving along had the four middle lanes taken up by the Delhi Metro construction. There is no where to divert the traffic to. Everyone drives further up on the sidewalk than usual. So the construction company has embraced all the newfound obstacles with signs that indicate, ‘this tree brought to you by Larsen & Toubro’. It’s still safer than the crews demolishing the buildings on the Delhi – Gurgoan road, who stand two stories in the air and hack away with chainsaws on the concrete struts between their feet.

Delhi is starting to feel a bit more familiar. This Tuesday evening I was walking back through the market with my anti-tourist gear: a loaf of bread, dahi, and a sponge for the floor. I was almost mown down by someone I know. The samosa-walla and the flower sellers and even the crows in the dumpsters stopped while we had a big loud hug. When Ryan and I went to Chandi Chowk, I found the perfumerie that has been there since 1904, and whose bag houses Owen’s Apple Nano. Now I’ve mopped my floor, if not cooked a meal in my apartment. That must count for at least one pomegranate seed on the way to a season in a new world.

Death by Palaak Pakora

2007-09-04T20:43:00.000-07:00

[picture - Progress!]

[music – boards of Canada, Bishop Allen, other b songs from Gavin and Amit]
[drink – Assam tea from Brown Sugar. Apparently rented. They call it stomach troubles, but really it’s just delegation of responsibility for trouble to the guts]

Three days in, this trip has still been a good showing for faith. The sewage drainage pit is downwind, and it is cool enough to sleep at night without an air conditioner, at least until 6 am. Delhi as also done what I expected it to, which is crystallize my identity as a white woman. I’ll have to try very hard to break out of the expat tracks. My helpful upstairs neighbours recommend a restaurant that is full of expats, and actually serves sushi. Right now that seems tasteless, but perhaps after a few more months of unrelenting infamy I’ll be ready for anonymous whiteness, however expensive. It’s not just people who are defined against elsewhere. The drygoods say ‘export quality’ and the sugar says ‘refined to European standards’. The coffee shop has faux 50s women on the walls and Avril Lavigne on the radio. [addition Sept 4 – it’s not just top 40, it’s the same top 40. They say ‘Justin Timberlake! Timbalake! every 3.5 hours] The table decorations are either non-functional hookahs or non-functional bongs, but too far from either to tell. Of course, this is the location that I paid more money to obtain. It’s quiet, and the rickshaw drivers who follow me home in the dark are comparatively deferential.

I don't like fans

2007-09-04T20:38:00.000-07:00

Aug 30.
Delhi, India

[music – Oscar Peterson, Note by Note album]
[drink – ‘Inder Raj Rum squash special’ – Old Smuggler Indian rum, water, and ‘orange sqaush’, a nectar composed of sugar, water, and orange juice, in that order]

The Oscar Peterson is struggling to overcome the sound of the fan overhead. It’s behaving better than it was last night, when it cut out periodically, as if in collusion with the mosquitoes who crept in through the kitchen window. The room is pretty, and the capacity of my landlord to define reality through assertion is impressive. I shouldn’t need an AC because the hot season is almost over. I shouldn’t have any mosquitoes because they don’t come to the third floor. Fortunately he also has put a lot of care into my little apartment. The kitchen would be small by Manhattan standards, and so far has no electricity, or anything to use with electricity or gas. The bathroom is small but clean. It has the eccentricities of ‘conveniences’ over here. The sink drains through a tube onto the floor. It points into a hole in the wall, and from there I know not where it leads. The shower is a bucket on the floor, and the heater is OFF according to the giant red switch on the wall. The main room does have room for a bed, a couch, two chairs, two side tables, and a fridge. Take all your mental pictures of those items and multiply by about 0.5, and you’ll have an approximation of my furniture.

I’ve landed in a very nice part of Delhi. The houses are beautiful, set back from the road by walls and surrounded by trees and flowers of many different colours. Most importantly, there is no alley of mechanics shops. It is astounding now that I am here how much I took on faith. The window doesn’t look into someone else’s house, the house isn’t right beside the drainage ditch, the landlord truly wants guests. Regardless, I felt very timid in the market today. I was trying to buy batteries and bread, and glucose biscuits (for Shakti!) I couldn’t quite assert myself enough to find out what the bread cost, and I found it very hard to decide what kind of food I wanted. I ended up eating bread and jam for breakfast, and more for dinner. Maybe it would be better if my landlord weren’t so helpful, so I would buy my pulses and ghee myself. Maybe I’ll just do it myself and see what happens.

Tomorrow (today, really) I go into the office for the first time. We have a meeting with the CEO of our partner investor on Monday. On the plane over here, I tried to give myself permission to be competent and healthy and happy. That’s Ashoka terminology for, well, freeing yourself from all the constraints that no longer exist and you’ve ceased to struggle against, and all the barriers that you’ve given up resisting. But first, I’ll have to break a 500 Rs note and negotiate with a rickshaw driver.

coffee shop writings

2007-02-14T21:52:00.000-08:00

How dare you, they said.
But we are lost and
drifting, like paper straw
wrappings, left behind, we replied.
We are a language no one understands
carefully copied by painters
who hate our God.

We drink all night to write one line.

After thirty minutes riding due south,
with the current, wind off the
ocean, now receiving,
a full moon raises words
in my throat like a pregnant poem.
Separately, tourists ask
into my sudden shiny eyes
Where is the hole
behind their backs.

In between, we self-medicate with music.

God used to live in the sky,
before it moved far away.
In water, more dear for distance.
We count in numbers no one knows
Under street lights shaped like palms.

A green canvas hat,
sprouting flowers
two strangers meeting
over a phone -
flower stickers and blue plastic,
bus shaped
trail of wonder.

We are made of clay, but also of time

Last haiku

2006-12-13T07:48:00.000-08:00

Long awaited, she
Marked in captive bonds her red;
Decided to stay

you look more and more like her everyday

2006-12-11T20:21:00.000-08:00

Why can’t the caring be the question?

Damnit, why won’t you pick up your phone? I’m cutting myself with knives.

I’ll meet you down there.
This place makes the best milk tea. I wonder why I like this place so much.
Why do they have to ask why all the time? Why can’t they say, let’s listen to some opera?
Why isn’t listening to opera enough?
A real book about bread doesn’t get to the recipes until page 352.

Costa Diva is the most beautiful song in the world. I’m going away now, and I’m not sorry.
I don’t trust psychiatrists. They’re all crazy. I think they want me to fix them.
Why did they put me in restraints? I just wanted to go home.
It was the pain in their faces.
Where should we go for lunch?

You need a haircut.
There are no ground rules.
Kathleen Ferrier just opened her mouth and sang. You can check on the cover.
I understand it all through practice. Can you hear the Italian?
I’ve been living a lie.
I think email gets in the way of real communication.
Do you care?

Do you want to know why I can’t take care of them right now?
It was August 15, 2001, and I said, we’re going to move you into school.
What can I do to make you feel less worried?
I’m smarter than all of them.
My dress was so short I couldn’t sit down.
You should marry him when he grows up.
They didn’t even find the other bandages.
Cutting yourself doesn’t hurt at all.
Little girls just like you.
Tony Schipa is the greatest singer, and Buehler genuinely sucks.
Violetta, thank you.
Do you remember her from nursery school?
She was glad to see me too.

Listen.
I think we’re all in here, in one form or another.
My whole life is in this book. You can substitute for everything except baking powder.
It was the small knife, the cheap one. I think I used it to cut vegetables.
It’s easy, you just take all 55 pills at once.
The babies really love me.

Blood is an excellent media for writing.
A liquid, but not a liquid.
It dries slowly, but not too slowly.
You can wipe it off if you don’t want to make a mess.

If I were any happier I would pop and make a big mess but I would cleanit up so can I stick around?

coming home to silence

2006-11-05T20:01:00.000-08:00

Nov 5, 2006

Multi-coloured, former salsa jars
purple juice, warm vodka
(still open on the stove)
sits silent. Five empty rooms.
All lights on.

Instead, the cheese is squished between
half-eaten tortillas, perched on a mixing bowl
with waves of whiteness.
Perhaps beans, refried, stuck
on the spoon, half-hidden by empty orange-
stained scraps of carrot bags.

Melting. Spinach. On the floor.
Must have missed the garbage on the way.
Arm-shaped arc of paper
scraps from frying pan to floor.

Judging by the state, the shape
of butter, half-wrapped but clearly sitting
in our dog’s bowl
they left
less than an hour ago.

Dressing up

2006-11-04T09:18:00.000-08:00

Oct 31

A pregnant nun fights
With a construction crew, while
Santa Claus looks on.

Oct 25

Hip ticks tell volumes.
I move like I'm still fighting.
He just kept guessing.

Oct 18

Smell of fresh cedar
On air, suddenly frigid
Biting biking hands.

Oct 10

Caffeinating crowd
Lined up against the sunbeams
Gets ready for train

Oct 2

Barefoot, 2 am
City streets like cold black rock
From dry river bed

Sept 18

Green does not mean go
When guac sits on desk all day,
Then makes stomach sore.

Sept 12

Tired, hungover,
I stare at keyboard dust balls,
Think of action words.

Sept 8

Pointing at my dog,
Little boy says, "A lion!"
He's a city kid.

Early Thanksgiving

2006-08-27T12:24:00.000-07:00

My little brother is going to university. We never thought this was possible. It’s a huge accomplishment for him, and a positive testament to what happens when a village works. I think it’s important to take a moment and reflect, as something great is about to happen, on all that was part of bringing us to this point. It’s a unique time after the pull of hope has become strong enough to make a difference, but before it becomes so familiar as to be unnoticable. So congrats, little brother, you’ve come so far.

Rebirth

2006-08-27T11:51:00.000-07:00

Possibly bifurcation, Aug 25

Did it really rain,
Or did they film a rain scene?
Sometimes I can't tell.

Bifurcation, Aug 21

Who killed the rooster,
Replaced it with an alarm,
Wrapped both in plastic?

July 24, The Citadel

Circuses on stage:
First a real one, on stunt bikes,
Lights up silent fort.

July 18

Quiet, warm mornings
We wander not far from dreams
Just barely talking.

July 10

Wearing tiredness
From last night like a secret
She missed her train.

CanaDay, July 3

On Canada Day
Everyone's from somewhere else,
Sings like refugees.

Canada Day

2006-07-05T21:27:00.001-07:00

On Canada Day
Everyone's from somewhere else,
Sings like refugees.

Floor 4.5

2006-07-05T21:27:00.000-07:00

June 26

An awkward angle
Spills pale light from office eyes
Onto sleeping head.

communication

2006-07-05T21:25:00.001-07:00

Working late last night,
Would have wished you had called me,
But I have no phone.

Pyramids

2006-07-05T21:25:00.000-07:00

June 6

Before English hours
Fruit sellers and men on bikes
Make the city day.

Memorable Weekend

2006-07-05T21:24:00.000-07:00

Brilliant new freckles
And late laughter of great friends
Glow strong on shoulders.

Computer fun

2006-07-05T21:22:00.000-07:00

May 23

Now they're on to us:
Google chat forever banned
From work computers.

Let me tell you, O,
These days, art is hard to do
While making money.

Let's start a hai-coup
Viva la revolucion!
more art! less money!

Haiku train

2006-07-05T21:17:00.000-07:00

Owen's election, May 15

Give a speech, they said,
As they censored the hard parts.
He stood up, smiled and...

May 9

Warm late nights to come
In neighbour-spotted darkness
We'll sweat in silence

April 20

White shirt walking by
Looks like bird flying slowly
Across dark window

snow in april

2006-04-08T18:46:00.000-07:00

April 6

Mom, happy for snow
feels world won't end for a year.
Imagine, a year!

More warm days

2006-04-02T13:50:00.000-07:00

March 31

Spring days in New York
Skirts rise faster than flowers
On Central Park lawns

Warm Days and Nights

2006-04-02T13:48:00.000-07:00

March 29

Tell me of old things
Walls that cry with history
Lost tongues by the sea

Raising the bar

2006-03-25T19:34:00.000-08:00

March 22, ROM for two

From old grey facade
Steel girders cut new angles
Towards stone cold sky.

March 16, For Imanni

There once was a woman in Philly
Who thought that to email was silly.
She wrote letters on bricks
Which she threw at old pricks
Until health care came standard at Chilly's

March 1, Threes

You made a sandwich?
Though not vegetarian,
A great late-night snack?

From Prem:

dirty poetry
checked in client workspace cubes
soda runs down face

Feb 22, Potluck

Family and fresh food leaves
Empty pots and hangovers,
Quiet sense of joy

2006-02-23T12:16:00.000-08:00

Feb 22

Black and white, or loud
Other people's certainties
Taunt delicate dreams

Feb 13

French Canadians
Jump through New York snow, and ask
Where are the people?

Feb 10

twisted legs and drums
converse, marking time between
our crumpled heartbeats

Free coffee?

2006-01-23T18:19:00.000-08:00

Jan 19

Black clad, blow dried folks
Murmur, and smell of power
Clean and cold shadow'd

Last Skate at Bryant Park, New York City

2006-01-23T18:18:00.000-08:00

Jan 16, 2006

Hard slice of cold blades
falling down frozen rivers
as children make waves

insides and outsides

2005-12-21T04:44:00.000-08:00

Dec 20

Open, car-free streets
Frigid footfalls of strangers
Make morning music

Dec 12

Morning on the Pike
We wake in our cars, and brush
Teeth in rear mirrors

Dec 8

Across the table
Colleague hums with ambition
In blue light of screen

Nov 30

Me:
Exotic Chai? A
Flavia disappointment
Dashes such sweet hope

Prem:
Franzia at night
Washes away bitterness
Of flavia drinks

Nov 23

A friend:
Family sleeps over
Where do I hide the condoms?
Thanksgiving panic

Nov 22
Silence from the boss
Filled with morning rain, and smells
Of fresh ground coffee

Nov 1

Dad:
A ticket today
A departure someday soon
Grandpa says pay half

Me:
A message too late!
Early saturday morning,
The cheque was sent off.

Oct 25

Human waterfall
Looks down, cursing upwards,
Struggling in the rain

Indigestion

2005-11-02T21:13:00.000-08:00

I'm eating my salad from the subsidized cafeteria, the only place in this city where you can get broccoli that is not worth its weight in gold, and onions that were not massaged by hand and told bedtime stories. I am cleaning up after stressful meeting number one today. The kind of day that starts off busy, ends up ugly, and involves a lot of talking to myself in between. Or maybe that's just me. It was a morning of pretend numbers that climb up the sides of buildings and dive back into the yacht club on the other side, into the pockets of Burberry coats or trust funds in the Caribbean. The blindness of accumulation only walks in a straight line across the page. Perhaps stepping sideways to explore another garden of well-manicured possibility and tasteful profits. No plan must combine with another plan, or exist beyond seven years. Proper segregation of opportunity, to keep order in the world, if you please.

I picture the people we speak of walking down the street, cut up into their consumer essences. Average spend, favourite colour, expected wait to speak to customer service, miles to nearest Taco Bell. A stack of paper cuts across their bodies. The papers slice through their ankles, their tired hips, rest against their spines, take a curved wave off their collar bones, hang off their ears. The papers declare to each other: what a great thing we've found! A creature that likes to bounce up and down, push back and forth, resist sideways motion, reflect candlelight, and turn towards other ears! Best of all, it needs cleaning, oiling, and protection from the elements. A whole ecosystem to support scavengers. Remarkably resilient against neglect and abuse. These delicate stacks don't notice as the slices slide back and forth against each other, letting in a sigh of air sometimes. Pressed between the gravity of the earth and the march of time, glued together with occasional bout of hope, they manage to make love and fight wars.

One day you might meet a slice person. You might stand in his shadow on the bus, just as the sun is setting on a brilliant autumn day. Flecks of dust glinting in the air might pass through an incongruity in the pancakes. He might frown at a bump in the road or the kids talking too loudly in a language he doesn't understand. But truly, his insides are raw from the grind of earth between slices marking imported olive oil and that last Botox treatment. A slice woman kept in place by a delicate vest of statistics and accomplishments might scatter in the wind when a good friend dies.

Maybe the unbearable piercing of children and God, of leaves changing colour and the smell of fresh tea, will weave these slice people back together. Maybe they will become less a feeding ground for need and an experiment in insatiable desire. Maybe we will become less see-through to marketing and more transparent to ourselves.

What we learned at Grandma's

2005-10-26T12:51:00.000-07:00

The little plane from Newark spills us out into the arrivals level and down the stairs, past the waterfall and the cedar planks, into the immigration chute. Wandering happily through cutting sunlight, the passengers stop more to admire the rare, rain-free view than to adhere to red lines and borders, French, and English queues. From the Halifax airport the road doesn’t even suggest a city waits over the next hill, tucked against a harbour and looking out to sea.

After we’ve got lost once and found our way back to the horse-track turned highway by the Bedford basin, the stories start. Imagine this inlet bursting with troop ships and supply ships, destroyers and frigates, marshaled for the perilous journey across the North Atlantic in World War II. Imagine steel pouring in from Ontario, farm boys from Saskatchewan, salt cod from Newfoundland, starched uniforms and young loves packed away in trunks and waiting to be stowed aboard. Imagine a country at war with a distant enemy, helping a slightly less distant mother country that still watches from the flag and the face on the quarter. Nova Scotia has history. At least, history in the post-European sense, recorded in land titles and stone walls and poems about God’s country. A strange flag marks where, two hundred and fifty years ago, the French Acadians were hauled off their farms below sea-level that they had painstakingly turned from saltwater marsh into rich silt fields. In the cruel irony of history they ended up in Louisiana and became the Cajuns, to drain the salt from more swamps and play more music with spoons.

My father speaks of cousins as the road turns. On both sides towns fly by, Windsor, Grand Pré, Gaspereau and Wolfville, as the French and English battle for permanence. There was a time when there were only four names in the valley, he says. Marriage was like choosing a kind of fish from the dock. The better ones were only available every few years. One cousin married a Stirling, the other, a Joudry, he says. A decision that sounds as solid and sensible as building a house on the leeward side of the hill, near the apple trees, with a view of the ocean on a clear day when the tides are in.

The Stirling fruit market (now an Atlantic Canada institution) offers seven kinds of squash this time of year. The rest of the world has started to rediscover the North Shore, after passing over it on the plane from London to New York. Still, so far, there is only here, and the rest of the world. Within here, there are all sorts of important distinctions. One can go out home, down home, and up home, not so much directions as intentions – not to move away. But now, there is an ethnic food aisle in the supermarket, a fair trade coffee shop, and a world cultures market by the university. My grandfather, who left the civil service about the time when he would have had to learn French, points out “these are our exchange students from Vietnam” as if he were explaining the difference between a Gravenstein and a Honeycrisp.

Leaving the corporate incubator to learn family history is an exercise in slowness, in stories traced along streams now buried in storm sewers and in kitchen equipment holding up magazine racks. The paved roads have moved further up the valley, the post boxes have moved closed to the door. Canadian Living, November 1998, rests by the butter stamp my grandmother used after she’d churned the butter from the farm. My grandparents slide along old arguments like the smooth handle of a knife. “Did we call that traditional or old-fashioned, those apples?” Conversation turns to the troubles of homeownership and lost land surveys, two topics never to be heard in New York City. Also from a different time and place, “Do you want butter on that?” I nod, concerned, at the subsuming of concrete, and how long to wait to take in the garden hose before the first hard frost. It’s true, Grandma, it’s crazy what people will sue for these days. Eventually it turns to every grandchild’s favourite question: “Do you know how to play bridge?”

response

2005-10-17T20:52:00.000-07:00

Oct 13 - Luke's entrance

i will be at home
sick, in a brown cardigan
no health insurance

slow haikus

2005-10-09T21:30:00.000-07:00

Sept 27

Manhattan morning:
In window across the street
Fat woman in thong

Oct 6 – from Prem

flavia machine
makes bland, scalding beverages
sugar bin empty

Oct 7

Late morning coffee
Erupts in storm of emails.
Calmness, lost again

Oct 8 – from Prem

Think I heard a song
Early on the radio
About two lovers

Haiku 2/42

2005-09-20T18:03:00.000-07:00

Night-swept west highway
Ends in calm, curry-filled streets
Where taxi cabs rest.

20 Sept 2005

Haiku 1/42

2005-09-20T18:01:00.000-07:00

Last red of the night
Stolen by necklace of cars
Homeward bound at last

19 Sept 2005

Smithsonian

2005-08-15T08:51:00.000-07:00

By the Smithsonian

Night clad, white clad,
spinning escaped tendrils of light
into a visibility cloak.
My daggers, one on each hip,
plunge, Earth-turning
towards the sleepy cracked crust.

Washington Sqaure Park

2005-08-15T08:46:00.000-07:00

Pigeons and Paupers

There are very fine lines sliding amongst the crowds.
Eight paths lead in to the centre
fountain pillar. Out of all possible paths
people glide
delicately balanced against both sides of
the reading, eating, talking,
graciously unstaring bench bower.

Their eyes bounce in earnest
from just above the ear of one
to just past the shoulder of another,
playing out the necessary fiction of
seeing without watching.

As if we didn’t come for this.
To note who carries a parasol, smokes a cigar,
whose dog loses fights with squirrels.
We feign interest in the fountain,
in the passing of clouds, in a rare glimpse
of distance through tree frames.

We barricade ourselves
between arm rests
and bags, food or a book
within reach to throw up against
someone who violates
sensitive zones of silence,
slicing through an accidental glance that
bumps up against another,
preserving the pockets of calm.
We sit armed with a purpose.

Softly and evenly they move.
Intentioned, sliding streams
of people tracing their legitimate presence
along the spokes of the wheel and out again.
Only tourists, children and madmen
take undue delight.

We’re all here to pretend to be alone.

Kengsington Market

2005-08-15T08:44:00.000-07:00

Gay punk rock
Asian guys with dreads and
skinny white girls with low-flung flares
and died black hair.

All that’s needed for nourishment:
organic ice cream,
mango hempseed banana smoothies
for all purposes, says the sign:
“Having an Affair? We Cater Too!”

and the eye-open, seat-sharing strangers
tossed up on the ragged edges of the road
smile, not asking to be entertained,
but caught up in the mirror of who we’d be
if we were born Russian, or angry, or short.

No corners meet cleanly here.
Delivery trucks and tricycles
slowly part rivers of
sun-warmed fish, incense, spilled beer
and the lilting sweep
of many tongues slipping over each other
in well-kept ignorance.

Productivity

2005-08-15T07:30:00.000-07:00

Before I start work on Wednesday, I'll try to accomplish something that can't be summarized in a PowerPoint presentation. This is going to be a bookcase in my new favourite coffee shop and bookstore, the Ganas Book Cafe on Staten Island. Maybe it was the paint fumes, but it's easy to work when you're listening to world chants, and talking about the history of God and the intricacies of tea. The masons were smoothing concrete outside, delicately tracing lines 20 feet away with a pole in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I appreciated anyone who can make walls or draw warmth from wood. You can't count down to completion doing this work. Every stroke has to be valued for itself. The beginning and end of satisfaction is watching the colour appear from under your hand.

Afternight thoughts

2004-10-02T15:22:00.000-07:00

The leaves are just starting to fall from the trees here and the nights are touched with a prescience of chill. Not cold, so much as a reminder of what's to come. When the light gets low now in the afternoon the sunbeams cut through my room and strike the wall above my bed. In this phase the square sunlight hits into the middle of a frame. The frame surrounds a gash in the wall. When the plaster puckers outwards and trickles white tears, what else can you do but make it art? The growing exclamation point behind my left ear punctures my dreams when it conflicts with the top of my head’s idea of appropriate dream space. It pulls away from its subject and reminds me that the naming and containing of things leaves sharp edges and bruises and has a tendency to fall apart after a good night’s restlessness. I wish I could make my other dangerous nuisances into art. If only I could frame the mice and cockroaches that climb the walls at night and eat my leftover hummus. Or even do some sort of performance art of cohabitation. I’d write a poem and they would leave my beans alone.

2004-08-27T14:11:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the online journal of a wandering Canadian girl in the strange lands below the 49th parallel. If you're reading this and I don't know who you are, then welcome and apologies for the apathetic rants and mediocre commentary. If I do know you, well, you said I make my words dance, so welcome to the party.