Return from India: Excuse the lapse. I disappeared to India for a month. A whole month. Only scratched the dusty, magical surface. Kashmiri bandits & elephants, tongas and maharajas and tigers in the wild. Will get photos tomorrow and hopefully can scan some. Don't have a digital.
Hope you guys got to check out the two Black Book cover stories. The Summer issue was on Beck; the Fall issue was on John Cusack. Now I'm pulling together a travel essay on tigers & cremations, and travel in India. Will try and place it with Washington Post Sunday mag, or DoubleTake, or somewhere cool, depending on the length. I want to write it how it needs to be written -- then find a home. So continues the non-business mind of Resnick.
Back to Topanga, and teaching in the MFA program at Chapman College, and privates, and a two-weekend course at UCLA -- a reprise of "A Touch of Evil: Writing Unflinching Fiction."
PUBLICATIONS, CURRENT AND UPCOMING:
THE DICTIONARY OF FAILED RELATIONSHIPS (Three Rivers Press), with my story "'M' Is For Muay Thai," comes out supposedly this spring. Haven't heard from editor recently.
BEST FETISH EROTICA is out, and the same story, "Man and Woman: A Study in Black & White," also reappears in BEST WOMEN'S EROTICA 2002 (also Cleis Press) along with Isabel Allende. Editor Cara Bruce threatens she, Isabel & I might have a reading up in San Francisco.
STUDENT NEWS
After teaching at UCLA, and Antioch, Chapman, various private workshops for the last five plus years -- I've got a bunch of former students who are making the news with their publishing, MFA'ing, or general antics! PLEASE SEND IN NEWS TO ME IF YOU ARE A FORMER STUDENT, OR KNOW OF NEWS OF ONE! And click on back issues to see earlier news.
Mia Taylor is now Associate Editor of THE BOOK LA. In the recent issue with astonishing photos by Gregory Colbert, she interviews Colbert, and also the mother-sister of deceased photo-journalist Daniel Eldon, whose posthumously published collage journals have created a cult following.
Thea Klapwald is writing a piece for the TLS (Times Literary Supplement) on Los Angeles writing.
Current workshop member Aaron Jacobs, founding editor of forthcoming Los Angeles mag Quench, has a story coming out this month in the excellent Surfer's Path mag out of London. Here's the link where you can get a salt-tang taste of his story, "Living With Water": The Surfer's Path: "Living With Water"
Sunday, February 1, 2003
Dear all,
Today is my beloved brother Michael's birthday, and also one of my dearest friends, Bronnie Milovsky. Michael's based in Austin, Texas, and Bronnie's in Rome, Italy -- though her Brooklyn roots are strong.
I am recently back from a month-long, soul-rejuvenating trip to India. Unbeknownst to me, I had enough racked-up frequent flyer miles from years ago to fly anywhere in the world. They were old TWA miles. I debated between Africa and India, both with costly airfare. In the end I chose India because it was cheaper and I had more connections there.
So I flew to Delhi, with the aim to write an article about tigers in India (and also to see India for the first time.) I also wanted to see Death up close. Somehow in all my years I'd never seen it -- typical of the West. In Delhi, the first night I had my camera stolen by Kashmiri bandits -- then returned later that night. Long story! And that was only my first night. Met with many tiger wallahs in Delhi, a slender Bengali scholar who gave me the Hindu perspective, ate many masala dosas at the United Coffee House -- after a month sweet chai runs through my veins and chapatis fill every artery! Had to go undercover, hiding hair under scarf, wearing glasses, the Punjabi "salwar kameez" pajama-like outfit, and scarves -- but still the harrassment was intense. Women are hassled a lot in India, whether foreign or Indian. You just have to get brutal about it, brush them off like so many horseflies. The phenomenon, like all of India in different ways, is a challenge, an assault, unforgettable.
After Delhi, I went to Agra to see the Taj Mahal and get assaulted by Hindi hustlers and crass rhesus macaque monkeys, then Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary in Rajasthan, then Bandhavgahr National Park where I saw five tigers my first "safari"! A tigress and her four cubs. Then the four cubs the next morning safari. All from elephant back, driven by a "mahout" who steers the elephant by constantly drumming his bare feet on the elephant's hide. The ride through the jungle a slow, sea-like sway, on a palanquin with other photographing toursits. At one point, when a cub began to follow the elephant -- I felt, not just awed at the beauty, the magnificence, the power, the perfection -- but fear. Even a small cub, was clearly a king. The elephant didn't seem too high with his striped face and intense eyes directly upon us. Stayed at the Maharaja's Royal Retreat, met the owner -- son of the former Maharaja (they've since had almost all their priveleges, and titles, removed) whose father had bred the first white tiger --
Yes, yes -- the very same one you can trace all the Siegfried & Roy white tiger brood back to --
Visited this modern-day Maharaja in his hometown of Rewa where I saw the palace where the first white tiger was kept, the forests (what remain) where he was caught as a cub during a wedding hunt, and many dusty stuffed red tigers. Had one dinner, thrown in my honor, with a grimacing stuffed tigress, teeth bared in an eternal snarl, facing me directly. Another dinner guest moved when he couldn't take the stuffed tiger heat -- a glimmer of what they must be in the wild? "Be careful you don't fall in love with the tiger," warned P.K. Sen, former director of the famous Project Tiger, largely why the magnficient creature still exists today in India -- despite horrific poaching (thanks again to China's insatiable, costly appetite for all manner of dead animal concoctions and potions for health, potency --)
Then on to Varanasi, where I, along with many other tourists and travelers, was completely mesmerized by the cremations at the burning ghats along the Ganges. Where I met a one-legged sadhu who turned out to be a 'Nam vet who'd gone mad, and ended up in Varanasi where he was rescued from living in a park and given a room at a local Brahmin's home -- which Brahmin looked the spitting image of a Hindi Bowie, I kid you not. Sadhus wear homespun, not much of it, orange turbans, and white holy clay dust smeared on their faces and bodies to great dramatic effect. I had no idea where that Texan twang was coming from during my argument with the cycle rickshaw driver over a few rupees.
Got stuck in Varanasi for some days -- unusual during my go-go-go trip -- the fog helped, delaying flights, causing me one night to sleep in the massage room of a hotel, on the massage table with one blanket -- shivering the whole few hours I slept there. Then all the way down to Kanha National Park. A stunning place. ARDUOUS travel. Cheap. Trains, autorickshaws, cycle rickshaws, tongas, and finally -- the dreaded buses. Don't ride buses, ever -- warned my friends (who also said Don't go to India) -- they go over the cliff every day, killing hundreds.
But in the remote areas I was traveling, there was no choice. So I went. And barely survived, smashed between bales of weeds, and thin villagers, all piled into seats for two -- all hacking and coughing in the freezing winter cold (who knew India was so chill?) -- us bumping along a pitted road, BONE-SHATTERING bumps I'm talking -- I'm still jarred. My whole skeleton is rearranged permanently.
Then to Kanha, where, though I saw no tigers as in Bandhavgahr, I saw the mystery of the tiger -- the yearning. The traces. Everyone had heard the tiger roar the night before! During dinner. And then seen a male tiger lazing in the grasslands the next morning. I had no such luck -- but it was even more beautiful somehow. Seeing instead the traces of the tiger -- the sounds (the chilling, human-sounding shrill call of the chital, spotted deer) signs of a kill sight right near the gypsy (jeep), but the tiger and prey invisible. Only the vultures circling overhead as they do when there's a fresh kill and the tiger's still there, eating. I found myself desiring more and more to see the tiger, to be around them -- to feel their presence.
The last night in Kanha, I saw a star so bright, it burned through the night's canvas, and twinkled fiercely. I had never seen such a star, or night -- and when I left the park -- on that bone-shattering bus again -- back to the crowds of a billion plus people, the intense press of population (pressing too against these parks, the only refuges left -- and weirdly, only there because they were hunting grounds for the Maharajas sport, or for the Brits) -- I was moved.
From Kanha back to Delhi. I missed Khajuraho, the erotic temples. Too far, no time. Things get dropped during travel, especially in India. Impossible there. In Delhi met with Britishers Belinda Wright and her mother Ann -- the latter who'd been among the first, with Indira Gandhi, to start Project Tiger. The daughter, Belinda, a former photo-journalist and documentarian, now devotes her time to flushing out big-time poachers. She goes undercover, using her excellent Hindi and village tongues to fake out the poachers. This family has been in India for generations.
Then I met a female doctor from Dana Point, California, of all things. I'd not only seen few travelers/tourists, I'd met hardly any Americans whatsoever. Jeannine had just spent a couple weeks volunteering at a medical camp in Gujarat, where she was thrilled to've seen her first live case of elephantiasis. She enjoyed amputations, she told me. Though she and her husband had given up surgery to open their own practice. When I coughed, she mentioned, yes, it was possible it was TB. With no trace of softening.
We toured Rajasthan together, hiring a driver and making him mad with our slow female ways of wandering. Jaipur, the Pink City; Pushkar, with its sacred lake and hippies and Israelis; Jodphur, the Blue City; Udaipur, with its spectacular Lake Palace and Lake Palace Hotel -- where our fine doctor sprang for a lakeside room and invited me to stay, too. Where "Octopussy" was shot -- way out of my range at almost four Benjamins a night.
Then she flew back to Mumbai, and I went to Ranthambore, the last national park I would have time to visit. There I missed the legendary Fateh Singh Rathore, a true warrior Rajput from near Jaisalmer with his curly mustache and colorful turban, reputed to think more like a tiger than any man alive. Instead I met his charming Gujarati wife, an excellent artist in her own right. F.S. Rathore showed Bill Clinton around when he visited Ranthambore.
Finally back to Delhi -- for Republic Day. I was unable to meet with Valmik Thapar, another famous tiger wallah -- this one from a family of intellectuals who, since college, has been obsessed with the tiger and is a charismatic spokesman for their survival. Instead I dashed around the city one more time, through the muddy streets of Pahar Ganj -- and on to Tokyo for some real culture shock, to see a famous temple with monstrous lanterns, and then LAX.
The above is merely a quick sketch. I will be working the material and moments up into at least one article, this travel essay about tigers, and death, and women in India, and freedom and marriage, and potency. In the meantime, happy new year to all. More to come. Travel whenever and wherever you can.
Best,
Rachel
Click to get back issues of updates -- more gossip, ranting!
Winter 2002 -- Back-to-Back Black Book Covers -- All Things Cusackian & "Meant Work"
Summer Splash 2002: Entering Beckworld and Other Self-Tanning Adventures in Scribbling
December 2001-January 2002: General Holidaze, & The Erotic Side of the Flu
September-November 2001 -- the 9.11 Spread, This New World Of Ours
September 2nd Update: Loss of Lima, and, other ramblings from the days before The World Changed
June-August 2001: Off the Rails at Track 16 Gallery & Other Tales
April/May 2001: Second Pick-of-the-Litter Winners! plus Snap and trash from Tin House bash
December/January 2001: Happy Kwanzaa Send-Off, Holidazing
November 2000 Update: Seven Deadly Sins Contest! Plus Bonus Political Rant
June 2000 Update: Hell's Angels, Rocking the Tin House, and More!
February 2000 Update: My Bloody Valentine