Leaving from Alleppy, we took this very relaxing cruise on a houseboat (with a captain, mate, and cook) through the backwaters of Kerala, a “must-do” when visiting. The food was excellent, as was sitting on this boat reading, relaxing, watching Kerala as we floated by.

Here was an odd aspect. I really wanted to do this tour, because the novel (The God of Small Things) is set in a village that is along the backwaters. I wanted to see the scenery. But, you are basically touring people’s neighborhoods. Granted, it was on water, but the American equivalent might be if foreign tourists rented RVs and toured around suburban streets. We actually “parked” in front of someone’s house for the night. I know the residents must be very used to all of the tourists, but it’s got to be very annoying. I cannot imagine waking up and seeing an RV parked in front of my house with gawking tourists. (And that is basically what we did.)

We saw rice fields growing famous Keralan rice, which is very different from basmati. There are a lot of photos from the houseboat tour, so I will simply let you look at them below. Click on individual photos to enlarge them.

A note about the photos: the long skinny boats full of men are snake boats. They are preparing for the famous snake boat races. The hammers and sickles are indicative of the strong presence that the communist party has in Kerala, which plays a large role in the novel The God of Small Things. The rest are photos of views we saw while on the boats — or pictures of my family.

After we got off the boat (into pouring rain), we got into a car for a twisty ride up to Thekkady and the Periyar Wildlife Preserve.

I am not sure I am going to be able to write up the rest of my trip. I will do what I can, but school begins on Wednesday, and I have a lot of work to do. I’ll try to at least post a few pictures here and there. Besides, such a large part of blogging is very self-indulgent.

I had coffee with a former student today so we could share stories about our respective summer travels. I was telling her that I miss being in India. Granted, there is something to loving a place while one is on vacation. Living in a location is entirely different. I think part of it was that I really enjoy spending time with my sister and her family. Since my sister left for college, I have always lived far away from her (except the summer I lived with her in Philly). I think that when they return to the States, they should move to the luxurious and wonderful state of Connecticut.

This passed weekend, my relatives took me to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. They gave me the royal treatment! First they hired a professional photographer to take pictures of me (and all of the family members). The got a few cute photos and then even one of me looking as if I were holding he top of the Taj. This is a very popular pose for Indian tourists.

Ekta did not come on this trip, but Sudhaphoi’s four year old granddaughter, Akanksha, came.

Here is a shot of Anilkaka and a shot of Samta:

The Taj Mahal is both beautiful and romantic. For those of you who do not know, the Taj is actually a mausoleum for ShahJahan’s wife, Mumtaz Mahal. He was heartbroken when she dies, so he had this beautiful complex built in her honor. It is completely made of marble with inlay of lapis and other precious stones.

This is a shot from inside one of the two mosques in the complex, my favorite shot.

Then we went to Mathura and visited two temples to Krishna. Mathura is the birthplace of Lord Krishna. The day started to take a turn for me when we got to Mathura. At the first temple, a very beautiful and peaceful temple complex, I fell in the bathroom. It was pretty disgusting, because I fell flat on my back onto the wet bathroom floor. God knows what was on that floor. I hurt my elbow, bruising it and cutting it. It that moment, I was suddenly overcome with how foreign I felt. I felt like everyone was looking at the white girl who can’t even walk. Clearly, I am very odd to Indians — sometimes inspiring curiosity, other times inspiring disdain. Often, I am very aware of how bizarre I am to people around me. Most of the time, I am perfectly fine with it, but in this moment, it completely overwhelmed me. It got better as I went through the temple, but I was getting tired, and my cold seemed to be worsening. We went to another temple to make an offering just in time before they closed the entrance to see Krishna. Then we were in the marketplace.

We shopped for a bit, and I was getting increasingly tired. After a bit, we got in the car to come home. We stopped for dinner, but I was not hungry because I just wasn’t feeling well. I’d developed a cough and a sore throat. Finally, after being stuck in traffic, we got home at about 1:30AM. It was a very long day.

Again, I had another wonderful time with my relatives. They were so kind and generous to me, and I really appreciated everything they did for me. When I fell, they were very worried I had hurt myself. And they suggested several remedies for my cold.

I had a good long sleep, and I felt a little better the next day. That day, I went with Lesa’s family to have lunch with a Canadian family in Khan Market. We went to a place that serves western food. And today, I went shopping at the state emporiums and got lots of gifts for people back home. Feeling better today, but still on the mend.

One of my best adventures so far has been meeting my new relatives. I was very nervous about meeting them, because I was filled with a mixture of wanting to impress them, fear or “messing up,” and concern about cultural misunderstandings. I was pleasantly surprised. When I first reached Nikafoi’s house, I was welcomed with this view:

I believe the intention of this wording is “Welcome to our home” or something along the lines of “Our home is your home.” Clearly, I was immediately part of the family.

Let me explain something about titles for family members. Aunts and uncles are called certain titles based on the relationship to the child. Father’s sister and her husband are foi and fua, respectively. Father’s brother and wife are kaka and kaki. Mother’s brother and wife are mama and mami, and mother’s sister and husband are masa and masi.

At this point, I was visiting Nikafoi. Sudhafoi just happened to be visiting from Mumbai, and Anilkaka flew in special from Amhedabad. So this was an extra warm welcome. When I arrived, Nikafoi was still at work (she works in the income tax dept. for the government), so Sudhafoi did a special blessing for me. It was a crazy little scene as I was trying to do the right things: take off my shoes, tough my relatives’ feet, greet everyone, etc while Sudhafoi was trying to do the blessing. But it all went well, and I felt very welcome.

Then Nikafoi came home, and this is a photo of us.

She pulled out an old photo album and showed me family pictures, which were lovely to see. I even saw a picture of Sujal from his last visit, 17 years ago. As one can imagine, family would like to see him again. I brought my laptop and we called him on Skype, so he got to practice his Gujarati. This was another level to the visit. Samta and Ekta (Ekta was the first person to welcome me, meeting me at the car) speak good English, as they learned it throughout their schooling. I believe their classes were conducted in English. Anilkaka also speaks good English. Nikaphoi and Sudhaphoi speak some English, though they understand more than they speak. But still, it can make communication tricky. Samta and Ekta translated, yet we still ultimately speak a different dialect, so sometimes there were miscommunications, though nothing egregious.

Finally, they took me to a large mall in Gurgoan and took me to a very nice Punjabi restaurant. Here is a photo of Nikaphoi, Sudhaphoi, and Anilkaka:

And a photo of me, Ekta, and Samta:

Samta and Ekta are lovely young women (both in their early 20’s). Ekta is a dentist, and Samta is studying to be an electrical engineer. They were both very friendly and chatty with me.

I know that I am rather unusual in my bedtime and need for sleep in that I usually am in bed by about 9PM, so getting home after midnight was a very late night for me. I wasn’t at my best, because of this pesky cold I have, but all in all, it was a perfect meeting! I could not have imagined feeling any more welcomed!

I just had a lovely birthday. Sujal and I initially had plans to spend the day in Northampton, one of my favorite towns ever. Alas, plans did not pan out. Sujal has not been feeling well the past few days.

We decided to grab breakfast around here — drop by Harry’s Pizza because they have a great breakfast on the weekends, and we hadn’t been there in awhile. The website says they serve until 2PM on Sundays. We got a late start and arrived at about 1:20. Sadly, it turns out the changed their hours. After driving a round a bit, Sujal and I settled on bagels at Bruegger’s, which, frankly, hit the spot. Then we did a little B-day shopping. I got a cool Eagle Creek travel purse (I love Eagle Creek bags!!), and Sujal got a Travel duffel. We picked up a cake and went home to do some tidying up around the house.

At six, we met up with our friends Joe, Lara, Rita, and Mike at one of our favorite restaurants, Bricco. Delish! Then everyone came to our place for cake. It is so lovely to spend your birthday with friends and loved ones. I could not have asked for a better day!!

Since school has been done, I have slowly begun preparations for my trip to India. For those of you who don’t know, my sister moved to Noida, which is just outside New Delhi, in December. She will be there for two years. I am going to visit for six weeks — Yes, you heard me — six weeks. I’m very excited and a little nervous — nervous mainly because Sujal will not be coming with me. He can’t get any time off of work. Initially, we thought he’d come for two weeks in the middle of my trip, but he can’t.

So far, I am planning to see the Golden Temple in Amritsar (figures in Bharati Mukherjee’s writing and is the setting of Bride and Prejudice), Kerala (setting of The God of Small Things), Agra (the Taj Mahal — can’t miss that), and Jaipur (my sis raved about her visit to Rajasthan).

After my own travels (some with sis and family), I am meeting up with my sister-in-law, and we are visiting family in Mumbai, Amedhabad, and Delhi. I’m looking forward to meeting a lot of family I have not yet met, and I’ll be seeing one auntie whom I met at our wedding.

And yesterday I got my ten year visa! Sujal and I hope to perhaps come back in March to see relatives, because he has not been back to India since he was in high school.

If anyone has any good advice — I’m open to it!

So I haven’t wanted to write about this publicly until now. Sujal lost his job at Fanzter in November, which is a pretty scary thing considering he is definitely the breadwinner of our family. He interviewed with Newsweek in New York City, where he would have had a very attractive position working on their website. We went to NYC several times, but I just really did not want to move. I’m not much of a city gal — I really value space and quiet, to items that are at a premium in NYC and its environs. So to make a long story short, he turned down the position.

He was also interviewing at ESPN, and I am thrilled to say that he will be starting back at ESPN in January! Woo-hoo! While I have always maintained that I don’t love Connecticut, apparently, I do! Truth be told, I prefer small towns, but over NYC, I apparently love the suburbs. I love suburban Connecticut. There I set it. I truly am The Connecticutian. I love our house. I love our life. Could there, be improvements — of course, but things are pretty damn great. I’m also very happy at my school. It’s tough to begin at a new school. It’s like being a first year teacher all over again, and I like what I have established at my school.

The bottom line is, Connecticut, you can’t get rid of us! I am the Connecticutian: Hear me bore — I mean roar!

On a side note, Sujal found this great song by Jesus H Christ & The 4 Hornsmen of the Apocalypse.

My sister and her family moved to Noida, which is just southeast of New Delhi, on Monday! They are keeping blogs about their experiences. My brother-in-law is writing the blog Swimming in India, and my niece and nephew are writing a blog called R.E.Lee India. Enjoy!

It’s Sunday evening, and I have been cleaning out the kitchen cabinets. We got new dishes, Santiago Square green dishes by Dansk.

Those of you who are close to me know that I have been obsessing about dishes for quite a while. I’ve been wanting nice stoneware dishes, so I’ve done a fair amount of research. When I was in Buffalo, my mother and I went to Niagara-on-the Lake for her birthday. While there, we stumbled upon a Dansk store that was going out of business, selling dinnerware for 40% off. Woo-hoo for Sujal and me!

Another really cool part of that trip was that my mother and I saw two foxes. Here is a great shot I got:

I wish we had foxes in our yard. Foxes are the best.

Anyway, so I had to clean out space in our cupboards. Afterward, exhuasted and coaxed by my husband, I am now watching a documentary on fonts — Helvetica specifically. When he came and asked me if I wanted to watch a documentary on fonts, I rolled my eyes but was silently a bit interested. If he’d told me it was about helvetica — well, I’d have probaby said no. I’m not a fan of font without serifs. I know that probably sounds funny to most of you, but what can I say? I’m a serif girl. The documentary, Heletiva, was somewhat interesting, though I was writing this post through most of it. It goes through the genesis and life of the font. One aspect I found specifically interesting was one woman saw a correlation with helvetica and “right” politics. She associates the Vietnam war with helvetica. Check it out if you are: a. into documentaries b. into helvetica c. into design d. into font.

As I was driving on Wednesday, I heard this piece on All Things Considered. I heard most of it then, but I looked it up today after work. It’s part of a two-part series, and I listened to the second part today, as well.

The first part deals with small children (2, 3, 4) who strongly identify with the gender that is opposite of their genetic make-up. It details two boys, one on the east coast, one on the west — both who strongly identify with being a girl and with “girl-things.” The set of each boy’s parents goes to see a doctor about their son. The east coast set goes to Ken Zucker, and the west coast set goes to Diane Ehrensaft.

After listening to this piece, I began to read up a bit on Zucker and Ehrensaft. This article called “Drop the Barbie! If You Bend Gender Far Enough, Does It Break?” reveals how “behaviorist” and rigid Zucker is. As part of his therapy, he has parents take away all of the “girl” (in this case) toys. He has the parents disallow him to play with girls or pretend he is a girl character is his play. In the ATC piece, he brings up that if one were to bring a black child to a therapist, and that child says, “I’m white,” then should the therapist have that child live as white? or should the therapist try to make that child comfortable with whom s/he is? He says one would do the latter. He claims that both “confusions” stem from surrounding dysfunction.

This is not an apt comparison. At the very least, racial identity has more to do with cultural identity, since race is a social construct. Whereas gender is obviously cross-cultural, and it is biological to at least some degree. [Honestly, there is a lot more to this -- I can intuit it. It is not an apt comparison, yet at the moment I do not have the words to fully articulate it. One one hand, a) a black child identifying as white -- what does that even mean? White culture? The whole question of a black child claiming to be white relies on an idea that there is a limited way to be black and a limited way to be white. b) Does this happen? If anyone has thoughts on this -- I'd love to hear them!]

In terms of Zucker’s idea that gender “switching” in small children is caused by dysfunction (thus nurture), he, of course, seeks to find the cause (from the article “Drop the Barbie!”):

Zucker and his colleagues try to uncover the psychodynamics in the family that might be at the root of the child’s gender distress. Girls may develop GID, he believes, because they’ve formed the perception that being a girl is weak or dangerous. One little girl he saw recently, for example, had witnessed her mother being assaulted by the mother’s boyfriend. A boy, on the other hand, in a family where the mother is suffering from depression and is emotionally unavailable, might make an effort to act like a girl to get closer to her.

He goes on to say:

Parents are encouraged to set limits on the cross-gender behavior of the child. “We urge them to say, ‘Let’s figure out what other things you can do besides play with that doll,’” Zucker says. “In some situations, we have to work hard with parents’ own issues about gender. Could be a mother who’s had difficulty with the men in her life and has a lot of mixed feelings toward men. That gets translated to the boy, and her fear that he’ll grow up to be like those men causes him to reject being a boy.”

Hmmmm. This smacks to me of the ol’ “Let’s blame it on the mother…” “Gay son — he was mothered too much!” Here, mom is the cause of both disorders. I can’t say I see sound logic here, either.

When Ehrensaft was interviewed, she said something that I thought was pretty profound (from ATC):

Ehrensaft, however, does not use that label. She describes children like Bradley and Jonah as transgender. And, unlike Zucker, she does not think parents should try to modify their child’s behavior. In fact, when Pam and Joel came to see her, she discouraged them from putting Jonah into any kind of therapy at all. Pam says because Ehrensaft does not see transgenderism itself as a dysfunction, the therapist didn’t think Pam and Joel should try to cure Jonah.

“She made it really clear that, you know, if Jonah’s not depressed, or anxious, or having anything go on that she would need to really be in therapy for, then don’t put a kid in therapy until they need it,” Pam says.

If it’s not a dysfunction, then don’t make it one. Human nature is such an odd beast, and I wonder if I’d take that approach if it were some behavior that seemed truly wrong from my perspective. I guess the difference is that in order for something to be truly wrong, I would think it would need a component of causing harm — causing harm to the self or to others. Part of what is difficult for me is that this feels like an automatic response for me, to use a phrase I don’t really like, a “no-brainer.” Yet, I am having a very difficult time articulating why. Anyway, check the series out and let me know what you think.