Light pollution

When I go outside at night and look up at the sky I have a pretty good view of some familiar constellations: the Big Dipper, Orion, Cassiopeia. I live in small town British Columbia. The nearest big city is a five hour drive away. But still, light pollution here is bad enough to obscure the dimmer riot of stars and the fuzz of the Milky Way that I remember seeing as a kid in southern Ontario.

About half an hour from here, hidden in the desert-dry rolling hills, is the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory. Last August, I went there to watch the Perseid Meteor showers. The plan was that I'd meet my son and two other friends there. But it was so dark that I lurched among the hushed bodies wrapped in blankets on the grass, then gave up and rolled into my sleeping bag on my back and looked up. Every time a meteor flashed across the sky, a gasp of awe rose up from the crowd and then the whispers, "Did you see it?" It was a moonless night. I can't remember when I've seen so many stars. Even my 14 year-old son and his friends were buzzing with excitement when I found them.

The sad thing is that there are places in the world where it's no longer possible to see the stars. The problem is worse in cities, obviously, but an article in the Telegraph in 2010 says that according to astronomers, "eight out of ten people in the English countryside cannot see the stars at night because of light pollution." It's troubling to think that there are children who could grow up never experiencing the overwhelming humility that comes from gazing at a starry sky.

There are actually now "dark sky reserves," places named for having exceptional night-time darkness. These are some of them:

Canadian Dark Sky Preserves and Reserves

• Torrance Barrens Dark Sky Reserve, Ontario
• Point Pelee National Park and Dark Sky Preserve, Ontario
• Cypress Hills Dark Sky Preserve, Alberta/Saskatchewan
• Beaver Hills Dark Sky Preserve, Alberta
• Fraser Valley Dark Sky Preserve, British Columbia

It's not only the stars that suffer from light pollution. Brenda "Birdschmidt" probably knows about the organization called Fatal Light Awareness (FLAP http://www.flap.org/index.php) that's trying to get the lights turned out in city buildings to protect migrating birds. Below is a photo of some of the birds killed from hitting lit windows.

Me and Leonard

A few posts ago I mentioned that one special day I found myself (well, at least my name and Shelter's name) in the same issue of the Guardian as Leonard Cohen.

One thing that Leonard said really struck me as profound. (I figure as a fan, a Canadian, and co-Guardian subject, I can call him that).  He was talking about writing as work, and the fact that songs don't come easily to him, but that he could hardly compare it to work in a world where "guys go down into mines, chewing coca and spending all day in backbreaking labour." The interviewer asked him if he learned anything from writing. Did he work out ideas that way? Leonard said,

 "I think you work out something. I wouldn't call them ideas. I think ideas are what you want to get rid of. I don't really like songs with ideas. They tend to become slogans. They tend to be on the right side of things: ecology or vegetarianism or antiwar. All these are wonderful ideas but I like to work on a song until those slogans, as wonderful as they are and as wholesome as the ideas they promote are, dissolve into deeper convictions of the heart. I never set out to write a didactic song. It's just my experience. All I've got to put in a song is my own experience."

I like this first of all because it's an unfashionable thing to say and surely Leonard Cohen is one of the coolest people on the planet. At seventy-seven years old, he can say what he really thinks and no one's going to accuse him of being trite. I remember when I was in my first university Creative Writing class, back in the 1980s, the professor told us to write what we knew. That advice is out of style now. In a recent Globe and Mail interview about Cat's Table, Michael Ondaatje goes to great pains to deny that the novel is a memoir. Fine, I get that. As a writer, you want the freedom to invent where the facts are too dull or don't fit your design. But then he says, "I really don’t want to write down what I already know. If I’m going to write about something that happened in my childhood, I’m going to invent the hell out of it. There are some writers who know exactly what the book is going to be before they write it. Writers I really admire. But that would bore the hell out of me."

I find this a deeply dismissive thing to say about writing in general and memoir in particular. (Back me up, Melanie Murray!) It's also the ultimate arrogance to think that it's easy to write down "what I already know." As Leonard Cohen's songs confirm, writing from your own experience doesn't mean writing what you already know. It means writing what you want to understand, what you've glimpsed, choked on, sweated over at 3 a.m. under the cover of your own shame, closed your eyes to, wept over, and made bargains with various forms of God over.

I often read (or listen to) work I think of as great: anything by Virginia Woolf, anything by Neil Young, Margaret Laurence's Diviners, T.S. Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Homer's Odyssey, Leonard Cohen's Bird on a Wire, John  Lent's Real World and I ask myself what they have in common. What makes them great? And I think it's the quality that Leonard talks about. I'd almost call it sincerity. The artist has worked on it until he or she and their lofty ideas have disappeared and what's left is the most vulnerable and sincere core of experience. For me, I know it's great when I forget I'm reading or listening. There's no more clever writer, no talented musician. Just the deep "convictions of the heart."


Here's that wonderful, affectionate article about Mr. Cohen.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/jan/19/leonard-cohen

The kindness of strangers

I'm home and so happy to be here. The last few days of the trip were clouded by my battle with an intestinal bug, so I have a skewed idea of Mumbai, I think. Also, I'm not much of a big city person and they don't come much bigger than Mumbai. Actually, according to my Google search, Mumbai is the 4th most populous city in the world, with a population of about 20 million and is set to overtake Tokyo as the world's biggest city by 2020. Canada's population is 34 million, so that puts it in perspective. India as a whole has over 1.21 billion people. Flying into Mumbai from Bangalore, we dropped down through the brown cloud of smog and then as we descended I could see the slums that ring the outer edge of the city. Here's a link to a National Geographic article with some photos that capture it well:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/05/dharavi-mumbai-slum/jonas-bendiksen-photography

Mumbai is a good city for walking, but unfortunately I was too weak for that. So I hired a taxi and the driver and I became friends for two days. (When you find someone who drives you where you want to go and accepts the payment you agreed on without argument, you want to stick with him). On my last day in the city, I went first to Dhobi Ghats, Mumbai's open air laundry, which was fascinating. For some reason, I felt like I could have watched it all day. Though the water looked questionably clean, the laundry hanging to dry is crisp and bright.

Then to Chowpatty Beach. It was Sunday afternoon, just before sunset. The beach was crowded with families, sweethearts, groups of friends, hawkers of roasted corn, roasted peanuts, giant balloons, florescent pink cotton candy, toys, juice, deep fried food of various kinds and garbage. Lots of garbage. It's hard to know what to say about it; it seems like a desperate problem and I found it upsetting to say the least. But I'll let the photos speak for themselves.

Now that I'm home safely, what sticks with me is the kindness of strangers. It makes all the difference when you're traveling. There was Jay, an Anglo-Indian man discovering his family roots and fellow traveler on the Golden Triangle tour. When we first met and he saw I had a cold, he went to his room where he had a tea kettle that he travels with, and he brought me back a cup of hot "Lem-Sip", a lemon drink like Neo-Citran. I later gave him some melatonin tablets which the next day he pronounced "brilliant."

In Hampi, not quite strangers, but fellow writers Eugene (from Korea) and Birgitta (from Sweden), helped me with my unwieldy luggage (the London clothes which I had hoped to ship home from London but was unable to), by hiring a taxi to drive us to the train station, instead of taking a complicated route involving a ferry and auto-rickshaw. At the Hospet/Hampi station, Eugene lugged my heavy bag, even though she herself was traveling with a light knapsack. And Birgitta answered my every craving, first for a Coke, then an orange, then potato chips and apple juice as I sat immobile on a dirty bench smelling of urine, and watched the trains, praying we'd get the first class compartments we were waitlisted for, instead of sleeper class. We didn't. When I had to make a dash to vomit in the nearest garbage can, I think Birgitta almost cried along with me. It was a low moment.

But what made it bearable was the Indian family in the station who saw my Air Canada baggage tags and began to talk to me about Canada. When they learned I was sick, they carried my two heavy bags onto the train for me and stowed them safely under my seat. And as luck would have it, they were sharing our compartment. The berths (Eugene took out her antiseptic wipes) were pretty dusty and you don't get any bedding in sleeper class, but I had my scarf and a blanket I'd brought from Canada and hadn't needed until then. I was so spent, I was just grateful to be horizontal and I felt safe with the kind family sitting and talking with Eugene and Birgitta. I actually slept really well on that train and thankfully wasn't sick again.

These aren't my train photos, by the way. I was in no state to be capturing the moment. I found them online.

On my last day, when I was catching the taxi to the airport at 11 p.m., I gave my blanket and my remaining change to a man who worked at the hotel. It was only because I had no more room to pack the blanket and had left in the room. When he came to carry my bags and I told him I was leaving it behind, he asked if he could have it, since he has to sit outside the hotel all night and it gets cold. And I gave him the change because I had no more paper money to tip him. But as I got in the taxi, he said, "God bless you." And it seemed so heartfelt that I truly did feel blessed, always a good feeling when you're flying.

The taxi driver (the same one who'd driven me around Mumbai for two days) rode along with me and his friend (he's a day driver; his friend shares the taxi and is the night driver) and then when he was dropped off at his train stop, he fussed over the airport arrangements and told me to call him on my cell when I got to the airport.

It was a good trip. Now, every night since I've been home, I've been dreaming that I'm still in India.

Saturday night in Mumbai

I had a good day today in Mumbai, in spite of lingering cramps and the fact that climbing a few stairs seemed like a marathon (ie. I'm a little weak). I began the day with breakfast on the roof-terrace overlooking the typically grimy yet grand neighbouring buildings (sooty? or mould-stained from rainy season? not sure). I shared a table with three sisters about my age from Mauritius, an island off the south coast of Africa (in case you didn't know; I didn't!). They were very nice and had come to India just to "do Mumbai" but they weren't all that impressed. Instead, they sung the praises of Mauritius, which does sound beautiful (and I just googled it).

After breakfast I got a carefully handwritten itinerary from two receptionists at the front desk of Kemp's Corner Hotel. (By the way, I did change rooms last night and though this one smells strongly of fresh paint, it's better than mothballs and the room in general is far cleaner and nicer, if not quite deluxe. I was getting dressed to go out when I was overcome with fatigue and instead ordered room service and watched Sex and the City II on HBO. I then slept like the dead.) They called me a taxi and I went to Banganga Tank, an out-of-the-way sacred spot, like a man-made pond sort of, where pilgrims come to bathe and splash a bit of holy water over their heads. It was very peaceful and I may go back tomorrow. I went to several Mumbai tourist spots, including the Gateway of India built over several years beginning in 1911 for the visit of King George V and Queen Mary. But the highlight of my day was a student art show in a square near Mumbai University.

Here's a sample:

Cutting chai glasses pyramid with the artists

This one (above) is called "Cutting." It's a pyramid of chai glasses, or actually it's more like a teepee. Two of the six artists who built it were nearby with a box of fresh glasses to replace any broken ones. They told me they'd been up all night putting it together and were very tired.

Bisleri water bottle maze

This one, the Bisleri water bottle maze, really spoke to me. It was just what it sounds like, a maze made entirely of empties of water bottles, to draw attention to the problem of recycling (as the notes said.) But ironically, though garbage is a huge issue in India, apparently the recycling rate for water bottles is something close to 90% in India. I learned this fact from an Australian environmental lawyer on my Delhi tour. Still, bottled water is both a curse and a blessing in a place like India. I believe in the west, in Canada anyway, it's just a curse and our recycling problem too is monumental. But here, access to clean drinking water is a challenge. For ten or twenty rupees, about 25-40 cents, you can get a 1-litre bottle of water. It's sold everywhere. It's not just westerners who get sick from drinking tap water. Indians do, too, especially when they travel to an area of India away from home. Cleaning up the water supply, making it safe to drink, along with cleaning up the extremely polluted rivers and waterways, that would be the real answer.

Crows

This one, Crows, was really cool. It reminded me of the work of the talented, late John Henry Fineday, who also loved crows. Crows love Mumbai. And they were pecking at my window every morning at about 7 a.m. at the Sangam House retreat. According to the artist's (Sumeet Snajay Patil) notes, in Hindu belief crows are synonymous with salvation (mukti). The crow is the one who gives mukti to the dead. So each of the crows in the installation represents problems in the city, symbolizing the desire for mukti from these problems. Here are a couple of close-ups. One shows a crow at a water tap, so more about the water problem.

After my day of sightseeing I went back to my hotel and with the cooling fan and clean white sheets, it did feel pretty deluxe. I went out again later, walking around my hotel. The big deal for me is the traffic. Okay, that and my horrible sense of direction which is compounded by the fact that a map is almost useless as it's nearly impossible to find out the street names. But the traffic. Holy kamikaze. It seems like walking signals, when they exist at all, are meaningless, or at least so many vehicles run the red light that the green time to cross is reduced to a fraction. Then add traffic that drives on the left, (except when some impatient driver decides to take a shortcut), meaning you have to remember to look the correct way before crossing. Funny how instinctive that is. I can't unlearn 40-odd years of training in a month. So what I do is tuck in beside a group of others who are crossing the street (I did it in London too). Then I dash, try to catch the eyes of the driver (instruction from a Bangalore friend) and hold up a hand if necessary. Way to get the adrenalin pumping. But I did manage to get to my destination, Crossword Bookstore. Hard to keep my purchases within reason. There are so many books here that we can't easily get in Canada (I know because I've tried). Tomorrow's my last day in India.

Bombay blues

I'm in a dingy Mumbai hotel room recovering from food poisoning. I just asked the bellhop (or whatever he's called) to come and kill the spider that was in the corner. I've also asked if they have a double room available because I heard they're "deluxe." I could stand a bit of deluxe right now. Actually there's nothing much wrong with the room, besides the smell of mothballs (popular in India), some blistered paint, a few stains on the otherwise clean sheets and the aforementioned spider. But I'm feeling a little frayed and not quite as stalwart as usual.

My two Sangam House friends, Birgitta and Eugene, (from Sweden and Korea respectively) and I traveled together the other day from Bangalore to Hampi by overnight train. On the way there we had 2AC class which means you each have a berth with another person sharing (ie there are 4 berths). The train left at 10 p.m. and as soon as it pulled out of the station, people made up their berths and went to bed. So we did, too. It was quite comfortable; they supply the bedding.

We took an autorickshaw to Hampi, then crossed the small river by ferry (ie. loaded to the max steel bottomed skiff) and stayed at a place called Shanthi guesthouse. Very nice. Mosquito nets in the cabanas. I love a mosquito net.

Lotus Mahal

Hampi is an incredible place. There are ruins from the the 14th-16th centuries when this was the centre of the Vijayanagara empire. At one time, there were bazaars with visiting merchants from China, Persia and elsewhere. The two most compelling things for me were the Lotus Mahal, apparently the queen's palace, so beautiful and peaceful with a warm breeze sweeping through it and the Hazara-rama which is a temple carved with hundreds of images from the Indian epic, the Ramayana. There's something about the way this narrative has captured the imagination over the ages that's inspiring, to say the least.

Hanuman the Monkey king

But back to my sad tale. After two days in Hampi, I woke up on the third day, the day we would be traveling back to Bangalore, with a bad case of food poisoning. I admit I had relaxed my guard just a bit and had a couple of things I wouldn't have normally because I thought I was home-free. At any rate, the difficult thing was that we were waitlisted for a First class AC train but had bought back-up sleeper class just in case. Sure enough, the train was full and it was sleeper class for us. Not easy when you're sick. Luckily we shared with a really nice sympathetic family. Still, it's not an experience I'd want to repeat. I can't talk about it just yet, as I'm still in recovery mode. Tomorrow will be better.

Home soon.