Rajasthan: Clay in the Desert

I just spent a week in a small town in Rajasthan with three other students (Ally, Ilan, and Margaux) and our Hindi professor, Prahladji. Ally, Ilan, and Margaux are just super kind and passionate and exuberant people and were a lot of fun to be around, and Prahladji is a bit of a trickster and makes a lot of silly jokes and sticks out his tongue and I am pretty sure he enjoyed our company as much as we enjoyed his. Every day we rode a taxi from Nathdwara, the town we were staying in, into the smaller village of Molela to work with Mukeshji on making pottery. Mukesh didn't have the best English, but was extremely patient and very warm and a brilliant potter. He made everything seem so easy! And then we'd mess up and everything would be awful and he'd come over and say “No problem, no problem” and touch our pottery and it would instantly be better than it was before we spilled water everywhere or tore an arm of Ganesha.

And he had us over for lunch every day and his family was just the sweetest and most hospitable and also very large and difficult to keep track of. He's only 26 but has two children, Mahai and Pulak who are adorable and very shy and never spoke to us and spent a long time hiding behind Mukesh and peering out at us as we made a great variety of faces. And then there was his mother who found it incredibly amusing when we told her in our elementary Hindi that in the US, there aren't any cows on the road; and his wife who worked really hard to memorize the phrase “Hello, my name is Vimla” so that when she was asked “Aap kaisi he? [How are you?]” she just responded “Hello, my name is Vimla” and fell silent. We only heard the rest of the story later. Mukesh also has 7 sisters and a brother and a variety of nieces, nephews and grand-nieces and grand-nephews, and we requested a family tree for reference but never got one. But! They were all so nice!

And afterwards we would hang around Nathdwara, play badminton at the sports complex where we met some local college kids and befriended them. We told them we'd be back the next day, but then there was a bit of a change of plans and we went out to dinner and missed Teremindrah and his pals and never saw them again and that was super unfortunate. But the food was good, and Ally got a sari and it was a pleasant evening. And every evening we managed to sit around a computer and watch a movie, which was a nice little tradition.

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Wednesday was particularly spectacular. We got up early, at 4:30 (the movie had ended at 12) to go see the sunrise darshan at the Shri XXXX temple, which (the temple) culturally dominates the town of Nathdwara. Darshan refers to a rather intense, spiritual and difficult to translate eye-contact with a sculpture or painting of a deity which in fact is that deity, and the statue of Krishna in the temple is a very important one, of which we heard a variety of legends (it self-constructed in that very spot, it was carried there at great cost by an old Rajput king in opposition to Akbar's Mughal conquest of India). My eye contact was brief and definitively lacking in any of the deeper spiritual meaning, but it was nevertheless nice and a great privilege to be allowed in on such an intimate moment between so many people and their god. We stopped and got chai outside the temple, a delicious minty blend that I haven't had elsewhere (although, apparently Ilan's mother makes it the same way and hers is “totally better”), and happened to run into one of Mukesh's neices.

On return to the hotel it was only 6:30 and there was no way I was falling back to sleep, although we had a few hours and everyone else was headed that direction. So I popped in some earbuds, put on some Flaming Lips, and wandered off towards a nearby hill which was just beginning to get touched by the morning's early rays. Like the sports complex, the mountain seemed to be owned and well-maintained by the temple. The trail was paved with a very slight incline, lined on both sides with flowers and flowering bushes and flowering trees, with bird feeders at frequent intervals and elegant green parrots flying to and fro. As I was rounding the eastern side of the hill (the trail was about 3 kilometers and circled the hill around halfway up its side), the sun just started to emerge from behind some distant mountains, revealing also my first view over the town: it was much larger than I had thought, and full of houses that looked pseudorandomly generated and placed, either in pristine white or a rich, light blue (with, of course, some variance), spreading out over the countryside. I also noticed that the air that I was thinking of as incredibly, amazingly clean was in fact not that, and Delhi is just awful in comparison to anywhere, but you know what: that was fine. There were groups of women and girls lining the paths, picking what seemed to be seeds for the various shrines distributed around the mountain, and then the occasional man in work-out gear going for a speed walk. Later, I encountered some men in workout gear and sunglasses riding some motorcycles.

From the encircling path, on the far side of the hill, there was another path leading up to the very top, where there was a lone shrine or temple to Shiva, a trident planted in the ground and two lonely flags flying on a flag pole. Back a little bit was an old and suspiciously abandoned looking building whose windows and doors were just open passages into the rectangular and one-roomed exterior, lined with the same graffiti that you see everywhere. By climbing outside of the little paved structure a bit (bare footed, as one is not supposed to wear shoes in holy areas such as those, and so a little woried about scorpions) and balancing on a narrow edge of a rock, I was able to achieve a 360º view of the towns and hills, the desert or “dead lands” as the Hindi translates to stretching out into the distance, the horizon showing up about where the visibility due to pollution makes distinguishing things difficult. A predictably beautiful panorama of Rajasthan, all in all. (Actually, I lied: this view wasn't discovered until I came back on Friday and did the sunrise hike again, this time managing to drag along some company who were jealous of my adventurousness (they weren't, but did want to go for the hike))

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Fast forward a bit and there we are, driving at 10:30 down to Molela and Mukesh's work shop, where he can't get the electric pottery wheel to start and so we are left with the classic: a large round stone set on a thick wooden axle in the dirt, which you activate by spinning with a long stick for a long time. The momentum builds up, and then you are given about 4 minutes of enough momentum to make your pottery; after, you need to usethe stick again. Mukesh was actually not too much of an expert at the wheel, and ended up cutting off the bottom of a few cups that we were making. The other guy there, though, who spoke no english and with whom we exchanged zero words (he just showed up for that day) apparently cranks out one thousand little clay chai cups each day for the temple in Molela. This number seems rather difficult to believe, but you know: maybe he does, maybe he does. He definitely was better than the other students, and definitely definitely was better than I. It is amazing how simple and straightforward one can make the creation of a clay bowl seem and how that is opposed to the difficulty of actually performing such an action. I made some pots though, and some cups and some asymmetrical candle holders (?) and it was a lot of fun. A little bit more exciting than sitting cross legged on the floor for hours slowly trying to approximate Krishna in clay form and continuously failing to do so (although, I am kind of proud of how my Krishna turned out, and Prahlad-ji took him home! Which I am very proud of). And it was also a lot of fun to watch, as the other students and also the master wheelist took turns making their own creations, to see the spinning column of clay transformed through gentle touches into what I can go ahead and call works of art.

We were not at the wheel for very long though, and due to the singularity of the wheel itwas mostly spent watching. Quickly afterwards, we were ferried off on a drive deeper into the mountains or hills, through tiny villages and past lakes, through slightly bigger villages and past a surprising number of pretty touristy looking hotels. We stopped at one of these for a quick lunch on the side of the road before carrying on the Kumbalgarh fort, which was (as per usual) spectacular.

The fort is located on top of the tallest mountain in the region, and from it spans a 32 kilometer long wall that rumor has it is the second longest wall in the world (the Great Wall being rather longer and a bit more impressive of course) and also visible from space, whatever that means. It was formerly the stronghold of the Mewar kingdom, which spanned most of the region of Rajasthan that we explored, and was one of the last Rajput kingdoms to resist the Mughal empire's expansion. It could have been built in like the 6th century?? But no one really knows how old it is, and most of the history we learned about it seemed to be centered much later, around the 16th century. But: it was riddled with holes in walls and outlooks from which you could see the mountains of the region spreading out in every direction, it had numerous temples and other buildings for a variety of purposes, each constructed somewhat simply but beautifully. The crenelations on top of the walls in the main building/palace/fort caused water to drip down in stripes along the walls; this caused mold and mildew to profligate in stripes, so now the walls are striped with white plaster and black water damage, in a rather attractive effect.

On the walk up, through the paths weaving back and forth that approach the main building/palace/fort situated at the very peak of the mountain, each corner revealing a new grand vista, Prahladji started walking very exaggeratedly for a photo and then we started a whole Ministry of Silly Walks type thing. Also, we got an excellent slow-motion video of Ilan jumping from an archway over a hedge and doing a little heel-click.

What I'm trying to say is, we had a good time.

On the drive back, everyone was squished together and halfway asleep but we struggled to stay awake and watch the sunset over the mountains while we all listened to our own music and occasionally had brief conversations.

It was one of the better days of this semester.

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And then like, more did happen. There was much more to it than that one day. We visited Udaipur, explored the city palace, had ice cream while looking out over one of the three centuries-old artificial lakes built at the same time as the rest of the city, with an old palace situated on an island in the middle of it and temples dotting the tops of many of the mountains visible in the distance. We visited a museum that we didn't quite understand, and watched a 20 minuted documentary in Hindi made with mid-2000s 3D video game graphics that was followed by a walk past a bunch of largescale diaramas and anamatronics that were amazing. The death scene of the emperors horse had the horse's eyes, tongue and ears move back and forth in time with eachother, and the emperors arm moving up and down, and nothing else. Outside we rode a camel for a few hundred feet. We fired and painted our clay pieces, one with bright colors and the rest in a simple but beautiful terracotta. Ally wanted to buy a sari, so we spent a long time sitting in two sari shops while we explored all the options, with intricate designs and gold and silver and jewels and probably mostly fake gold and silver and jewels, but very shiny, and flowers made out of fabric emerging from the cloths and bright bright bright colors and more muted colors and glitter. The first one that she tried to buy, she was too excited about and so the shopkeeper tried to charge way too much money (it worked out to 2300 rupees, or $34), so we left that shop and she found a similar one at the second for a mere Rs. 1300 after another half an hour. We had a lot of Gujarati food, and delicious food (I do not mean to imply that one was not the other: on the contrary), and stopped at a restaurant/hotel that had a curious collection of antique cars, and then flew back Friday evening.

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It has been pointed out to me that I don't do a very good job about talking about the people involved, giving kind of vague compliments and dealing very superficially with the actual relationships. I don't really know how to write about this, though. I'm still struggling with concrete imagery, and have barely any idea about how to approach the more and nebulous metaphorical imagery of Friendship. But: I thought this Rajasthan trip was especially pleasant because of the people involved. Ilan is half-Gujarati and very excited about the food, about being able to explore his heritage in a small way. He thinks a lot and thinks well, and puts a lot of effort into being a good person and a virtuous person and is pretty successful at it. He can also be quite ridiculous. Margaux is very passionate and excellent at thinking critically about things (she is, rather fittingly, a major in Critical Theory) and is a fascinating person to talk to, while still being pretty weird and pretty silly and she is enamored of the Spooky Scary Skeletons dubstep remix, which some of you probably know of and will help color in the lines of Margaux a little bit (also, it is the week of Halloween, so by enamored I mean for Halloween times, not all the times). She also listens to sooo many podcasts and does a lot of cool LGBTQ work. Ally is the person who shares my homestay with me and is a lovely person to be around, smiley and exuberant and nice and a studio art major who does some cool art and is very knowledgeable about music and listens to some rather silly music. All together, we had a lot of really interesting, thought-provoking conversations; we had a lot of really silly conversations. We got along quite well, and there were no fistfights whatsoever. We tolerated sleep deprivation, exhaustion from sitting cross legged for hours, and not really understanding what is going on or what the plan was with minimal complaints and just a lot of being super pleasant.

It was a good week.