While in India I have been working on binding my book ‘Sound Horn Okay’, a book about Indian wheeled transportation. I have made the prototype, which is Ashwin’s copy, and I’m working on the first of an edition of ten. I plan to have them completed by the time I return to Chicago. Hot off the presses and ready to sell! 🙂
Below are examples of a few of the finished pages.
Did I forget the mention the Golden Howdah? The highlight of the Jamboo Savari are the elephants at the end, including the large central elephant carrying the Golden Howdah. This year the caparisoned elephant was Arjuna, carrying the 75 kg (or almost 200lb) solid gold Howdah bearing the idol of Goddess Chamundeshwari. Originally it was used to carry the Maharaja of Mysore. Notice the armed guards surrounding it? Don’t ask me how anyone could manage to steal it in this setting. Maybe by helicopter?
This elephant was injured while pulling the band cart.
Mysore Palace
The spectacle of Dasara in Mysore was as far as we could get from our experience in Gudalur, but this is where we went next. On Friday evening we joined the throng at the palace to see the display of lights. Traffic was stopped so we got out of the car and walked along two sides of the block before meeting up with our car again. The excitement was palpable, and Ashwin skipped and danced down the sidewalk until it became too crowded and we had to hold on to keep him from getting lost. Much of Mysore was lit up, like Christmas or New Year’s Eve at home, with colored lights draped over every important building in the city. Roads had lights strung across them, and colored lights formed pictures of gods in motion. The palace was completely outlined in white lights. It was spectacular!
The beginning of the procession
On the following day, Kamala and Anil Kumar made arrangements for us to watch the elephant procession, the Jamboo Savari. We had a comfortable place to sit in a storefront until the parade started, then we were taken to the front row and given seats on a platform with a perfect view. Included in the parade were 45 floats (or tableaux) with 71 costumed folk art troupes in between, drumming and dancing. The performers were hypnotic (Ashwin didn’t make a peep for two hours) and the tableaux were the height of kitsch. My personal favorite was the one with the giant silk worm on it (the man is trying to adjust the mannequin’s falling sari). There were many paper mache copies of temples, a giant ear, political figures, village houses, handicrafts, and tons of gods and animals. Two floats  included a tiger attacking a man and another announced all of the repercussions one will suffer from going to the bathroom outside (including being attacked by a tiger and other monstrosities). In other words, this was by far the BEST parade I have ever seen in my life.
Hanuman the monkey god came to visit
Over 5 Lakh (or 500,000) attended the Jamboo Savari, and when it was over a huge crowd of mostly men ran down the street after the procession. It was total chaos! We just waited until the majority of the crowd passed before leaving, but it was still a sea of people when we got to the side street. People were purposefully stepping in the elephant poop with their bare feet (good luck?) some climbed up onto the train bridge, the train halted and was blaring it’s horn. The front tire of a motor scooter following behind me ran into my heel, someone pinched my butt so surreptitiously and cleverly I wasn’t sure it had happened. Ha, ha! you have to admire that a bit, had I realized in time I would have slugged him with my water jug. Â In short, I loved it and had a fantastic time!
The end of Jamboo Savari
Last Thursday and Friday we visited the Vidyodaya School in Gudalur with Azim Premji University. APU is interested in enrolling students from a diverse set of backgrounds and went to talk to potential students. Venkatesh and I went to take part and we brought our son Ashwin with us. Initially he didn’t want to go, until he saw the Gudalur yellow autos, and then he didn’t want to leave! In order to get to Gudalur we had to drive through the Bandipur (in Karnataka State) and the Mudumalai (in Tamil Nadu) Tiger Preserves. There we saw deer, rhesus monkeys, langur monkeys, wild boar, elephants, mongoose, peacock and sloth bear. No tiger I’m afraid, but the sloth bear – mother and child were a rare and exciting sight. We stopped to look at some langur monkeys on the side of the road and two jumped on our car to peek into the windows. Usually langur are shy, but obviously people have been ignoring the signs that warn against feeding the wild animals. One wouldn’t jump off until we started slowly driving away.
Vidyodaya School is an amazing place, set up to educate children from the Adivasi Tribe who live in the forest near Gudalur. I was asked by APU if I would make a presentation to the school kids, so I read my book ‘Sound Horn Okay’ to them while a school teacher translated explanations of each page. I think it was a bit of a flop as these kids come from the forest and haven’t been exposed to all the various forms of wheeled transportation. But then I demonstrated the block printing technique by inking a block with a carving of an auto rickshaw and laying a sheet of paper over it. When I peeled back the paper for the first print there was an excited gasp. They loved it! I encouraged them to come up and press the paper onto the block with the baren and help me peel the print. They were so happy to touch the materials and to see the results. It was a fantastic experience for me and I think for them also. One young man wanted to try inking and printing one on his own and asked me to teach him how to make prints. I had to leave after the demo, but I spoke to him for a while about various prints that can be made simply. I have also been asked to come back for a one day workshop, so I will try to fit it in during this trip to India. I would love to go back – these kids are so well behaved and so genuinely curious. It was a joy to meet them and talk to them.
Check out this beautiful video made by a 9th grade student after completing a video workshop. These kids are amazing!
Ashwin was a little less impressed and he took some time to settle in. The Adivasi kids are a very close knit group and they were very curious about him. Ashwin didn’t want to stay with us during our meeting, so we let him go off with the kids and figure it out for himself. He spent some time running, hitting, screaming and generally behaving badly before he settled in to play. I knew the local kids could fend for themselves, so I let him run wild and free until eventually they were playing together.
Need I say more?
Remember this serene setting? Well little did I know this was to be the scene of an all out ant war! We thought the monsoon was finished, but not so. We had major down pours yesterday and today. It rained into our bedroom a bit yesterday, so today I asked Venkatesh to go up and check our window. He said it was strange, there were a bunch of ants on the floor on my side of the bed. ‘How many?’ I said. ‘Oh about seven or so’. At bedtime I went up and there were quite a few, I killed about a dozen – (again, a Jain I’ll never be). Â I got into bed and suddenly there were ants crawling up my arm. Of course I freaked, killed another batch of ants and called Venkatesh. This is when he looked under our mattress…
We must have vacuumed up hundreds of ants. It was unlike anything I have ever seen before.
Making coffee is even different here. First you make the ‘decoction’ in something like a French press (left), it takes at least half an hour to drip down for a concentrated brew like espresso. This can be used and saved for the next day, unlike brewed coffee at home which turns bitter. Then you boil the milk that comes in soft packets. The milk is very fresh and is usually used up in a day, although I keep mine for about two days. It has a cream on top that looks like small droplets of butter when warmed. Next you pour a small amount of decoction into a bowl and add hot milk – blowing on the surface to keep the skin from pouring into your coffee mixture. Pour into a cup with the desired amount of sugar, then back and forth between pan and cup to create a froth. Pure bliss! I could get a coffee maker here, but it means buying a coffee maker that no one will use when we leave. When in Rome……..
We just started keeping water in a clay pot. We have water for washing, but we don’t have a water filter in the Cloud House, so we carry water up from the floors below. Clay also absorbs impurities and the evaporation process keeps the liquid cool. It’s a beautiful way to keep water. The ants on the other hand are not beautiful. We have to wash everything immediately or we get big red ants in the evening. That’s it for the kitchen blog, I must go pick Ashwin up from school!
Besides binding the book I wrote for Ashwin, ‘Sound Horn Okay’ I have been able to work on some other fun things. I have been making some Envelope Drawings of animals. They are fun and I don’t have to think much, they are pure play and who know where they will lead? On our wedding anniversary I was thinking of our time on the Cape and our beach wedding so I made a large ink wash drawing of a hump back whale. It seemed appropriate somehow, working on Indian truck prints in Chicago and whales in Bangalore. I bought the paper in Chang Mai, Thailand. I wasn’t sure at the time how I would use the printed gold sheet, I only knew that I loved it. Maybe I’ll draw some ships while I’m landlocked in Bangalore too.
Cloud House
This is our Cloud House. To get to the Cloud House we climb the main stairs up two flights and walk across the terrace to the back. It’s our own little house with a loft for sleeping. It’s bright and cheerful and mosquito free! (Below is a view of our living room from the loft above.) V’s parents  and his aunt live on the ground floor and his sister lives on the 1st floor with her husband and baby daughter. The Indian first floor is above the ground floor, the British system I think. The house was originally owned by Saras Auntie. The family hired an architect to renovate the original house on the ground floor, keeping the best parts – including the polished crimson floors with black inlay patterns, and to build the apartment and Cloud House above it. The architect has a reputation for ‘green’ building, sourcing local materials, and is known for her beautiful arched brick ceilings. She has also included solar panels for heating water and rain water reclamation
I call it the Cloud House because we can sit on the living room couch (which is also Ashwin’s bed) and watch the clouds through the top window of the opposite wall. In the evening around 7 pm or so, a massive colony of fruit bats flies low over our terrace. They live in the trees at Sankey Tank by day and all fly out in a great swarm in the evening. It’s a stunning sight. The tree outside of our bedroom window is in fruit, so we have been hearing the bats squawking and fighting with each other at night as they eat the fruit. During the day we have lots of kites flying overhead. I woke up from a nap with Ashwin the other day and watched a kite sitting in the palm tree outside. I think it’s building a nest – it flew low overhead today with a big stick in it’s mouth and landed in the same palm tree.
Gopal (Venkatesh’s father) is a great recycler. He has salvaged the extra wood from the old house that was renovated and hired a carpenter to make some beautiful pieces of furniture. The wood is old teak which is very hard to come by and it’s expensive. He keeps all of his old salvaged materials in his wood room on the terrace, (the other little brick house with a red tile roof). I love going in and looking at all his salvaged scraps; ammunitions boxes from World War II, an old camp cot, pots and pans, mirrors, lamp pieces and lots of other things not unlike the mystery utensil from my first post. Oh, and wood of course in every shape and size. He also has a ‘polisher’, a man who comes by and sands, fills, tints and polishes all of his old furniture and new wood creations. Venkatesh’s desk was once the old piece of furniture on the terrace that was piled high with wood scraps. I didn’t think it was even something worth salvaging, but it looks beautiful after polishing.
View of clouds through the top window and Gopal’s wood room through the bottom window
Our sleeping loft
Ashwin celebrated Onam in school last week. He was told to wear white ethnic clothing to school and to bring flowers. They took the flowers apart and made beautiful patterns on the ground outside his school gate and inside his classroom. He LOVED the kurta/pajama and wanted to wear it to bed. He asked to wear it the next day too. He said it is ‘so comfortable Mummy!’
Angkor Wat
I have to go back to Angkor Wat, both in my mind and in person. I’m sorry Ashwin (the boy who had to poop in the grass at a world heritage sight) but next time I’m going back without children. Maybe you will be all grown up by the time I return and you can come with me again – I would love that. I’ll go at sunrise when its quiet, I’ll climb to the top level where I can see the view and the altars that are still in use by monks – and I will think and draw and have peace of mind. Angkor Wat is huge and even when there are a lot of people, it doesn’t feel crowded. Even at the top level, which is fairly small, it doesn’t feel like there are very many people – but not everyone wants to climb the steep steps and children are not allowed. I have realized when I go to these holy places, no matter the religion, I am looking for my own inner peace and some kind of experience that is larger than myself. I am not a religious person, I don’t practice any particular religion, but I do feel the need for a rich inner life. I look at these pictures and sometimes I can’t believe I have seen these things.
That being said, I will certainly never be a Jain. I am currently waging war on the ants in the cloud house and the black larvae on the terrace! The larvae have come out of the compost and they move remarkably fast to the dark corners of the terrace to protect themselves from the sun. I can’t leave anything outside our door, not a door mat or flip flops or broom. They will congregate underneath. There are many things that I love about India, but the bugs are not one of them and when I’m having a difficult day they drive me crazy! Ashwin is still having major tantrums about going to school in the morning and I’m afraid it’s the bugs who suffer. I haven’t gained the tolerance of those who live in the tropics.
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