A Glass of Tea

India 89, the surface well improvement project in Kolar District Karnataka that I was a member of for three years, including training and an extension ,was as far as I know, one of the first programs that recruited specialists.  I was a mechanic for the group along with Mike Lipman, who many years later went back to Kolar and founded the inspiring and important Bio Sand Filter Project together with Cathy Forsberg. Mike and I were enthusiastic young men sharing our skills and at the same time learning something about ourselves and the intricacies of the Indian culture. Cross cultural collisions were inevitable in as much as we came to a place that seemed to stand outside of time. Bullocks lumbered past our bungalow marked with cum-cum, their curved horns painted in gaudy colors. The primitive carts that they drew with their wobbly, wooden spoked wheels were a stark contrast to the vehicles and machinery that we serviced and repaired in our Mysore Agro Industries workshop and evoked scenes from another millennium. We were raised with words like industrious and efficient, inventive, prompt and done in a jiffy, but we were to learn that these terms were disassociated from what we thought they meant and couldn´t be applied to our life or work in Kolar. Tomorrow or in a few days often meant sometime in an unspecified future, but we were infatuated with India and like anyone infatuated we saw but forgave all of her flaws.

The trail that volunteers follow is a crooked one and we didn’t have a map of what to expect along the way other than the rough sketch that we received in training. The workshop that Mike and I established was functional many years after our departure, but I could say with just a touch of hubris, that if one wanted to measure our true success as volunteers, or any volunteer for that matter, that they would have to look into the hearts of the people we worked and interacted with. We came to India as ambassadors of change without realizing that change was a slow process. India probably changed us and our way of viewing the world more than we changed it, but we were enthusiastic young men sharing our skills and at the same time learning something about ourselves and the Indian culture. A few cross cultural clashes were inevitable.

The wear on our clothes was understandable in as much as they weren’t washed on the gentle cycle.  How the dhobi ever got our dirty laundry clean was one of those mysteries that would always remain unsolved.  Even though he washed everything in a muddy pond, he still managed to get the whites sparkling, and the grease and oil out of the shirts and shorts that we wore in the workshop. He soaked the clothes first and then rubbed them in with a bar of brown Sunlight soap, swung them high over his head, thrashed them against a granite slab and literally pummeled the dirt and the life out of them.  He rinsed them in the same stagnant water that the villagers bathed their animals and themselves in, and then hung them on a line or threw them over a bush to dry under the cloudless sky.

My threadbare shirts, prematurely abraded by the original stonewash method, needed to be replaced.  In as much as readymade clothing wasn’t available, that meant buying suitable cloth and then having new ones sewn up. The cloth merchant greeted me with joined fingertips and bowed head. “Namaskara”, and as I stepped into his shop he asked “uta ita?”  “Namaskara, Yes I had eaten,” I replied in Kannada, and looked up at the garland draped portraits of Nehru, J.F.K, and Mahatma Gandhi. “Sit, I’ll send out for tea” he said in the tone of a host that didn’t leave any leeway for a no thank-you. His assistant pulled up chairs, hopped down from the shop step onto the street and brought back two scratched and dulled glasses on

Bolts of cloth lay scattered about.  After our tea and conversation, he pulled the rolls out one after the other and showed them, proud of their delicate woven patterns and elaborate prints. I ran my fingers over the fabrics as he explained their unique and special qualities, as though they each had a story or a life. He showed me homespun khadi in cotton and silk and explained the political significance of cottage industries during India's struggle for Home Rule twenty-five years earlier. When it was time to choose some cloth, he was disappointed when I took only the simplest kaki from among all his treasures. I paid him and thanked him for the lesson in Indian history and tea and more importantly for his hospitality and cycled to the tailor.

Gandhi said that if you went looking for the soul of India you would find it in her villages and towns. I understood that as I made my way through Kolar's milling streets, as usual feeling as though I had fallen through a time warp and had tumbled into another age. I followed a narrow lane that opened onto a mosaic of shops and stands. I pedaled around and through the crush of bodies, swerving past turbaned men with skin that had the hue of polished mahogany and women in colorful saris, their hair braided or coiled in a tight bun and decorated with a sprig of jasmine. Sad-eyed cows, past their usefulness and in the Hindu tradition and by local law protected from slaughter, roamed unattended through the warren of dusty lanes foraging for anything edible; the thatch from low hanging  roofs or discarded  leaf plates that Brahmins ate from would do, or sometimes they were fed by the pious doing a good deed. Troops of monkeys watched intently from the treetops and eves, waiting for an opportunity to swoop down and snatch a mango or a banana from one of the fruit venders who plied their carts through the crowd. 

The tailor's shop was no more than a large shed that opened onto the street. It was decorated with the usual framed portraits draped in garlands of marigolds, almost identical to the cloth merchant’s except that the picture of J.F.K was replaced by one of the venerated local saint Sai Baba and there was a small shrine with sandalwood incense burning under an image of the four armed deity Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and good fortune. The tailor sat in the middle of a once elegant, but worse for wear Victorian dining table, a relic of the British Empire, and the room’s only piece of furniture. His legs were tucked into his dhoti and were folded under him lotus style, his slender arms swinging in graceful arches as he stitched.  His helper sat at a treadle sewing machine, pumping up and down, keeping a soothing, steady rhythm as he moved the cloth under the needle.