Apathy

Surely, I am not fully present.
This world is a dream land that I observe from outside.
I watch, numb to all feeling, having been necessarily desensitized; perhaps permanently. I am bored and lost, nothing satisfies me yet I do not know what will heal my restlessness. I ache for excitement, but a living paradox, I long for solitary retreat. I do not know what I want, what I need. I have everything and nothing. What more does this world have for me? Have I seen it all? I am apathetic to all people and all things, I have a hatred for human interaction yet a yearning for meaning and companionship. Simultaneously desperate and distant.

Mountains look like a manufactured diorama.
Beauty, a misty illusion.
Adventure, dull.
Delight is absent from deliciousness.
Compassion is absent from companionship.
I am suspicious of all generosity.
Love must be impossible, a hallucination in this hell--I do not believe that you are my friend, for so many have hurt me before. This must be one of those horror stories where I am tricked by temptation. Pleasure is a feeling that I have estranged, rejected, it is an undesirable, guilty indulgence. From it I hide. Will I ever feel again? I believe not. For life is too full of deception to leave oneself vulnerable to experience. To embrace joy is to face inevitable discouragement, it will become disappointment in time. To trust one's senses is to be blinded by sensation. To trust one's heart is to be naked to the hatred of the universe. I am paralyzed by disbelief and doubt. For I have been disillusioned too many times
My heart broken
My hopes dashed
My efforts thwarted
As I am left in utter melancholy,
Incompetent, unimportant, and in fact
Non-existent.
I do not suffer from depression, you see,
For I am impermeable even to such swarms of sadness
But rather I am plagued by the torturous lack of feeling altogether,
The dishonorable indifference that protects me
As the world passes by my glazed eyes
And I do not care.

Tso Pema

Rigid peaks lit linger at evening horizon
As sun flickers to rest
And golden glow on tall jagged mountains
Is only illumination
Lake Tso Pema rests
Amidst Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist temples
Trout feed on holy bread
Turban-headed Sikhs pray at lakeside
As Buddhists spin their prayer wheels
Hindus chant across still water
A memory of Padmasambhava
That was born from the lotus flower
Friendly monks are dinner's company
Monastery is my accomodation here
I climb to the Buddhist meditation cave
Where blankets of prayer flags mask the landscape
And chanted Tibetan prayers
Are the music of the cave

The Tibetan monks

A kind red-robed friend offers home-cooked food to sleepy, belly-ill traveler.

I follow him to his modest one-room cement dwelling

Sipping Taiwanese tea

They have fled from Tibtet to study at monasteries in India

Because in what is now China, religious freedom does not exist

Their families remain there

Living under communism

The refugees have trekked 23 nights across the Himalayas

Escaping persecution

From a place where culture is demolished and protesters murdered

Land invaded, nature ruined

They illegally cross the treacherous mountains

Threatened by the weapons of military border guards

To find a new home

In a place where they do not know the language,

The food and climate make them ill,

And they do not earn a living

They seek only a life where human rights are respected

They are the nomads of simplicity, faith, and gentleness

Loving the Dalai Lama

Loving humanity

Loving me, for some reason

Serving me bakchoy-alu with rice and kimchee, home-cooked on their gas stove

No money, they insist

I am shocked, surely they expect money for generosity, like everyone else in India

I kindly find my next meals outside

But return for their company

Kalsang shows me the Tibetan herbs they grind and eat for medicine; all natural

They dedicate their days to yoga, meditation, cooking, reading, English language, and Buddhist study and prayer.

It is a life of luxury
And a life of loneliness.
They support themselves by the grace of foreign friends

Normally their families would support them

But they can never return there for they will be certainly imprisoned
Do you like India?
I do not like India people
Always about money money money
Just money thinking only
Selfishness
In Tibet, if I don't have, my neighbor give me,
If he don't have, I give him
No money
Here, we give because we want to give
It makes us happy to give

They offer me free accommodation and food

Which I accept with a gift in return

But what fills me with joy
Is the hug that is filled with compassion, understanding, and trust

The sheer gratitude

Of sincere companionship

Too jiche, thank you.
For I have finally found my first friend in India.

To you

I came to India with unrivaled idealism

The hope to change the world

The optimism of a child and the naivete of a girl

I have been faced with deception, theft, manipulation, and cruelty.

Revenge, jealousy, lies, exploitation

Man's true nature unveiled

In hideous horror

To virgin eyes

My heart has been broken

My world turned upside-down

I have become suspicious, cynical, exhausted by sin

And haunted by the selfishness that not only surrounds me,

But that lurks within myself

My disillusionment crippling

My faith in humanity crushed

I doubt even my own motivations,

My ambitions

And certainly my capability to bring good to this world

Are we beyond repair?

Can we hope for more than brokenness?

Some days, I think not

Some days, the depression convinces me that we are doomed,

Prisoners of our own making

Destined for failure

And impossibly trapped

By shackles of greed

But you!

You come and hold my hand

You warm my body with chai

You share your food and home

You lift me up the mountain

You point to the brilliant sunset

That I could not see

For I was buried in my elbows,

Ashamed of my tears

And I see

That perhaps

The world still has tender moments of beauty

That can live just as long as they are protected by the weapon

That is love.

A train ride with Arish Chandal

Why don't you wear arguments?

What?

In your ears and nose--no instruments!

What do you mean, instruments?

Ornaments!

Oh, we call them piercings.

 

Abraham Lincoln was the first prime minister of your America.

Actually he was the 16th President.

He was a good man--a good black man!

No, you know he was a white man.

Das Capital. A very fine book! He wrote all about the landlords and made the first capital of your America!

 

You know Graham Bell? Edison?

Yes.

So many solutions! More than 50 solutions they created! Amazing!

 

We Indians are intellectual and also emotional.

Foreigners all are self-centered. Only intellectual, not emotional.

 

Do you live with your parents until death?

 

In America, everyone is rich, no?

In your America, you may just have living relations with any person, no problems.

Like Bill Clinton!

In my India, boys and girls, we are not allowed to have living relations.

Even after marriage, it is not allowed for 2-3 months.

In America you can just kiss someone, no problem, that is your system.

Here, we go to jail for 6 months! 6 months!!!

 

In America, what is your caste system?

In India, we have four castes. If we marry outside of our caste, the father of the groom, the father of the bride--they will murder you! You will be murdered, most definitely!!!

 

We have 6 seasons in India: winter, spring, summer, fall, and rainy season. Hot, cold, wet, and the junctions of the seasons.

 

God is a super-artist. He made lovely animals, lovely plants, lovely rivers, lovely human beings!

 

Do you know Mendeleev's charges? What is the symbol for glass?

Gold is Au, Silver is Ag, Mercury is Hg.

But what is glass?

 

Indian girls like to wear these bangles. Mostly glass, some gold, some silver, some brass. You don't like to wear?

 

What is Newton's law?

 

So tell me what is your life's mission?

 

This what we are having its called intellectual discussion. I learn some things about your America, and you learn some things about my India. We make a good masala.

 

He picked up my book, trying to prove his knowledge of the English language. Very easy, he said.

No sooner did he read the first 2 sentences than he was interrupted by a telephone call, at which point he simultaneously realized that this was his train stop. He was going to see the Taj Mahal. He put my book on someone else's lap and was gone.

Khechepuri Lake

Dew gathers in a row, resting
In a beaded necklace
Along my hair that I glance
As I write poetry.
Like a spiderweb in the dawn
The threads woven into a net
Sit silently waiting
For words to wander into their clutches
A flute's song prances across the valley of fog
To dance with the cow's low and the children's musical calls
In the dry lakes of my ears
The whiteness of cloud blinds
As it sharpens the earsight
Its swollen moisture collecting
Into the droplets that begin to fall
In a rhythmic harmony that drowns the noises of Khechpuri valley
Demanding all sensory attention
Except
That I can still see the remains
Of spiderwork strung across the porch,
Which reminds me of those dew drops
Nestled in sheltered safety,
Clinging fast
To strands of black hair.

Backwards

Kolkata is a place where good deeds are misused, honesty is taken advantage of, loyalty meaningless, and generosity trampled upon.
For all is backwards here.
Not only do all the light switches turn down to turn on,
Not only do dirvers use the left side for travel,
Not only is the time zone half an hour increment off the rest of the world,
Not only do ladies scarves hang across the fronts of their bodies rather than resting on the backs of their necks,
And skin-whitening creams applied instead of tanning lotion.
But this society rewards misdeed, when one follows the rules one becomes victim of the vast majority who don't and who can't, for the sake of their own survival.
To slow for a red light only means you are left yielding right of way behind the aggressive rush of traffic.
You are delayed, the eager drivers push past you impatiently and honk their horns to remind you that rules are for fools.
The patient rickshaw driver is ignored as the loud, obnoxious one steals the commuter.
A friendly street stall with fair prices, clean food, and multi-lingual service is closed by the police; it is competing with the neighboring restaurants who rely on cheating foreigners to continue their businesses.
Shopkeepers with no-bargaining policies are passed by, businessmen without touts stand no chance, in an economy that relies upon commissioned men to prey on naive customers, and ridiculously steep prices reduced by 5% trick foreigners into thinking they are winning when they are in fact paying double the real price.
The 18-year long employee and loyalest staff who travels 2.5 hours and spends 1/3 of his salary on transport, works the longest hours, does the dirtiest tasks, while office administrators sit all day in AC behind desks joking about how the chai is not ready, earn at least twice if not 5 times as much as those doing all the clinical work beginning over one hour earlier.
Physicians are in dire shortage all over the country, but foreign doctors are not allowed to practice here; indeed, it is illegal and worthy of imprisonment.
Hospitals only pay for first line medications for HIV and prescribe 2nd line with referrals saying "medicines not available." They refuse to admit women who have given birth on the street because of the liability of taking such an unsanitary case; should anything go wrong the hospital would be responsible. Underweight babies of HIV-positive prostitutes do not get tested or even trated because, what if the baby died under our care?
The nation-wide food security subsidy program for the poor is found to be corrupt, the officials embezzling millions by lying about prices and stealing the food.
NGO's are run as businesses, disguised in the robes of charity, decieving all donors so cleverly that these orphan children are desperate for food, when really, it is the staff who are consuming that very food. There may be no orphans at all...better check on that.
Ambitious, hard-working, career-driven women with dreams of life abroad cannot possibly fulfill them for the barrier of visas. Even if she could find a sponsor or a job offer, she would not have the 1 lakh rupees that is arbitrarily required to have in one's bank account to even be eligible.
Friendship is only an exchange of needs; a relationship of mutual benefit; watch out for disguised generosity and grace.
If you do not manipulate you will be manipulated.
It is a system that rewards the liar.
That applauds the cheater.
That laughs at the honest man.
Where sin always wins
And evil conquers good.
It is survival of the fittest.
Where poverty, so devastatingly endemic
Escape is impossible
And hopelessness pervades
Why not wallow in selfishness?
To think of oneself is all the energy one has.