Low Ridin' - High Flyin'

I was thrilled when I learned that I would get the next two days off from work. Rakhi is a Rajasthani holiday during which sisters give their brothers gifts in return for the promised protection of their honor. Charming… I know. In reality however, at least as I experienced it, Rakhi isn’t as painfully patriarchal as it sounds.

On the first day I did absolutely nothing. Well, that’s not true; I did go and get a shave from my barber at the “American Saloon” on Station Rd. I walked next door afterwards, face stinging from ayurvedic balm, and had a fresh-squeezed pineapple juice.
I also went to “Fitness Planet”. Leaving the gym, tired, I was considering stopping for a cane and mint juice. I was rounding Ratanada Circle, slowly, when the bastard cut me off. Complain as I may, it was actually my fault. Driving in India, when someone cuts you off, you have to be ready for it. I wasn’t. My right foot mashed the rear brake just as I passed over a pile of drift-sand. It all happened incredible fast but somehow, as the bike went down, I summoned the reflexes of the panther I hadn’t seen in Ranakpur and sprang off the footpegs. If forced to do it again I would surely end up in the hospital, so this account should by no means be taken as representative of my athletic prowess (generally lacking) but rather a freak burst of coordination. I landed in front of the crashing motorcycle on the balls of my feet, tripped, and rolled back into an awkward decelerating sprint. As I dusted myself off, rubbing my bruised shoulder through the tear in my shirt, I realized that two hundred bewildered pedestrians were gawking at me. It was awkward and embarrassing to say the least. Flustered and frustrated that I hadn’t thought of a biting Hindi insult to shout before the other driver had fled the scene, I turned and walked back to my bike. In retrospect, I am glad the other driver took off: I don’t have a driver’s license and, after the Day of the Deliveryman, I am keen on avoiding hot encounters with Indian police. The motorcycle wasn’t as badly beaten up as I had expected it to be. The headlight’s plastic cover had been shattered but the bulb was still intact. The front fender and chrome crashbar had been scraped up good but luckily there wasn’t any mechanical damage. The forward, right turn indicator had been sheered off. Not a big deal though; drivers here do not look behind so forward turn signals are effectively useless. I righted the bike, struggled with the kick-start as traffic buzzed around me, and rode slowly back to the guesthouse.

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For Wednesday, the day of Rakhi celebrations, I had been invited to a coworker’s house. Ever since that first week here in Jodhpur when I jumped out of the village jeep to change its flat, Santoz-ji Jain has treated me as a surrogate son. When I walk into a room she beams, curls her upper lip in a manner that if I didn’t know was affectionate I might mistake for slight annoyance. She unfailingly relinquishes her seat to me when there are none left. I found this very uncomfortable at first but now that I’m aware of the futility of resistance it is actually quite endearing.

Now, even as we are good friends, before going to Santoz-ji’s house, I knew next to nothing about her or her family; she does not speak a word of English. Come to think of it, she doesn’t even call me by my English name. She’s always calling me “Prem” which I think means “love” in either Hindi or Marwari.

I woke up early to go buy a housewarming gift. A while back I asked Govind if a plant (flowers?) was an appropriate thing for a guest to bring. He laughed at the peculiarity of my assumption.
“No, Benjamin-Singh, that would be… weird. Indians bring sweets.”
So, in an effort not to be weird – those of you who know me well know that this is a daily struggle – I drove to the nearest sweet shop and bought a one-kilo box-o’-diabetes. Fresh Indian candies are crammed with refined sugar and ghee. Most of them are too sweet for my taste but a few, the pistachio ones especially, are pretty good.
Santoz-ji’s youngest son, Praveen, showed up at the guesthouse at eleven o’clock and I followed him, on my bike, through Sojati gate and into the labyrinth of the old city. Horn blaring at innocent bystanders, I tailed him as we careened recklessly through knee scraping alleys and backstreets. He looked back every now and then, smiling, half surprised that I was keeping up. We pushed through the maze, drawing closer to the fort, and finally rumbled up to an indigo washed house, indistinguishable in color from its neighbors’.

Stepping over the open sewer and into the foyer, I kicked off my sandals and followed Praveen to the second floor.
“Ram ram,” Santoz-ji said, curling her lip and beckoning me towards an open-front room overlooking the alley and my parked motorcycle. Santoz-ji called her daughter to come and lay down some sitting cushions. I wasn’t at all prepared for the young beauty that walked into the room. She was small, a bit wispy, but moved with the obnoxiously elegant poise of a runway model. As she floated across the floor she looked at me and curled her upper lip into a smile. I quickly realized that I was being weird and awkwardly shifted my gaze away. I knew better than to get my hopes up but I was nevertheless disappointed when her husband entered shortly behind her.

Someone brought me their wedding album and we all sat in a circle flipping through hundreds of photographs. I noticed that the son-in-law, the husband, was not looking at the photos but at me. That was fine though; at least I wasn’t the one being weird.
Santoz-ji returned to the kitchen to continue lunch preparations while her husband and sons sat and “talked” with me. None of them spoke English but because one of the sons was deaf, they were all fluent in sign language. The entire family was very attuned to hand signals and gestures. As a result, even with no sign knowledge myself, we found it relatively easy to communicate with each other. When lunch was ready it was placed on the floor in front of us. There was veg. pulauo, warm khil, channa curry, bhati, fried puri, papad, and a mountain of the fresh sweets that I had brought.
I ate too much trying to appease everyone who begged me to eat more. When we had had enough, everyone stretched out on the floor, belching and massaging their bellies.

I noticed that the light in the room had shifted when I opened my eyes. Propping myself up on my elbows I blinked around the unoccupied area. It was almost five o’clock when Santoz-ji, seeing that I was finally awake, called for Praveen. He had wanted to take me to his uncle’s house so I grabbed my camera and we set off on foot through the confusing alleys. Rakhi is celebrated throughout Rajasthan but like most cultural celebrations it has developed unique regional characteristics. In Jodhpur, perhaps due to the city’s proximity to Pakistan, the predominantly Muslim tradition of kite flying has been adopted. As Praveen and I walked through the old city, gangs of children scampered about, squealing as they chased runaway kites. Kite salesmen crouched at street corners winding spools of multicolored string. Looking up at the narrow strip of sky between tenements, dozens of strings crisscrossed, kites darting perilously close to power lines. The responsible conscience cringed; apparently America has not yet exported the lessons of Benjamin Franklin.







The uncle’s house was near Sardar Market and sat facing a modest Hindu temple. The songs of tabla and harmonium players escaped the shrine and resonated in the surrounding streets. I followed Praveen to the roof of the house and was immediately taken aback by the view. Against the backdrop of imposing Mehrangarh Fort fluttered thousands of paper kites in the sunset breeze. Thousands of people craning their necks on rooftops that stretched to the horizon in every direction.



I took hundreds of pictures and soon people on neighboring rooftops were calling for me to join them. Praveen had disappeared downstairs so, balancing on a walled ledge I leapt to the next house over the narrow but gaping drop to the alley below. The father and son who had urged me were delighted and invited me to come down into their home for chai. I took tea and papad and talked with the older man for a bit. His right ear was severely disfigured and he told me, shouted at me with a voice resembling Kermit the Frog, that he was effectively deaf. I finished my chai and by then was tired of shouting at the man so I thanked the family and returned to their roof.





A girl called out to me from a few houses over. I made my way, creeping over water pumps, busted spring cots, and apologizing to a sweet old woman who I startled by dropping onto her roof from the adjacent raised one. I ascended a staircase, mere slabs embedded in a cement wall, and mantled onto the girl’s parallel roof. She smiled at me, blushed, and tied a white garland around my wrist. As the man with one ear had, she led me downstairs to meet the rest of the family. We all took chai and laughed at the girl’s little brother, a toddler who couldn’t even be in the same room with me without bursting into tears. I thanked them all and returned once again to the roof.
This scene was repeated a number of times – jumping roofs, flying kites, meeting families, exchanging cell-phone numbers – until, jittery from too many cups of chai, I returned to street level. I didn’t know exactly where I was but was able to find my way back to Praveen’s uncle’s house by the sound of the music coming from the temple across the street. I felt a little guilty about disappearing but Praveen didn’t seem to have been at all worried about where I had been.







Along the way back to Santoz-ji’s house, we stopped for fresh pan. I watched the pan-wallah meticulously clip a palm sized betel leaf, spread three different pastes, sprinkle betel nuts, coriander, anis, cinnamon, and dried fruit and then fold the whole thing up into a bite sized package resembling a Greek dolma. We tucked the pan into our cheeks and continued walking, frequently stopping to spit sour blood-red betel juice into the foul sewers.

Santoz-ji’s eldest son, Kishore Jain, had just come home from a friend’s house and was thrilled to meet me. He was even more excited by my eagerness to “talk” with him through crudely written notes and assumed sign language (Kishore is deaf and mute but reads and writes English semi-fluently). We struggled sometimes but he was patient with me and beamed whenever we finally understood each other. He told me that he loved to travel, slapping his hand and extending it away from his face in imitation of an airplane. I flipped through photos of him and his wife at the Lake Palace in Udaipur, the Taj Mahal, and at India Gate in Delhi. We watched a DVD of his wedding celebration and he proudly showed me his talented wife’s portfolio of drawings and watercolors.

The Rakhi ceremony took place in the main upstairs room in front of the family’s Jain shrine. What I had expected to be an outmoded show of Rajasthani patriarchy was actually a loving display of familial affection. From the description I was given I thought that I would see the manly men of the family, the protectors, avow their swords to the defense of the fragile, incapable womenfolk.
But their were no swords, no snorting bulls, and no subsidiary siblings. Santoz-ji’s daughter, my future wife in some favorable alternate reality, smiled at her brothers as she tied red string bracelets around their wrists. They gently touched her shoulders as she pressed a dot of vermillion between their eyes and placed sweet barfi on their tongues.
The gorgeous young woman then turned to me and, to my surprise and delight, repeated the ritual. Now, I’m no patriarch, and I’m an even worse swordsman, but as she dotted my forehead I was pretty sure that, for her, I would follow Kishore and Praveen into battle.





The sun had long since set behind the fort and the old city was by then dark except for the occasional crackling flicker of fireworks. I thanked Santoz-ji and her husband, said my goodbyes and motored away slowly through the restricted maze. Turn left where the camel is tethered to the kulfi cart, turn right at the house in front of which the shirtless fat man sits munching on a jalebi, and turn right again at the courtyard with the hanging, freshly-dyed saris. My route markers remained fresh in my mind’s eye but they were now unhelpful; the camel had wandered off, the fat man had had his fill, and the saris had dried and been removed from the clothesline. I directed my bike aimlessly though the alleyways, honking around blind turns and squinting for potholes and sewage canals.
I pulled over next to an elderly woman who was sitting on her stoop in some unfamiliar backstreet. I feel that it is rude to talk to people while wearing a motorcycle helmet, so after killing the engine, I unbuckled my chinstrap. Sometimes I feel a bit like Darth Vader removing his helmet and finally revealing himself to Luke Skywalker. The only thing that’s missing is the overdubbed oxygen-mask effect…and I guess the whole, embodiment of evil, thing. I must have fooled the old lady though because, as soon as I unveiled myself, she stood up, retreated into her house, and slammed the door behind her. No bother. Even without the old Jedi’s help, I eventually found my way back home by just “using the force.”

It is always fascinating to meet a friend’s family. Although I didn’t know what to expect of the Jains, I cannot say that I was surprised. Having myself come from an overtly affectionate household, I find that I am sensitive to and perceptive of similar families. In the villages, over the past two and a half months, I have observed Santoz-ji: the pincher of babies’ cheeks, the heroine, the inspiration for and close friend to countless rural women. Santoz-ji, the coworker, and friend who always gives away her curled-lipped smiles for free. It is incredible people such as she and families like hers who have defined my summer here in Rajasthan, a time characterized by not so unexpected love.