Our little technophile

I am confident that our babe can now survive in the wild. I don't know whether it's our station in India, her age, or my unnatural attachment to my laptop and smart phone; but Violet has acquired a few new survival skills worth mentioning...

Violet's morning ritual: emailing her grandmother and cousin and video chatting with her California friends

Take this sample email I got while sitting in a meeting at work (while her father was also at campus).

Subject: Oh No!!!!!!

Mommy, 

Saraswathi has not come................ 

Boooga

Violet was distressed that our cook had not come by 11 in the morning, so what did she do? She pulled out her dad's computer, entered his password, logged into his gmail account, and sent me this note.

Here are a few other classics that I hope she won't mind me sharing for posterity...

Subject: hi hi in the sky

Dear Mommy,

This book is soooo exciting! So I'm just going to finish it and start an A to Z mystery. Anyways, it will make up for the TV I used to watch a lot. I swam already. Maybe Daddy and I can go for a coconut. See you at 7:30, Mommy. I miss you!

Love, Violet

------------------------------------------

Mommy, 

Today was the worst day of my life at camp. Because we were writing stories and we had to make it about a certain picture and Bidushi only wrote one sentence. 

Then we graded each other. I was being honest. I gave Bidushi a 4 out of 10. Mine was a good story and deserved a 7 or a 6. But Bidushi gave me a 3! 

Okay, here's the worst part of my day. We were painting and I accidentally knocked down a bottle of red paint on the floor and it went on the cupboard and on the wall and a little bit on my backpack.  

Love, Violet

I think I must the luckiest 60-hour work week mom in the world to get notes like these between all-hands meetings and performance reviews. 

But how anyone can possibly function in society on her own at 8 years old, you ask? People! She even knows how to text. Nick and I had a late dinner in a hotel in Kerala a few weeks ago, and she begged us to go back to the room to go to bed. We took her up to the room and then finished up our meal (over-protective parents, judge at your own risk). As we were heading back to the room, I noticed I had a text message. It said, "When will you be done with dinner?"

These two developments may be more pride-inducing than her first smile, her first steps, etc...If she can send me an email when she's at home or send me a text, she can care for herself. But the cake-topper is that she's begun building power point presentations and sending them to me. This I find a little more disturbing, but in a strange way, I suppose it comes with the territory when you have a mom like me. And I guess kids need to know their way around technology these days. Is it sick that I promised Violet that she can come to my office to deliver a presentation on her birthday? 

Srilakshmi's Wedding

On Friday at exactly 9:31 am, one of my team members, Srilakshmi, married Sridhar for love. Sri and Sri (as they affectionately allow people like me to call them) have known each other since they were kids. Since they were both Brahmins - it was a match made in heaven according to their families.

Sri has been preparing for the wedding for months. One Monday I asked her how her weekend was, and she replied, "So busy, Jessica! I was sari shopping for my wedding."

"How many saris did you get?"

"10!"

"10! When will you wear them all? How could you possibly need 10 saris?!"

"Oh Jessica - I will wear them throughout my wedding." This is when the ladies surrounding Sri pipe in to explain that every couple of hours during the wedding, she'll change into a new 9-yard sari - in fine silk and no petticoat!

Sri invited our entire team to the wedding and told them that 9:31 had been designated the auspicious time for the wedding (I understand that the "marriage act" is also assigned an auspicious time which may or may not fall on the same night as the wedding), but naturally Sri did not mention that...

Meera, the kind woman on my team who meets me every Friday morning in the locker room to assist me with tying my sari (I wear one weekly and I can nearly tie it myself) arranged the collection for a wedding gift and coordinated our travel to the wedding Friday. Three of us (and Nick and Violet) arranged to leave the office at 11. Sri's wedding was on the other side of Hyderabad, close to Nick's university campus, so it would take well over an hour to get there. Our plan was to stay for an hour and have lunch (which apparently is perfectly appropriate - since the wedding ceremonies would commence at 6 am and go well into the night; people come and go throughout the day. We even saw guests sleeping in chairs and on the floors). My boss graciously gave us leave knowing that it would be a highlight of our Indian experience. Oh and it was...

An auspicious sign...

When we got out of the car, I started squealing about the poster with their faces that was posted outside of the wedding hall. As we approached the lobby, Sri's brother materialized (I immediately recognized him given their likeness), and said my company's name. "Come!" he said. He whisked us into a dancing crowd where Sri and Sri were holding hands (they held hands the entire time we were there). Sri was laden with flowers and henna and gold. Her groom was shirtless wearing a yellow dhoti.

The lovely bride and groom.

Sri's proud father greeted us (also shirtless) in a beautiful white and gold silk dhoti. There was a lot of bowing and gratitude for our presence. It was overwhelming. Soon we were introduced to Sri's mother who held my hands in hers. Sri's sister in-law also guided us around the dance circle after discreetly instructing me to fix my sari so that it was covering the entirety of my blouse.

Me with three women on my team (from left) Anaisha, Amulia, and Meera.

Then we were escorted to the front of the room by Sri's father where we sat in front of a TV monitor to watch the proceedings.

Violet in front of enormous vats of food.

Before long, a friend of the family took us up to have lunch early, because they understood we had to get back to the office. There Brahmins (also shirtless and wearing dhotis) served us a delicious South Indian feast - roasted channa, dahi wada, poori chole, puli hora, donda kai, brinjal, and laddoo. We ate with our hands and gazed at everyone's beautiful silk saris.

After lunch, we watched the Brahmin priests conduct various ceremonies around a fire that Sri and Sri sat in front of.

Marriage rites (note the hand holding!)

Sri took a break to come and show us where they had hidden the letters of her new husband's name in her henna designs. (Purportedly, he can only conduct the marriage act at the auspicious time AND once he's identified his name. Again, this information was not shared by his lovely bride.) Soon it was time to go, but what a joyous communal occasion. As we were leaving, Sri's father accompanied us saying what an honor it was for us to come. The married ladies in our party were given a wedding favor - a silver plate, betel leaf, banana, betel nuts, spices, and blouse material. We were also blessed with some yellow and red powder on our foreheads.

Sri - wishing you many years of happiness and loads of fertility (which I wasn't allowed to write in your card...)

Dharamsala

Namaste. We are back from the mountains.

Our three days in Himachal Pradesh felt like a week. The air was clean, the temperature was cool--basically, it was the anti-Hyderabad. Yes, Hyderabad has its merits, but natural beauty is not one of them.

We stayed at Jagatram Niwas, a guesthouse in the hills outside Dharamsala. The proprietor, Bavinder Singh, grew up here in the village of Heini.

Bavinder joined the Indian foreign service and worked for a few years in Pakistan before returning home to build the guesthouse with his brother. Their father still lives next door. Violet spent some fun evenings with Ansika, Bavinder's six-year-old niece. Here's a video of the girls playing cricket with a basketball. The colorful structures you see in the background are shrines dedicated to the goddesses Durga and Kali. Bavinder's son is lighting the shrines in anticipation of the evening puja.

Almost exactly a year ago we were in Yosemite for another long weekend, and I could not help comparing the two destinations in my mind. Both are spectacularly beautiful. However, like Indian yoga teachers (who are both more and less spiritual than their American counterparts), Indian mountain retreats are both more and less inspiring than American national parks. To begin with the "more," let's just say that I love the Sierra Nevadas, but they are hills compared to the Himalayas. I read the other day that the highest mountain outside Asia is a 6900-meter peak in the Andes; the Himalayas have over 100 peaks higher than that. So this is the world's center of mountain-ness. But it is also the center of the world's population. Which means that even after an hours-long trek through pristine wilderness, you are likely to end up at a cafe selling carbonated sugar water, and chances are you will have to share the triumph of the climb with a bunch of Punjabi guys smoking hash in their underwear and daring one another to jump in the freezing pool.

Then again, you might be alone. But there will be a cafe.

Can you believe I've made it several paragraphs into a post about Dharamsala without mentioning the town's most famous resident, the Dalai Lama? Well, His Holiness was out of town (in California, ironically) but we made a trip to the Norbulingka Institute, a center H.H. established for the preservation of Tibetan arts and culture. The gardens are meant to resemble the original Norbulingka complex in Lhasa, Tibet--now part of the People's Republic of China. Walking around the magnificent gardens at Norbulingka, you can't help but feel the sadness tied up in it. The Dalai Lama has not seen the real Norbulingka since 1959 and likely never will again, since he is prohibited from entering Tibet.

It started raining while we were inside the temple, meditating.

Finally I want to tell you what happened on our way back from one of the waterfalls pictured above. Rounding a bend, Jessica heard a noise in the trees. Her mind scrolled quickly through the most likely sources of the noise: a cougar, a tiger, a man-eating yeti, a very lost and confused member of the Taliban... I assured her it was just another hiker. But she didn't believe me, and she turned out to be right: the noise was coming from a herd of ... goats!

The goats were followed by a shepherd and his trusty dog, who kept an eye on the herd while the shepherd visited the cafe. He needed a pack of cigarettes. Tell me, where could a shepherd buy cigarettes in Yosemite?

Jai Hind!