Month: October 2008

India is a short-term home for me. I feel more at home all the time. It’s not my country, of course, and it’s obvious at a glance that we’re foreigners. Though I know that my whiteness will never go away, as we frequent the same restaurant and shops, people become inured to us. It’s getting more comfortable. I’m glad I lived in Hawaii first, because there’s stuff about geckos and cockroaches that I experienced in Hawaii that India can’t touch (or just hasn’t yet). I’m not scared of this place – haven’t been – but I can see where some people would have a harder time. Still, I do not picture myself extending my visa indefinitely or seeking citizenship. And it has nothing to do with the people, the government, the land… I had the abrupt and slightly sad realization that India would not be my final home in Jew Town, Cochi. We were staying in Ernakulam and we’d taken a ferry over to Cochi. We walked around for a while but weren’t impressed by the hawkers and pushy autorickshaw drivers. We took a rickshaw, though, from Cochi to Mattancherry to see the palace. Underwhelmed by the palace (where, admittedly, they were working on the displays), we decided just to go back to the room and shower again (and again, and again). We walked from the palace toward the water and got caught up in the Jew Town bazaar. So many spices, so much perfume…the smell changed by small degrees every step we took and each change was just more to love. It didn’t look like much on a weekend, but it had such olifactory presence that we didn’t feel we were missing anything. As we walked along, we came to a sign. On our right was the Malabar Yacht[…]

Here’s a google map on our exact coordinates: <br /><small><a style=”color: #0000ff; text-align: left” mce_href=”http://maps.google.com/maps?q=N+08%C2%B0+27.844+E+076%C2%B0+56.900&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;ll=8.47441,76.952534&amp;spn=0.024026,0.04549&amp;t=h&amp;z=14&amp;iwloc=addr&amp;source=embed” xhref=”http://maps.google.com/maps?q=N+08%C2%B0+27.844+E+076%C2%B0+56.900&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;ll=8.47441,76.952534&amp;spn=0.024026,0.04549&amp;t=h&amp;z=14&amp;iwloc=addr&amp;source=embed”>View Larger Map</a></small>

We’ve begun our work. Yesterday, for the first time, James and I sat down at our desks in our shared office and we worked on our books. James produced several pages of new work and I did a careful read of the first 80-some pages of Blue Water Dreams. I also made notes on a bunch of the things I want to add to give the book depth. I started this book at the most shallow of levels, and I’ve been struggling ever since. In order to give myself a structure and some plain goals, I made an outline of the elements of a good romantic novel. I then took those elements and made an outline of my story as it fits the elements, calling each major element a chapter. Next, I wrote a one-page abstract of all of the things that would happen in each chapter. At that point, I had a map. All of this was in a notebook, handwritten, and I decided that I could simply write the book from the beginning by moving from page to page through the abstract. Whoa. I mean, don’t get me wrong. It started the way I had intended. I wrote 23 single-spaced pages on June 7, 2005. But then I didn’t write much more for a long time. I edited those pages until January, only adding another dozen pages in all that time. By March of 2006, I still only had 50 pages. In April, I reached 85. And more than a year later, on July 8, 2006, I broke 100 pages and finished the story. What? A hundred pages long? That’s not a book! Of course, in that time I also got a promotion at work that meant I worked long hours, sailed all around the San Francisco Bay,[…]

So yeah.  James and I are vegetarian.  Soft-core – we eat fish and other sea-creatures, but no land animals or birds.  Blahblahblah. It’s been really easy to be full-veg here in India.  The majority religion is a vegetarian one, and most restaurants seems to be labeled veg, non-veg, or veg and non-veg.  We’ve mostly stuck to the veg only ones.  (Pure veg, by the way, means no egg when looking at restaurant signs in India.) So we moved into our new digs.  We had our first night, sleeping on our comfortable spring mattress (an extravagance in a land of flat pallet type mattresses, but well worth it).  The first full day, we met a bunch of our neighbors.  The family across the street was out and about in front of their house…and boy did we get a grand introduction!!! The 1st of October is the official end of Ramadan (or Ramzan) and the beginning of a two day feast after a month of fasting for Islam. We live in about a 98% Islamic hood.  When we got to our gate and said hi to the neighbors, they invited us to the first hour of the feast beginning at 9:30 am. We very graciously accepted the invitation, woke up the next day and went to breakfast at our new neighbors’ house across the street… Well, Islamic people as a rule are not vegetarian!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yeah – we knew that.  For some reason, we thought that breakfast, of all meals, would have some kind of non-meat options… We have a rule.  If someone prepares a bunch of food for us and, out of kindness and ignorance, serves us meat, we will eat it with big smiles on our faces, enjoying it to the very limits of our abilities. They served us both a[…]