Written on October 19th

We are currently celebrating the holiday Navarati here in Mhaswad, and unlike with Ganpati, I have no idea what this holiday is about other than the fact that the name Navarati means “nine nights,” which is the length of the celebration. This festival is much more low-key than Ganpati was, but still involves large religious statues under colorful tents set up around the village and speakers blasting celebratory music from sunrise to midnight (which gets a little obnoxious). I’m sure it involves much more than that, but those are the most obvious elements from a foreign perspective. And as my mentor here at the NGO says (who’s not from here), this village celebrates enough festivals to render them all unremarkable. I’m beginning to see what she means. Brenna had heard that this particular celebration involved some sort of stick dance, and really wanted to see it. I wasn’t initially very enthusiastic given that I envisioned the same drunken mosh pit of local men coated in radioactive pink colored powder that we’d seen a few weeks before. But, thankfully this was almost the complete opposite. Thursday night, we met up with a friend from the bank who took us to a peaceful little courtyard right off the main road and next to a temple that I had never seen before. About 20 people were sitting on steps and on the ground, watching another 30 or so youngsters do “the stick dance,” or as they would call it, “playing.” There were two circles, one inside the other, which would rotate in opposite directions. Each person has two sticks, and to the beat of the music you hit your sticks together and then against those of your partner in a regular pattern until you slowly rotate to the next person and continue along until the song ends. Brenna and I were content to sit and watch this innocent little diversion, but of course were inevitably expected to participate. I went first, trailblazer that I am, and in my fumbling lack of coordination managed to make Brenna’s ‘playing’ look absolutely wonderful in contrast when I handed off the sticks. The sequence of stick smacking wasn’t hard to pick up, but it was amusing how much you had to adjust to each person’s personal style—the younger kids were more predictable, but the older ones had been doing this for years and had managed to individualize their stick-hitting to involve such varying flair and flamboyancy that they were practically unpredictable. It’s hard to hit a stick against another stick when you can’t tell where the other stick might be flying to, all the while trying not to laugh and fall and miss the beat. One girl seemed to prefer not hitting the sticks at all, so it was even harder to remember who she was, respect her boundaries, and mimic her “fake hitting” by missing her stick by just enough space that we were doing the moves but avoiding collision. Oy vey. But needless to see, it was highly amusing to the crowd that we joined in, and we had a lot of fun.

The next day got even better. After I taught my English class Friday morning, Brenna had been invited to visit a village school with Tinki’s (a employee at the bank) daughter Palavi on the birthday of the school, so I tagged along. Palavi took us to her classroom, past rooms teeming with children uproariously excited to see two white people at their school. They kept running up to us and yelling, “Hallo! Hut is your name?!” and furiously shaking our hands before running back to their rooms. Once inside Palavi’s class, perhaps eighty 8th grade students stood in unison and chanted “Wel-come Madame!” The teacher promptly told us the celebration must start immediately because we were an hour late (Palavi had been late in fetching us, and we had no idea where we were going). He then gave some sort of explanation as to why Brenna had been invited as a guest of honor, which included the venerable qualities of being a foreigner and speaking English. We were seated at the front of the room, and a smiling Jaishri (my next door neighbor), came from the back of the class to give us our two wild roses apiece, a candy bar, and a helping of some spiced rice puff-things. After the principal and another administrator had arrived and were seated next to us, it was explained to a bewildered Brenna that she, as the honorary guest, would be cutting the tiny chocolate birthday cake decked in flowers at the table in front of the student’s desks. At this point I could hardly contain my laughter, because this was so far from what we were expecting it was ridiculous. As Brenna cut the cake, the children cheered and a boy let off what seemed to be a hybrid between a blow horn and a silly string device, covering Brenna in sparkly foam and probably the cake, too. Then the administrator handed us our pieces of cake (which led to an awkward moment because it seemed like she wanted to feed it to us, wedding style, but it was really hard to tell), and after eating our bite-sized pieces in front of an audience of watchful, probably ravenous students, the teacher asked Brenna to give an encouraging message to the class. At this point I was thanking God I had come. This should be good, I thought. Brenna, being the roll-with-the-punches person that she is, began to tell the class with great verve and energy who she was and how Mhaswad in many ways was very similar to her native Iowa. And then she told the class about her favorite upcoming American “festival,” Halloween. I don’t know how this came to her, but the class had this glazed over look in their admiring eyes that it probably didn’t matter if she had read them a recipe so long as she was looking at them and talking. Once done, the teacher looked at me with anticipation and said, “Yes? You?” So, I proceeded to go through my introduction, and babbled on for awhile about my beloved Oregon, the importance of education, and who knows what else.

When we left, the entire class followed us to the hallway to send us off. I shook nearly everyone’s hand and gave my full name over and over and over until everyone was satisfied. We then, on our way out, were invited to every other class in the school to introduce ourselves and give a short speech (there were probably only 5 other large classes, so this isn’t nearly as impressive as it sounds). Surprisingly we were only there an hour, but if there had been any sense of order before we’d arrived, we certainly left a wake of chaos and near-hysteria when we left. The whole experience was as close as I ever hope to come to being a celebrity, but it was pretty fun, and a highlight of my trip so far.