Auto Parts Super Center
You photoblogger guys and gals — y’know, the ones that would be in the blogroll to the right, if it were working — may not know this, but when you post? It pops up on my computer within like five minutes. So when I saw Joe and Drew update in the same hour, I took it as a sign I should be putting something online.
These images come from a neighborhood that’s kind of defined by car parts. It’s tough to say which businesses are legit and which aren’t; like a lot of marketplaces, there are a lot of stalls with a lot of stuff, and the place can kinda give you sensory overload. But if you need a part for anything, odds are you can find it somewhere around here.
Imran at his family’s auto parts stand, near Russell Market, Bangalore, 2008.
Getting to the story
Note: This is a post that I wrote but forgot to put up. In hindsight I may never have finished it. It’s not worth finishing now; as we speak I’m wrapping up a long-form article on the Khasi story. I showed a draft to one of my professors this morning and ran a loose edit by Eli. That’ll all end up here soon. In the meantime, I have this half of a thought to put up.
JUNE 26, 2008 — It’s 7 in the evening on the Kashi Vishwanath Express to Delhi. I’m transcribing quotes from the Khasi story and starting to outline the final product, which I hope to start writing next week. Listening to the quotes, I’m reminded of a post I wanted to write back when I was trying to sleep through a monsoon in the village of Kenbah, in a valley hundreds of feet below the nearest paved road. It’s a post about something really simple, almost like a Zen koan, that everyone already knows: to get the story, you must first get to the story.
Friedman says “The world is flat;” Disney suggests “it’s a small world after all;” Carl Sagan says the planet is a “pale blue dot.” There’s some value to all of these metaphors, but if you were to have asked me in Kenbah, I’d have told you, “The world is big.” Despite miracles like internal combustion and powered flight, despite satelites and intercontinental fiber-optic lines, if you’re five to seven feet tall and the planet is 130,000,000 feet around, it’s a big world, and getting where you’re going is not always gonna be easy.
Take Kenbah for example. Here’s how we got there: we flew to Calcutta and took the 18-hour Saraighat Express train to Guwahati. From there we hired a Sumo (it’s like a Jeep) and a driver to take us to the city of Shillong. We met our contact, Peter, then rested. We then woke up early to go to Bara Bazar, where we hired another driver to take us to the tiny town of Mawsynram. At that point, we walked. About 300 yards down the road there are some steps, at least 1,000 of them, that take you 3,000 feet down over two miles, through a waterfall, into a valley, to a rickety foot bridge over whitewater rapids. Welcome to Kenbah.
There was one other thing we needed to finally get to the story. And looking at my notes now, it kind of makes me smile. It came up at that first meeting with Peter, in a charming Shillong coffeeshop called “Swish.”
“The chief of the village has to know that you’re coming,” he said.
When I asked him how he planned on informing the chief of our visit, he replied with something that, I must admit, made the world seem the tiniest bit smaller:
“By phone. Mobile.”
Having said that, however small the world felt then, it felt equally big when it came time to climb back out.
four from Benares
If you follow my Twitter feed you may have noticed me kvetching just a little bit about the city of Varanasi, also known as Benares. (just as an aside, most cities here seem to have at least two names. In some cases it’s one of the awkward legacies of the Raj [Calcutta/Kolkata, Bangalore/Bengaluru], but in the case of Varanasi [or, variously, Benares, Benaras or Kashi] it seems to have more to do with a mispronounciation that happened probably a thousand years before there was a Britain. But I digress.)
Despite the heat and the complicated name and the veritable sea of scam artists along the holy river, I managed to take some pictures. Here are four of them. (and by the way, those are birds in the first frame, not dust on the sensor. Except for the one piece of dust on the sensor; that’s dust on the sensor.)
This trip has made me think a lot about the difference between being a photographer, a journalist and a photojournalist. I’d go into more detail here, but there have been too many words on this thing lately, and not enough pictures, so I won’t. Buy me a beer and ask me about it. It’ll be more interesting that way anyway.
Child with Sheep, Agra, 2008. This would have been my “Youth” entry for PHOTOSPECTRA, but alas, didn’t make it in time.
UPDATED 4 July 2008: This post mistakenly stated that it was a goat. Sorry about that. It is a sheep though, right?
as an aside: The Spiritual Quest
In an email to a friend a few weeks back, I mentioned that this India trip has been less of a spiritual journey and more of an economic one. I’ve been meeting people and trying to figure out how they find their place in the world, trying to understand how the jigsaw pieces of these small economies fit together. I think that I’ve been doing a good job of it; my notepad reflects some good reporting, even if the blog posts don’t always get that across.
But there’s something on the margins of the story that gets to me. It’s something I see mostly in the cities, but even in villages spotted out the windows of sleeper-class train cars, I see it. It’s not just the realization that people are left behind. It’s the realization that, in a world as big as ours, there’s no easy fix. Much ink has been spilled over the street children that roam the Calcutta train stations, but I must say that I felt deeply disturbed when I saw two children, maybe 7 and 8 years old, climb through the windows of our train at Sealdah. They lunged for empty water bottles, colliding and hissing and meowing at each other like feral cats.
“This country is too much for me sometimes,” I remarked to one of my companions. Maybe that’s why in Calcutta, I decided to hear mass at Mother Teresa’s tomb. Perhaps the faith of my childhood, I thought, could offer some answers, or at least some sense of direction. And while it goes against the ethos of this blog to stray from reporting as much as I’m about to, I dunno, sometimes aiming for a sort of truth requires it.
When I was small, I prayed sincerely. I remember this well: kneeling cramped in a fifth grade church pew, whispering words into folded hands, hoping that prayers might travel faster in this way than by whispering them into air alone. A decade later, my whispers feel like whispers, and hands seem no more sacred folded than unfolded. There are days when I wish my hands could again be holy. Most days, I don’t even notice they’re not.
On the way out of Mother Teresa’s tomb, one of the sisters asks that you sign the guest book with your name, age and country. It also asks your purpose, offering four checkboxes: Pilgrimage, Prayer, Visitor or Tour. The most popular box seemed to be “Visitor,” with “Prayer” a distant second.
I had prayed. I vaguely remembered how, as I kneeled at the foot of the tomb and folded my hands. I prayed for my sister and my parents and my grandparents, called to mind my cousins and aunts and uncles by name. I prayed for the kids in the Sealdah station, and the child flying a plastic bag like a kite in the village out the rail car window. I prayed for the women of the Mising tribe and the Khasi weavers. I prayed, for whatever it’s worth.
I don’t know how I feel about my little spiritual quest. Perhaps I’m not meant to feel quite yet. The thing of it is, I’m not proud of losing my faith, nor am I ashamed to have had it at all. Sometimes I wish that I could believe even now. But the truth is that I can’t. My hands have forgotten, and warm whispers don’t travel far.
![Peter Marbaniang ascends the wet, steep steps from the village of Kenbah in the Khasi Hills of Meghalaya, northeast India. Marbaniang, a graduate of India’s National Institute of Design, is working with traditional bamboo-weavers in villages like Kenbah, testing out new designs and exploring ways to get their wares to more lucrative markets. The isolation of the village, however — it’s a strenuous two to four hour trek each way — means that the baskets and woven goods destined for markets in Delhi and Bangalore must be painstakingly carried up these hills.
[UPDATED: in an earlier version of this post, the village’s name was incorrect; this has been fixed]](http://media.tumblr.com/5ndb0SfWkaj2u3c18halGmUO_r1_500.jpg)
Peter Marbaniang ascends the wet, steep steps from the village of Kenbah in the Khasi Hills of Meghalaya, northeast India. Marbaniang, a graduate of India’s National Institute of Design, is working with traditional bamboo-weavers in villages like Kenbah, testing out new designs and exploring ways to get their wares to more lucrative markets. The isolation of the village, however — it’s a strenuous two to four hour trek each way — means that the baskets and woven goods destined for markets in Delhi and Bangalore must be painstakingly carried up these hills.
[UPDATED: in an earlier version of this post, the village’s name was incorrect; this has been fixed]
The view from here
After a day and a night of travel, and before one night more, I sat in room 407 of the Vishwaranta Hotel in Guwahati, wrestling with the front desk in the hopes of getting a wireless connection. Leafed through Lonely Planet in the wait; it described Guwahati as a town that “isn’t beautiful,” and advised travlers to “Come here to arrange tours … then move on swiftly,” and although our itinerary wasn’t as touristy as the book implied, we did in the space of four days take a bus from Guwahati to Jorhat, a boat to Majuli Island, and a jeep to Shilong. In fairness, no place is quite that drab — and I’ve been told there are some nice things to see in Guwahati — but my experience of the town was too brief to say more than a few words.
The train station, for its part, is far smaller than the Howrah station in Kolkata, but when the trains are unloading it’s bustling like a decent sized airport. The auto-rickshaw drivers there don’t seem like they’re from a different region than Bangalore; they seem like they’re from a different species. In Bangalore all the auto drivers are trying to scam you, and they know they can do it too. These drivers were polite and caravanned us to where we were going; they asked Ranjana where we were from and smiled. Which is not to say that others aren’t trying to scam you too; from the moment you walk out of the station you’re greeted by dozens of men asking, “Where are you going? Where are you going?” You shake them off and walk across the tracks to your legit travel company — most of them are clustered together here — only to find more men, screaming destinations, “Shillong! Shillong! Shillong!”
[Also, as an aside: If you do need to hire a car to Shillong here, speak only to the driver of the car you want to hire. Everyone else — especially the ones not attached to the vehicle you’ll be driving in — are trying to screw you. No exceptions.]
The train ride from Kolkata was long, but enjoyable. We traveled in 2nd Tier AC class, which means the car is air conditioned and you get either a private berth, or a shared berth with four other people. I got the latter, sharing my berth with a very polite Hindu mother and father traveling with their son. We set out from Howrah at 4:00 in the afternoon; without windows I missed the sunset and the sunrise, yet in a truly surreal moment I was able to get SMS updates about Steve Jobs’ introduction of the new iPhone. My cellular switched from Vodafone to Airtel as we passed into the far northeast; Vodafone text messaged me, “Have a nice stay,” and mentioned the customer service number in Bihar.
But for me, the defining moment of the train ride came when a man with a sitar entered the cabin. I didn’t feel like tipping, so I avoided eye contact. But he saw that I’d seen him, and so began his song. I tried to shoo him away at first, then tried ignoring him, then feigning sleep. But I couldn’t shake him, and besides, he was playing a song for me.
I left a tip.
Everyone here wants something from you. From the scammers steering you along the commission racket to the children swarming outside the Kolkata airport, everyone’s eager to help, provided there’s something in it for them —and most of them know how to work that something in. Can you blame them? Everyone’s got to find place in the world, room to exist. So should I blame the kid for trying to find my taxi for a tip?
‘No!’ I imagined, ‘I have the taxi receipt right here, kid, I can find it on my own. Seriously, I don’t need your help.’ Taxi kid was annoying, frankly, and we really didn’t need his help, and I really didn’t feel like sparing any change. I’d have been more apt to give him ten rupees in exchange for just buzzing off. But then I’d think to myself: he’s just trying to carve out that room, trying by way of this to help himself and maybe his family. Is that such a sin? “I’ve got a ticket out of Kolkata,” I thought to myself. “The kid finding my taxi doesn’t.”
My story idea crystalized over the weekend on Majuli Island as we were visiting with the Mising tribe, the second largest tribe in the northeastern state of Assam. I suppose the crystallization started early last week, when Karam, one of the friends who I met here, challenged me on my last post. This was the one about the round market and the flat one. Paraphrasing now, he asked me, “Where do you suppose the tea man got his thermos?” He made the point that global markets touch the round-world economy of the dhobi and City Market all over the place. He also suggested I might be asking the wrong question when I ask about the fading role of the dhobi wallas.
“Did you speak to any of the dhobi wallas?” he asked.
“Ravichandran was the only one we could converse with,” I replied.
Karam asked me whether I had asked about Ravichandran’s kids.
“He didn’t marry and he didn’t have any children,” I said.
Karam paused, and explained: Indian people, he said, tend to have a sense of acceptance about their lot in life, coupled with a sense of hope that it might be better for their children. He said that he knows cooks and maids whose children are attending schools on scholarships. In other words, there’s no need to worry that the dhobi wallas may fade. If the dhobi ghat doesn’t get passed down, it’s because of a hope that the kids will do better.
But the bigger point he made went deeper. Capitalism is a kind of a winner-take-all system, not entirely unlike evolution. It’s not kind to the weak, and it makes the strong stronger. And for all its brutalility and its failings, evolution has pushed us this far. So, who cares if markets change?
“We would never have crawled out of caves if not for change,” he offered.
It’s a valid point. And my thought — that markets are changing too fast for people to catch up — seems a bit quaint from this perspective. But I can’t help it: I see that there are a lot of people who depend on very fragile economies for their survival.
Later in the conversation, he asked if I had met his friend Pradeep, who runs an NGO called the Action Northeast Trust; I had. He asked if I had spoken to Pradeep about what he found in Assam; we all had, at least in a basic way. At that point, though, we had already booked travel to the area, and I thought aloud that maybe Assam was the place I needed to see next.
Nearing the end now of the journey into the northeast, I’ve visited a tea plantation and a half-dozen tribal villages. I’ve conducted about an hour worth of interviews and an hour more of natural sound, filled 1/2 of a Moleskine notepad and all the memory cards I brought. And the answer, or perhaps I should say the new question, is a bit more complicated than the old one. But I’ll be writing about that soon enough.
—
That’s the view from here. This time tomorrow we’ll be trekking the foothills of Cherapunjee to meet the Khasi people, which will be the last bit of reporting from the northeast. We split slightly and head for Varanassi in a couple of days, and to be quite honest, I may “go tourist” for a week or so before, hopefully, picking up my train of thought on the Rajdhani Express to Mumbai.
The Two Markets
Again with the cross-posting. Sorry about that. It just kinda feels like a necessary followup to the City Market post.
left, City Market, Bangalore, in the shadow of Mysore Road; right, Indigo Nation, about 5 miles east, 100-Foot Road, Indiranagar.
I’m reading Thomas Friedman’s award-winning 2005 book “The World is Flat” at the moment. In case you haven’t read it, it’s his thesis on how the technological and cultural developments of the late 20th and early 21st century have changed global markets fundamentally by — for lack of a more precise term — rendering geography obsolete. Friedman was inspired to write the book after a visit to Bangalore; he saw the call centers, to be sure, but he also saw the outsourcing of everything from income tax preparation to software-writing. When he realized that Bangalore could effectively be “a suburb of Boston,” he decided the world was flat.
The flattening of the world has had an immense impact on this city. The community of Indiranagar, in which land used to be given away as a pension to military officers, has become a burgeoning commercial zone. The 100-foot road houses tony shops from international brands; the Dockers store, most memorably, sits next to a ten by twenty foot picture of the Golden Gate Bridge. The nearby Leela Palace Hotel — a five-star hotel with attached three-level shopping mall — gives a great sense of the growing economy here. Looking to another neighborhood, we drive almost every day down Hosur Road, passing by the Koramangala office of MphasiS, the outsourcing firm whose founder reminded Friedman that America will need to invent a new future in order to survive.
“The great challenge of our time,” Friedman would later write, “is to absorb [the changes inherent in globalization] in ways that do not overwhelm people or leave them behind.”
—
For most of the history of life itself, survival didn’t depend on markets, global or local. For most of the history of life, it didn’t matter whether the world was flat or not. In primordial pools, there wasn’t even a sense of life forms. There was just life. At some point genes settled down and species became clearer; Darwin’s rules took over and suddenly organisms gained a purpose: survival. We went from ingesting sunlight to eating plants to eating animals, and somehow we survived.
Nowadays, survival is completely different. For most people, the only thing that remains unchanged from our animal stage is breathing. Eating is still dependent on finding food, but that’s largely bought and paid for. Development has sullied sources of water, so it must be purified, and whether it’s from a pipe or in a bottle, this too must be purchased. In other words, survival for most people requires finding a niche in a market and earning.
Why bother mentioning all this? Because walking around the same Bangalore that inspired Friedman to say that the world is flat, I see that there’s a round world here too. There’s a world of traditional markets as well as a world of global ones, and — this is the important part — far more people live in the round world than the flat one.
Friedman sees an accounting firm in Chicago. It outsources tax preparation to Bangalore; this cuts the firm’s costs by, say, 80%. But even at 1/5 the price, in Bangalore this may be a job with prestige and high pay. This brings wealth to Chicago and Bangalore — and creates a market here for more stuff, like motorbikes and Dockers pants and washing machines, which creates wealth elsewhere. This is the rose-colored glasses version: innovation creates new markets and more wealth.
But then I see Ravichandran at the dhobi ghat washing the neighborhood’s clothes for three rupees a shirt. While we were speaking to him he bought a two-rupee cup of tea from a Sikh man with a thermos. That man — hypothetically — may have purchased the tea from a seller at an open-air market like City Market. These people are getting by too, in the only market they know. But with less work for the dhobi, it’s a round-world economy that suddenly seems vulnerable.
Friedman is right: the great challenge of our time is to digest the globalized world in the least painful way for people. The problem is that the globalized world, the flat world, isn’t the only world we need to be worried about.
From the notepad: City Market
I spent yesterday in City Market, a kind of a sprawling open-air marketplace sitting in the shadow of a flyover. Sights and sounds came hard and fast there, but one image struck me. Somewhere between the mother and child selling coconuts and the old lady rearranging greens, the bearded man selling cheap watches and the father and son selling cheap radios, I saw a woman, seated, in a turquoise dress with black hair pulled back in a red tie. She sat on a blue tarpaulin with her simple wares: three locks of black hair.
I raised my camera with a glance in a body language interrogative. She declined politely with a shake of her head; I lowered the camera and walked away.
My mantra since I got here has been simple: I need to find the story before I can tell the story. So for the past week and a half I’ve been letting Bangalore unfold before me; I’ve been taking in the soul mix, listening to the people I meet. One of our newfound friends here commented on India’s glut of labor: “It’d be cheaper to hire 1,000 people than to bring in one machine.” I think that’s one of the things that’s become stuck in my head. Every living thing has to eke out an existence somehow, and here it’s out front and exposed; from the man outside our apartment pressing shirts with a wood-burning iron to the women selling mangoes and curry leaves.
But then there was that woman with the hair. Something about her got stuck in my head too; was this real hair? Was it her hair? For a moment I imagined her with her black hair shorn, carrying to the marketplace one more bundle to place on the tarp. The imagining was easy, but as a journalist, I couldn’t be satisfied with imagining. I had to find out.
India has several hundred languages; a recent Indian census suggests that 29 of them are spoken by over a million people. The majority language in Bangalore is Kannada, so it didn’t surprise me all that much that the woman selling hair might not speak English. But faced with it, I realized: without a translator I would not be able to talk to her; without talking to her I could never discover the story of the hair; without discovering the story of the hair, I didn’t have anything.
I walked away.
Elsewhere in the market there were easier pictures to take, pictures that at some basic level I understood. The business of business is simple enough; carrots go from farm to market; pepper makes its way from plantations; a young girl looks to pedestrians from behind piles of turnips and okra. Everyone’s got to eke out an existence somehow.
I soon found myself at the other end of the market, in front of the very last merchant who had set up by a local bus stop. He had books splayed out on his tarp in the shade, but these were not the ubiquitous pirated Harry potter books I so often see along the roadside. These were books on the languages of India.
In the end I paid 25 rupees for the book, “Learn Kannada in 30 days.” I didn’t need the whole language, just enough to ask about her hair and her name. I spent the better part of an hour sitting in a patch of sunlight near the bus stop, working out the details from the poorly-organized paperback. At a certain point I felt confident enough to walk over and ask my questions.
Fighting my way through the push of people, I stooped in front of the woman and asked, “Kannada?”
She shook her head. I was struck for a moment; if not Kannada, then what?
“Do you speak Hindi? Tamil?”
She repeated the motion vigorously; the man sitting next to her took an interest.
“Does she speak Kannada?” I asked the man.
“No,” he said.
And that was that.
—
In hindsight, I don’t know whether she didn’t speak the language, or if she just didn’t want to speak to me. Regardless, I came away with no photo and no answers.
It’s tough to see clearly sometimes; it’s tough to find what you need in order to understand. You can do all the research and see all the things around you, but you can’t talk to everyone. Hell, everyone can’t even talk back to you. So what do you do. You keep on going, take good notes, seek what you seek and find as finding comes — and if you have the right questions, you gotta hope the answers come with time.
The Dhobi Ghat
(cross-posted to the untitled india project)
On Monday we went to the dhobi ghat on Lazar Road. A dhobi ghat is a place where washermen, known as dhobi wallas, wash other people’s clothes by hand. Ravichandran, one of the dhobi we spoke to, said that he picks up clothes from the surrounding neighborhood, charging three rupees to wash a shirt or pants, a little more for a blanket or a bed sheet.
In Mumbai, one of the dhobi ghats has hundreds of washing stations, and the fact that it stretches out under a large bridge has made it a bit of a popular tourist stop; visitors often ask the auto drivers to take them to it like an overlook. According to Frommers, “At the very least, it’s a great photo opportunity, though most locals think it rather amusing that their everyday work arouses such curiosity.”
The dhobi ghat on Lazar Road is much smaller, perhaps two dozen stations, not all of them even occupied. It’s situated near the train tracks, in a neighborhood full of one-way roads that seem to point outward. It’s a fascinating tradition and it’s visually (and aurally) interesting. But there’s something below the surface of this, something the tourists don’t realize as they shoot video off of overpasses: the dhobi wallas are a dying breed.
We spoke to one dhobi walla whose interview we didn’t use in the slideshow piece. Now that there are washing machines, he said, people don’t give them clothes anymore. People do the small clothes in the washing machine, and mainly give the dhobi blankets, rugs and bigger clothes — the end result being less work.
The impact of this is quietly huge. In Koramangala, a neighborhood that is now a major software hub and Bangalore’s self-described “Most Happening Place,” a dhobi ghat that existed just a few years ago is now gone. I’m writing this post at a Coffee Day in Koramangala; the mood is chatty, the air, conditioned. Outside the plate-glass windows, the Bangalore Development Authority has erected a commercial park.
These developments are great for the economy; looking outside, the first floor of the BDA complex houses storefronts, their names written in English and Kannada; “Maruthi Stationers,” “Vijayanand Travels.” Above that there are two floors of offices; none look vacant. I see a man with a plastic shopping bag; an older man, sharply dressed, with cellphone and an attaché; two younger men now with plastic name badges hanging from belt loops. There’s bustle here, and bustle is good for business.
But across town, there’s Ravichandran. Despite his occasionally broken English, something he said at the end of our interview hints at a growing dillema:
“I want [a] nice job,” he said. “But no, I don’t know which one. I can’t work…” he trailed off. “[This is the] only job I know.”
Ravichandran learned the business of the dhobi ghat from his father in the seventies, and in a job that passes from fathers to sons, it’s not difficult to imagine that chain going back a century. It’s a chain that may be broken in this generation; for his part, Ravichandran never married and has no children — no son to teach to wash the clothes, and fewer clothes to teach a son to wash.
This post was written by me and co-reported with Ranjana Thomas, who stunned me by conducting interviews in English, Hindi, Tamil and Kannada.
Ranjana and Preetham, and a new box.
Ranjana and Preetham, Bangalore, 2008.
Ranjana (at right, obviously) is one of the people on this crazy trip. She’s also kind of our den mother, keeping us out of trouble and showing us our way. Preetham (on the left, also the only other one in the picture) has been the kindest person ever; he invited us to his estate, took us around town and had us to his apartment here. He’s also an all-around cool dude. Shot this at his apartment last night; we were all tired after waking up at 4:30 AM and were falling asleep all over the room. Anyway, I like the picture a lot.
A couple of years back, when I was working with the DT Weekend, a post at least ostensibly written by Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum surfaced on a message board and caused a little bit of a row. The post was soon discovered to be a hoax, but I remember the incident for two reasons: one, I discovered my love for Neutral Milk Hotel long after the group parted ways, and I was excited to hear they might make more music; and two, because of one line that the poster — who was not Jeff Mangum in the end — wrote:
… we dont know whether this will be korena pang or neutral milk hotel or michael bolton but that doesnt really matter. names are just a box we put things in to separate them, and we’re figuring out what box these songs go in.
As some of you may know, my companions and I are blogging about this trip on another blog, the Untitled India Project. I’m going to be posting some things here and other things there; sometimes when I’m not sure which box a thing fits into, it’ll end up in both places. But yeah. Untitled India Project. This post is a rather long way of saying, it’s another box into which we’ll be putting things we like a lot. Follow it and be excited.
an understanding
Writing now at 39,000 feet, it feels like 8 PM. When we land in five hours it will be 6:15 in the morning. Two planes from now, when we finally touch down in Bangalore, it will be 7:00 Wednesday morning. The sun’s set once on our journey, and it will set again before we find our destination; there are times in the darkness when I’m not sure if we’re running from the evening light or chasing after the morning.
—
When I arrived for the first time in El Paso last year, I didn’t know what the border felt like. Sure, I’d done preliminary research and read the web site of our contact, Jay, but I didn’t know what bridge I was looking for, what the city was like, where I was, where to park, what to expect. Drew and I parked the car and walked around the area; Google Maps told us to go straight, but our own eyes found nothing but a railyard and a muddy lot.
Eventually we found the bridge, and our contact. Over three weeks and three thousand miles, we found the understanding that had eluded us on day one, found out what it meant for these neighbors to share a river. We found an understanding of the history of this place. We found land grants that even today span the river — land grants proffered long ago by the honest-to-god Spanish Empire. We found the $2 per car fee to drive a car into Mexico. We found an American woman, a school principal, who drives across town for church some Sundays; the $2 fee was nothing to her, “an ice cream cone,” she said. Not a half hour later we found a school bus driver — Mexican but legal — who drives the same bridge three times a week to visit his mother; “six dollars a week, four weeks a month? Twenty four dollars a month. For a year…” his voice trailed as he ticked off the hit to his paycheck.
After three weeks and three thouand miles there were two trips to the interior and another down to Eagle Pass. With every minute I spend there I better understand that long line in the water from El Paso to the mouth.
The artist strives to see. The journalist strives to understand. Maybe this is the source of my recent flirtation with sound: I’m trying harder to understand.
—I’m beginning to get to know the borderlands. And in just two weeks, over a few short months, I’ve begun to understand Mexico, its potential and its challenges. I’m getting to know Edelmira’s family; maybe next time I’m down there I’ll come to know Nene.
But for the moment, it’s still dark outside the airplane window. Fourteen-hundred and fifty miles from London, I am chasing after tomorrow’s morning light.
And maybe, once morning light finds me in India, I’ll begin to get to know that place too.