Sovereign Nations

And it’s called Bakri.

(Not what you were expecting, eh?)

Here’s the Islamic version of a story I heard differently (but no more or less unbelievably)…

Monday, December 8, 2008
**Eid-al-Adha (Feast of the Sacrifice) (Islam)
Including the Hajj, this three-day festival celebrates Abraham’s test of obedience to Allah (God) when he was asked to sacrifice his son Ismael.  At the last minute, Allah replaced Ismael with a lamb.

This festival is called different things in the various tongues spoken by Muslims.  Here in my part of India, it’s influenced by the Tamil version, which is named after the Urdu word for goat – baqri.

Anyway, so this festival requires that Muslims make a great deal of food and share it, 1/3 with the poor, 1/3 with friends and family, and 1/3 for the household.  We got another lovely batch of food – parota, something like stretchy tissue but tasty, and a chicken curry in which we dipped the other things.

Then I got on the computer and researched the holiday.  Seems right to know why I’m getting fed, eh?

Okay, so this festival is about sacrifice.   And part of the whole deal is that Muslims who can afford it are supposed to sacrifice their best domestic animals.  Sheep, camels, cows, goats.  Whatever you’ve got on hand, as long as it meets strict age and quality standards.  Only the best.

Right after my birthday, the 2nd or 3rd of December, our neighborhood got even louder than usual.  We’d grown accustomed to the birds – they’re loud and some of them sound insane, but what can you do about birds?

Roosters and chickens, no problem.

Then, right after my birthday, I started to hear a kitten crying.  I drove myself crazy trying to figure out where the sound was coming from and finally saw the little critter in the house next door.  The mama cat must have been out hunting.

Then, maybe a day later, we heard a goat.  The goat was not happy.  Sure enough, next time we went out-and-about, we saw a goat tied to a tree, mowing the empty field on our lane.  Effectively, I might add.

And a day after that, when light’s out came around, the cacophany swelled even further.  A cow, mooing.  Someone had brought a real cow into our neighborhood.  That’s a very North-Indian kind of thing, there not being nearly as many random roaming cows down here in the South.

So the symphony was complete.  We had humans (either neighborhood children or muezzins doing the call to prayer over loudspeakers from the three mosques nearby), birds of twenty varieties, kittens, a goat, and a young cow.

The peace of light’s out was banished.

After we got the gift of food from the neighbor and I looked up the holiday, a slow dawning thought bummed me out.  Oh, no.  Were these animals going to be killed as sacrifices?  Ugh.  James scratched the goat between the horns.  I talked to the cow while waiting for him.  We were tentatively buddies.  Why oh why did the vegetarians end up in the Muslim neighborhood?

Different websites said different things, so I wasn’t sure how long our new friends had to live.  One said it was a three day festival.  Okay, so we’d get more peace (though not, perhaps, of mind) in a couple of days.

One day, the goat was gone.  We made sorry icky faces, shook our heads, and wondered at the continued presence of the cow, now doing a mediocre job of mowing the empty field.  Several days after that, the cow mooed.  We were having chai, just after getting up, and it occurred to me.

The cow was still alive.

Tentative happiness filled me.  Maybe they bought it for milk!  No, next time we walked to lunch, we confirmed that one doesn’t buy a bull for milk. Day after day, sooner or later, a moo would reach our flat and one of us would comment, “The cow’s still alive.”

I don’t know if the poor cow was rejected for sacrifice – too young, too skinny?  I just know that it’s one less thing I need to think about.  And the cow is less annoying than the goat, so if one of them had to go…

Now, my only concern is that I haven’t heard the kitten in a while…

We came to the Indian Sub-Continent for a multitude of reasons that have been dissected over the past 6 months on these virtual pages but the reason to leave is quick and simple…

Money!

Oh yes… ‘Money, the root of all evil so they say!’

My primary motivation for coming to India was, as always, visual. To me, to try to explain a place and a culture that I do not know or understand through words is futile but to show how I see people living is quite easy! For 25 years I have been documenting the human condition through captured images (on average) 1/250th of a second at a time and I believe I’m pretty good at showing how people interact with their environment, as long as my equipment is operating!

You see, I’m a Nikon man for traditional reasons. In 1987 I bought a Nikon F2-T, considered at the time by 1000′s of professional photojournalist to be the most rugged 35mm camera ever made. As a young passionate man I felt it was my duty to personally put that reputation to the test, and believe me I did! I dragged that tortured piece of equipment through a life of camera hell from the barren wasteland of Oklahoma to the drenched streets of Seattle, from the deserts of North Africa to the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I did everything in my power to make sure that that camera maintained it’s well deserved status as the worlds #1 photographic “Tough-Guy”! Then suddenly, in 2006 shortly after our landfall in Hilo, Hawaii, my trusty Nikon F2-T just quit, belly-up, X’s on the eyeballs, cold-blue, quit! Of course, by that time, for monetary reasons (money again!!!), I was shooting most of my life through the lens of my digital camera and used my F2-T primarily for B&W 3200 speed experimental photographs but much to my chagrin that time was now over! As long as I could shoot the pictures I wanted to see I was ok so I got over the death of my F2-T rather quickly and quietly (considering our tenure together). Anyway, my digital camera of choice was not a digital SLR but a Nikon none-the-less. I was shooting about 150 shots a week on a Nikon 8800 and really for the most part I was happy enough with it. Like most non-SLR digitals it had its issues with speed and accuracy but I did capture some exquisite images with that camera from the San Francisco Golden Gate to the top of Mauna Kea.

About a month after we got here and about a thousand shots into India, my (now old and beat up) Nikon 8800 just up-n-died! Not 19 years after I purchased it used but a mere two years after I bought it new! Two YEARS!!! This is an OUTRAGE! When I started shooting with Nikon there was no other name in 35mm photography. (Besides Leica.) At that point (we were in Ernakulam, Kerala, India at the time) I started thinking that maybe it was possible that even Nikon could fall into the “Planned Obsolescence” trap and start building cameras that not only didn’t last for 25 years of mud dragging, but didn’t even last until the next software upgrade. If that was indeed the case then it really didn’t matter what digital camera I bought next, hell, the cheaper the better! BUT!!! I just couldn’t wrap my brain around that, there was no way that My Nikon could fall for that ‘Ol Henry Ford trick by making a product just good enough to keep ‘em buying but not good enough to last!

So I got on e-bay, looked up the best price that I could find on a new Nikon SLR (single lens reflex, meaning you focus and shoot through the same lens) digital camera. I also went to the Nikon website and looked at all their cool new cameras and came to the conclusion that the best camera for my money was the Nikon D-80. It’s not as fancy as the new D-3 but about $500 bucks cheaper. It doesn’t shoot at 12 Mp (mega pixels) like the D-90 but the difference between the 10.2 Mp that the D-80 shoots at and the 12 Mp that the D-90 shoots at is so minute that it is impossible for the human eye to see the difference, but not impossible to see the difference in the $200 USD price split. So I went with the D-80. I found a great deal on a brand new one on E-bay that came with a pair of lenses, 18mm to 55mm and 70mm to 200mm, and a bunch of other junk that I didn’t need but best of all it had free shipping! Well, free shipping in the U.S… I had it sent to my father-in-law in Washington State so he could re-send it to us here in India.

Ug, I hate this story!!!!

…So I’ll make it quick. He sent it to us here in India but because it was still in the original boxes the Indian government felt it necessary to charge us Rs. 35,000, that’s rupees and at 42 rupees per 1 U.S. dollar it still works out to about $833.00 U.S. Dollars in customs duties! But that’s not the best part of this “I just wish I could kick myself” story!!!

Here’s the best part. My new camera died about five days ago while we were on a road trip to shoot pictures of the Neyyar Dam Wilderness here in Kerala, India! Just up-n-quit! It still takes pictures but it won’t focus through the lens and the color balance is so off that the photos can’t even be adjusted in Photoshop! I wrote Nikon-US. They referred me to Nikon Asia, who referred me to the company I bought the camera from who told me my warranty was only good in the U.S. So I spent almost $2,000 USD on a broken camera that I will have to take back to the U.S. if I want to get it fixed for free. If I take it to a non-Nikon-approved repair facility, my factory warranty is considered null and void.

Oh yeah, our decision… So because we’ve now spent more than four months of living expenses on my brand new broken camera we are obligated to go back to the U.S. and thus back to wage slavery for a while.

I love my birthday – it’s myyyyyy day. James and I agree that birthdays are the most important holidays. We went and bought me some books, then went to a fancy bakery that does the kinds of cakes I think of as BD cakes and got slices of Black Forest, and this evening we’ll be going to a fancy hotel buffet for dinner. It’s better than you’re imagining, being a buffet and all. Indian food lends itself very well to being kept warm in that buffet kind of way…I just hope they have that Malabar Fish…Mmmmmmm!

On this, my thirty-third birthday, I’m also celebrating the successful completion of the NaNoWriMo Competition. This is my page on their website. Now, the goal is to write 50,000 words in the month of November. That makes it a rather short novel, since the standard novel length is 80-100K, but it is still a shitload of writing to get done in one month. I finished at 76,386 words. Pretty cool, right?

I wrote most days, getting a ton done when I knew what I wanted to say and not much done when I hadn’t figured out what happened next. Duh, right? Well, I hadn’t thought about that part very much before we started. I finished my last go-round on my first manuscript on October 15th and sent it to a small, select group of people who seemed interested in reading it (avoiding any people who responded to the idea with the deer-in-the-headlights look). That gave me about two weeks between finishing that one (for the moment) and beginning the next one. ‘Cause that’s the rules, see. You can’t start before the 1st.

I spent two weeks pulling my vague idea together, doing a bunch of research on the careers of the main characters, some of the points I was thinking about covering, and the backgrounds of the MCs. One large part of the plot line is that the action ties into the process of building an eco-friendly house. So I worked on pulling together all the information I could find on green building and running it by my expert adviser – Harold Rhodes. He’s wonderful – really thoughtful and insightful, and an expert in the wild and woolly world of contractors. He’s also married to my mother, though calling him my step-dad feels kind of weird since he’s younger than my own husband.

If I hadn’t spent those two weeks creating character sketches and backgrounds, researching construction methods and timelines, and writing and rewriting a synopsis, I can’t imagine having been able to write much at all. It’s amazing to me, but it seems that a lot of NaNoWriMo people just sat down and started typing. Wow. I’m not that creative.

My novel’s not quite finished. I’m planning a real full MS, and I think…I think I have about 15,000 more words to write. I should be able to toss that off by Friday. Heh.

Here’s the synopsis of the book’s beginning, though it will probably change in revisions. This takes you a little more than halfway through the book. This version of the synopsis ends when the book starts the downhill, momentum-gathering sleigh ride toward the grand finale.

Root of the Lilikoi Synopsis

by Dena Hankins

Construction project manager Kerala Hilma is new to Hawaii, skeptical of the allure but drawn by the boom in work. She chooses to work for Malama Construction, the mid-sized, family-owned kind of company she likes, and starts work within a week.

Tired of the glass office, CEO and solar power engineer Ravi Dietrich needs some R&R and R&D. A dedicated scientist, he’s wilting in the corporate hothouse and rarely making it to the ocean to soak his saltwater soul. He blends experimentation with time off by planning an off-grid model eco-vacation-house. A killer deal on waterfront land sends him to Hawaii from California to bring the dream to life.

Malama Construction has no history in green building, so the boss gives the Request for Bid to the new girl with her fancy Ivy League education. Though Kerala submits a bid several hundreds of thousands of dollars higher than her competition, Ravi hires Malama as general contractors on the strength of Kerala’s impeccable research and demonstrated commitment to building to his specs.

Kerala hears that the Kama’aina (locals) will try to protect what they believe is the site of an ancient burial ground. Kerala is hardheaded and not in the least superstitious, so she takes the rumors as an indication of possible difficulties with local workers.

Ravi and Kerala strike sparks off one another and enjoy a flirtatious relationship when they’re not arguing details. They observe the boundaries of professionalism through the occasional visits for planning and design meetings. As she and Ravi refine the plans via email and phone conversations, they get to know each other without the pressure of their undeniable attraction, developing a strong mutual respect.

Kerala is beset by permitting problems, bumbling suppliers, and a community of sub-contractors that won’t even bid on the work. She gets the crew working on deconstructing an old hotel for recyclable building materials while she shouts, finesses, and bulls her way through the obstructions.

After a perilous slide down a hillside rigged to collapse, she finds evidence that her problems have been sabotage. She calls on her two best men, Kekipi and Jack, to help her find the wrongdoer. But the men seem to have a secret.

Ravi flies in the next day, ostensibly to help sort materials from the hotel deconstruction. He has come to warn Kerala of a pattern he’s seen in her reports – he wants her to watch out for sabotage! Kerala is impressed by his analysis, but not by his insistence that she let him move in to protect her. The desk jockey protecting the construction worker? Preposterous. Their fight escalates beyond polite words, and the heat is intensified by their smoldering physical awareness. They achieve a fragile détente, but settle nothing.

Days later, Kerala is run off the road while walking her dog. She gathers Kekipi, Jack, and Ravi at her house, bringing them up to date and asking a distraught Ravi to stay with her after all. Kerala challenges Kekipi with his suspicious behavior and he explains that he was involved with a Hawaiian separatist group when he was younger. The work disruption follows the pattern of his old community, but he promises that they aren’t behind the physical violence to her personally and explains, worried, that the separatists he questioned are also worried about the rogue.

After Jack and Kekipi leave, Kerala indulges herself by throwing down a sensual gauntlet that Ravi knows she can’t back up, bruised and tired as she is. As she expects, Ravi declines to take advantage of her upset state of mind and sleeps on her Laz-e-Boy recliner. Ravi gets his revenge by planning a long, slow, painful mutual seduction.

Ravi suggests that Kerala quit, which would remove the barriers to their relationship while also ensuring her safety. She is outraged at the idea of slinking away from a project in which she’d invested so much energy. She is determined to get the upper hand and insists that they work together. Ravi, frustrated once again, moves forward with his plans to bring them to a peak of need and finding the breaking point. Finally, their sexual pressure explodes in furious lovemaking.

The situation explodes when they dig up a lilikoi tree for replanting and find a body in the ground nearby. The Hawaiian Island Burial Council and the state Historical Preservation officer arrive quickly, but so do the police. When the body is analyzed, far from being one of ancients, this body is only a decade old. The story comes to light that a previous owner tried to build on the same land but disappeared, and his estate discontinued the development.

Sure enough, Kerala’s crew has improperly exhumed the previous owner, who doesn’t seem to have died of natural causes. Now there’s a murder to match her accidents and the string of sabotage. The only good thing about this find is that Ravi can’t point the protective finger at Kerala any longer. He seems to be in danger as well.