The Clearing

While chatting with my mom the other day, she wanted to know what we (now that I am a married man the pronoun has changed in some contexts) were planning to do for Diwali. Being no match for my mom's enthusiasm, I handed the phone over to the wife who was similarly enthused. She, while still on the phone, asked me if  I remembered the story my dad narrates during the Diwali puja. The idea of narrating the story in our own puja suddenly seemed quite appealing to me; I took the phone from her and got my mom to revise the story for me. Here's the story:

Some 4-5 hours into my trip from Penn State to Champaign my check-engine light first came on and then began to flash alarmingly. I pulled over at a gas station, feeling a little anxious because I still had so long to travel, the weather was terrible (there was snow predicted later that day most of which I was able to avoid by taking a detour that took me all the way South to Kentucky), and I didn't have AAA to bail me out if it turned out be something serious. Was so perturbed that I started discussing the problem with the first stranger I met. He turned out to be a truck driver originally from Algeria. When he heard about the source of my anxiety he burst out laughing, revealing really bad decaying teeth, telling me that he had been driving his truck for years with the check-engine light on and I should probably just ignore it too. I drove the rest of the trip considerably less alarmed.

I saw it--a big chunky spider--in the bath tub just before going to bed. Was relieved that I would not have to deal with it till at least the morning by which time it would probably be gone. My subconscious however had other plans, because a few minutes later I found myself having decided that I needed to wash my feet before going to bed. Dealing with the spider was tricky. I didn't want to kill it because would have hated cleaning up the gooey mess it was sure to create. I tried to initially nudge it so that it would walk up the walls of the tub and out, but I think the walls were too slick for a good purchase. Then I just scooped it into a magazine--pushed it up the wall and caught it on the magazine as it fell back off the wall--and dumped it outside the tub. Making sure that it left the apartment would probably have been a smart thing to do but I have become too complacent since I got an actual bed to sleep on--bye bye sleeping on the floor grad school days! But as I was falling asleep I obsessed a bit about where the spider might be. When I left the apartment in the morning, as I turned back to make sure that I'd locked it behind me, I saw the spider on the door mat on its way out--perhaps to a friendlier bath tub.

Labels: Music, Software

About two weeks into my 2007 trip I found myself in the Southern Ecuador town of Baños which, being located at the foot of the volcano Tungurahua, gets its name from the resultant natural steam baths. Despite the fact that the driving force of the town is tourism, its commercial enterprises seem well blended with the natural charms it has to offer--actually, I'm not completely sure about that claim, maybe I was just in a happy-tourist frame of mind, and would have discovered an ugly underbelly had I stayed longer than the five days I spent there. This was a time when I was allowing myself to be baby-sat by my Lonely Planet guide so this is quite possible. A related image from the day I arrived there, after a short bus ride from Latacunga, is that of walking towards a hostal strongly recommended by LP and actively ignoring the beckonings of proprietors--I was a dead give-away tourist with the backpack--of other hostals which had not made it into LP. Later in the trip, now that I was a more seasoned tourist and more comfortable with the setting, I would strike up conversations with tourists as soon as I landed in a town and get them to recommend places to stay at instead of using LP. That worked out much better as you can't beat up-to-date info. Also, new hostals open pretty frequently in tourist-centric places and offer really competitive prices in the beginning--I was paying $5 a day for one in Cuzco which had been recommended to me by a tourist in an internet cafe. I never regretted any of these recommendations although some of the LP recommendations left me a little cold. In Lima following LP's recommendation I stayed in a place which didn't have any other tourists but was full of lots of office-going locals--I remember feeling quite lonely with my minimal Spanish there, definitely a bit of a low point of my trip.

So where was I? Right, getting back to describing the town, the wide and clean streets of Baños gave the impression that the town did not come up haphazardly, but was planned, and had an efficient local government. There were some interesting cafes, discovered again mostly through the LP, which served a blend of local and international cuisine. One that I was particularly fond of had cosy seating areas with a happy mismatch of furniture, and was tastefully decorated by people with obvious artistic sensibilities. It was spacious with many comfortable nooks and corners, random pieces of art--very international. And a collection of books which is ubiquitous to any place frequented by tourists, and the policy-- also quite common--of only exchanging books as opposed to allowing people to buy them to maintain the volume of the collection. I think the owners were Americans who had visited the town and liked it so much that they had decided to settle down there. The food was quite good though a little more expensive than the less ambitious eateries in town. The larger room of the cafe also had big sized windows which let lots of natural light in.

There was another cafe which was run by a local artist who, as the LP predicted, also used the place as his studio when it was not open. Although it did have a strong odor of turpentine, the food was good authentic unassuming cuisine from Ecuador which had a homemade feel to it. Ecuador was, in general quite friendly to the vegetarian tourist. The locals' diet has a strong presence of vegetables and fruit--some completely new to me--and I really enjoyed the fruits salads I often had while over there. Your average lover of spicy food might however be a little disappointed as I found the food a little on the bland side and would have struggled had every meal not been accompanied with ahi which is a sour and sometimes hot tomato based salsa. I would have come back to this eatery more often if it was not so stifling from the smell. The paintings were just about average and I was glad for the artist that he'd had the sense to start this side business.

A major source of excitement for me was the discovery that a couple who I'd met and liked in Quito were staying in the same hostal as me. In any case, people are very friendly while traveling like you can only be to strangers you don't expect to ever meet again. A second meeting, under the circumstances, is like meeting a childhood friend! It provided such a fine start to my stay in this town. And this was not the only time this happened. There was another couple I shared the bus ride out of Baños with whom I ran into a second time in another one of my favorite places of the trip--Vilcabamba, which is farther South of Baños, not too far from the border with Peru. I was in the town square when I saw some people waving in my direction. My first reaction was to assume that they were waving to some one else but when the waving persisted I realized who it was. They were wearing sun glasses this time and different clothes--inexcusable, how could I have recognized them?! I guess staying on the gringo trail has its advantages.

There's a very pretty river that flows on one end of the town and my first hike here was down to the river bed. It was fairly pleasurable hike till at one point I found the trail blocked off by a large barking dog who was intimidating and threatened to cut my hike short. I spent about half an hour inching my way towards the dog--I would have felt incredibly stupid if I'd turned back--the philosophy being that if I gave it time to get used to my presence it would not find me so threatening. It was nerve-racking nevertheless to be in that situation and I really wouldn't have know what to do if the dog had decided to attack me--somehow the thought of traveler's health insurance was not a particularly comfortable one then. I eventually made my way past the dog, and a small one room structure outside of which a couple who were cooking and were the likely owners of the dog sat not reacting to my friendly and relieved 'hola'. Although probably squatters on public property, they felt comfortable enough there to resent my invasion of their privacy. Another few minutes and I was at the river bed where I sat meditating about my trip and soaking up the sun. This revery was interrupted by this time the barking of not one but two dogs. The original dog had brought along a scarier and braver companion who was leading the charge. I got pretty scared especially when this dog stepped off the trail onto the river bed I was occupying. My strategy of trying to get these dogs used to me was obviously not much of an option now. I made some mock half-hearted threatening gestures when he did that which forced him to get off the bank temporarily. We reached some kind of an impasse (with the dog taking note that I tended to get more aggresive when he stepped on the shore), I was quite unsure about what I should do and just stood there for a bit. After a while the aggressive dog seemed to lose interest in me and wandered off. I used this chance to start back up. I encountered the dogs again soon but was somehow able to use my momentum to carry on. Along the way I made my anger felt--more in tone than in actual words since my Spanish vocabulary was pretty limited at that point--to the couple outside the hut. Once I got back to the hostal I discussed this encounter with the Quito couple who gave me advice that took care of this issue for the rest of the trip.

The thing that makes this novel really work is its limited ambition and I don't mean that in a negative sense at all. It describes a photojournalist's trip to Afghanistan to cover a story about women choosing to take their lives rather than being forced to marry men much older than them. The novel covers just this limited period of time spanning the trip and a week or so leading up to it and the few story lines from the past that are included are so uncomplicated that they seamlessly blend in with the present tense. This feature of the novel--that it is uncluttered by too many fancy writing devices like competing subplots or too much jumping around in time or the presence of too many secondary characters--is what makes this book succeed. Although the book is of average length, the feeling I was left with after reading it was that I had just finished reading a short story.

Marciano uses a very sparse and clean writing style which accentuates the book's resemblance to a short story. But clearly, these very things that work so well for this novel can so easily fail if the plot itself is somewhat lacking. In this case, however, it is plausible, and fast paced, and, despite the several novels having been written about the devastation in Afghanistan, also seems very original. And even the people described in the novel, even the ones the author does not give too many paragraphs to, seem drawn--and drawn well--from real life. No effort is made to mask the grim situation in Afghanistan and this honesty only adds to this book's worth. Not a groundbreaking work of fiction, this, but well worth your time.

This is a really terrible book. The first part, about Italy, is still fairly readable although you start to realize very early on that the author doesn't seem to have much of substance to say. Her writing confirms that just because a person decides to write about her emotional life, it doesn't mean that the description is going to be insightful or intelligent or, most importantly, even readable. A lot of the writing is of the personal journal kind--one section that immediately springs to mind is when she writes an analogy about loneliness and anxiety; the analogy reads like something written by a 10 year old child who is trying to explain to herself in baby-talk these emotions in an effort to deal with them--and who is also learning to write at the same time. That was the first time I wanted to stop reading the book.

There is something quite false about her account regarding her improving mental health in the Indian ashram, the subject of the second part of the book. She gives the impression that she is making rapid strides in the spirituality department as if it is some exam she is preparing really well and frantically for. Contrary to her claims, it doesn't sound like she is achieving her goal of becoming a calmer person. Then there are these encounters she has with a Texan at the Ashram. These descriptions really made me cringe: the fact that not only does she admire the kind of intrusive, judgmental, condescending and cliched remarks this guy makes about her--the book is autobiographical and you really have to wonder how intelligent a person our author is to give so much credence to this random guy--but also the way she writes about them as if they're these out-worldly pearls of wisdom she is oh-so-lucky to have received and is eager to share with her hapless readers. I think I decided to finally stop punishing myself by reading this book when she started describing her dreams: some really boring, commonplace dreams which belong only to her journal--to reiterate--and no other place. Please don't waste your time on this book, there are many smarter and more insightful things to read out there.