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going underground

September 23, 2012 By meerasub Leave a Comment

I allowed way too much time for my journey, sure I’d get lost or confused along the way. I wanted to avoid a repeat of last night’s sweaty slow slog in a taxi, stuck in bristling traffic, so why not try the Delhi Metro? I’d only been on once before, a few years ago, when the five-line system was still expanding rapidly across the city. Online, the interactive map helped me figure out where to go, and that my journey would cost 19 Rupees (less than 50 cents). I headed out, and found overhead walkways to get me across the busy main street of Lajpat Nagar, no line to get my token, a quick pass through security, following the cues as everyone tossed their purses and backpacks through the x-ray machine and stepped through the metal detector. A woman in a sari additionally swiped me down with hands and wand. I barely had to break my stride to follow huge signs in Hindi and English leading me where I wanted to go. A broad clean platform had a sign perched above it, telling me it would be 4 minutes til my train arrived.

My friend Rashmi Sadana wrote an ethnography of the Delhi Metro, after she approached it the way one would a foreign land, studying it as its framework was being placed within the existing cityscape. [Read more…]

Filed Under: travels Tagged With: india, metro

a nighttime dance

September 23, 2012 By meerasub Leave a Comment

expressionnisme

It’s late in the evening and I return with my friend in her car, driving through the night streets of Delhi. The congestion of the daytime, or even the evening not so long ago, are gone, and the action consolidates around stoplights. At a red light we stop, and a man wipes a rag over our windshield as my friend waves him away. He steps in front of the car, arms up, as another vender selling colorful whirligigs atop sticks passes behind him, bonks him playfully on the head with one of the whirligigs and continues on. To our left, I see a shadow of a woman from the corner of my eye, holding a baby in her arms, just on the other side of my rolled up window. I’ll always wrestle with these moments of naked asking, of naked refusal. [Read more…]

Filed Under: travels Tagged With: india, streetlife

reading & writing

May 20, 2012 By Meera Leave a Comment

I have fallen in love with many a friend after seeing their bookshelves. Forget the eyes. The books that line the shelves of our homes, or lean in precarious piles on the floor, or crowd out our bedsides, are the windows to one’s soul. We see familiars we have at home, titles we’ve always meant to explore. We discover, always, something new. We see how they organize. Or don’t. We see the merging of a couple’s disparate and/or overlapping tastes and interests. I fantasize about a trip that took a lifetime, just visiting friends around the world and spending all my time reading their books. I fantasize boundless free time at home, to even get through my own. [Read more…]

Filed Under: travels Tagged With: india

you can chaat me up anytime, baby

May 20, 2012 By Meera Leave a Comment

It can be the tiniest of things that one loves about a place far from home. These aren’t my finely manicured nails (obviously), but here’s a decent photo of the chaat called golgappa (pani puri) that I had at a friend’ parents’ house. The little puris were crisp, containing the pani liquid of mango and tamarind we poured on top of the potato and chick pea filling. One bite, maybe two, some dribbling down the wrists, every taste on the tongue fired off.

Here’s a recipe that looks like it might could work, but i fear this just wouldn’t taste the same in Cape Cod.

Filed Under: travels Tagged With: food, india

deportation

May 15, 2012 By Meera Leave a Comment

I arrive in Amsterdam as the sun breaks over the horizon, and the airport is familiar. I was just here. I came through on my way to…where? Abu Dhabi? Nairobi? The travel blurs, and I forget to keep seeing, too comfortable in the movement. The woman’s cries as soon as I settle on flight KLM flight 871 to Delhi awaken me. She is keening, repeating a phrase over and over in a language I don’t recognize. Louder, repetitive, insistent, urgent. I’m hurting or Let me go or Leave me alone. All heads turn towards her voice, rising somewhere from the last center rows of the plane as passengers place their bags overhead, unfurl cheap fleece blankets. But there is no woman—or is it a child?—to be seen. Just five large men, one in an orange vest, another with a shiny metal badge affixed to his hip, one with a shaved head, all staring inward to where this invisible but beckoning creature must be. They don’t speak to her, or gesture as though to restrain her or help her. They just watch, silent, patient. All the rest of the passengers look at each other for some guidance. Is she hurt? Why aren’t they helping? What is going on? Is it a child? The flight attendant near us explains. [Read more…]

Filed Under: travels Tagged With: india, politics

thirteen miles

May 15, 2012 By Meera Leave a Comment

It took two hours and thirteen minutes to travel the 13 miles from the Barnstable bus stand to Sagamore Bridge, the definitive point between “on Cape” and “off.”  I took a front seat, looking over the bus driver’s shoulder at the road ahead, as we pulled onto Route 6, flying for those first few miles. Then, a long line of brake lights lit up like a Christmas strand. The Sagamore Bridge, where peregrine falcons considered nesting amidst its metalwork last year, is under construction. The pair was spotted only once this year before they fled, surely, from the noise and construction, the men hoisted into the heavens by cranes and lifts, bringing blowtorches and making human thunder. Bridges have always fascinated me, the engineering feat of building such structures that can stand for decades of dedicated use, letting us leap over water, canyons and gullies. [Read more…]

Filed Under: travels Tagged With: cape cod, energy, nuclear

Peregrines at Padre

October 17, 2008 By Meera Leave a Comment

fly! be free! Photo by Gregg Doney

“It’ll change your life.” This was said to me more than once by multiple people I’ve interviewed on this trip – Bud Anderson, Tom Cade, and other men who have worked with peregrine falcons all their lives. They were referring to the study of peregrines that has been taking place on South Padre Island in Texas for more than three decades.

And so I came. I happened to be back in Austin the first week of October, peak migration season for the peregrines, specifically Falco peregrinus tundrius, the northern birds that range across northern Canada and Greenland. The anatum falcons of New York only make smaller migrations, if they choose to move at all, but at this moment in the fall, the tundrius are peregrinating their way across the breadth of the Americas on their way to Argentina and Chile for the winter. Many of them, and I do mean many, pass over the sandy flats of South Padre. It provides an opportunity for study virtually unparalleled in North America.

South Padre is not known so much for its birds, but for a gathering of a more carnal type. This is where heaps of college students come for Spring Break, filling the hotels along the beach and proceeding to get drunk and naked. Usually in that order.

I only saw one naked woman, and she was well over twice as old as she might have been in college. She was walking along the beach smoking a cigarette, her small white poodle cowering in the shade under her large pick up truck, which was rigged up with a large striped umbrella. She’d parked along the shore further north on the 26-mile-long beach, miles beyond where the hotels, kite shops and paved road ended. The shore-side sand, in true Texas form, is a state highway, open to all traffic.

I caught her image quickly. I was flying by on a four-wheeler Honda ATV, trying to keep up pace with Gregg Doney, Alastair Franke and Mark Prostor, while we slalomed through the debris left behind from Hurricanes Dolly and Ike that had passed through the month before. All the salvageable lumber had been gleaned and what was left behind was the waste. The organic matter tossed up from the sea, but also the plastic jugs and plastic garbage cans, the plastic bottles and plastic parts that where once important for something but now have ended up here, severed from their utility, their shape unidentifiable. It was a mess.

We pulled hard to the left and left the waves and trucks and people behind. Into the wash, the dunes sheltering an endless expanse of flat sand that stretched inland toward Laguna Madre, a mile or four away depending on the tides and the wind that moves the land. We killed the loud engines and lifted binoculars to eyes as the quiet settled in. Immediately, we saw a distinct upright form standing on the sand.

It was the same form I have seen now on the stone formations of the Riverside Church on the Upper West Side and the wires of the Brooklyn Bridge. On a severe cliff face at the edge of Lake George in the Adirondacks. I have seen the 18” upright shape on the window ledge of a sugar beet factory in Boise, Idaho, Tom Cade and I standing in the light rain with our binoculars.

I spent the rest of the day following along with the men as they trapped the falcons, mostly yearling females, and collected the data they would need to test for avian flu and West Nile virus, to monitor their size and understand variance. They carefully drew blood for genetic studies, moving quietly and quickly to keep the birds calm. An ID band was cinched around a leg for future identification. None were already banded on the day I spent with them, but about 10% of the birds they catch are. One female from this season had been banded fifteen years earlier. “Think of the mileage that bird has on her,” Alistair said, amazed, and you could see him doing the multiplication in his head…more than 6,000 miles each spring and fall, for at least fifteen years.

Greg, used to working with peregrines in places like Colorado and Greenland, where they’re all on cliffs, looked out across the sand flats and up, as yet another falcon came into view. “You’ve got a vector there with cliff-nesting birds,” he said, looking up at the brilliant blue sky dappled with clouds, “but here they’re right on the ground. You’re in their world here.”

When the work on the bird was complete, she was daubed with temporary red dye so that she wouldn’t be caught again and then, they handed her to me to release. I held her in my hand, the steady warmth and weight of the wild heavier than the two or three pounds she would register on a scale. Her round dark eyes gauged me calmly and on the count of three, I let her go.

Filed Under: travels Tagged With: peregrine falcon

postcard from pattipulam

July 1, 2005 By meerasub Leave a Comment

Six Months after the Tsunami on the Shores of South India

Fifty kilometers south of the large city of Chennai, in south India, a group of five fishermen are building a boat alongside the coastal highway when we pull up. They are using axes to carve thirty-foot logs, five of which will be lashed together lengthwise to make akattumaram, the Tamil word for boat that has found its way into the English language nearly intact as catamaran. A simple thatch roof suspended on poles located under the arching arms of an old tree offers a double layer of shade from a relentless midday sun. An untold number of these catamarans were swept out to sea six months ago in the tsunami, along with houses, personal possessions and people here along the shore of the Bay of Bengal.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: travels Tagged With: india

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