India.Ari

 

by Philip Reari

I’d never listened to R&B artist India.Arie when I named my blog after her in 2007 and I still haven’t. Yet there on the sidebar of my Blogspot is a verse from her song, “Headed in the Right Direction:"

Headed in the right direction

I can see the light of day

I've got faith and intuition telling me that I will be okay

Down the path that I walked there's a light

Somebody told me that I look like I'm glowing

They just dried all the tears from my eyes now I can see that

I guess my 23-year-old self found it humorous to quote inspirational lyrics so at odds with my subdued and ironic demeanor as the leading message in the public journal I’d created to document my nine months living in India. Above the India.Arie excerpt — my name being Ari being the obvious joke — is a photoshopped image of me hanging off the wing of a plane, the sky behind me the faded pastel colors of early evening as viewed from 30,000 feet. I’m wearing a dark suit, and my free arm is held up high, presumably waving to the amused onlooker in 23F or whatever seat looks out over the wing. I still really like this image, which I originally created for a senior-year art project by laying across a dining table while my roommate Chris took my picture, which I later photoshopped replacing the table with a plane wing. Like the India.Arie quote and the blog, and even my entire India excursion, it harkens back to a time of playful creativity in my life.

According to the blog archive, I made 88 entries before returning to the states, moving to Portland, living like a character in “Portlandia,” and celebrating the hell out of Obama’s victory prior to relocating to Texas for graduate school. I haven’t been back to Portland, nor have I returned to India. At this point, it’s completely feasible those two places will never be in the right direction for me again. But, I hope they will.

I composed the first blog entry, “America.Ari,” on August 7, 2007, in the attic accommodation of Chris’s parent’s house in a wealthy suburb of Seattle days before I crossed the Pacific. My enthusiasm, while presented humorously, is palpable.

I'm departing to an exotic, foreign land carrying just a suitcase and a wealth of recent goodbyes with nothing I have to go back to, and everything to look forward to. Like blogging, I look forward to blogging.

Chris and I are no longer friends. After meeting at the freshman ice cream social on campus at UC-Santa Barbara, we had a good twelve-year run. Around the time we turned 30, he decided to cut off communication with me and the third member of our trio. I found his wish to sever ties very hard to accept, and just as hard to respect. I still can’t resist occasionally including him in emails, but he never responds.

A similar thing happened with Dustin, a friend from high school and the subject of the second blog entry. I stayed with him in San Francisco during my pre-India West Coast tour. Dustin dropped out of high school, at least out of our high school, and never really accepted the challenge of leading a conventional life. I laughed a lot with him, often under the influence of marijuana. Around the time of Chris’s ultimatum, Dustin also receded from view and eschewed contact with the high school friends he’d maintained. I remember running into him in a restaurant during one of my infrequent trips back to Santa Fe, NM, where we grew up. He acted like he didn’t recognize me. I didn’t know how to process this denial of our shared history. The significance of it crept up on me in an agonizing fashion, like a slow-moving amoeba eating away at the part of my brain where our shared history was stored — there is no pain quite like losing a friend. I cycled through anger, despair, forgiveness, and nostalgia. Then one day, maybe five years later while I was at work, Dustin called and said he loved me. He apologized for his actions and said he was working through stuff and that friends are good. I shut my office door and reciprocated his outpouring as best I could in the middle of the workday, not a constraint he necessarily appreciated. Another five years later, we’re on good but distant terms. He’s drifted a bit too far into conspiracy theory territory for me, and while I could write that off as playing around in our 20s, it’s harder to justify it in our 40s.

In that second blog entry, I announce that I’ve created a blog for Dustin, too:

We’re listening to some quintessential Dustin music; drum and bass beats, profane lyrics, high-pitched vocals, all interrupted by some guy speaking Spanish. Dustin says he doesn’t know what to write about, I write about that. It’s all very interesting here in Dustin’s studio apartment. Entering into Dustin’s life for several days feels in a lot of ways like a spiritual retreat during which I can reflect on everything that happens during my time in the real world.

Dustin’s blog has six entries. Reading through them now, the jokes fall flat because I understand they aren’t exactly jokes, more like exaggerations. I think I assumed he wasn’t taking himself too seriously because I never took myself too seriously. I’ve since learned it’s wrong to assume this about people.

So Ari made me a blog before he went to India so he could keep track of my life. In case you don't know me my life consists of consuming things while doing as little as possible. I don't like spelling or punctuation, its just another way for the man to keep me down.

…so now that i have a blog i figure i should be ultra political. I am pro war anti Human and running for any office I'm eligible for so vote for me. Really I am a racist robot form the future sent back for a laser battle with a group of animal rights activists. aside from being a bigot and a war monger i have mostly leftist views and am deeply disturbed at the low number of civilian casualties being inflicted by US troops in global conflict. I mean how can the rest of the world know how bad ass the united states is if we don't really throw down and start rolling deathsquads through the middle east.

I went to India for a nine-month fellowship with an independent book publisher in Chennai, a large city in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The publisher, Tara Books, specialized in hand-made, screen-printed books and had their own printing press in a sprawling cement building on the outskirts of the city where a staff of 20 or so young men lived and worked. Aside from colorful children’s books filled with beautiful drawings by Indian artists they also published socialist-adjacent literature. People often asked me how I found this unusual opportunity, and I always enjoyed responding with the banal answer of bookjobs.com.

The publisher was run by three Indians, two middle-aged women and a charismatic young man less than a decade older than me. I lived with two other fellows — a Canadian woman my own age and an American woman around 30 — in the basement apartment of a house occupied by a loud and enigmatic lady and her ten-year-old son. During an early rainstorm, I donned the full-body rain gear left behind by a former fellow and at the beckoning of the landlady climbed onto the roof to help bail water so the surrounding yard, which she had completely paved over for some reason, didn’t flood. She later justified the paving over by claiming some ancestral connection to architecture, as if she possessed an innate insight into structural design. I never got more clarity than that and I’m not sure any was possible. These are the types of experiences I mined into what I considered entertaining blog posts. There were many of them throughout my stay.

For instance, my arrival in India — specifically the taxi ride to the aforementioned residence — which I remember to this day as an unparalleled moment of giddiness, and which for some reason I wrote about in the second person:

You are on a road but there are no lanes. People driving cars, auto rickshaws, scooters, motorcycles, bikes, are all weaving in and out of each other in what to you seems like the kind of graceful disarray you might arrive at if you turned the world on its head. Your driver seems to be honking with his forearm as he drives, everyone seems to be honking, ceaseless honking…

…Eventually, a very long eventually, you arrive at a stoplight and people actually stop, and this surprises you. Then the driver will turn on some Indian pop music and everything will seem ok, even great, for a while, you even think you notice yourself laughing out loud. You arrive at some smaller streets where you can see remnants of old stop sign indicators, but clearly, very clearly, after only being in the country for one hour you are already very certain of this, nobody would stop at a stop sign in India.

Looking back, I think my initial take was a little harsh. In India, drivers slow down at stop signs and some percentage of them stop. And this isn’t so unique. On a recent trip to Mexico for a wedding, my friend referred to four-way stops in Mexico as four-way gos. This phrasing brought me far more pleasure than I’m sure she imagined, and I kept coming back to it for some reason. And here I’ve come back to it again.

I did some strange things in India, and I don’t mean like eating out of my right hand (I’m left handed) or half-assedly taking a Kalari class, a form of South Indian martial arts, from which I would bail after the extensive stretch routine to go smoke a cigarette on the beach. Although I did those things. No, I mean I took Spanish lessons and obtained a membership at the local video rental store. Southern India is where I watched the Godfather movies, on my laptop, which still had a disk drive, for the first and potentially last times. It’s also where my Spanish grammar peaked. People wondered why I didn’t try to learn Tamil, figuring being from New Mexico I must’ve had ample opportunity to learn Spanish. For starters, everyone I conversed with regularly in India spoke English. Secondly, in no way could I imagine myself pronouncing that ancient Dravidian language which seems to gurgle up from a part of the throat I’ve never accessed like a hidden current. It was a sad occasion when I informed the video store clerks that I was returning to the states. We’d formed a repetitive-interaction bond that didn’t require much in the way of divulgence or even conversation but felt deeper than many superficial relationships in the office or with other parents. We shared a mutual respect based on some smiling and head bobbing. I wonder if movie rental shops still exist in India.

I started a global studies master’s program in Austin, Texas, about two years after returning from India and soon made a friend from Delhi (by way of NYU). He wasn’t used to his American peers chatting him up about Indian experiences and I’m sure it helped us connect although I also greatly valued his insights into our statistics homework. We both currently live in Washington, D.C, and still gather semi-regularly for a beer. We saw the last two Ari Aster movies together at the Alamo Drafthouse here, a theatre chain originally from Austin. Reclining into the capacious leather seats offers a reminder of the much more ramshackle lives we lived in Austin, back when even Drafthouse seating wasn’t as luxurious. These things are all connected in the story of my life, pointing me in the right direction.

Oddly, my trip to Goa, the former Portuguese colony on India’s west coast and the culminating destination of my long winter vacation only received a fleeting mention in the blog. On December 28, 2007, I noted how all my accommodations were nice, “until I reached this hostel in Goa where nothing is as it was advertised.”

Though I do not recall how the hostel was promoted, I do remember being assigned a bed in a large, dim, fan-blown room housing at least a dozen sparse beds laid out as if for new military recruits. An outdoor corridor led to a cracked-cement bathroom with open showers that would’ve made more sense along the beach. I befriended a curly haired American on break from his doctoral studies in Australia. We didn’t have much in common, and he shortly caught a cold. I felt bad for him because he kept calling home and talking to his mom, his voice all stuffy.

Three days later I spent New Year’s Eve on the Goan beach with a beautiful Swedish girl named Josefine who liked Blink182. I think we met at a restaurant, me jumping on the chance to expand my social group beyond the academic American. Josefine and I dined at an outdoor restaurant with a view of the Arabian Sea while the evening’s romantic undertones gnawed at me. But I never made a move, and she never indicated she wanted me to, at least as far as I could tell. She soon departed and I moved on but not without some heartache. We emailed several times before drifting apart for good.

Here is an excerpt from her final email to me several months later:

…I dont remember i have ever written an e-mail this long, but i like to tell you things about whats happening in Sweden and in my life, i cant say i have to many people to email to eihter, because i am not wery good to stay in touch (is that wright way to say it?) with people.

Before i forget her name, have you heard about Duffy? the new singer? Its only one song i really like, its called Mercy. I think she comes from England. And did i tell you about a group called Cafe Del Mar? I am listening to them wright now, and i love them.

One thing’s for sure, we had very divergent tastes in music. Although I’ll always have a pocket of teenage angst reserved for Blink182’s “Dude Ranch.”

Going back through my emails and blog posts, it’s amazing how readily many experiences come to mind at the slightest provocation. The tidal wash of time sands down the memories, flattening them out and making them all more or less equally cherished. The important thing is that they belong to me. I am hesitant to allow myself this descent into nostalgia, but I’m justifying it as a literary project. I relied on a similar excuse in creating the blog. I write to understand things, including myself, and also to share things with others. Writing has many potential upsides, for introverts and extroverts.

Everything did not end well for me in India, although it ended well enough. The longer I spent at the publishing house, the clearer it became I didn’t fit in. Partly, I refused to drink the Kool-Aid. I didn’t show enough enthusiasm for what they were doing. Some of this can be attributed to my skeptical nature, but also, the publisher was cliquish and once I exhibited reluctance to buy in fully, I lost esteem in their eyes.

The split became official via a series of dramatic events that I described in a 2009 article about my publishing career for n+1 magazine:

One morning, I arrived at work to find that the “bosses”—there were three—had somehow uncovered the publicity manager’s secret blog. In it, she disparaged everyone on Tara’s twelve-member staff—everyone but me, whom she referred to as her “mermaid” and described with endearment. We were close friends. The only other staff member who had previously known about the blog was another American intern, who was a favorite subject of the blog’s disparagement, and who possessed a distinctively American determination to be the office’s alpha female. She, presumably, had leaked the blog to our bosses.

During the fellowship I also took on some freelance work with another publisher. I think it’s worth excerpting my description of this from the samen+1 article:

I visited the New Horizons Media office once—a memorable trip that took two rickshaw rides and the reconsideration of several wrong directions. (In India if you don’t know where something is you give directions anyways, especially to foreigners.) After ascending a flight of external stairs I entered the reception area and signed one of the large, wide-ruled visitors’ books found in all Indian entryways. I entered the publisher’s office to find him nestled inside a makeshift Plexiglas-and-wood structure in the far corner of the office. He invited me to join him there. I casually walked across the humid room and opened the flimsy door, trying to imbue the situation with a bit of normality. It was much cooler than the outer area in this mini-office, like a little icebox just for him.

Near the end of my stay, I integrated into the broader expat community and spent weekends at the beach with a crew of German, French, and Swedish residents who worked for auto or tech companies. They were a boisterous bunch who rode motorcycles and stayed out late at dance clubs. I struggled to match their care-free attitudes and through them I saw how reserved I could be, even meek. But I had another type of reserve stored up beneath my stoic appearance. I met a Swedish woman at one such group gathering and texted her a few days later on my dinky cell phone having gotten her number from a male acquaintance. After getting dinner by the beach on our first meeting, she came to my place when both my roommates were out of town. By the time I made a move on her it was nearing midnight, and she audibly expressed relief. After several hours of playing cards, she must’ve wondered if I had it in me. When she learned that I was 24, six years younger than her, she commended me on my courage for pursuing her. I hadn’t thought much of it; I had the confidence in reserve when I needed it.

Twelve years later, I blew off steam during the pandemic shopping for art online to fill the walls of the house my wife and I had recently purchased. My criteria were both simple and frustratingly general: cheap, meaningful, not trendy but still tasteful, and ideally having something to do with the natural world. For art to be meaningful, I must have a unique connection with it. For instance, I bought a print of one of Henri Matisse's "Goldfish" paintings because we had one in my house as a child.

I still received Tara’s newsletters, and a promotion of their screen-printed posters caught my eye. A few weeks later, a long cardboard tube from India arrived. The off-white paper label of unusual dimensions immediately piqued my senses, transporting some part of me back across the world. I recalled how when I’d returned from India, opening my suitcase had released a stowaway aroma of spices and sweat and dusty crowds that can’t easily be replicated. I pulled the 560 mm × 560 mm poster from the tube and unrolled it on the bed. Called “The Sacred Seed,” the limited-edition screen print was made on recycled cotton paper. An array of plant stems and leaves unfurled from a central seed resembling a reptilian eyeball, creating an ornate ensemble of flora expanding outwards.

The artist, Bhajju Shyam, described the artwork as such: “All life comes from a source, a small seed that holds the possibility of life, and when the time is right, allows it to emerge. The seed is the source of all plant life.”

Reading this now, it strikes me as lyrical, maybe even something India.Arie could write a song about. I can almost imagine how it would sound, even though I’ve still never listened to her music. When the time is right, life emerges from the seed and heads outwards in whatever direction is right.

There’s a seed of life in all of us from which we grow in many directions. It’s a beautiful tangle, an intricate tapestry full of storylines, a circular journey around the sun, towards the sun, away from the sun. When my journey ends, I wouldn’t mind having the following scene from my India.Arie blog play out before my eyes as the world winds down (after, or course, spending some time with my family).

Fish and Juice

I am buying fish and juice in India. I am buying them regularly, leisurely, casually. Nothing too fishy about it, nothing too juicy to tell. I am a regular. I go to Fresh Zone and I point at the fresh limes, which are the size of oranges and mostly taste like oranges, and I say “fresh lime” and sometimes I say “juice.” It doesn’t even matter though because I am a regular. I walk the 40 yards to Fresh Zone from my house, I drink my juice sitting on the steps, and when I’m done they pour me the extra juice. I get the leftover juice. A nice phenomenon, that extra juice, like a free refill on a smoothie. Whoever heard of that?

I sit on the steps beside Fresh Zone, in front of the three pay phones, all different models and makes, sipping my juice from a straw, and I ponder the group of skinny guys smoking. I wonder about their jobs and what sort of husbands they’ll make. I watch the married couple approach the adjacent medical stand, our local medical shop, and I wonder where their dog sleeps. I wonder what drugs the auto drivers are buying, what drugs the software engineers are buying. What makes their meters run? What keeps their microchips conducting?

I leisurely, casually drink my fresh lime juice and when I’m done, done with the extra as well, I hand the friendly man 15 rupees and we both cordially shake our heads from side to side. Then I walk away like that’s life. And it is.