TwoRoadsDivergedTake2

I think this is a better take.

Two Roads Diverged

At Pirates' Cove

Marin Headlands Hike

BLACK FRIDAY 24 NOV 2012

MY FAMILY IS OTHER ANIMALS

MY FAMILY IS OTHER ANIMALS, AND SO CAN YOU!

The resort sits on the eastern side near the end of a south-tending peninsula, which defines a shallow bay north of the Konķaɳ. The cottages are dispersed in a eucalyptus grove in a hollow somewhat protected from the mid-day sun. The grove looks very alluring when you get there in the middle of the day, only later do you recall the deathliness of eucalyptus outside Australia. Its fresh leaves provide no sustenance, the fallen ones allow no plant or tree of any other kind to grow, the straight trunks provide no foliage cover till about 10' high. No birds nest in its branches, there is no animal life, no plants, not even grass. No Indian butterflies have use for it and not many monarchs migrate from Mexico to Maharashtra. Its wood is useless as building material, seeing use not even for scaffolding. However, we see village women who collect the fallen leaves in giant baskets and carry them off - to burn them and then to spread the ashes on the rice fields. This exposes the incipient runnels down the hillside and the footpaths – you can imagine them eroded to deep gorges in a few years time.

The restaurant is on a promontory and overlooks the bay, with its skeletons of dying mangroves. The last bit of the footpath leading to the restaurant consists of crushed shells that glow white in the moonlight. The surrounding hillside is littered – Minute Maid (TM) juice boxes, plastic Bisleri (TM) and Aquafina (TM) water bottles, the ubiquitous plastic bags. 

As we sat for lunch, a few stray dogs and a stray cat came around. The cat, after miaowing from under the tables, came on to the table. In an effort to impress us, the head waiter, Krishna, an immigrant from the Nepali foothills, came charging out with a broken wooden table leg and thwacked one of the dogs, who took off yelping. Another dog limping around we had already noticed keeping its distance. A waiter grabbed the cat, dangling her 20 tense, sharp points out by her tail at arm's length. Krishna took a swing at her and missed, but Maya, our 6 year old, born and brought up in the US, saw him and started bawling, “What are they going to do to her?”, terrified for the animals. In turn, Elsa, her younger sister started crying for Maya. While their mom tried to calm the two of them, my sister, protector of nieces as well as of stray cats, jumped up infuriated and started berating the waiters. The Indian nieces and nephews – immune perhaps to displays of violence towards animals – sat unfazed through the whole thing, even the 3 year old, who looked mystified at her older cousin's upset.

After that, at least in our presence the waiters left the animals alone. Our one felinophobic cousin left the next day, and the rest of us accustomed ourselves to the animals, mostly ignoring them, except for my sister, who talks to the cat; and Elsa, one and half years old, who squeals, warbles and trills and bobs her head while making calling gestures with her hands, almost throwing herself out of my arms in her efforts to interact with the dogs, cats and crows.

A couple of days later we had fish for lunch. Maddened by the smell, the cat miaowred hideously through our meal. The moment I finished and sat back, she jumped on my leg and onto the table without scratching me, hunkered down and started eating the fish bones off my plate. I pulled the cat off the table with her jaw full, by her scruff but not in the correct immobilizing hold, and she nicked me, drawing blood.

“You are the second one to be scratched by that cat – the other day Papi was scratched too!”.

“This cat?”

“And what about that crow that pecked Nima on her head?”

“Where did that happen?”

“Arrey here only nah.”

“Yah, lucky for us the chipkali fell on the dining table before our food was served.”

“This place is filled with animals, I found a frog in the bathroom.”

“A frog! That's nothing, you won't believe what I found in the bathroom.”

“What?”

“I had been shaving in the bathroom, when I heard a rapid ghasar-pasar near the window and a chipkali darted in, the head of a snake an inch behind it when the gecko managed to climb around the frame and escape along the wall to hide behind the water-heater. The green-brown snake, thumb thick and 3' long, slithered in and out again immediately and I thought it was gone for good, but it climbed the window slats on the outside, coiled its hind part around the top slat, levitated itself off that and swayed two feet into the bathroom, looking for its recently escaped prey. I had been petrified and now futilely waved a plastic mug in its direction. The snake noticed me, coiled back and reptated back outside.”

Now people noticed that the cut was bleeding and suggestions started: “Rub some salt on it.”, “No, no! That will sting, just squeeze some lime juice on it.”, “Just crush some of that raw onion, that will also work.”. Then the suggestions left the immediate vicinity of the table and expanded outwards to the kitchen and the larger world beyond: red chilli powder, cumin powder, haldi, neem leaf, calendula and everybody's favorite ayurvedic or homeopathic remedy. I squeezed a couple of more drops of blood out, as my dad suggested, rinsed it and, since I had had a tetanus booster recently, forgot about it.

I imagine the same scene in the US, people discussing the relative antiseptic merits of relish and ketchup.

A morning in India

Thomas Friedman's head is flat

Elsa, our 15-month old, is up soon after 5AM. She is calm, so I keep hoping she will go back to sleep, but after an hour of her tossing and turning next to me, raising her head up to check if I am awake, I pick her up onto my chest, where she starts patting me. The light is now coming in, our jet-lagged 6-year old is up too, up to going for an early morning walk up to the gate defining this gated community.

Elsa sits in a sling on my hip, we draw a lot of curiosity – very few men can be seen carrying a child. Unlike in the U.S., where strangers compliment me essentially for doing my job, here the curiosity is silent. Elsa warbles and barks at birds in trees and dogs being walked by their owners' servants. Maya plucks a flower off each tree and names some – powder-puff , hibiscus, pomegranate – that she has learned from my mother and sister. I show her the yellow bougainvillea sprawling 25' up the silver oak and the tamarind with unplucked fruit only on the higher branches. Isa points upwards into a bamboo grove and we see the double hole of a half-finished baya-bird's nest, abandoned.

On the roads in the society, we pass domestic maids in 9 yard saris on their way in to work, gardeners on bicycles, the newspaper deliveryman and the milkmen on their motorscooters. From the main road a 100 or so yards away, we can hear the near-incessant high-pitched braying of the auto-rickshaws and the insistent baritone of trucks' horns. If you filter out the distant sounds of traffic, you can hear numerous birds – a flock of “seven sisters” exchanging family gossip, totas – the ubiquitous long-tailed green Indian parakeets, various finches and flycatchers and others unknown to me.

The air is still cool as we spot the sun glutinously disconnecting itself from the horizon, orange-red from the dust ¾ ever-present. Soon we will rotate further under it; freed of the dust, it will regain its familiar white and the silent heat will beat down. Just outside the gate, we see cowherds pulling out the neat garbage bags from the trash container, ripping them open and tossing them to their cows, who will munch the previous days Sensex numbers and produce milk to feed the kids of the global Indians – both NRIs and RNIs.

Further along, we see a couple of donkeys browsing the dry brown grass of the posted army land between our society and the village. Isa pulls out the camera and manages to frame a donkey between the scraggly branches of a thorn tree, cutting out in the foreground the man squatting in the drain and in the background the shiny glass buildings of the local outsource city – software complexes and call centres – filled with the appropriately accent-corrected, newly upper middle class “Sid” and “Angie”, gorged and pudgy from burgers and pizzas like the Americans whose jobs they are in-draining.

As the day warms up, you can hear a one-per-second “twoop-twoop-twoop”, the meta-period is: on for a few minutes, off for a couple. I imagine the chakki, the flour mill in the village, its canvas belt a little loose, slipping regularly on the pulley, women bringing in their grain bought in bulk to be ground to order, queueing up, getting a light coating of the flour as they wait their turn. It is a sound I have heard seemingly all my life in the towns of the plains and plateaus of India. Later, at home, I ask my mother about it, thinking it would be nice to show Maya a flour mill. My mother looks at me with a quizzical smile and says, “That's not a chakki, that's a woodpecker!”

What else am I so grossly mistaken about?

If you go

If you go to India and

• have never been in a largish American city
• travel to Delhi by your lonesome midwestern selves
• attend a wedding to which your hosts - the family of your boyfriend's Indian office mate in the US - has been invited
• wear your memorable bright red tight sleeveless dress with lots of decolletage, which was very appropriate for dancing on the tables at a wedding in the US, because it will “keep you cool”
• wonder why the women are not dancing
• dance with the men in the baaraat anyway because “they asked me to”,
• wonder why you were then shunned by the women for the rest of the function
• wear that same red dress to Red Fort
• get separated from your boyfriend who saunters on ahead while you visual-graze in the shops in the crowded entrance
• are confronted by someone in uniform who does a double handed simultaneous boob squeeze (on you), then does namaste and walks off
• fly to Pune, take an autoriksha instead of allowing a local contact to pick you up at the airport
• lose your camera bag (with the camera bought especially for the trip) and glasses
• are unaware of the number of bags you are traveling with (“the big black one, the small red roll-on, that green one”, “the samsonite?”, “No! The one we bought for the trip to Mexico, the shopping bag from Dubai duty-free, the medium dark blue one with the clothes for the wedding, ...”)
• not check behind the seat when disembarking from the autoriksha
• accuse the (unknown and long vanished) riksha-wallah of being a thief who intentionally put stuff behind the seat
• eat a sandwich for lunch at 11:30AM because you “always do”
• refuse to eat with the rest of the family at 1PM because you “just ate”
• go, again in the infamous red dress, when you could've replaced it with a modest salwar-kameez for $2, to a small locals only shopping area to buy a sari
• enter the dark sari shop,
• are puzzled when a young child starts screaming and crying, yelling something that sounds like “bhoot, bhoot”
• insist on hot water for a bath, or at least for hair, because “it's been three days in the dust and heat”, and complain about the length of time it takes,
• then after washing hair, complain about dinner being late, on a specially arranged trip to see tigers in the wild at an undeveloped preserve, at a “hotel” with obviously only one coal fire...

...Never return. Please.

Mountain Medicine

--- In ...@yahoogroups.com, Tapas <...@...> wrote:
>
> What? I tried to 'save' you guys? Must have been out of my mind or maybe i
> just wanted that stuff for myself.

Arrey Tapas, I had been trying to save your current reputation as a wanna-be-bad-boy, but you are forcing my hand:

Himankan '82, Pahalgam valley.
(Side note: Who was it that tried to "protect" potential employers from the truth that he was just a participant (and a cribbu one at that) on a trek and disguised it by claiming to have been an expedition leader? Someone claiming to have very high, upstanding moral values etc etc?)

When we were in Chandana-wadi, word somehow got around, since we weren't trying to "protect" anybody from any truth and were not particularly discreet, that Misha and I were trying to score some Kashmiri stuff. We had been tasked with this by our wingmates, and advanced the then astounding amount of Rs.40!

Tapas, that dear boy, found out about this, and already planning his campaign as Sports Sec ("I personally saved one of our top triple-jumpers from a life of dissolution by keeping him from destroying
his lungs, and, look at him now! He can almost reach the pit! Vote Tapas!"), anyway, Tapas approached the Doc, with whom we hung out a lot, and asked him, "Doc, You are good friends with these two boys, Misha and Tate. I am concerned about them, they are young, they know not what they do, they are trying to buy some hash, and you know it will destroy them. You, as an older, more mature, trustworthy and responsible doctor, and their friend, you spend a lot of time with them. So just prevent them from buying any pot or hash or grass." And it was true, we were quite friendly with the Doc.

Evenings, after dinner and duties, while most others would be participating in "good clean fun" listening to some kitschy crap on the mouth organ, some of us would go hang at the chai-wallah.  Until our last evening in Chandanwadi, Misha and I had been completely stymied in our efforts to obtain any stuff. That evening, the chaiwallah wished to thank us for what one of us had done for him and the other villagers and asked how he could repay us. We asked him if we could get any hashish. After a patient explanation to us that the end of winter was hardly the season for any hash, let alone "fresh" hash (Collective "Ohh! Fundas!" from us.) he agreed with his brother to get some from their personal stash. There were two problems, one, his village was a day's march away and we were taking down camp and leaving for Pahalgam the next morning. Two, he could only sell us a hash quantum, known as a golon, for Rs80, and Misha and I only had the Rs40 that our venture capitalist Nikunj had invested in our enterprise. Luckily, we had an obvious and richer co-investor right there, with his savings from his residency pay, who would happily put up the other Rs40 and take his half of the golon. So chai-wallah's brother ran all night to his village and back, and by breakfast chai the next morning we were the proud and sole co-proprietors of 1 (one) golon, a fist sized prolate ellipsoid, hard as old clay, and without any bouquet. We divided it in two right there, and almost fainted from the aroma, but Misha and I could not honestly sample and thus cheat our fellow wingmates. Luckily, our co-investor had no such constraints, was eager to try it out and happily shared with us. Good stuff, man. But not anywhere as good (by a factor of 5 I would say) as the CaliMari you get here. The VC in Bombay was quite happy with the results, as I recall.

Two years later: Bhaiyya, Mayya, Misha and I plan a private expedition to Poorvi Ikualari (Yeah! yeah! Serves me right for the sidey Chandana-wadi joke at Tapas' expense.). Mayya gets bitten by a dog, and is forced to stay under observation to ensure that the canine doesn't contract rabies, and so he can learn to drive. On our way back from the Ikualari basecamp on the Milam glacier, after an expedition that was not only unsuccessful but also non-epic, we stopped two nights in the town of Milam - it used to be a District Court town during the Raj, now, in summer, only a third of the houses were occupied. Already, on the way up, I had acquired the reputation as a "doctor" because the townspeople had seen me treat a bloody infected blister I had on my foot. On our way back, the morning after we reached there and spent the night in the village headman's house, there was a line of 30-40 people who had come to see the "doctor". The nearest real doctor of any kind was 6 days march and half a day's bus journey away. Luckily, Misha had learned something from the Himankan doc, from what he had done that had earned us the Chandanwadi chaiwallah's favour. It devolved on me to clean and dress all the open wounds and for the others, those with more mysterious, internal or imagined ailments, Misha proceeded to listen attentively to each villager's complaints, and then tell me "One pain killer and two multivit.s" or somesuch and I would count them out and hand them to the villager and repeat any instructions that Misha had given.

Until we got to the guy on the litter, with the broken femur.

Make Hunter proud!

Guys, we are only a few days away from our H-8 B-Wing reunion trip to Vegas, and I thought I would take the opportunity to inspire you to great feats.

Hunter S. Thompson did not write Fear and Loathing in Columbus, OH. Columbus, OH, has gambling, shows, drinking and prostitution. But it is not Las Vegas. And we, señores, are going to Las Vegas, which brings up the question: What are we, as individuals and as a group, going to do that will have to stay in Vegas: something that will make HST proud, Las Vegas what it is, and ourselves, laudably loathsome?

Now, you don't have to transgress my boundaries, leave alone those of HST. All you have to do is transgress your own. Let's consider some examples of transgressions that won't count.

• Lose more money gambling on this trip than your previous high. (Unless it is greater by an order of magnitude.)
• Eat till you are sick and have to be hospitalized. Obviously, this proscription applies only to Raj A. and Sanjay U., for everyone else, this is a fair challenge.
• Plain and simple vomiting. Unless

1. You do it from the top of a ride
2. You do it from a gondola into the canals of Venice
3. You first drop your glasses and then puke on them.

• Make a fool of yourself. This blanket proscription is in place because

1. It is too non-specific
2. You've done it before – Dude, we know you.

Let me throw out some ideas.

Gambling: Remember the order of magnitude rule. You have to risk at least 10 times your previous maximum net loss. OK, it doesn't mean you have to end the weekend with that much net loss, just that at some point during your stay you have to be down by that amount. You can, and in fact are encouraged to, stay at the table so you can win back your losses. This has the advantage of potentially lowering the amount you'll be obliged to risk next time you are in Vegas with us, a factor of 11 marginal benefit. For example, say your previous maximum net loss on a trip was $10. This time you have to risk $100. You play till you are down $ 101 and have met your goal. But are you satisfied? Next time, you'll have to risk $1010. Whereas if you stay at the table and win back $10, so that your net loss is only $91, next time you'll only have to risk $910! That is an overall saving of $110 over this trip and the next!

What does this translate to for me? $2.50! Why? Some decades ago, in a desperate attempt to read the romantic tea-leaves as it were, I played 3 quarters in the slots, one each for myself, for my fiancee at the time and for TWIWF. The quarter for TWIWF won back 50 cents, my fiancee and I broke up, and TWIWF went back to her cheating hubby. Isn't astrology amazing?

Climbing: Being jilted doesn't make you a better climber, it just makes you less concerned about your own mortality, makes you give even less of a shit. Within the space of a few months I'd repeatedly taken a 30 foot whipper on a 5.10+ trad route and one 35” whipper on a 5.10d sport route. My previous hardest climbs have been a 10b/c trad and 11b sport. So in Red Rocks my goal will be to do either a midlength 5.9+ or a very long 5.8. How exactly is this “upping the ante”? In the increasingly inaptly named Yosemite Decimal System, the grades go from 5.0 to 5.15a, passing through grades like 5.8+ (harder than 5.8 but not quite 5.9) and 5.9- (5.9, but just about) and grades like 5.12a, 5.12b, 5.12c, 5.12d after which comes 5.13a. Somewhere we also have 5.10b/c, and we also have qualifiers like sport vs. trad, a length scale from I through VI+ and a safety scale : PG, G, S, R and X. So now it should be perfectly clear why a long 5.8 is going to be a wordy challenge for me.

Sex: In increasing order of merit:

1. Pay for sex
2. Fall in love with an escort
3. Fall in love with an escort without realising his/her profession
4. Get into a barfight with the pimp in an attempt to “save” the person in question

Where am I on this ? I've struck-out on AshleyMadison, so (1.) will be a good goal for me. However,

mitigating circumstances exist. 

I'll be attempting to climb one of the tall, free standing, erect, towers in Red Rocks, and as any half-decent Freudian knows, that is an expression of my deep-seated and suppressed homo-erotic fantasies. For women, (and just by the way, why aren't there any women in our reunion?) the equivalent would be to climb in Owen's Gorge or the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. Plus, after I'd taken that 40' whipper on the 5.10d, and Orlando had driven himself into a drunken black funk on New Year's Eve by expecting Las Vegas to be like a “plaza in Spain” and, hungover, had properly dishonoured himself on Fear&LoathingIII by dogging and pulling and hanging his way up, we were quietly getting stoned on the drive back to Santa Barbara, when he looked at me and said, “Hombre, if you were a woman, I'd kiss you right now.” To which I'd replied, “O-man, you are so beautiful I would have kissed you back.” Then we'd stopped just before the CA border, at the last chicken-ranch in NV, imagined the girls in the back rooms and looked up at the curtained windows. “Last chance!” he said. “No. Our cheating bitches will be pleading for us when we get back.” said I. And it was true.

That is when you know you are well and truly fucked, when she pleads for you, when she lies and promises and cajoles her way into your bed before washing herself off and going back home to her BF or husband. She can afford rejection from you because patient, kind, loving, or, this is a good one “He understands me!” is waiting for her at home, to comfort her should you be smart enough to reject her. She can afford to give you a choice which is no choice because you'll never, never, in that moment, say “no!”, because before that deeply miserable and lonely night you will have glory, and if you say “no!” you will have no glory and only slightly less miserable and lonely a night.

And O-man and I made a pact, that we would climb more, waste less time on the women who respectively and respectfully had us by the balls, a pact that we knew we wouldn't keep, because we would be admired for our bruises, for our sunburnt skin, for our stories of valor and failure, for our twisted, bent and damaged but strong fingers and other words would be said, words which would atrophy our brains but swell our heads and one other body part each. Where are you O-man?

So I'll give myself a pass on this one. What do you guys think?

Other, innocent ideas:

• See the wild burros in RRSP
• Listen to the coyotes howl in the desert
• Confess to us something that none of the rest of us know about you. (And fukinn make it good, I don't want to hear about some stolen patent or how you fired a 100 people, not unless you stole their panties and screwed half of them first.)

To conclude: You guys are all Masters of the Universe, goal-setters, accomplished followers of Stephen Covey. Set a goal, make a plan to accomplish it over the weekend and publicize it so you can be held accountable. Recall what Prof. Isaac, then Dean of Student Affairs, said to us: “You represent India's best. You are the brain in 'brain drain', you are the cream in 'sour cream'! You've floated to the top, like shit or Sorrow.”

And as Gandhi said, “If you don't plan to make an ass of yourself, you won't!”


Acknowledgements: This work was supported in part by Arun Yethiraj Patron of the Arts Grant LV-SEP2011.

Family trip to India

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A Diré

Durante mi visita de vuelta a Tombuctú, viajé a Diré con mi hija seisañera, a instancias de mi madre, para presentar nuestros respetos a mi abuelo. Utilizo esa frase intencionadamente. El siempre se mostró remoto durante mi niñez y, en las pocas ocasiones en que tuve contacto con él, fue demasiado autoritario para que yo le amara mucho. Diré está al suroeste de Tombuctú, en la parte más poblada de Malí. Muy diferente de la region del Norte, que es tan despoblada que ni siquiera Michael Fay la ha sobrevolado aún, y eso que ha sobrevolado África entera. Diré está en una curva del río Níger, aguas arriba de Korioumé, donde habíamos abordado el barco. Si Naipaul no hubiera basado su libro en otro lugar, lo podría haber basado en Diré.

Mientras nos disponíamos a subir al barco la multitud había permanecido silenciosa (el equipo de Costa de Marfil acababa de eliminarnos 3-0 en un partido clasificatorio del Campeonato Mundial). Hasta las malolientes cabras parecían desalentadas. Cuando por fin conseguimos meternos, me encontraba muy incómodo por lo estrechos que eran los bancos. Tenía una rodilla doblada contra el respaldo del asiento de delante y M estaba sentada en mi otra rodilla, la cual sobresalía al pasillo. Esa pierna me impedía caer al pasillo desde mi medio asiento, el cual me había ofrecido mi vecina, a pesar de que yo no hubiera hecho el más mínimo esfuerzo de pedírselo: yo ni siquiera lo había visto. Ella se había deslizado hacia el interior, apretándose a su vez contra su vecino, que se había movido un poco encogiéndose de hombros, como disculpándose. Me trajo a la mente el autobús del aeropuerto de Chicago: más de 20 asientos, pero 5 personas grandes y sus maletones, ocupando dos sitios cada uno no dejaban lugar para nosotros. Haga Ud. los cálculos.

Cabras malolientes. Hace 15 años, antes de haberme ido de aqui, nunca habría utilizado ese adjetivo superfluo: el olor era el mar en que nadaba. Ahora me estaba ahogando en él. Me di cuenta que miraba a la gente de mi alrededor con cautela, sospechoso, después de haber sido estafado por el taxista tuareg en mi propia ciudad natal. Cuando nos hubimos sentado con el equipaje el me había dicho, despectivamente, sólo dos palabras: "¿Tarjeta verde?". Me recordó una frase que mi amigo indio solía repetir los viernes por la noche en los bares de Madison: "El perro del lavandero no pertenece ni a la ribera ni a la casa.". En el barco, yo miraba con envidia a una fotógrafa española, tan claramente a gusto, tan contenta de estar aquí: toda sonrisas, sacando fotos, prestando su cámara digital a un joven quien, con timidez, le hacía preguntas. "Sonia Villegas", decía su tarjeta. Sus fotografías no se habían vendido aún, pero tenía muchos seguidores en la red.

Al rato M bajó de mi rodilla (la cabeza nudosa de la cabra entre sus rodillas le había proporcionado diversión para un buen rato) y pasó a través de la multitud, acompañada del hijo del cabrero, a mirar el agua de color café insipido, tanto ella como él colgando sus cabezas y hombros a través de las rejas sin protección. M estaba entusiasmada, y buscaba hipopótamos en el río, aunque yo ya le había explicado que, aún si hubiera hipopótamos, en todo caso probablemente sólo se encontrarían aguas arriba, en los pequeños afluentes. Ella insistiía, "Pero ví una foto en Panoramio, papá, los ví, más hacia el océano." "¿Hacia Tombuctú?" "¡No! En la otra dirección!" Inútilmente, intenté explicárselo otra vez mas: " Querida, no hay hipopótamos en Malí ya, tal vez río arriba en Guinea". "Pero yo los he visto!" Ella había aprendido poco antes de nuestra salida de Madison que el nombre de nuestro país tenía algo que ver con los hipopótamos, y una vez aquí, me ví obligado a limitar, a un total de 10, su colección de monedas de 5 francos con el hipopótamo en el dorso. Durante la semana que había estado aquí, M había aprendido algunas palabras de sus primos, y ahora se comunicaba felizmente con el hijo del cabrero. M, que nunca había aprendido ni una sola palabra de bambara en los EE.UU., que había rechazado mis intentos mas desesperados de enseñarle, que había encontrado la complicidad en la risa de su madre, mi ex, quien nunca aprendió a decir ni siquiera mi nombre.

En Diré, al acercarnos al muelle, el cabrero sacó su móvil y empezó a regatear el precio de sus cabras.

To Diré

On my visit back to Tombouctou, at my mother's behest I traveled to Diré with my 6-year old to pay my respects to my grandfather. I use that phrase intentionally; he had been too remote during my childhood, and, on the few occasions I'd had contact with him, too authoritarian, for me to love him much. Diré is to the SW of Tombouctou, in the more populated part of Mali; very unlike the North which is so empty of people even Michael Fay hasn't overflown it yet – and he flew over all of Africa. Diré is at a bend in the river Niger upstream from Korioumé, where we had boarded the boat. If Naipaul hadn't set his book elsewhere, he could have set in Diré.

As we had boarded, the whole crowd had been subdued – the Ivory Coast had just eliminated us 3-0 in some run-up to the World Cup. Even the smelly goats seemed chastened. When we eventually squeezed in, I was discomfited by the closeness of the benches, one knee was scrunched up against the seat-back in front, my other knee was sticking out into the aisle and M was sitting on it. That leg was preventing me from falling into the aisle from my half-place, offered to me by my neighbor in spite of my not having made the slightest move to ask for it - I hadn't even seen it. She slid inwards, squeezing against her neighbor, who budged a bit and shrugged his shoulders apologetically. It brought to mind the airport shuttle in Chicago on my way here – more than 20 seats, but 5 large people and their duffels occupying two seats each left no place for us. You do the math.

"Smelly goats." 15 years ago, before I'd left, I would never have used that superfluous adjective; smell was the sea I swam in. Now I was drowning in it. I caught myself warily inspecting the surrounding people, suspicious of people ever after I had been ripped off by the Tuareg cabbie in my own hometown, who'd said only two words so derisively to me when I'd sat down with my luggage, “Green card?”. I was reminded of a saying my Indian friend at grad school would repeat on Friday evenings in Madison bars, “The washerman's dog belongs neither at the riverbank nor at home.”. I was envious of the Spanish photographer who seemed so obviously at ease, so delighted to be here: all smiles, clicking away, lending her digital SLR to a young boy who had shyly asked her questions. “Sonia Villegas”, her card read; her photographs hadn't sold yet but she had a following on the web.

Soon M was off my knee – the goat's knobby head between her knees had provided diversion for a good while. She went squeezing through the crowds with the goatherd's son to look at the light brown water, both of them dangling their heads and shoulders through the unprotected railings. She was excited, looking for hippos in the river though I had explained that if at all, they were likely only upstream, in the smaller tributaries. She insisted, “But I saw a photo in Panoramio, Daddy, I saw it, further towards the ocean.” “You mean back towards Tombouctou?” “No! The other way!” Futilely, I tried a last time, “Darling, there aren't any hippos in Mali anymore, maybe upriver in Guinea.” “But I saw them!” She had learned just before our departure from Madison that our country was named after the hippos, and once here, I had had to curtail, at a total of 10, her collection of 5-franc coins with the hippo on the back. In the week we had been here, she had picked up some words from her cousins and was now communicating happily with the goatherd's son. M, who had never learned a single word of Bambara in the US, who had rejected my fraught attempts to teach her, who had found complicity in the laughter of her mother - my ex, who never learned to say even my name right.

At Diré, as we pulled in to dock, the goatherd pulled out a cell-phone and began to haggle over the price of his goats.