India Is Everything

For Christmas in 2007, about a year and a half after we met, I gave James this Lonely Planet guide to India, which we both very much wanted to visit. The book was an investment and a promise, a pledge and a challenge. But through the next five years, as other journeys and interests took up our lives, it sat on a shelf, quietly waiting. 

Then it came time to plan our honeymoon, and there was never any doubt where we were going.

A screen at the Qutb Minar complex in south Delhi 

James did nearly all of the planning here, and deserves all of the credit. We started in Delhi, in the "Mughal North" -- so called because many of the ancient buildings were built by the Mughal emperors . . .

. . . including this one, built by Shah Jahan as a tomb for his wife, Mumtaz, near Agra (where we went next). Twenty-two thousand people labored for twenty-one years on the Taj. Shah Jahan intended to build a black mausoleum that was otherwise identical to the Taj Mahal across the river from it, but his son Aurangzeb felt that he was spending too much time and money on buildings, so he imprisoned his father until his death here . . .

. . . in the Agra Fort, in an apartment with a view of the Taj. We learned incredible history like this over and over again in India -- of Akbar, Shah Jahan's grandfather, who established tolerance between Muslims and Hindus (before Aurangzeb threw it away), and the process of Independence and Partition, so very human and complicated -- and it made me angry with my world history classes in school, because why were we so big on Europeans when Indian history was just as awesome? Why didn't we learn about this too? 

These forts are astonishing structures -- huge castles that outdo any European fortresses I know of in scale and impact. The Agra Fort here was specially designed to withstand attack by an enemy who would be riding elephants, including a sloped, walled entranceway where defenders could pour boiling oil on invaders, and then roll boulders down the ramp if the oil didn't work. 

From Agra, we went to Jaipur, stopping along the way at the Chand Baori stepwell, which movie-loving readers might recognize from The Dark Knight Rises.

We splurged on the services of several drivers for most of our time in India -- a true luxury, as we didn't have to worry about catching trains or hauling baggage. (On the other hand, we often felt a little isolated from daily life, and Indian highways are the closest thing to a living game of Super Mario Kart I ever hope to experience in real life.) Nearly all of the trucks were painted with wonderful colors and designs. I asked one of our drivers why they were so decorated, and he said basically, "Why not?" -- and indeed, our solid American trucks and buses feel very boring and impersonal by comparison. 

Outside Jaipur, we visited the Amber and Jaigarh Forts, finding our way from one to the other through an open tunnel with monkeys watching us from overhead. (I told James, "This is what a honeymoon should be! Adventure plus monkeys!") In the city, we marveled at the decoration of the City Palace, including these peacocks.

We spent a lovely night at the Deogarh Mahal -- a former maharaja's palace, now converted into a luxury hotel straight out of a fantasy novel. We scrambled over the flat roofs taking pictures, saw a Rajasthani dance performance in the courtyard here, and walked the narrow, twisting streets outside, purchasing a number of shawls from a kind shopkeeper who promised to feed us dinner the next time we came to town.

One of our most unexpected and delightful excursions was a two-hour train ride through the Rajasthani mountains, which our driver arranged for us. A little wizened man with a kettle poured us tiny disposable cups of chai (hot, delicious, sweet Indian spiced milk tea that I could happily drink at every meal for the rest of my life), for the grand price of ten rupee each (about twenty cents).

More monkeys at a train stop. I never got tired of seeing them.

From there, we went to Udaipur, the "Venice of the East" for its location on the banks of Lake Pichola. (The Lake Palace Hotel here appeared in the film Octopussy, which played every night at half the restaurants in town.) This was likely our favorite city in India, as we loved the winding streets and views of the lake, and a wonderful vegan restaurant called Millets of Mewar, where we went for breakfast, lunch, and dinner over the three days we were in town.

In the city garden, this group of tourists stopped James and me and asked us to pose for pictures with them. This happened over and over again in India, pretty much everywhere we went, and especially with groups of schoolchildren or teenagers. (It is weird to think how many people's vacation photos I appear in.) I asked these ladies if I could take a picture of them minus me, because I was madly jealous of all the gorgeous saris, shalwar kameezes, tunics, and other clothes I saw on women throughout the country, but I rarely had the opportunity to take photos of said clothing with permission. As with the trucks, the brightness puts our Western neutrals to shame. 

From Udaipur, we flew to Mumbai, which I also really liked.... While we did not see a great deal of the enormous city, what we did see felt like New York to me, crowded and cosmopolitan, a mix of old architecture and new structures, tradition and the cutting edge, and as everywhere in India, the enormous contrast between rich and poor. This is the city's laundry center, where (according to our tour guide, whose hand you can see here) nearly all the laundry that is sent out for washing is still hand-scrubbed, hung, and ironed. Note the skyscrapers standing just beyond.

The ironies of this contrast are further explored in Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, a nonfiction book I read on the trip, which I cannot recommend highly enough as a portrait of a community, an exploration of the causes and effects of poverty, and an extraordinary work of reportage and writing. It is set in a slum near the Mumbai airport in 2008, and I found myself constantly thinking of the people in the book while we were in the city -- wishing almost that I might run into them and find out what happened next in their lives.

The other book about India I would recommend enormously, both as historical context and just as a wonderful read, is Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire, by Alex von Tunzelmann. It traces the causes of the British withdrawal, the thrill of Independence, and the disaster of Partition through five fascinating figures:  Dickie Mountbatten, the British envoy; his wife Edwina, who was arguably more competent; Jawaharlal Nehru, who had an intense affair with Edwina in the midst of becoming India's first prime minister; Mohandas Gandhi, who comes off terribly; and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. I kept leaning over to James to tell him fascinating facts I was learning -- such as the fact that Pakistan is a made-up name, as before Partition, there were no people called "Pakis." Rather, it was an acronym for the northwestern, mostly Muslim regions of India selected for the country: Punjab, Afghania Province, Kashmir, Sindh, and Baluchistan. Illuminating, no? And it reminded me how much the history we take as settled fact is in fact made of people's choices, like the ones our leaders decide every day...

After our tour of Mumbai, we went to see a delightfully ridiculous Bollywood film called Dhoom 3, which was Moulin Rouge meets The Prestige via Bad Boys. We couldn't understand any of the Hindi dialogue, but this mostly wasn't a problem. (Sample dialogue for the Americans: EVIL BANKER: "Who's robbing my bank?" BLONDE FEMALE COP: "It's a thief, sir.")

This was taken at Elephanta Island -- a historic site about six miles off the coast of Mumbai (with no elephants, for the record) -- and the litter was unfortunately very typical of everywhere we went in India. . . .

But then, so was the wonder I felt on seeing this, also on Elephanta -- a relief sculpture of the god Shiva, deep in a cave, radiating peace, and carved in the sixth century A.D. -- easily one of the oldest, most awe-inspiring places I've ever been. If we ever return to India, as we hope to do someday, I want to visit more sculpture caves like this.

 

Always good advice. 

From Mumbai, we flew to Kerala, the state at the southwestern tip of the subcontinent known as "God's Own Country" -- and if you told me the Garden of Eden was located there, I would believe you. We stayed for three nights at a cardamom plantation in the mountains near Thekkady.

One day we took a three-hour nature trek through the Periyar Nature Reserve, where we saw this mama and baby elephant feeding in the wild. We also saw an awesome demonstration of kalaripayattu, which thrilled me especially, as it's the martial art that Ash Mistry learns in The Savage Fortress and The City of Death.

Then we descended to the coast, where we spent a delicious night on a houseboat in the backwaters. I got up at six a.m. and watched the sun rise from our deck, along with thousands of talkative waterbirds.

On our last leg of the trip, we went to Mysore, where we visited the palace and zoo, and stayed in another palace, the Lalitha Mahal:

 Yeah, I could eat breakfast here every morning.

And our last activity of the journey was visiting a friend's digital animation company in Bangalore -- on the nineteenth floor of an anonymous office building, the lights off and the windows covered in shades, three hundred animators at rows of flatscreen computers carefully sculpting a nose here, a gesture there. That, too, is India.

As a honeymoon, it was not the easiest:  I have never been on a trip that thrust my extreme privilege as a white American, and how easy I do have it, and how intractable the world's problems are, so much in my face over and over again. I keep turning those issues over back in my New York bubble -- where we have so little history, comparatively; where I can drink the water -- and I am not sure where to start. But as a personal experience, I learned so much, and did so much, and rested and read so much, and saw so much, so that I felt sometimes like nothing but a pair of eyes -- and ate so much, as oh my goodness, the food, the FOOD -- we have no sense of how to cook vegetables here, really, and I could also happily eat Indian food (especially Southern) at every meal for the rest of my life. And I haven't mentioned the tea plantations or the security, the cement advertisements or the languages, the milk scammers in Mumbai or James's obsession with Shantaram, the ways in which their environmental adaptations are ahead of ours, our wonderful friends in Delhi or the boat ride in Udaipur or praying in a temple and all the other monkeys we saw . . .

It was everything I hoped it would be -- a wonderful, challenging trip that stretched my mind in the best ways. And I am so very grateful for it, and for the husband who planned it; and everything goes on. 

Southeast Asia in the Autumn: Editors' Boot Camp

For the first two weeks of November, I was on the other side of the Earth, first for five days in Singapore, then for seven in Thailand. This will be the first of, I think, five posts about my experiences.


I went to Singapore to teach at an Editors' Boot Camp, which the National Arts Council sponsored as part of the Singapore Writers' Festival. My co-instructor was the excellent Francesca Main of Picador Books UK -- an adult-books editor who was just as passionate about the art and craft of editing as I am, resulting in three good days of sharing our knowledge with the Malay and Singaporean editors in attendance, and learning from them in turn. Case in point: The Singaporean publishing industry does not have two things that completely change the publishing equation when compared to the US & UK:

• Agents. This makes sense when you consider that Singapore has four official languages (English, Malay, Chinese, and Tamil) for a population of just over five million, which greatly fragments the publishing market, which in turn makes it difficult for an agent to build a living out of 15% commissions. Thus most manuscripts in Singapore are submitted directly to the publishers.
• Amazon.com and the Kindle. They do have e-books, which can be purchased through the website www.ilovebooks.com, among others. But the 900-pound gorilla that has so transformed the US and UK publishing industries hasn't yet established a Singaporean outpost. 

What they DO have:

• Diversity. This is a "duh" statement given the country's languages and population, but coming from U.S. publishing, it was a pleasure to see so many editors from such diverse backgrounds gathered in one place:  Muslims, Malays, native-Chinese speakers, expatriates . . .
• Energy. Not only were the editors eager to learn, but the government was eager to support the country's publishing efforts, as evidenced by the existence of the course itself. 
• Creativity. I was really impressed by the wide-ranging and beautifully designed lists of small publishers like Epigram Books, Monsoon Books, and Marshall Cavendish (which is very different from the MC we have here).

Four observations I offered in class, which I rarely have occasion to offer in my courses for writers:

• Authors and manuscripts are published most successfully when they are a good fit with the editor's values, the house's values, and the market's values. That is:  The editor values what the book accomplishes artistically, and knows how to help the author maximize its intellectual intentions and emotional effects; the house can successfully connect the book with its audience, because it's an audience the house already values and knows how to reach; and the market recognizes the worth of the book and embraces it. The market's values are endlessly created and recreated, because it doesn't know what it wants until that desire has been offered to it. But an editor's and house's values can usually be seen in what they've published in the past.
• Having recently seen, and really liked, the film of Cloud Atlas, I finally read the New Yorker article about its making, and I was greatly struck by this quote from Lana Wachowski:  "The problem with market-driven art-making is that movies are green-lit based on past movies. So as nature abhors a vacuum, the system abhors originality. Originality cannot be economically modeled." (Those of us who must deal with comp titles would also observe that originality has a highly mixed sales record.) 
• Much of being an editor is dealing with negative space:  what is not there at present and should be. 
• Editors have a close-to-inexhaustible faith in the perfectability of manuscripts:  that they can and will get better, with the application of the right combination of insight, imagination, time, and elbow grease. We acquire this faith through seeing the process happen over and over again, for a wide array of writers and projects. It is a much harder faith for writers to keep, given that they usually don't have the opportunity to see any process but their own, and they're so deeply personally invested in that and the outcome (whereas we editors get to have a little more distance from both).

Thanks very much to Francesca (pictured to my right above), to the writers and editors in our class, and to the National Arts Council for making the trip possible!

How I Spent My February Vacation

Thanks to the magic of frequent-flyer miles and my good friend Donna Freitas, I ran away to Barcelona! If you'd like to see pictures, you can check them out here.

(The lovely thing about the Internet for vacation photos:  I can enthuse about Gaudi and goofy Catalan words for as long as I like, and you can ignore me as much as you like. We both win!)

A brief video of a brooch I would not want to wear, from the Dali museum in Figueras:

And, for the hell of it, another video of some food I did actually eat. The restaurant was called the "Buffet Giratorio," which I found delightful. It was amazingly hypnotic just to sit there and watch it go by.

(These video selections, and this post as a whole, are brought to you by my jetlag. Also my smartphone, which is why the quality is not great.)

I read Bossypants by Tina Fey, a short biography of the aforementioned Gaudi, and about 150 pages of The Art of Fielding on the trip. The Gaudi biography was disappointing, because I wanted it to go inside his head and explain his bravery and vision and imagination, and it's well-nigh impossible to do that with a genius. But Bossypants is terrific about all the joys and contradictions of being a woman in the modern age, even if (especially if, I suppose) you're as awesome as Tina Fey, and it's hilarious as well.

The business part of the trip:  Donna is the author of this also thoroughly delightful book, coming out in June, edited by moi. It is exactly the book I would have wanted to read as a preteenager obsessed with gymnastics, and our "business" consisted of discussing the fact that not one but TWO Newbery Medal winners have now blurbed it. Yay!



If you'd like to win a galley of it, let's see -- tell me what international city you'd most like to run away to and why, and I will do a random drawing before the end of the month.

Now it is back to work for me. Here is wishing you unexpected joys like mosaic-covered dragons and all-you-can-eat raw fish on conveyor belts wherever you are.