Jaipur in June

Sane people say do not go to Rajasthan in June. That you will basically shrivel up and die. They are mostly right.

HOWEVER.

Although it was 112, 115 degrees every day, my sister Hopie and my mom had such a tremendous time we almost didn't come back.

It was supposed to be a biznass trip: the mission was to work on the fall line for Block Shop. And that's precisely what we did each day. But walking through the village at sundown with Vijendra and a pack of giggling knee-high stragglers, stopping in to say hello at the block carvers, the dabu printers, the indigo dyers, the cousins and wives and elders and gurus, I know that "business" isn't the right word for what Block Shop's become for me. I know Hopie feels the same way (everyone wave and say "hi, Hopie!").

When P. and I lived in Jaipur for a year I had a capricious understanding with India that read like the script for an abusive, hot-tempered relationship (said in my best B.D. Wong whisper-therapist-voice from Law & Order).  Some days it was Lily and India are Best Friends and Holding Hands. Some days it was Lily F*cking Hates India and Is Crying. (In all fairness to Mother India, living on a shoestring rupee budget as the only non-Indians in a conservative neighborhood had a lot to do with this. So did Dengue fever.)

But this trip, my first visit back, was –I'll say it– magical. Bringing my mom gave me new eyes, made me consider Jaipur in new ways. Her astonishment and delight was palpable, inspiring. Hopie and I felt so much pride bringing her to Bagru, introducing her to the printing coop as maira mama. 

Between the punishing heat and ten-and-a-half hour time difference (ten and a HALF! Why the incomprehensible extra half hour? Because it is INDIA, my chapatlettes, and as many of you know there are no rules, but when there are you'd better have the official paperwork) my New York brain melted like a scoop of kulfi and my instinct brain kicked in: suddenly Hindi words I hadn't even realized I knew flowed from my mouth and my head bobble kicked in as naturally as my acchas and my teek hais. Suddenly the cultural disregard for orderly lines no longer bothered me; I smiled and gently elbowed my way through airport security like Anna Pavlova's swan through a crowded cafeteria. 

One night Hopie and I went to the palmist. He read my palm and told me all my secrets, strengths, promising future. He also told me some messed-up shit about my character flaws and then closed our session by smiling abruptly and and saying "nonetheless I see you will live to be ninety-one-plus. Namaste."  

Chuffed to know I'll live to 91+ I ordered a piña colada at the hotel bar.

The next day I bought a faceted black onyx ring to ward off "bad eyes" juuust in case. One can never be too careful with these things. It glitters and beckons from every angle like a personal-sized, blingier Nietzschean void. And the gatekeeper of that void is Ganesha, and in my version he is eating mangoes.

Why not? Anything is possible. ANYTHING.

We spent every day mixing new dye recipes, perfecting new designs, drinking cup after cup of masala chai and sweating our chapatis off. Literally. One afternoon my hands were so shaky and sweaty from the heat I dropped my chapati on the cement floor of Vijendra's house. I thought of the diseases our friend Santiago had listed off during his visit to Bagru to assess the medical needs of the community, of the rampant parasites and skin conditions. I scooped the oily chapati off the dusty floor, looked at my onyx ring, shrugged, and plopped the doughy disk in my mouth. "DELICIOUS, Didi-ji! Barhiya hai!"

That evening Vijendra pulled our first prototype from the dye vat and everyone gasped. Our natural grey dye shimmered silver in the waning desert light like the stomach of a magic fish. "I think this one..." he paused. "Maybe this one is best design. I think this one maybe is perfect. Now we have chai and take rest."

More on Instagram, here. 

Greenly, Woodly

There was a period in middle school when Hopie and I rode to school on our horses. I knew the back way down through our hay fields, across the river, across the neighbor's place, through a housing development, down the PSE&G gas pipeline, and across the football field to school. This was before cell phones, google maps. We just slipped on our backpacks, saddled up, and trespassed to school. We tied the horses up in the ravine where the high school punks smoked cigarettes. I think I must have taken them somewhere to get water in the middle of the day? I guess my parents knew we were doing this?

I don't remember those details. But I do know we were LARPing the hell out of our Laura Ingalls Wilder fantasy in suburban New Jersey, so help me god. 

On Memorial Day Hopie and I tromped down into the woods on the farm in search of childhood antics, the last jack-in-the-pulpits, the first may apples. Lemon and Pie are long gone, so we walked.

Dyna swam across the river and chased crayfish. Hopie found the spot where we built a tepee one summer when we were obsessed with the Lenni-Lenape Indians (who, to be clear, did not live in tepees. Details.). That was the summer my mom signed us up for tracking camp at the local nature preserve; this bandana'd dude who looked like a Muppet must have smoked A LOT of weed before leading a bunch of middle schoolers through the tick-infested woods of New Jersey in an army crawl.

I still have a plaster cast of a fox print somewhere.

I graduated from my MFA program last week and wore my billowing purple robe and velvet hood on the subway and told a group of school kids I was headed to a Quidditch match. Which is, essentially, what an MFA in studio art really is. I am now a Master. I'm thrilled. I wish I could have kept the robe, for subway riding if for nothing else. 

Hopie and I leave for Bagru, India in exactly one week to work on the next line for Block Shop. And we are bringing the mother, which is terrifying for all parties involved. (MOM IF YOU'RE READING THIS YOU'D BETTER BE PACKED.) 

One last thing: the spring issue of Lapham's Quarterly. The theme is animals. It is perfect. Get it.

All pictures from my iPhone, some Instagrizzled. 

Jaipur at 3am

Was searching for an earlier draft of my thesis and came across this stash of files in a folder on my desktop, taken exactly two years ago. Suddenly I'm back in Jaipur at 3am on a Monday night in Brooklyn.

I was coming off a staggering month-long gut-rot affliction and probably had Dengue fever, and yet I was more or less happy, energized, motivated, optimistic. I was spending my mornings out in Bagru working on what would –almost two years later– become Block Shop, and my afternoons apprenticing with master painter Ajay Sharma (whose lovely wife's cooking may or may not have been responsible for said gut-rot).







P. and I had both just been accepted to graduate school. We knew how many rupees for a cup of chai, a bag of milk (it comes in little plastic bags! why not!), an auto-rickshaw ride to Anokhi Cafe, a garland of marigolds from the one-legged flowermonger and reigning champion in the women's division of amputee weight lifters in the great state of Rajasthan (I am not making this up).

I was reading Just Kids. We were out of money. We had no idea what was in store for us.







Somehow we've almost made it through two years of this long-distance insanity and I can hardly wait. GRAD SCHOOL. Over in two weeks.

Hope you're having a good week, vixens. For listening: Something Good by Alt J (but don't watch the terrible video! No one needs to see a poor man's Enrique Iglesias as a rose-wielding Tragic Matador!), which reminds me of something I would have listened to on a rainy New England spring day in high school. For reading, James Gleik's Wikipedia's Women Problem in the New York Review of Books. And before you hurl yourself outta window in utter despair, this baby penguin being tickled. 

Old Dogs in Springtime

Because of the manhunt I couldn't get to Boston to see P. on Friday, so I fled New York to the farm to dog-sit for my parents. I've kept it private for the most part, but you might as well know: Mac's back legs started to go soon after we moved back from India, slowly at first, but now he's completely paralyzed from the shoulders back. Mac (also known on this blog as Biscuit) has been my copilot for twelve years. He is my Life Dog. Steadfast and lionhearted, he's defended me from coyotes, rattlesnakes, scorpions, and the vicissitudes of the heart, but late-onset degenerative myelopathy is getting the better of him in his otherwise spry old age back on the farm. (His body is crippled but he's liberated when he dozes; as I write this, his front paws are twitching as he chases something in a dream.)

I spent six hours answering Block Shop emails Sunday afternoon with Mac at my feet, then at five o'clock I poured myself a bourbon, set my jaw, and headed out to the barn. I rifled through the storage and boxes of baling twine in the now-empty hayloft until I found our ancient Radio Flyer, which contained a mouse-nibbled garbage bag labeled "CHILDREN'S SHOES / 4 GOODWILL" in my mother's neat, faded handwriting. There's probably a word in German for the feeling of finding a forgotten bag of one's childhood shoes, but I don't know what it is.





I loaded Mac into the wagon and took him for a walk down to the edge of the woods where rogue daffodils come up every spring. Mac sniffed the breeze perched like a regal Maharajah atop his palanquin while Dolly chased voles and I filled my bucket.

My ninth grade English teacher made us memorize and recite Wordsworth, but I can only ever remember the first two couplets of Daffodils. But sometimes two couplets is plenty, and I recited them for Mackerel as I pulled him up the hill through the boggy spring fields and back to the house.





I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud
(or, Daffodils)

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

–William Wordsworth, 1807