“MADAAAAMMM!!” I’m startled awake from my perch, basking in the morning sun beating onto my balcony during the waking hours. Mohan is yelling, as he does, from the bottom of my ramshackle stairs that I swear, one day, will topple over as I’m descending. I’ve already practically face planted into the upper stairs as I’ve climbed them with a quick, impatient but what I thought a reasonable pace. Why Mohan, one of the brothers who owns and operates the guest house and restaurant I’ve been staying since my move from party crazy Dharamkot Road to a quieter location, just days before Vipassana, continues to call me madam, I will never know. I’ve requested a few times for him to just call me Jess, Jessica, J, asshole, whatever, anything but madam, but alas, a man forms a habit with no desire to break so I adapt to what I find an unnecessary formality. I think he just doesn’t want to remember anyone’s name, which I don’t blame him, considering this place is a revolving door of tourists, predominately Israeli, so why remember anyone’s name? The thing is, I’ve been living in his upstairs guestroom for 2 months, I have dinner with his wife, I play with his adorable niece Shelly and I'm pretty much an extension of their family at this point. Instead of going through the revolving door as everyone else, I’m that idiot who sneaks into the small opening during the final swing of momentum of a manual entrance, thinking it’s automatic, and I just stand there, waiting for something to happen once the revolutions stop. I'm stuck and here to stay but if madam is what he prefers to call me, then madam it will remain.
“MAAAADDDAAAAAAMMM!!” Completely unaware of what he wants I brace myself like an old lady and lurch out of my comfortable position on the balcony chair, unlatch both locks on my front door, fling it open and holler back, “Whaaaaat?!” This is where the formalities stop as we scream back and forth at each other to communicate. It’s what we do.
“Madam, garbage! Do you have any?” he asks me.
“Oh yeah! I was wondering how that works around here. I’ll be down in a few seconds.” I hustle to my bathroom, grab the only garbage can I have in my room, slip into my flip flops positioned at the door, grab a few plastic bottles and patiently and carefully step down the stairs. The first step is a little further away from the top landing and there is a huge open gap that separates them, and it's at a wee incline, not to mention they are made of metal slats so they are a girl in heels worst nightmare! I am in flip flops and they are still a nightmare. Any wrong footing and you’d tumble down the very narrow, deathly looking contraption that is a fabricated norm in India. As I set a foot on solid concrete ground I’m welcomed by an aged gentleman who has a massive old weaved rice bag that holds the unwanted contents of countless houses’. He looks at me, silently, opens the bag and I dump the contents of my garbage to mix with that of everyone else’s. I thank him, give him the India head nod and before I walk away, I see him synch the bag closed, heave it onto the top of his shoulder girdle and start to shuffle his way down the uneven, slanted, crumbling steps that go from upper Dharamkot to main Dharakmot Road. “Well, I guess that answers my question about garbage pickup,” I think to myself. Of all the places I’ve traveled in this world and actually set temporary roots, I’m always fascinated by how different system’s work. In Rishikesh, India and Lesotho, Africa, they just burn everything they can’t recycle. In Rishikesh, the recycling is minimal and that was apparent by the daily evening asphyxiation we’d be subjected to but in Lesotho, they find the oddest uses for any normal item we’d throw in the trash in the US. In Peru, we found much of the hillside in San Francisco de Asis, a small community just east of the coastal fishing town of Ancon, buries their garbage in the dirtiest sand hill I’ve ever seen, which we found out was a garbage dump when we ended up digging into it during the process of our construction work. If they didn’t do that, once or twice a week a truck would drive down the sand path, honk their horn and people would need to run out of their house and throw bags of their waste into the back of the truck. Some would just leave everything in a big pile, not unlike they do in Manhattan, and the garbage collectors would pick up the mess. India is just a different world and I really can’t ever figure out the systems they have in place, for anything, really.
I’ve had to leave my green, “keep your surroundings clean” Northwest born attitude at home and believe me, the first time I did the unspeakable, I felt like I died a little inside. I had just finished devouring delicious steamed momos from one of the street vendors, post one of my first killer Ashtanga practices, and asked a girl if she’d seen a garbage. Her response, “Uh, look around, India IS the garbage. Just toss it.” I swallowed hard, closed my eyes and let my paper container dangle from my fingertips before it silently dropped into the drainage ditch below me. The sides of the streets at the end of the day look similar to those in the Mission in San Fransisco but something tells me monster street sweepers don’t cluck along Temple, Bhagsu or Jogiwara Roads in the middle of the night and instead everyone in McLeod Ganj has the untouchables to thank for keeping the filth to a minimum.
I’ve been more fascinated with the daily life of those in Dharamkot and McLeod, myself included because during one of my many epiphanies I had during Vipassana was, “why in the hell am I going to do an Ashtanga teacher training when I’ve only done 2 classes myself?!” That epiphany came on day 3 and day 4 I decided that if Sarah and I didn’t get chosen to be the travel bloggers for a project in Japan, which we were supposed to find out about while I was deep into sitting 12+ hours a day, observing my bodily sensations, I wasn’t going to be upset because the thought of incessant traveling tired me greatly. My intentions of coming to India were to immerse myself in as much yoga as possible and anyone I met along the way whose plan didn’t align with mine, I would just say hello and then good bye. Little did I know that while sitting in silence for 10 days I would come out the other end with 2 incredible new friends whose paths were very similar. I made a decision to stay put, set roots and really begin to live, a normal, daily life, in this Himalayan hillside, without stress, without a desire to move around and without going through another strictly regimented yoga teacher training. I know that will come again in my life but right now, it just didn’t feel like the right time. I have to admit, I chuckle to myself when friends back home speak about all the adventures I’m having because, once you’re settled somewhere and set roots, everything just becomes a norm and nothing seems like an adventure. This is why I haven’t updated my blog in so long, each day brings me the same satisfaction, which is great, but it’s all just life for me. I feel like writing now would be like keeping a travel blog while I’m in Seattle. J
Every so often I have to stop and realize exactly what I’m doing and I’m amazed by my life. I wake up every morning and head to yoga, like I do at home, head to some fine establishment for food and tea with friends, like at home, find a quiet café with a balcony that has an amazing view to read for a few hours, which I do at home, and maybe catch a free movie and then walk up the hill or depending on the daylight, catch a ride up the hill to my place of residence. Sounds pretty normal, yeah? I feel like I’ve turned into one of those people who answers with, “oh you know, the usual,” when asked what’s new but in reality, that couldn’t be further from the truth, which as renewed my desire to capture just what life is like where I'm living. This is less a travel blog now and more a life experience blog, which I find completely acceptable at this point in my life.
Each morning I wake and now that the monsoons have subsided, although not entirely, the sun is fighting with all its might to seep into my room through my blood red curtains, sometimes succeeding and leaving a small bead of light shooting directly into my eyes. I smile as I emerge out of my burrow of sleep sack and mound of blanket and fling the curtains open with awe at the beauty of the new day. The mountains have this spectacular glow to them, whether from the dew collected over the night or just how things look here without any explanation, but everything shimmers and it’s amazing. My entire room lights up, I open all the windows and make my way to the balcony to sweep whatever mess the wild cat has left in the middle of the night of its scratching post, which is my chair. I plop down for a minute, close my eyes, sun radiating much needed Vitamin D into my skin and just breath in the morning, all while listening to Rinku, Mohan’s older brother, aggressively, almost violently gargle, hack and spit into the sink in their family’s outside shared bathroom. My Dalai Lama blessed Buddhist prayer flags gently flap in the breeze, which I hung as soon as I realized I was staying for awhile, life on the hillside slowly starts to stir and I can hear the Vipassana bells in the distance. Now that I’ve lived a life for 10 days by those bells, it’s impossible not to notice each time they ring. While I was in Vipassana, the moment we could start to speak, one of the first things I said, as Jasmin, the main server, was walking around with one of those god-awful hand held bells going “dinglelinglingdinglelinglingdinglelinglingdinglelingling” was “when I leave here and hear a fucking bell, I’m going to have a Pavolvian response and it’s not going to be salivating.” Oops, there’s some aversion for you. The fact is, now that I’m out, I love hearing them and while my meditation has been anything but consistent, when I try my best to make time, I try to time it with the bells. Those bells, this view, these sounds, the smells, none of these things are anything I have in Seattle. Life lived on a mountainside in the Himalayan mountain range is like nothing else on this planet and it’s beyond beautiful and experiencing this is my adventure...
Cheers from the mountain and more to come,
xxxo,
Dirty
Cheers from the mountain and more to come,
xxxo,
Dirty
