Marionette Strings of Ink: Udaipur, an excerpt

May 11, 2006. Udaipur, Rajasthan, India.

The sun crackled overhead; I walked across a bridge in Udaipur, Rajasthan, and a dog shifted his position and gazed up at me, a headless dove held between its paws - I suppose all the food here is fresh.

The buildings pulsate out below me, all of us underneath the desert sun; light purple bricks flicker white and upward, saris and fabric billowing in the hot winds. It's high noon here in Rajasthan - a time for clothes to dry, when the streets empty and the rickshaw drivers take off their shirts, crawl into the back seat, and doze off.

Amidst the dust and sand and sun is wedged a palpable nobility, earned through hundreds of years of questionable decisions to settle this land. Chants drift up like heat in the distorted air, filling the slums with music when the wedding processions aren't shimmering by in noisy momentary glory.

A writer could get used to this type of life: spreading days like butter across the weeks; carefully sculpting visual and sonic stimuli and playing them off against bouts of pleasantly numbing relaxation.

When one can buy a large mango for less than thirty cents, eat a meal for a dollar from a rooftop cafe, and still have change to catch a rickshaw down to the lake (I stroll, for the record)...Why wax philosophic anywhere else?

Of course, I wish still that the days of the Maharaja were here - that horses galloped from the city gates to meet the enemy - but times change; even the imperial, hubristic romanticism of the Raj has long since been displaced...

...I'm sure the Rajputs, like all ruling classes, were to the same effect: utterly repulsive. That they have enshrined their portraits with violent battles, gory beheadings, and bodies sliced vertically off horses, is seared in my mind...

It's hard of course to write of anxiety...

...bringing moments and people to life with marionette strings of ink; with a bazaar of Indian spices as colours and a Chinese junk of authority...

...In other news, today I rented a bike and explored parts of Udaipur unexplorable without one...It was marvelous - out toward the other lakes it got increasingly lush.

A pack of street dogs chased a monkey as I watched. Several other monkeys sauntered down the side of the road, oblivous and soon one ended up - with the others - atop a pole demarking a driveway, surrounded by snarling dogs; this is unenviable - also, was my creeping up to take a picture and failing to notice another monkey behind the tree.

It turned on me and bared its teeth, emitting something like 50 per cent hiss and 75 per cent growl. I stumbled backward into a man sitting and watching me - he then mimed a pack of monkeys slashing at his own face, and laughed...

..Earlier today one (dog) trotted after me smiling and wagging its tail. I thought it rather quaint but for the whitish-yellow froth dropping from between its jaws onto the street.

The Pope vs. Sam Harris; the Pope: An Idiot?

The Pope has recently said some things that were pretty unreasonable. Because of this, there is once again a flaring of passions throughout the Middle East. Though I blame this also - presumptuously, I admit - on lunatic Imams spreading this to poor Muslims without access to critical media, it is beyond doubt the Pope has acted foolishly.

Apparently, speaking out against condoms and abortion and women's liberation was just, you know, not enough.

I just read an excellent article on Truthdig.com, from one of my favourite secularists - the delightful Sam Harris - on the Pope's utterings.

Here, an excerpt:

"It is ironic that a man who has just disparaged Islam as “evil” and “inhuman” before 250,000 onlookers and the world press is now talking about a “genuine dialogue of cultures.” How much genuine dialogue can he hope for? The Koran says that anybody who believes that Jesus was divine—as all real Catholics must—will spend eternity in hell (Koran 5:71-75; 19:30-38). This appears to be a deal-breaker. The pope knows this. The Muslim world knows that he knows it. And he knows that the Muslim world knows that he knows it. This is not a good basis for interfaith dialogue."

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060916_sam_harris_rottweiler_barks/

Thai coup d'etat

Well, it appears that there is a coup going on in Thailand. Tanks have rumbled into Bangkok, the Prime Minister has declared a state of emergency, and a renegade general has revoked the state of emergency so that he may declare martial law.

And, as the New York Times is currently (18:26) reporting, a spokesman for General Sondhi, the coup d'etat'er has

"...apologized to the public for any inconvenience caused by the coup."

It's great that in the middle of a situation in which armed soldiers and tanks are roaming through the capital of Thailand, we can still have civility.

Of Boston Legal and Homecoming

This weekend I bore witness to the mass lunacy that is Queen's University Homecoming. Saturday night saw Aberdeen turn stupider than I imagine it usually is. However, the main point of going was to see some of my best friends, namely two Dan's, a Phil, and a Jenna or two.

Friday night: Ripping shirts off to "Don't stop me now," by Queen; riding bikes and falling off; ripped Converse; chatting to several policemen about statistics and arrests; otherwise being excellent.

I carried a notebook the whole night; most of what I wrote down is illegible and, to be honest, brutally inept and unpoetic.

A sample: "This city is awash with refugees from comfortable homes and arguably ridiculous lineage."

Don't ask me what exactly I meant by that; just know that it was funny to read back, as it is again, now.

Also, me and Phil relived the brief 3-week stint I spent at the Whig-Standard by sitting around without shirts on and watching Boston Legal.

This show is excellent for several reasons: 1) Subtlety; 2) The delicious timbre of well-mic'd low voices, including Spader and Shatner; 3) The basis of a show around monologues which pay delightful homage to rhetoric, reason, and argument; 4) The bizarre but excellent politicization of Season 2.

A Missionary Becomes the Convert - an excerpt

The following are selected excerpts from a short story I am currently writing. I started writing it in Beijing in July 2006 and have yet to finish it; indeed, I have no idea either how long it shall stretch to or when I will finish it.

The crumbled, smashed ruins of a suburban settlement outside Shanghai smoldered in the distance, growing fainter under the clouds of fog that had rolled in from the East China Sea, the smoke from the fires that now consumed it, and because the ship from which it was being viewed was quickly retreating southwards, back to its native port of Canton – full of looted bounty and being pursued by treaty port ships sent from an imperial outpost to defend British interests in China...

It was a windy day; the sails billowed and cracked above him, their bleached, patched surface pulsating with the changes of wind. His exhalations of smoke were quickly borne away. Kim leaned back on the railing. Around him, and strewn across the midsection of the boat amid coils of rope, was booty. Stolen livestock – pigs and chickens, mostly – poked and sniffed their way around bags of spices and numerous sacks of gold and silver. Among this mass, hunched over, with her knees in her chest, bound at the wrists and ankles, bruised and bloody, was the object of Kim’s attention.

Her name was Judith Shawl, a British missionary from outside London. She was 45 and had dark blonde hair streaked through with the silver of years. She was in the employ of the British Sisters of Charitable Mercy and had, for the past 17 years, been converting isolated pockets of non-Christians across greater East Asia...

Judith understood Kim’s act of salvation and was as grateful as one could be while tied up with pigs and chickens and having seen one’s host family raped and lit on fire. She watched Kim smoking and felt torn because he was clearly responsible both for saving her life and murdering half her village with a hearty and incredible gusto. She was in this splintered mindset when she realized Kim was watching her.

Kim tossed his cigarette into the crest of a wave and started walking toward Judith. He sat on a sack of cinnamon and looked her in the eyes.

Judith looked up at him through the smoke that wafted between them.

“Why did you kill them?” she asked in Cantonese.

“Why,” Kim replied, lighting another cigarette, “is the sky blue. Why do waves crash eternally on the shores of this land? Why is anything the way it is so?”

“Because of God. Because God has willed it.”

“Maybe your God wills me to kill, to slay men and women and children for money and pigs and spices.”

At this, Judith shuddered; Kim pulled back on his cigarette; a chicken walked between them pecking at scraps of grain.

“It is not so. God would never tell you to do that.”

“Why are you alive?”

“Because God has willed it.”

“Did God also will me to spare you?”

“He must have; otherwise, you would not have done it. You are cruel. I have seen you kill.”

Kim smiled softly, calmly. Judith sat shaking in anger, tears beginning to fall down her face – a face cracked prematurely under the strain of living in small villages, of helping elderly women sit cramped over bibles while grandchildren went unspoilt and front stoops went unswept.

She knew what he was getting at, but could not wipe the tears that fell embarrassingly down her stained cheek. Her hands were still bound.

“Then also, he must have willed me to kill everyone else in your place.”

Inaugural Airing of the Laundry

I've decided - in the interest of posterity - to put online individual entries from the journal I kept over the summer. In May, I traveled alone through India; in June and July I worked as a writer in Beijing; in August I traveled through China's northwest Xinjiang Province/Autonomous Zone, and journeyed to the tropical cum Tibetan Yunnan Province in China's south.

I shall post the entries as I wrote them, and make only small edits. This is the inaugural post - two of my earliest entries.

Friday, May 5 - 6:20 a.m. / Delhi

It seems bizarre, and slightly unreasonable, that this is my third sunrise in a row in a different country. The sun crested the 401 as we drove toward Toronto's Pearson International, then it lit up the industrial smoke stack and hustle of north Beijing, and now, from a rooftop in Paharganj, Delhi, the slums of the Indian subcontinent are waking up. I'm not one for reason, or sanity, if any of those means I can't feel "this" - the personification of an evolving internationalism, the understanding that the sun rises on a shared humanity.

1) lizard on wall of hotel
2) two women named Marissa from Montreal
3) all is well

May 6, 8:24 a.m. / Border, Uttar Pradesh

We're in a colum of cars at the border; old, wizened men with cobras slung over their backs walk up and down offering to pose for pictures. Toothless bears with rope threaded in through a torn hole in their face and out their nostrils stand up for little children and their nervous parents; the bears teeth seem to have been forcibly removed, and, either from malnutrition or from the harness, their snouts are shriveled and drooping.

ETC. Indian countryside, dung huts or mud huts?

Borat

From the NYtimes:

"Mr. Baron Cohen, who is appearing in Toronto as Borat, declined to be interviewed for this article and will be conducting interviews ahead of the film only in character."

Excellent.

La Poste Touche Down

I am back in Canada.

The plane touched down around 3:40 a.m. and I got home a couple of hours later. I gave my parents the gifts I had bought them, and took things out of my suitcase in theatrical, story-telling fashion.

Today, in the afternoon, I spoke to a couple of very close friends and my brother and felt quite good about it. Later, I discovered that my writing had come to the attention of someone I admire; that pleased me immensely and filled me with something resembling great pride.

This evening I rested a bottle of red wine on the case of an Iron Maiden DVD case and watched a Noam Baumbach film - an old one it seems. Regardless, it was good. I also ate Thai food, though I slept through the meal with my parents at which it was meant to be eaten - I was a little tired.

The Times are Ticking

The past days have been filled with the things one regularly does here: drinking, shopping, eating, discussing, watching ex-officials do living-room-tai chi in their boxers.

It is a fitting way to wind down my summer; a summer spent traveling two of the most populated countries on the planet, and indulging (sometimes to excess) in both writing and thinking. And drinking.

There have been many bizarre days, and sometimes they stretch into weeks as I watch clock hands tick down on time I didn't think I was counting, and on moments and people and phases of myself I never thought I'd be shedding - like the snakes we sometimes think we've become after a few drinks.

It's difficult for me to write at the moment, as I'm in one of those transitions; where you are unsure of whether you can stand behind what you have transcribed when you reach the other side.

So I'll stop now and, for posterity's sake, simply state that: I am flying home tomorrow.