Adrian's Monday in Ahmedabad

A little tenderly, I got up and we went out shopping with our host, K, as a guide. His mother-in-law had a range of womens clothes to see in her house (where some tame, if still fearful, monkeys came for peanuts).

Then we walked to a mens clothing shop to get some more goods to take home.

Monday shopping

It's siesta time (after 4 local time, nearly 11 at home) and we're in the hotel reading, writing and will say our 'goodbyes' this evening.

K picked us up this morning along with his Auntie Beris to go shopping for kurti (short tops) and kurtas (long tops). His mother-in-law sells them from her home, and we arrived to find choices of clothing already arranged on hangers in the sitting room. There were several of us women there, trying on various colours and sizes. I saw colours like turquoise that daughter would like, and wanted something for SD#2 too. Her father recommended a red one, and we will have to find out if it will fit her. I chose a turquoise blue cotton one with Hindu patterns on for daughter but they didn't really have anything small enough for her, and a blue one with Parsi markings for me, as well as a pair of trousers with lace round the base of the legs. I'd paid and we were about to leave, when M-i-L showed me a lovely black kurti with patterns including green. I tried it on, as she assured me that it would fit, but it was too tight round the arms, so I was about to discard it when I realised it is bound to fit daughter. So I got out my purse ...

Then K walked us up the road for about half a mile to a men's outfitters where husband bought himself a kurtus (a long one) and we got a blue one with special patterns on for son. K says he guarantees he will like it.

Then it was back to the compound for a cup of tea and a parsee cake made of dal paste - lovely - and to say goodbyes to a lot of the family, such as the little boys, the auntie, Z's sister, K's cousin, and even the servants, who were very friendly and kind. There were invitations to New Zealand where K lives, and to come back in 2010 for the younger boy's Navjote. I think we might come.

Navjote - Adrian's report

We started with even more difficulty than yesterday before K with his elder son Z (whose Navjote was to take place that evening) came to take us to the hall where there was to be another communal lunch.

I was able to spend time watching the kites - coming to the idea that they occupied the ecological niche that seagulls do in England - when a couple of vultures appeared and took up residence in the trees surrounding the property. Dhun told me they were white backed vultures (they had large white patches on the under wings) and that vultures were under threat. The use of Diclofenac in the cattle herds was the culprit (the eggs did not hatch?). This in turn affected the Parsis who leave their dead on towers for the vultures to reduce to bones. Green parrots and a type of starling (?) with a yellow beak and white/yellow flashes on the edge of its wings appeared, and in the evening there were cormorants and a heron in flight.


We returned early in the evening so that we could see the public part of the ceremony (the private part involved something to do with the purified/concentrated urine of a cow of spotless white coat, and a ceremonial cleansing bath).


The public ceremony took place on a stage backed with a semi-circular structure draped with cloth representing the sun's rays, decorated with flowers and a large Z.




An urn was burning a fire lit from the perpetual fire maintained in the holy temple since Parsis came to India. Four white garbed and hatted priests, looking more like surgeons ready to perform an operation, led him onto the stage to kneel on a white cloth. Prayers, etc, were said, petals scattered and finally a long white thread was unravelled and tied around Z's waist. This took about twenty minutes and public interest diminished as the ceremony was inaudible, and probably in Sanskrit so would have been unintelligible to most anyway.

An orgy of photo-opportunities then ensued before the band (with leader/drummer and guitarist from the family) started to perform, at much the same time as dinner service started. More Parsi food served on banana leaf plates, with a fish wrapped in a chutney paste and steamed as a new (to us) offering.

The band were still going, but were offering music to dance to, so we joined the group to shake our limbs about, during which a makeshift turban was wrapped around my head (see embarrassing photos)


We were told, during the evening, how the Parsis who fled persia (though there are still some there) came to part of India where the king said his country was too full to take any more people and illustrated his point by showing a full bowl of milk. The Parsi leader sprinkled sugar into the milk without it spilling to prove that they could sweeten life, and would not overcrowd the country, in the same way as the sweetened milk was still within the bowl. They were then permitted to stay, as long as they married only within their community and adopted local customs (such as the wearing of saris by the women).

The Navjote

It's around 10.30 pm, and we've just got back from the Navjote - around 400 people at the Zorastian Hall.

We went in time for the ceremony, though we must have been the first non-Parsees to arrive. If you aren't a Parsi, then you can't go into the temple, but after the ceremony, they come out and the new Navjote (nav means new) repeats the prayers as the priest says them.

He arrived in a procession with his very proud parents and grandparents, garlanded in flowers, newly bathed as the ceremony requires, wrapped in red to be dressed in new garments.

We watched as the priest ran the thread round his waist several times. In future he will have to do this every time he washes. I thought the thread was of 27 threads, but Mr Gai tells me that it is 72 and the number represents 72 scriptures.

We had a lot of photo taking, and video taking, then a meal - a Parsi fish dish for the non-vegetarians.

Then there was music, with Khaizad's uncle Vispee on the drums and his cousin, Harmony singing. Watch out for the recordings I made - I'll put them on our home site. People started to dance, Khaizad with exhuberance and so I tried to photo him, but found myself on the patio dancing too. Next I looked up to find husband, not only dancing, but dancing with a red shawl wrapped round his head like a turban. Everyone was high with happiness, enthusiam and gaiety. Toddlers, teenagers, parents and grandparents danced.

Finally, the music ended, and people drifted off. Khaized put us in a rickshaw to make our own way back to the hotel.

Saturday 29th December - Adrian

We struggled to get out of bed as our bodies still said that we were in the small hours and went downstairs to the small room which called itself a restaurant for continental breakfast - tea/coffe, pineapple juice and toast. Almost as soon as we were finished we were taken off for lunch at the Zoroastrian Hall (1929), a large building like a church hall, with lawn in front and terraces or patios at the front and sides. One of these had long tables laid out for lunch, where we sat as large platters were filled with a first course of chappatis, pickle and a meat curry, followed by a second spicy dish with rice.

After lunch four adults and two children piled into a rickshaw (a 2 or 4 stroke 3-wheeled vehicle in green and yellow with an old-style convertible hood. I sat in the front alongside the driver - a dubious privilege as the horrors of the traffic are even closer there, and, as the small front wheel is almost underneath you, even closer to the wheels of bicycles, scooters, and the backs and legs of pedestrians, the hand carts and the monstrous fume belching buses.

I should have mentioned that we stopped first at the apartment of Zenobia and Noshir, the grand parents of the small boy whose navjote ceremony (a sort of first-comnmunion) was the cause of all the celebrations.

In the afternoon, while wife caught up with her sleep, I went for a walk, first of all to the completely misnamed 'Italian Bakery' (I asked what Italian bread they had but the Indian girl at the counter told me they had none).

I carried on walking, along the line of the old-city walls (brick-built and extensive but in disrepair) as I felt that the river which flows through Ahmedabad (dividing it into and old and a new town by its considerable width), lay behind the buildings on the opposite side of the road. As I walked, the new buildings opposite the wall (hotels, apartments, the Mount Carmel primary school and the Ahmedabad Rifle Club which was now degorging contestants from a National competition) thinned out and the spaces betweeen occupied by shanty settlements of increasing squalor as I approached a cross-road and turned left to find a bridge crossing the river (Sabarmati?)

Rusi Uncle - how we met

Nilu & I were reminiscing how Rusi Uncle and I came to meet. He had to work in Leyland for six months, and we used to catch the same bus home in the afternoon, me home from junior school, he after work.
He used to talk to me and offer me sweets - Rowntrees fruit gums - so I knew they were all right, but puzzled at my parents' instruction, which I obeyed:

"Never take sweets from strangers."

And I sensed that he was a kind gentleman, knowing also that he missed his own daughter. He missed her and I reminded him of her. When it turned out that she was two years younger than me, at the age of 8, I was even more puzzled; how could I, such a big girl, be like a little girl?

I wanted to show him where I lived. In order to do this, I would get off the bus the stop before my home, then run the 100-150 yards as fast as I could so I could point it out to him as the bus passed , carrying him on to his digs. As I usually couldn't beat the bus, it took me a week of these sprints before I got near enough to point it out.

N tells me the background to RU's emotions at that time. She was convinced that she was going to England with him, and at the airport was saying goodbye to everyone else, not to him, because she was going to go with him. It was only when he walked off without her that she realised. He turned and looked back as she cried. He cried.

When he returned to India, he sent me photos of the family - I think this one must be of Nilufer's Navjote, and a present of India coins, which started my coin collection.

Now talking to Nilufer, watching her with her own daughter, I miss my daughter - there must be some thing in the K and our family that reminds us of ourselves.

Adrian's first impressions

Ahmedabad 28th December
We flew into Mumbai airport by Jet Airways - noticing the shanty town by its side as we landed. International airports are usually a prestige monument to the host nation, but Mumbai airport fails to impress and as we transferred by bus to the domestic terminal, with closer contact to the neighbouring shanties, and the building work on the warehouses (unfinished so that cardboard packaged goods were out in the open) with women carrying building materials on their heads, the impression worsened. The domestic terminal is new but the expected electronic announcement boards were absent so that boarding was organised by announcements and rail way style destination boards at the gates - onto another bus to the plane on the tarmac.

We were met by Kaizad and one of his sons, with a cousin to drive a small and battered four-seat er into which we five and luggage were piled - seat belts ? - no! Nothing but the experience can prepare you for the horror of traffic in Ahmedabad - traffic in Palermo was peaceful and well-regulated by comparison. There is a continual beeping of horns to the extent that as a warning signal this exercise is pointless through indecipherability in the overall noise. There are no lanes marked - even in the few places where an all but indistinguishable mark exists it is ignored entirely - there is often no directional discipline, and crossing, entrances and exits are a complete free for all - with people and vehicles dashing into and across any free spaces. Bicycles, pedestrians from the fleet to almost lame, hand and horse cats, scooters and three-wheeled ''rickshaws' jostle with cars, lorries and buses, all without regard for each other. Not to mention ubiquitous dogs and the odd bullock grazing on greenery in the central reservation as additional hazards to be negotiated. No wonder the sky is filled with kites wheeling away in their dozens.


January 14th is the festival day or competition for the flying of man-made kites, when the sky becomes almost invisible with them, it is said. Remnants of unsuccessful kites are wrapped around every overhead wire and by the side of the road from the airport, boys were laying out lengths of white and fluorescent red threads on poles in preparation for the big day.

We were deposited at a small hotel. Across the road was an opulent 'Le Meridien' which we went into when ours did not know how to deal with travellers cheques. They couldn't deal with ours as we were not resident there, but phoned across the road with the necessary information and half an hour later a banker and his driver turned up so that we could perform a transaction in the hotel restaurant, sealed with a cup of tea and some social conversation.

Also across the road was a building labelled 'The Zoroastian Womens Ind. Coop' indicating the Parsee community of whom we were guests, and behind our hotel was a mosque, the PA system amplified muezzin of which woke us at dawn local time (1 am ish GMT).

First Impressions

Husband asks how you'd give this hotel Host-Inn, opp le Meridien, a star rating, but adds

"perhaps you'd give it an asteroid rating?"

However, at Rs1460/- per night for a double room, it costs only about 19 pounds sterling. Moreover, it is clean and friendly.

Last night we went to a party, just friends and family, but perhaps a hundred people. Zenobia wrote to me years ago about her friends Ferose and Farida, so I'm pleased to meet them. And Kaizad's friends from catering and management school and Noshir's friends from the bank where he worked. I should have remembered that when I had to change my travellers cheques.

We were introduced to everyone, initially formally as we went round a semi circle of chairs, but everyone was pleased to come and talk to us and make us feel welcome and tell us about themselves too. We met Z's brother from Bombay, who explained something about the Parsee religion. I hadn't realised how conservatively religious the family was, and that Rusi Uncle was a priest.

The party was on the grounds of a school, well out of the city centre, in the countryside - the 'jungle' is what Behzad, Z's 4 year -old grandson called it - lit by lots of tiny lights hanging from the trees that surrounded the 'playground' where we sat and ate and drank and chatted. We had lots of lovely nibbles, followed by a main course of rice and dal, washed down with sprite (or some sort of local home made concoction - this is a dry state).

Dhun (Noshir's brother) told us a lot about his media work, including with the Wild Fowl and Wetland trust in the UK and how that is influencing and improving tourist access to a mangrove park. He also told me about how Rusi Uncle passed away in 1994.

Beris, Zenobia's mother's sister-in-law told me how good the shopping was in Ahmedabad, and we've agreed to go together on 31st.

At around 11.30 we piled (7 of us) into a car, and they brought us back to our hotel with a promise to pick us up the next day (this morning) for another party.

This morning we had a cup of tea at Zenobya and Noshir's flat - I've been writing to this address for years, and at last get to see it.

Later we were driven in a rather grander car to the Zorastian temple, - you can't go right into the centre if you are not a parsi, - where there was another fine meal. We sat outside under an awning at long tables, one side only, so that the waiters could serve you down the other side.


Inside you could see them making the chappattis, and they were lovely and light and small. Then a monkey jumped on to and ran across the awning - you couldn't see it - just it's shadow, and then a long grey tail hanging from the tree where it stopped.

I met Z's cousin Rose, who lives in England, and Farida. She introduced me to her father, who said "Don't you remember me?" It was Mr Gai, the gentleman in Delhi who had so looked after Vera (McNamara) and me in 1975.

Now we are finishing a siesta in the hotel, to be picked up for the first of the celebrations for the Navjote, that takes place tomorrow.

Arrived

It's nearly seven o'clock and it's dark. We reached Ahmedabad with only a slight delay in planes when we changed at Mumbai. You fly in over the shanty towns to the international airport, go through customs and wait in a rather unofficial unair-conditioned corridor while airport staff bustle about until a bus trundles you round to the domestic airport.

We are staying in the Host Inn Hotel, which announces that it is opposite Le Hotel Meridien (that's a posh one) in the district of Khanpur. K and his cousin met us at the airport and got a taxi to bring us here. We've changed some travellers cheques and any minute are leaving to join a family gathering.

We've changed some travellers cheques, which involved quite a palaver. First we asked here, then we asked in the Meridien, who asked if we were staying there. It transpires that hotels can change travellers cheques for their own guests only. But the Meridien reception very kindly rang our reception and explained everything he had to do. And when we got back to our hotel, he looked the cheques, and my passport, and made another phone call to get the instructions repeated. Then we had to wait half an hour. Eventually, we were lead into the dining room where two Muslim men were waiting with a calculator, a black bag and a list of exchange rates. We agreed the calculation, counted it out and waited while someone was sent to take photocopies of passport and visa. We drank tea. It was all very leisurely.

I'm worrying about

• BA strikes at British airports
• missing the connections at Mumbai
• missing the connection at Paddington
  
• being inadvertently rude
• itchy insect bites
• not having a hotel booked
• not getting the travellers cheques changed and having no money for a taxi to a hotel
• malaria
• Japanese encephalitis
• camera battery going flat
• losing camera
• losing passports
• losing anything
• daughter at home may be lonely or hungry
• forget to pack something
• threat of bombs at Indian airports in January
• seeing a tiger
• not seeing a tiger,
• getting too close to the tigers in Kerala.

We leave on the 16:38 train...

Christmas passed

It passed well, hit all the right buttons, filled all the tummies and stockings, and no arguments (yet).

Post-Christmas plans

Mosquitoes!

That's what I'm now worrying about - do I need citronella or mosquito nets to supplement the malaria tablets for our two weeks in India? Will the hotel have taken measures to keep the wee beasties at bay?

Our hotel at Cochin looks a bit posh. We're there for two nights and on Thursday 3rd January we move to Munnar to stay in a standard cottage at the Tall Tree. Then into the 'wild' to see tigers at Periyar staying in a cottage. I imagine the houseboat at Alleppey will have the most mosquitoes. The final stop is at Kumarakom in a cottage at Radisson Plaza Resort & Spa for two nights before catching a plane from Cochin back to Mumbai where we stop overnight - I don't know where - we haven't heard back from the Indian friend who suggested that we stay in the NSCI club. She emailed that it might be full because of the wedding season.

We fly home Thursday 10th. And I hope we do fly, as now I've found, to add to my worrying, that there's been an email threat to blow up India airports on 12th January. Together with BA threats to strike 7th and 14th January, the trip gets a bit worrying. I hope we miss all the excitement.

Tae Kwondo demo

What am I going to do? We've had our last session till after the new year, yet the first day back we have to demonstrate something. I'm going to be jet lagged and unfit.

Daughter and grandson can work something out to demonstrate together while I'm away. Tonight I'm going to meet fellow tae kwondie over a drink to plan - can't see us practising in the pub though.

Christmas food & visitors

We have visitors on Sunday and on Christmas Day too. There are only 12 for lunch on Sunday - us five at home plus husband's brother's family and our son and his family. When the local grandchildren visit after lunch, we'll be a few more to play.

On Christmas Day we are 15. Us five plus visiting Italian in-laws and 5/6 children with their respective partners and offspring.

The menu includes a stuffed bird from Heal Farm and the usual accompaniments. I especially like their Grande Marnier tart. Yum! And I expect there'll be a little champagne.

Christmas plans

People ask me when daughter is coming home for Christmas, so I ask her father.

"When I pick her up."

And

"When's that going to be?"
"I don't know - when she tells me."

I speak to daughter:

"When are you coming home?"
"I don't know - when Daddy picks me up."

Stalemate. I'll see her when I'm looking at her.

AOTRA dinner

Aylesbury Old Town Residents Association held their Christmas dinner in the Rockwood.





I took some photos.

And some more.

Facebook

I've joined Facebook.

Facebook is a social networking electronic thing. It seems to be the fashionable update of what I've been using through Friends Reunited to catch up with people from my past (and then forget them again) and the First Class software that the OU uses to organise conferences/forums where I get so much through 'meeting' my fellow tutors and students.

Son and daughter talk about Facebook, but weren't too enthusiastic about my joining. Nevertheless, since it seems to be for university students and I'm a university student, I thought I ought to investigate it. So I've joined and now I've got three friends. One is a fellow post-grad and son and daughter have acknowledged me and agreed to be my friend. Son seems to be delighted to be the first to write on my wall - is there a competition to write on people's walls?

If you are Facebook, will you send me a message?

Vaccinations

Had various vaccinations yesterday ready for trip to India. Apparently my surgery needed six weeks notice and five and half weeks was too short, so I had to drive up to a private clinic 20 miles away, while husband got his vaccines free on the NHS through a different surgery.

It takes ages to get an appointment at our surgery. A week-next-Monday isn't unusual, but at least when I got referred to the hospital for an x-ray that happened within 24 hours.

Photographing London

I went up to London yesterday to meet fellow T189 students for a photo shoot. I took loads of photos, none of which are worth showing anyone, but I enjoyed meeting the other students and discussing the difficulties of F-stops and apertures and which way meant they were bigger or smaller and what ISO we were using.

A colleague took this photo of such a discussion. And here is a comprehensive description of where we went.
http://blogs.open.ac.uk/h807/kmb22/