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Love without grammar

An ode to my mom.


A plastic menagerie welcomes you to the Caswell home.

First you get a warning. Two plastic geese flank the doorway, one dressed like a pilgrim in a top-hat and buckled shoes, the other dressed like an Indian, with two black braids and a beaded suede dress. Thanksgiving is just three weeks away, after all. As they do every season, gnomes lead you up the driveway, and plastic beavers and squirrels welcome you throughout the lawn.

However, you still have no clue what is about to greet you on the other side of the door, for it is a surprise every time.

Your mother opens the door. Seeing you, she lets out a shriek of joy, breaks into a huge smile, and throws open her arms to hug you. You lower yourself to hug her and notice the orange lipstick on her teeth. You feel rotten for noticing orange lipstick on the teeth of a woman who has spent her whole life loving you.  

Behind her, domestic Disneyland awaits.  It is a full-on assault of the senses. A cursory inventory reveals: five monkey Beanie Babies, each wearing a hat; dozens of photos of you and your siblings dating from 1968 to the present; commemorative plates of Lucille Ball, Marilyn Monroe, and the cast of Little House on the Prairie; cookie jars in the form of a cow, a goose, a pig, and a fat chef, which, when opened, moo, quack, oink, and belch, respectively; a framed photo of you at age four on a pony at Busch Gardens next to a framed photo of you at age 30 on an elephant in Thailand; fake flowers draping nearly everything, including candlesticks, the window valance, and dining room hutch; your late grandmother’s ash tray that is shaped like a toilet and says, “rest your tired ash;” a toy train that runs around an elaborate village that includes, among its buildings, a replica of Graceland; a clock that has, instead of numbers, birds that chirp every hour on the hour; a clock that has trains, again instead of numbers, that whistle in a similar fashion; and, last but not least, a life-size statue of the backside of a child in the corner, arms raised over eyes as if counting in a game of hide-and-seek.

A goose wears a pilgrim’s clothing.  

You are in a mecca of misplaced apostrophes. Your brother’s first woodshop project hangs above the door: “The Caswell’s, Welcome to Our Home.” A statue of an Italian pizza chef holds a chalkboard where tonight’s menu is written: “hamburger’s.” Holding up your third grade class picture on the fridge, a magnet confirms: “If mommy says no, ask the grandparent’s.” There is no grammar here, only love, only the efforts of your mother to make every inch of this house feel like home.

A bevy of signs implores you to join in the sentiment. “Bless this home,” one sign demands, addressing no one in particular. “Spread some smile, trade some cheer, let’s be happy while we’re here,” commands another.

You recall how, when you lived here, you were completely miserable — despite the pleas on the wall, despite your mother’s best efforts.

The writer on an elephant at age 30, on a pony at age four.

In the bathroom, the tone is different, less demanding. “Be a sweetie and wipe the seatie,” politely requests the sign above the toilet. Next to the sink, fancy bars of soap in various shapes and colors collect dust. One of them your mother saved from the Waldorf Astoria, where six years ago you treated your parents to a room when they came to visit you in New York. Your mother hated the city, but gleefully declared, “I can’t believe this is my life!” when she caught a first glimpse of the hotel lobby.

Back in the kitchen, your mother tries to feed you but, to her dismay, there is nothing she can give you that you would want to eat. Her cupboard food arsenal is stocked with giant containers of Oreos, Doritos, and marshmallows bought in bulk at a discount food club. You open her freezer to find “family-size” trays of taquitos, gallons of Neopolitan ice cream, and boxes of pepperoni pizza rolls. You remember how, as a child, your friends would come over to gorge on what they called “junk food,” but you just thought that this was how everyone ate.  

You wonder how you ever got any nutrition and conclude that you owe at least one full inch of your 5’5” frame to Fruit Loops.  

Declining your mother’s best attempt at getting you a diet “pop,” you ask for water instead. Your mother hands you the water in a glass marked “Hard Rock Café, Savannah Georgia, New Years 2000.” Your mother has never been to Savannah, Georgia, or a Hard Rock Café anywhere, but bought the glass for 99 cents at a discount closeout store.

There is no grammar at our home, only love.

You survey the situation, its stockpile of stuffed animals, photos of you and your siblings, and value-size bags of potato chips. You wonder where all this stuff came from and whether your mother is an unwitting poster child for the global economy. The house really does appear to have enough to keep an entire Chinese village occupied in sweatshop labor year-round. If you were to find the worker who sewed the tiny cowboy hat your mother lovingly placed on her fifth Beanie Baby monkey and told him the final destination of the fruit of his labor, he would not believe you. He might even get mad at the injustice of it all — that someone would spend an entire U.S. dollar on something as frivolous as a toy monkey’s hat that he made while sewing in some sweaty factory 12 hours a day, seven days a week, on a $17 monthly salary.  But then, if he met your mother — met her and hugged her and saw the orange lipstick on her teeth — he couldn’t stay mad for very long.

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A $50 billion question

In his latest book, Bjørn Lomborg asks how we can best spend aid money.


While reading Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg’s latest book, How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place, one phrase kept running through my head: better left pdf.

This short edition — just over 170 pages — is simply an abridged version of a previous book edited by Lomborg called Global Crises, Global Solutions, which chronicled the ideas that came out of the Copenhagen Consensus of 2004. And it comes off that way – as a rehash. Not that its content isn’t important, but most of the data is a few years old now.  

What is new in this version is that Lomborg asks the $50 billion question: How do we prioritize where we spend aid money in fighting global challenges? The problems he lists are extensive: climate change, disease, civil war and arms proliferation, access to education, financial instability, governance and corruption, malnutrition and hunger, migration, sanitation and clean water access, subsidies and trade barriers. What should we do first? Lomborg and a pantheon of economists discuss 10 of the most pressing problems and then rank them according to “solvability.” They counsel: Fight HIV/AIDS, control malaria, liberalize global trade, and provide micronutrients to the undernourished — in that order.

While Lomborg’s instinct to create order of the chaos makes sense, the act of ranking comes off as a rather whack-a-mole approach to deep, systemic problems. And if you’re looking for substance beyond the surface, it just isn’t there. Can you seriously discuss climate change in 18 pages? Or communicable diseases in 19 pages? Given that short shrift, it’s a wonder the economists were even able to rank these issues. Overall, the result is simplistic, abrupt, and – paradoxically – unfocused for such a short book, which leaves the reader wondering if a white paper or article might have been a more appropriate vehicle for these ideas.

Another problem with the book is the almost total absence of experts and analysts from the developing world. Of the two dozen or so chapter authors and counter-argument presenters, all were attached to universities or institutions in the West, with the exception of only one or two. How much more valuable — and real — might this ranking system be if Lomborg had gone to the developing world and asked economists from those countries to identify the world’s most pressing problems and how they thought aid might be used more effectively? At the very least, this would have diversified and nuanced the rankings. At the very most, it would have been a substantially better book.

However, even these Western experts generally disagree on how aid money should be spent — highlighted in the opponent’s views sections, which follow each of the chapters. In a counter argument, Jacques van der Gaag thought the AIDS/HIV chapter fell short of addressing the needs of those who already suffer from the disease, and that basic health care services in places where AIDS is most rampant remain in such an abysmal state that simply throwing money at prevention is a stop-gap measure. David Evans, in another counter argument, doubted the figures presented and argued that there is an imperfect assessment of the burden the disease actually places on households.

Lomborg also neglects to distinguish which problems seem regional, or geographically specific, and those that are truly global in scope. For example, the control of HIV/AIDS, which is often managed regionally, tops the list as one with a “very good” chance to be adequately addressed, while global climate change initiatives are relegated to the “bad” category. And the solutions to combat each of these are overwhelmingly top-heavy and bureaucratic, rather than entrepreneurial. There is nothing in the book about bottom-of-the-pyramid approaches, private-public hybrids, or how global and local philanthropy can partner with governments and business sectors to tackle these issues.

Take the climate change initiatives, for example. The economists agree that potential solutions, such as the Kyoto Protocol, are unworkable and unrealistic, but eschew the fact that there must eventually be a new global standard for governments to enforce. They also ignore the possible impact of climate change on a whole range of issues: migration, for example, as some regions become less habitable, and the attenuating conflict, disease, or poverty that might result from this upheaval. There are, indeed, major holes in Kyoto, but by relegating it to last place in “solvability,” there is a risk that what is perhaps the largest and most damaging issue will remain ignored because of its complexity.

But let’s not get stuck on Kyoto, since it is a minor focus of this book. If Lomborg’s treatise has a redeeming quality, it is the idea that some of these global crises are not as daunting as they first appear — when painted in numbers. (What’s $50 billion when the cost of the war in Iraq could reach $1 to $2 trillion by the time all is said and done?) A mere $27 billion dollars could prevent about 28 million cases of HIV/AIDS by 2010, say the economists. Another $12 billion could address the problem of micronutrient deficiency in a majority of the developing world. The economists don’t offer an overall number for trade liberalization, but estimate its benefits could be up to $2.4 billion per year. Lastly, just $10 billion would be needed to dramatically reduce the number of cases of malaria in developing countries. Clearly, Lomborg and his cohorts should get in touch with Bill and Melinda Gates.

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Iraq’s art hero

Through dictatorship, war, occupation, insurgency, and counterinsurgency, Esam Pasha kept painting.


Iraqi artist Esam Pasha at his studio in New London, Connecticut.

On a warm afternoon in early March, I went to New London, Connecticut to visit Esam Pasha, a 30-year-old Iraqi artist. At the time, Esam lived in an apartment at the Sapphire House, a renovated mansion, owned by the Griffis Art Center, where he was an artist-in-residence. I had met Esam in January at a gallery in New York’s SoHo district, which had opened an exhibit featuring Esam and five others, billed as the first opportunity for Americans to view works by leading contemporary Iraqi artists.

Only six months prior to the exhibit opening, Esam was still living in Iraq. The juxtaposition raised several questions. How did Esam become an artist in the first place? How did he end up in the United States? I also wondered how Esam’s experiences could serve as a window to view and understand Iraq’s past and present.

Sitting in the living room of the Sapphire House, over coffee and countless cigarettes, we began talking. A former national judo champion and discus thrower, Esam has an imposing presence that is offset by a calm demeanor. Flecks of grey in his beard make him look older than he is. Born in Baghdad in 1976, he is one of seven children. His parents divorced in the 1980s. His grandfather, Nuri al-Said, was prime minister until he was assassinated in 1958 as part of the coup that toppled the Iraqi monarchy.

Growing up, Esam studied English at school, which he perfected by watching American movies, and then taught himself three other languages. On weekends, he prowled a book market on Mutanabi Street. It was there that he caught his first glimpses of Western art. He devoured a wide range of art books, but was particularly drawn to Klimt, Miro, Rembrandt, and Durer.

Esam lived through the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, the 1991 Gulf War, and the ensuing sanctions. He worked odd jobs as a teenager in construction, carpentry, and commercial painting before becoming a full-time artist in 1999.

During this period, Iraq suffered years of economic hardship and isolation, and as such, only two art galleries in Baghdad remained open. The only patrons were United Nations and NGO workers who typically requested works depicting scenes of “exotic Arabia.” Even these pieces fetched prices so low it was hardly worth the time and expense of artistry, Esam said. “You would get more money if you just broke a bronze sculpture down and instead sold the bronze.”

The intelligence service, or mukhabarat, kept a watchful eye on Iraqi artists for any sign of dissent. Being seen with foreigners raised suspicions. When Esam got a commission from the U.N’s Baghdad office for a panorama, the mukhabarat made it clear that he should not paint anything political. Stick to landscapes or abstracts, they said.

A sense of paranoia became widespread. Some friends warned Esam about a painting he had lying around his apartment of an eagle soaring down. Government censors could interpret the eagle as symbol of the regime’s demise, they said.

Any remnants of an authoritarian state quickly dissolved as the American military moved into Baghdad. In its place emerged a bonanza of opportunity, particularly for an English-speaker, like Esam.

Esam remembers the early days after the U.S. invasion. After the fall of Baghdad, the Americans set up a base near his home. Officials began recruiting local Iraqis for hire. Esam waited in a separate queue for English-speakers. “I thought I’d have to fill out a lot of paperwork and would hear back from them in a few days or weeks,” he recalls. In less than an hour, though, he was shaking hands with an army captain who hired him on the spot.

After the war, people’s spirits were lifted, Esam said. His fellow Iraqis could express opinions, go to cafés, talk politics, and publish newspapers and magazines. In September, Esam landed a commission to paint the first public mural in post-Saddam Iraq.  

But before he could paint anything, he had to rip down a portrait of the former leader. “I kept peeling back layers,” Esam said, shaking his head. “But each time I did, I discovered another portrait. It took me days before I got to the bottom.”

His thirteen-foot tall mural, described by one critic as “yellow, orange, and purple paint swirling around images of doves, traditional Baghdadi architecture, and the sun rising over a sky-blue mosque,” came to symbolize a crystalline break between past and present, despair and hope. He purposely avoided black paint in this piece because “we needed color, after all those years of suffering.” He named the mural “Resilience.”

However, as security deteriorated by early 2004, Esam was getting nervous. Unlike some translators, he chose not to wear a mask. “My face was well-known,” Esam says. At that point, he began thinking of coming to America.

A Connecticut art dealer, Peter Hastings Falk, read about Esam’s mural and took notice. “I had to find out who this guy was,” Falk recalls now. Hebegan emailing Esam about organizing an exhibit of Iraqi artists.

Esam applied for and was selected as an artist-in-residence at the Griffis Art Center, which he had learned about from Falk. In June 2005, Esam flew to JFK. He initially stayed with Steve Mumford, a New York artist who had worked in Iraq. Falk recalls first meeting Esam, who was carrying a traditional rug he had brought from Iraq as a gift for a friend. “Steve has a walk-up apartment, and we had to lug that rug up those flights of stairs. It weighed a ton.”

When asked if he had experienced any culture shock, Esam said no, but then apologized, sensing his answer was disappointing. “I knew all about Dunkin’ Donuts and Waffle House. I even had Starbucks,” he says, alluding to the time he spent on U.S. army bases in Iraq.    

Since coming to the U.S., he has visited many of the soldiers he worked with at their homes around the country. “We are real friends,” Esam says. “We’re not just polite to each other. When we call each other, it’s not a courtesy call. It’s to discuss real things.”

In his studio behind the Sapphire House, Esam discusses the practical difficulties of being an artist in Iraq. “During the embargo, I had to paint with whatever materials were available, mostly industrial oil paint. It wasn’t the best quality,” he says matter-of-factly. “Paint knives were hard to find, so I just started making my own, but even then, I used them sparingly.”

During the war, Esam was unable to buy oils or acrylics. After scouring his apartment for supplies, he noticed a box of crayons. So he heated a few and began applying the hot wax to a canvas. Pleasantly surprised by the results, he continued working until he produced a triptych, “Tears of Wax.” Falk later told Esam that the technique he employed, using molten wax, has a long history. Known as “encaustic painting” — the ancient technique was actually used by artists in what is present-day Iraq, among other places.

What stands out in Esam’s works is the swirling of color, conveying a sense of unease that runs through his repertoire. The images he employs form a discomfiting tableau: waiting vultures, floating coffins, faceless women, thrashing whales.

The dark mood is a stark reminder that the young artist’s lifetime spans the rule of Saddam Hussein. While Esam is adamant that he does not infuse politics into his art, he does not shy away from contemporary themes either. In one painting, he includes references to Iraq’s three distinct regions—marshes and reed homes for the south; minarets for the center; and mountains for the north. It is an attempt to stress that while differences exist, a national identity binds everyone.

Esam says the question he gets asked most often is whether conditions in Iraq are better or worse than portrayed by the media. Skirting the question, he prefers to talk about Iraqi culture—a topic he says is unfamiliar to most Americans. “It’s not surprising. For thirty years, we were pretty much cut off from everyone. And they were cut off from us. We didn’t have magazines, or satellite dishes, or Internet.”

The government no longer censors its artists, but limited exposure and security concerns make conditions tough, Esam says. The Internet has provided some relief. After the U.S. invasion, for instance, Esam sold several pieces to foreign clients on artvitae.com, a website for artists.

While Esam wants to return to Iraq, he has decided to stay in the U.S. as long as possible because he feels it is best for his career. At the same time, his decision to remain in the U.S. comes at a steep personal price. Esam says he greatly misses his family, all of whom remain in Iraq. Thinking about home, Esam sounds a bit homesick. “I miss just walking down the Tigris,” he says.

Esam has started building a new life. He has a girlfriend and travels to New York frequently to visit friends and museums. He likes New London and the people there, whom he says are “very friendly, kind of like Iraqis.” In July, Esam emailed me to let me know about an upcoming solo exhibition and talk he was giving at the University of Connecticut. He is also working on a memoir, which he hopes to get published.  

In an essay written when he was still in Iraq, Esam summarized his defiant spirit. “I have come to accept the daily electrical blackouts in Baghdad. On a good day, we would have one hour of electricity on and seven or more hours off. I have even come to accept the ever-present dangers of simply getting around Baghdad.” Concluding, he writes: “But I could not accept running out of pigments to create my art.”

Esam’s future, much like his country’s, is uncertain. If he has to return to Iraq, there will be much danger waiting and difficult conditions in which to work. But Iraqis, Esam says, are resilient. He has, after all, been through it before.

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Writer without borders

Shooting Water author Devyani Saltzman discusses her new memoir, Indian politics, and her global sense of self.


In her debut book, Shooting Water, Canadian-Indian writer Devyani Saltzman chronicles the personal and political tumult she endured during the making of Water, the third film in the Indian trilogy, along with Earth and Fire, by her director mother Deepa Mehta. As her mother faced death threats from Hindu nationalists and the disappointment of shutting down filming, the young author found an uncommon opportunity to reconcile her mixed heritage and the emotional rupture left by Mehta’s divorce from Saltzman’s father, Canadian filmmaker David Saltzman. Recently, InTheFray Magazine’s Anju Mary Paul took part in a group interview with Saltzman.

The interviewer: Anju Mary Paul, InTheFray Travel Editor
The interviewee: Devyani Saltzman, author of Shooting Water

Do you think that the upheaval that took place in the 2000 shoot brought you two [Mehta and Saltzman] closer together?

Absolutely. I was excited by the three months of being with her, and those three months were cut short when the film was shut down. We were in Varanasi for a month and a half total. I was in the room answering the phone when she got death threats and staying with her and watching her go through something very painful. And I think it definitely brought us closer together because we had to support each other because all of a sudden, her country and a country where my grandparents live, a country I love, was turning against us. So it was a very violent time and it definitely made us stronger as mother and daughter. But it also cut short our reconnection. So I actually left for Canada and she went to West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh, two different states, to try to make the film, though it didn’t work out. We left with these two minutes of silent footage that have never been seen, that are in our archives, with the original cast. And I was there on the day we shot those two minutes and a mob was outside chanting, “Water picture murdibad!” (Kill the Water picture!)

You acknowledge in the book that George Lucas supported the film. Were you disappointed that not many people in India itself spoke about your right to make the film?

There were a few artists, maybe not enough who supported it. The government at the time, which was the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu right, was strong enough to drown that out. There were actually a lot of lay people who stood up in support in Calcutta when we were shut down. A whole number of sex workers, women, marched the streets of Calcutta with black cloths tied around their mouths, symbolic of the suppression of freedom of speech…. One of the big things for me was that the BBC, the Guardian, the American press all reported, “Controversial film shut down” in 1999. But nobody asked the deeper question: Why? So, for me, and with my writing background, this was the opportunity to go into depth about Hindu nationalism, and what happened with Fire, which was her first film in the trilogy. And there’s a great quote — do you know Pavan K. Varma? He’s a writer and member of the Indian Foreign Service and he once said, “All nations indulge in a bit of myth-making to bind their people together.” And I love that quote because I think Water was one of the casualties of maintaining this myth of a Hindu India, an India without widows, an India without this really dark side of its history — especially in terms of its women — and so I wanted that story out there.

Why do you think the state government cleared the script in the first place?

Because I think that the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which any foreign production has to give their script to, genuinely loved it. I think it was really a ruckus started through the RSS and then it just snowballed…out of being just about the content of the script and into this idea of Hindu nationalism and purity and preserving the Ganges.

The writing is so lucid and so emotionally confessional. Did you keep a running diary or did you just recap how you felt?

A mixture of both. I’ve always been a diary writer so I did have a diary and research going back to press from the time — the Indian press and foreign press for 1999 — and photography and memory. I work through visual imagery so, when I wrote, I just tapped into that.

So it’s not like you went back every night and …

Not at all. I didn’t know I was going to write this book until 2004. The book that inspired me to be a non-fiction writer was Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish To Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with our Families. When I was 18, I worked at a photo agency in New York and I called up the New Yorker from a street corner and said, “Can I speak to Philip Gourevitch?” thinking that nothing would happen, but they put me through! So I said, “Hi, I’m a student. You don’t know me but I loved your book and I want to meet you.” And he met me for two hours and we had coffee on Columbus Avenue and we talked about writing. I’d thought he was a Ph.D. with a specialty in African politics. And he was like, “Yeah, I studied art but I dropped out, went to Cornell, worked as a waiter.” He showed me that you don’t have to have that credential to write. You just need your eyes and a pen.

What was the actual impetus to write this book?

It was two-pronged. For many years, I’d been feeling this is a great story and this film is finally out there. And emotionally, I talk about there being this existential weight, years of having to deal with being an only child and the guilt of divorce and it had to go somewhere. And so I just started writing. But I don’t know why that particular confluence of timing worked. A Canadian publisher said, we’re interested but you’ve only written 5,000 word articles. This is a 90,000 word book. Do three test chapters. And I did and they bought it. That’s just incredible luck but I had an editor who believed in me, so it kind of came together.

Given that your parents were filmmakers, were you ever tempted to go into movies?

If anything, it would be documentaries. But I’ve never wanted to be a filmmaker; I’ve always wanted to be a writer.

How do you think your mother transcended her anger through this film?

She basically went away and did Bollywood/Hollywood, and I think that was how she released her anger about the film, to go do this really irreverent comedy. And then she always said that she couldn’t make Water until she didn’t feel any anger because she didn’t want to taint the purity of the script. And Sri Lanka (where the film was eventually shot) gave us the distance, because it was a Buddhist-Sinhalese country and we were removed from India. It gave her a little more space to approach the film.
In terms of us, I had to deal with the guilt of a daughter choosing a father, and she had to deal with the guilt of why I chose him. As you know from reading the book, I never write about it in a linear fashion, it’s more of an emotional, literary experience. But it was realizing that I always loved her, that divorce tears people apart but, ultimately, underneath it, there’s a love, and it’s about finding that love again. And that’s the emotional journey. I learned to respect her, watching her as a director. And she learned to respect me as an adult, starting to work in photography and writing. So we just learned to find that love underneath the choices we all make.

You introduced yourself as half-Canadian, half-Indian. Is that really how you see yourself? Fifty-fifty?

Do you know Pico Iyer’s Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home? It sounds corny but I like the words “global soul” because I did grow up that way. My father’s Jewish. His parents — my grandparents — emigrated from the Ukraine, escaping the pogroms. My mother’s Punjabi. I was born in Toronto. I went to Oxford. I lived in England for three years. And I’d like to think of a world that’s borderless. People are always scared of their identity not being one or the other. I went through a little bit of that confusion but ultimately, it’s what made me a writer. That in-between space enriched me. So Canadian is the passport I carry, but I’m a global soul.

To read Anju Mary Paul’s review of Shooting Water, click here.

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No place like home

Devyani Saltzman searches for belonging in Shooting Water.


Marriages break apart so quickly and so often these days that we too easily forget how traumatic a divorce can be for the children caught in the crossfire. Devyani Saltzman’s first book, Shooting Water — a memoir, serves to jog our memories in a terribly effective manner, leaving readers heart-bruised and aching for the girl she was when her parents divorced.

An only child, Saltzman was asked to choose which parent she wanted to live with. She chose her father, Canadian filmmaker and producer David Saltzman. “As an eleven-year-old with a child’s instincts, it seemed only natural to choose him over my mother,” she writes. “I felt safe with him, while my mother’s pain and anger sometimes scared me.”

Saltzman’s mother, acclaimed Canadian Indian film director Deepa Mehta, never forgave her. And even though she knew instinctively that she had made the right choice, Saltzman never forgave herself either.

For the next eight years, Saltzman drifted anchorless through life — torn between her mother and father, their two homes in Toronto, and their two countries, India and Canada. On the surface, she was the good daughter: studious, polite, and docile. But inside her, there was “a lonely space filled with guilt and with the fear of disappointing my parents,” she explains early on in her book. “I wished more than anything to escape this vicious cycle and somehow break free.”

Saltzman’s chance came in 1999, when Mehta, who was about to start filming the first installment in her elemental trilogy on India — Water, Earth, and Fire, invited her then-18-year-old daughter to work with her on the set as an assistant cameraperson. Shooting Water is, above all else, the personal story of their reconciliation. But it is also an eyewitness account of the struggles Mehta encountered in making her film.

Water focuses on the widespread problem of Hindu widow abuse that existed in pre-Independence India. Many people know of the now-outlawed practice of sati, or widow burning, an ancient Indian tradition where a dead man’s wife is placed on his funeral pyre to burn to death alongside his corpse. But few are aware of the equally ancient tradition of widow abuse and neglect that is still very much present in modern-day India. Many widows are cast out or exploited by their families for the bad luck of having had their husbands die. Often they travel to holy cities like Vrindavan, dubbed the “city of widows,” by the banks of the Ganges and settle in ashrams where they must beg daily for alms to survive.

Saltzman writes about visiting a widows’ ashram hidden in the basement of a guesthouse soon after arriving in the northern Indian city of Varanasi, where Water was to be filmed. “They all wore dirty white saris and heavily darned shawls,” she notes. “Their heads were shaved … The room was freezing, but there was no direct sunlight or heaters to keep them warm.” These conditions were pretty much the same as those Mehta wanted to depict in Water. But two days into production, the film set was burned to the ground by Hindu fundamentalist protesters who accused the film of being part of a foreign conspiracy to besmirch the image of Hinduism. Mehta and her cast received death threats and the state government that had initially cleared the script retracted its permission.

The outcry against the film reflected the tumultuous changes India was going through at the time. The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) controlled the government, and Hindu militancy and fundamentalism were on the rise even as India as a country was modernizing and Indians were growing more self-confident as citizens of a rising economic powerhouse.

Saltzman ventures into stormy waters (pun intended) when she takes on the topic of the destructiveness of blind nationalism in the book, using the reception her mother’s film was given to illustrate her point. “You can’t pollute the Ganges! The Ganges will not tolerate your dirty Water!” shout female protestors waving their rolling pins in the air outside the film crew’s hotel in Varanasi. Saltzman says the women had never read the screenplay, nor did they know the plot of the movie; they were protesting simply because they believed their religion, and their nation, to be under attack. Both in her book and in an interview to promote the book, Saltzman cites a quote from Pavan K. Varma, a noted author and civil servant in India: “All nations indulge in a bit of myth-making to bind their people together.” According to Saltzman, “Water was one of the casualties of maintaining the myth of a Hindu India, an India without widows, an India without this really dark side of its history — especially in terms of its women.” That troubled period in India’s history has since passed but there are many other sacred cows that still exist within the country. (Recently, the Congress Party threatened legal action against a proposed biopic on Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the political party and the most powerful woman in India.)

But even as the political terrain was changing under their feet, mother and daughter were not able to change enough individually to reconcile. Saltzman recounts their struggles to heal their broken relationship: the tentative overtures toward one another, the lapses into shouting matches and bitter accusations of “You never loved me!” The conflicting demands on their time fuel this disconnect: Mehta is busy trying to salvage her film. Saltzman, meanwhile, is falling in love — for the first time in her life — with a young man who is so right (and so wrong) for her that you cringe following the progress of their affair, already seeing its inevitable conclusion. But the 19-year-old — so desperate to belong to someone — is blind to all of this and moons over her love when she should be with her mother.

So mother and daughter separate once again, their issues unresolved. Mehta travels to other parts of India, to search for alternative locations for filming. Saltzman returns to Canada, and then to Oxford University, to study anthropology.

Four years later, in 2004, the two receive a second chance at reconciliation when Mehta secures sufficient funding from the Canadian government to film Water in Sri Lanka. She invites her daughter, fresh out of college, to join her during the filming.

Everything is touch-and-go once again. Both India and Sri Lanka are in the middle of national elections. In India’s case, it appears the BJP will win a second term, putting an end to the country’s experiment in secularism. And in Sri Lanka, the outcome of the elections will determine the fate of the ceasefire with the Tamil Tigers. Fear that word of the film might torpedo it again results in the replacement of all the major actors and the film being given a fake name — Full Moon. And mother and daughter start their reconciliation almost from scratch again.  

The film is completed as Saltzman and her mother continue to oscillate between healing and hurting each other. But when, during yet another argument, her mother shouts at her, “Why don’t you just call your father. You chose him,” Saltzman is able for the first time to break the cycle of recrimination. “I looked at her sitting on the couch, rigid with anger. My own anger was numbed, but it was tinged with a clarity I hadn’t felt before. I didn’t run away to cry, or to call my dad.” Instead she tells her mother, “Mom, I chose Dad because it felt safer. I was 11. I’m 24 now.” And the process of forgiveness on both sides begins.

In Shooting Water, the parallels between the rebirth of the film and the rebirth of the mother-daughter relationship are as stark as can be, but so are the differences. In life — unlike in film — you can’t edit out the sad or painful scenes; there are no retakes. Saltzman chronicles all of the arguments, misunderstandings, betrayals as only the daughter of two filmmakers can: steeped in the aesthetics of film, with an eye for tight scenes and an ear for crisp dialogue. She writes with a deceptive simplicity — keeping her descriptions as spare as her mother’s screenplays — that reveals a deep, personal understanding of loss, guilt and the need for belonging. In a telling scene, she describes, how her parents flew from Canada to London when she suffered a nervous breakdown before her final examinations, undone by the realization that she could no longer be the perfect A-student for them. “They had sat together, side by side, on the itchy red synthetic seats of the Oxford Tube, an express bus service between the city and the university. And they had talked about me. They had talked about me as parents are supposed to talk of their children, perhaps for the first time.”

Perhaps the only flaw with Saltzman’s book is that it’s more descriptive than analytical — once again, very similar to her mother’s films. She does not discuss in great depth the rise of Hindu nationalism in India: When and how did it start? How does one combat it? What does it mean for minorities in India? This is a disappointment since patriotic hubris is an issue that will only become more important as India and other Asian countries continue to rapidly modernize their economies.

Equally, Saltzman’s disarming honesty about her own thoughts and actions doesn’t extend to her mother. She never quite explains why Mehta was always so angry or what caused the break-up of her marriage in the first place. Was it because Mehta’s start as a director was on the ascendant, causing professional tensions with her husband? Or something else? We aren’t told. There is a sense of conversations not yet attempted between mother and daughter — a distance still not bridged — and the story is weaker for it.

Despite these lapses, working on and writing about Water helped Saltzman carve out a new identity for herself, one no longer at war with her complicated heritage. When asked recently if she thinks of herself as more Canadian than Indian, Saltzman replied that she sees herself as a bit of a “global soul,” after the essayist Pico Iyer’s book Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home. “I’d like to think of a world that’s borderless,” she says. “People are always scared of their identity, not being one or the other, or how can you be this or that. I went through a little bit of that confusion but, ultimately, it’s what made me a writer. That in-between space enriched me. So Canadian is the passport I carry, but I’m a global soul.”

And with that, Devyani Saltzman leaves listeners heart-warmed that this child of divorce and difference can so confidently claim a space in this world — even if it is an “in-between space” — as her very own.

To read Anju Mary Paul’s interview of Shooting Water author Devyani Saltzman, click here.

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Commentary

Lou Dobbs is right

Outsourcing is on my agenda, too.


Lou Dobbs is right. So is that cartoon engineer Dilbert: We have to do something about the trend of American jobs going overseas. I realized this as I was inspecting the new data center in New Delhi for my U.S. company, Insituform Technologies, Inc.

With 2,500 employees, Insituform Technologies may not be the largest company in America, but we clean water in 40 countries using dozens of currencies and 80 pieces of intellectual property. The demands on our information technology are intense.

In addition to paying all the taxes, adhering to local regulations, and monitoring currency fluctuations, we have to track equipment, materials, and labor from our 100 crews that measure productivity and daily costs around the world.

As demand for clean water has grown throughout the globe, so has our business. Last year in the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency reported 73,000 sewer leaks. Many more go undiscovered and therefore unreported.

As our business grows, so do the needs of our data management operations.

When we learned we needed a better system, our first choice was to develop and run it here in America, but that didn’t last long. We discovered that transferring our data operations to India would not only give us the same capability for less money, but we would also have resources left to upgrade our system’s sophistication, reliability, redundancy, and security.

So we replaced the nine employees in our information technology department with highly educated professionals half a world away that make $9 an hour.

It was not a popular decision in or outside of our company. From Dilbert to Dobbs, many critics see outsourcing as proof positive that corporate greed is ruining the country; transforming America into a nation that does nothing but “take in the world’s laundry.”

For us it is not about profits, but survival: Either we slash costs and improve productivity, or our customers will either have to eat the higher prices, or find someone else who offers services at a lower cost.

As I walked through our data center, I saw not only a possible future of America, but also its past.

The people working for us are highly educated and highly motivated. For many, it is the best job anyone in his or her village has ever had. They all dream of having more responsibilities, more skills, more money—and they all have a fierce desire to do what it takes to get them.

The combination of work ethic and entrepreneurship struck me as what Americans must have been like 100 years ago. The world seemed open, bright and full of opportunity for those with the desire to take it.

This is the spirit that made America the most prosperous nation in the history of the world. The attitude Indians learned from us and embrace with enthusiasm now seem to frighten many in this country.

It is ironic that 25 years ago, the Indians embarked on this course by discarding socialism, lowering taxes, and encouraging trade. They learned this from us too. Now we must learn it all over again from them.

Not being competitive is not an option for our company—or our country. In our company’s case, we may be laying off nine employees, but we are hiring at least 30 more.

In India we are not just transferring work, but finding new customers. We spent time talking to the water authorities there about cleaning up the holiest yet dirtiest river in the world, the Ganges. And we held similar talks with customers and suppliers in Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, and other parts of Asia.

As these countries grow, so does their demand for goods and services that we in America can provide better than anyone else in the world. But this will remain true only if we are willing to recognize what our value is and, above all, if we are willing to become fiercely competitive in order to provide them.

No one can make guarantees to any American company, at home or abroad, other than this: If we do not compete and make our products and services better, faster, and less expensive, we can and we will lose.

When President Kennedy met Prime Minister Nehru, he told him about the educational benefits the Peace Corps will have in India. Nehru replied, “Yes, I’m sure your young people will learn a lot.”

Those young people are now running the country. And it is time we start learning. Dilbert and Dobbs are right. We have to do something.

And that something is get better.

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Commentary

For couscous and conversation

An unlikely friendship is born across religious and generational divides.


On a trip with Mehdi to Asilah, a small town known for its arts and culture festival which occurs during the summer each year.

Nearly every afternoon I stumble out of the stifling Moroccan heat into the cool lobby of Residence Tarik, take the elevator up five floors, and ring the doorbell of apartment number 38. And nearly every afternoon I am greeted by the smiling face of my surrogate mother, Fatima*, and exclamations of “I missed you!” and “Where were you?” before being ushered inside for a cozy chat over a sumptuous lunch.

Though I’ve been in Morocco for only a year, this ritual of three-hour lunches with Fatima and her family now seems like something I’ve been doing my whole life.

Coming here was one of the biggest decisions I’ve ever made. Though I’d traveled a bit by myself, and had the support of my parents, choosing to move 3,000 miles from my beloved New England home—where I’d spent most of my life—was not easy. I wasn’t so much afraid of what I’d find upon arriving, but of what I could be giving up by not staying in Vermont. Nevertheless, I decided to pursue my ultimate adventure.

What I’d been most anxious about was making friends. I’d spent a few months studying Arabic in Morocco earlier and had no real trouble meeting people, but that was at a progressive, English-language university in the mountain village of Ifrane, where the students spend their weekends much like American college kids. Meknes—where I’d be teaching English at the American Language Center—was a totally different cultural environment. Located in the heart of the Middle Atlas Mountains with a population of 650,000, it’s a city full of tradition and paternalism. And unlike its big sisters Rabat and Casablanca, there isn’t much of a foreign community.

Fatima’s main salon where the family gathers for food and conversation as well as television watching and larger  events.

An invitation home

In the beginning, though, making friends was easy. I’d meet someone while exploring the city and quickly receive an invitation to coffee or Friday couscous. It all seemed simple enough, but after a while I noticed that many of these “friends” were more interested in either showing off their newfound American acquaintance or trying to turn me into a Moroccan, rather than enjoying me for who I was.

By the time the holy month of Ramadan rolled around, I was trying to decide between the many invitations I’d received from my female students with trepidition. Ramadan, the month of sawm (or fasting), is one of the five critical pillars of Islam and carries with it important traditions in Morocco. Each day at the sound of the muezzin, families gather to pray, and then break the fast that they’ve been observing all day. Piles of dates, glasses of fresh milk, harira soup and plenty of other goodies are laid out, with the choicest picks placed in front of guests. As the new young American teacher, all my students wanted the distinction of my visiting their homes for lftour, the “break-fast.”

I was still weighing my options when Mehdi, one of my male students, invited me to his family’s home for this special event. He was the first boy to do so. Intrigued, I said yes. And that was how I first met Fatima.

Posing for a photograph with Mehdi on a trip to the coast of Tangier, a major port of Morocco and the country’s closest link to Europe.

Breaking the fast

On the Sunday of my rendezvous with Mehdi, I was nervous.

In a country where the unemployment rate lingers at around 20 percent, many young Moroccan men have a habit of “chasing after passports,” so to speak. And though Mehdi wasn’t one of my best students, he was a charming one. He would often make off-color jokes during class using vocabulary my other students didn’t yet know––generally words I would never dream of teaching them—providing me with a bit of inside laughter during a difficult first semester dealing with teenagers more interested in flirting than learning English.

Searching through my closet for nearly thirty minutes, I finally decided on jeans and a pink sweater. After all, I wanted to be myself, and dressing up wasn’t going to win me any true friendships. I tied my hair back and wrapped a pink scarf over the front of my hair like a headband. At four o’clock in the afternoon, I headed out the door to meet Mehdi near the school.

When I found him leaning against an old Volkswagen, dressed head to toe in Adidas sportswear, I breathed a small sigh of relief that I’d chosen casual clothes. He greeted me with a kiss on each cheek, the traditional Moroccan greeting usually reserved for same-sex friends, but adopted by the younger, more Westernized generation as a greeting for all friends, regardless of gender. I let out another breath.

Mehdi and I spent the next couple of hours driving through parts of historic Meknes: the giant faux lake built by the tyrannical eighteenth century king Moulay Ismail, the dungeon where that same king kept his prisoners. Time passed quickly without any lingering awkwardness on my part, and soon I was being led to the door of his family’s fifth-floor apartment building in the French-built ville nouvelle of Meknes.

Upon entering, I drew in a quick breath. Most Moroccan homes I’d seen were decorated with plastic flowers, imported Chinese fabrics, and little glass trinkets and baubles. This one was quite different (which would later become a metaphor for the family itself). The rugs were luxurious, the lighting sublime. One section of the salon was furnished traditionally with oak banquettes and plush silk-covered cushions; the other section was a modern adaptation of a traditional Moroccan salon, with saffron-colored couches and a low round table. It had an airy yet cozy feel to it, as though it would be the perfect place to relax with a book. I was led into a smaller living room, more simply furnished, where Mehdi’s father was watching television. I was introduced and told to sit while we waited for the call to prayer that would signal the end of the day’s fast.

At the call, Mehdi, his brother and father excused themselves to go pray in the large salon while I waited alone. When the prayer ended after a few minutes, Mehdi returned and showed me to the kitchen where he introduced me to his mother, Fatima.

Fatima dressed me for a party in one of her finest caftans. Moroccan caftans are worn by women at weddings and other special ceremonies.

“You must eat!”

She was young-looking and plump, with rosy cheeks that gave her a sort of jolliness and betrayed her age (43). Her long hair was tied back and she wore an apron over her casual jeans and collared shirt. After kissing me warmly on both cheeks and uttering the requisite marhaba (welcome), she shuffled me to my seat, where she proceeded to pile my plate high with tiny pizzas, boiled eggs, traditional sweets, dates, and fruit.

I don’t know if it was the presence of Fatima or Mehdi, or the fact that this was the only Moroccan family I’d met that ate in their kitchen at a regular table and on chairs (as opposed to a salon of banquettes and a low, round table against which I’d always bump my knees), but I suddenly felt strangely at home, even as Fatima shouted “Eat! Eat!” and piled endless amounts of food onto my plate. I learned that she spoke English, but hadn’t practiced much since finishing her baccalaureate studies ten years earlier. She worked outside of the home as a French teacher in one of the poorest areas of Meknes, where I later learned she had spent the early years of her marriage.

After Ramadan ended and winter came around, I began spending more time with Fatima, and therefore more time at her home. At first, I found myself being invited to Friday couscous. Then, Tuesday paella. Soon, it was every day, whatever was being served, and I’d better have an excuse if I couldn’t make it. If I didn’t come, the next time I visited I’d be bombarded with questions from Mehdi’s father and brother, as well as Fatima, of course.

It wasn’t very long at all before lunch was just an excuse for having conversations with Fatima. I would come over before the meal, before her sons had returned home from school and her husband from work, and we would seat ourselves in the small living room, sometimes in front of the television, sometimes not. At first, our conversations centered around innocuous subjects—celebrities, music, Morocco, Arabic language—but it wasn’t long before we were discussing marriage, her children, and the subject I dreaded most: religion.

A Moroccan woman in hijab (traditional head covering worn by many Muslim women worldwide) and djellaba, a hooded Moroccan garment worn by both men and women, takes an afternoon stroll past Bab Mansour.

Home at last

During my time in Meknes, I have learned that many Moroccans—the older ones in particular—are fond of trying to make non-Muslim friends feel guilty about not converting to Islam. Even though Morocco is 99 percent Muslim, the government is fairly secular and there are bars aplenty, but most Moroccans still feel strongly about their religion and its traditions.

The parents of some of my students, my neighbors, even my co-workers, have lectured me on different aspects of Islam. I’m often asked why I don’t pray and how I can believe in God but not ascribe to one faith. I’ve even been told outright that I should just convert. I find it frustrating to be treated so patronizingly. I have read the Quran and have made a conscious decision about Islam rather than avoid it as I did Christianity in my youth.
Raised by two hippie parents who chose to reject their families’ Protestant faith, I spent most of my years growing up blissfully unaware of religion. Though I later found faith in God, I am secure in that faith alone rather than in any organized religion, and feel no need to join a formal practice.

I hated to admit it, but the idea that Fatima might try to convert me was often at the forefront of my mind during our initial months of getting to know each other. She was indeed devout, observing the five-times-a-day call to prayer and wearing the hijab. Although its necessity is a source of debate, the hijab is the headscarf worn by Muslimahs the world over in order to fulfill Islamic dress code, which states that only a woman’s hands and face should be visible. Fatima’s hijab—worn only outside the home and around male strangers—was stylishly tied under her chin and secured with a pin. During those first few months, I observed her wearing a variety of multicolored scarves, from leopard prints to orange silk.

One afternoon I was excitedly telling Fatima about an American Muslimah I’d met at a hip hop show the week before. I described how she wore her dress loose and comfortable, and her hijab loosely wrapped halfway back on her head, but fully covering her chest. I would often watch young Moroccan women, many of them walking around in tight jeans and tops, their faces covered in makeup, but hair and neck wrapped in a tight hijab, and shake my head at their hypocrisy.

As I explained to Fatima how the American wore her hijab, she told me that in her interpretation of the Quran, it is more important for the hijab to cover the chest (or “bosom”, as it is often translated from Arabic) and not so much the entire head. I was surprised to hear this, given the way it’s most frequently worn in Morocco, but she confessed that the manner in which the scarves are worn here is more cultural than religious. She informed me that despite the pressure many women place on each other to begin wearing the hijab at a young age, she didn’t start wearing one until recently. In other words, it had been an entirely personal decision. This, along with her opinion on how it should be worn, revealed her open-mindedness to me. And hearing those words from a Moroccan helped validate my own thoughts on the subject.

Another day, the television was tuned to Histoire, France’s answer to the History Channel. Fatima and I were watching a program on Israel. While I was trying to comprehend exactly what was being said—my French being almost nonexistent—Fatima began to talk about Israel and Palestine, a topic considered taboo in many circles and potentially controversial when discussed between a pious Muslim and a detached American agnostic.

But as she spoke, I soon began to realize once again that we had more in common than I had previously thought. Fatima told me that she disagreed with both sides of the dispute, and while I vigorously nodded my head, she added, “It is a land for everyone.”
It was an argument that was idealistic, utopian, and something I wholly believed in, but I had never found anyone—even during my liberal New York college days—who concurred with me in that belief.

These moments of harmony became more and more frequent. I would relate some piece of trivia or another, and we would share a laugh, or sometimes even a tear or two. In my life outside Fatima’s home, I still felt like an outsider—stared at on the street and shown off to people as “my friend the American.” But in Fatima’s house, I was now an insider. She began to teach me how to cook, asked me to help her with household tasks, and took me shopping. I was no longer a guest in the house, but a member of the family—complete with the familial duties of picking up after myself and coming home every day for lunch. Fatima even asked me to call her “mamati,” a word of affection which literally means “my mother” in Moroccan Arabic.

I also began to realize that my belief in God and my respect for her religion were enough for Fatima. She didn’t want to change me, to make me Moroccan or Muslim. She was satisfied with me being myself.

I still can’t say that I’m totally at home in Morocco. I still can’t get used to the way people drive. I find hypocrisy nearly everywhere; the fact that people sit around in cafés for hours complaining that the government isn’t doing anything to help blows my mind. But when I walk the two blocks every afternoon to Fatima’s house, take the elevator to the fifth floor and knock on her apartment door, I know that I am entering a sanctuary where I won’t be judged for what I do, say, think, or feel. And so it is that in a country where I am a distinct minority—ethnically, religiously, linguistically—I have found a family (and most importantly, a friend) that accepts me for exactly who I am.

*All names in this story have been changed at the request of those involved.

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News

Mashing potatoes while smashing the state

When Food Not Bombs anarchists band together to serve meals.


ABC No Rio lets FNB use their kitchen on Fridays and Sundays.

Observing a Food Not Bombs event makes it easier to shop for produce. The moment I touched slime when sorting through old broccoli, deciding which vegetables were safe to feed to the homeless, I realized the silliness of fretting over a dented pepper at the corner bodega.

On a Friday in April shortly before 1 p.m., there was no way inside ABC No Rio, the art and activism hangout on New York’s Lower East Side that lends its kitchen to Food Not Bombs. The doors, marked up with graffiti, were locked, but they also didn’t have handles or knobs. There was a set of four buzzers, but punching them accomplished nothing. A placard next to the stoop read “Culture of Opposition Since 1980.”

Someone spoke up from behind. “Are you here for Food Not Bombs?” A kid with long brown hair hanging across his left eye poked his head around the outside hallway that enclosed the stoop.

He introduced himself as Pat, a high school senior who, instead of going to class, had arranged to spend most of his school days working at the John Heuss House, a homeless drop-in center on Beaver street. For the last few Fridays, though, he’d also been helping out with Food Not Bombs.

Food Not Bombs exists in 46 of the United States and on six continents. Every branch operates independently, but shares the same guidelines: get local grocers to donate ugly produce and other unwanted food, cook up a vegetarian meal (the NYC group is vegan) and serve it to the needy, no questions asked. The ABC No Rio branch gets its food mostly from Perelandra Natural Foods in Brooklyn.

The local Food Not Bombs website says that it was founded on anarchist principles, without leaders or hierarchies. Every Friday and Sunday, anyone who wants to help out with Food Not Bombs can show up in front of ABC No Rio. “There was no walk-in tutorial,” Pat said of his first visit. “It was just, ‘pick up a knife and start cooking.’” When the food is ready, the group brings it over to Tompkins Square Park in the East Village and offers it to anyone who is hungry.

These tomatoes and onions didn’t make the cut due to the puffy white mold near the bottom of the box.

“Usually we talk while we’re making the food, so if you’re willing to cut a tomato they’ll probably tell you what you want to hear,” Pat suggested.

Pat kicked the door a few times and eventually sat down on the steps. He talked about his desire to start carrying rope so he could scale walls, about the origins of his Mao Zedong tee-shirt, which he bought as a novelty item in China, about what he called the self-righteousness of leftists and about Critical Mass, the monthly rally where bicyclists flood the streets of Manhattan to raise awareness for non-pollutant transportation. Pat would be in attendance with his bike that evening.

A college-age girl with the keys to ABC No Rio arrived a few minutes after 1 p.m., gave a brief hello and let us inside.

The house rules certainly didn’t ban writing on the walls; every vertical surface was covered with graffiti, and a blacklight in the hallway gave an intimidating glow to the cryptic art. The girl led us to the second floor kitchen, where someone had neatly written in marker on the door, “Food Not Bombs Mash the Potatos Smash the State.” (A superscript “E” was wedged into “Potatos” to fix the typo.) We finally introduced ourselves — her name was Rudi.

Diane helps prepare a tomato and tofu salad.

We went back downstairs to grab the groceries. Rudi pulled out the food from a sliding-door fridge: an extra-long milk crate full of red, orange, yellow and green peppers, a damp cardboard box of lettuce, broccoli and indiscernible foliage, a crate of cucumbers and squash and an industrial-size trash bag full of bread.

The menu is dictated by what they receive from the stores, and Rudi decided to make stuffed peppers because there were so many. Potatoes, she said, are a popular donation in the winter. A lot of the donations are bread and produce so there’s usually a need to buy extra ingredients. Today, rice would be needed to stuff the peppers.

Before cooking, the inedible vegetables had to be discarded. Most of the greens were too slimy to be used, and those that passed the loose standards still had some rotting at the tips, or were covered in brown juice, which had left a stench on everything in the box.

During the sorting, another girl, Rosie, arrived. She had brown-red hair in dreadlocks tied back in a ponytail, and wore eyeglasses and one of those belts with spiky metal studs. When a question arose about a pepper with a brown spot near the stem, Rosie shrugged and said, “It’s Food Not Bombs,” as if to suggest that anything that wasn’t bombs was passable for consumption.

A song by Oingo Boingo played on a boom box while everyone chopped peppers in the dining room and discussed their plans for the next few days — a party here and there, a benefit for May Day Books, the Livewire music and activist festival, the anti-war rally on Saturday and the May Day rally on Monday.

Gaylen strains some potatoes to be mashed.

Meanwhile, Rudi gave money to Rosie to go out and buy rice. “Leader” is too strong of a term for the group’s anarchist principles, but someone has to make sure everything goes as planned. Rudi, an American Studies major at Brooklyn College, has been “bottom-lining” since two Januarys ago. She started visiting ABC No Rio for their weekly punk shows. When her friend, who was in a punk band at the time, went on tour and passed the Food not Bombs job to Rudi’s roommates, they bailed at the last minute and asked Rudi to fill in. Since then, she’s only missed a handful of Fridays, which she blames on oversleeping.

Food Not Bombs will make a temporary move to St. Mark’s Church soon, Rudi said, while renovations are being done on ABC No Rio. After years of legal battles, the administrators at ABC No Rio purchased the building from the city last year, and work is needed to bring it up to code; Rudi pointed out a shoe-sized hole through to the ground floor next to the kitchen sink as a noteworthy issue, and other holes, dents and dilapidations could be seen throughout the building.

A new round of chopping began as another girl, Diane, arrived. Of the group, she had the most radical hairdo — chunks of it were variously shaded, and some of it was randomly clipped to the side of her head. She had been taking time off from The Gallatin School at NYU, and she wore a white shirt with ripped sleeves that said “I (heart) my adjunct professor” on the front. At a later event, she wore a hat that advertised “Balzac,” the balloon ball toy from the mid-90s. She grabbed a knife and chopped onions while Pat chopped garlic, two more items that had to be purchased, since Rudi said it was impossible to cook without them. In the kitchen, Rudi added the vegetables to a pot of tomato sauce. This stew would be added to the rice to create the stuffing for the peppers, which were soon to be placed in the oven.

An older guy with wavy blonde and gray hair named Roger arrived to drop off split pea soup. For the last three or four years, he’s been donating extra food from a local Catholic Worker community. He waxed nostalgic about anarchy in the old days, when the movement was small enough that everyone knew each other. Once the dining room table was clear of stems and stalks, Rudi asked Pat to carry the day’s trash down to the corner, warning him not to get busted for unauthorized dumping. Pat asked me to keep an eye out, but then rushed ahead to the west street corner. He only took a few steps before spotting an officer, and quickly turned around, muttering an expletive, and heading to the opposite end of the block, where he placed the bag down next to a city trash can — it would not fit inside.

The food was almost ready to go, so Pat stepped out behind the building to select a shopping cart from ABC No Rio’s courtyard, which was at least 25 feet wide and 50 feet long with graffiti on every wall. A city parks sign that once belonged to ABC Playground — “No Rio” was painted in between the two words — was wedged between two rusty window bars, but so much of the sign was suspended in air that it seemed a minor gust might dislodge it.

The group hauls the food to Tompkins Square Park. The sturdy undercarriage of the red cart is great for carrying bulky pantry items, like bread and crackers.

There were three shopping carts outside, but Pat had instructions to pick from the two larger ones: a silver cart from Waldbaums and a red cart of unknown origin. He selected the red cart for its sturdier undercarriage and brought it out to the street to load up. The group left ABC No Rio at around 4:15 p.m., pushing the cart packed with a tray of stuffed peppers, a bucket of leftover stuffing, a tub of split pea soup, some plastic bowls, plates and forks and an industrial size trash bag full of bread.

“We’re not really pro or con anything outwardly,” Rudi said on the way to the park. Some Food Not Bombs groups give out activist literature along with the meals, but the New York City group only focuses on food. “I guess what’s radical about Food Not Bombs is that we get everything for free, we cook it for free and we serve it for free. But the most radical thing is that we don’t ask anything of the people we serve it to.”

Legally, a permit is required to do this kind of work, and Rudi said that Food Not Bombs never bothered to get one, because doing so costs money. Besides, legit soup kitchens like the nearby Trinity’s Service and Food for the Homeless have to buy produce locally. Carolyn Williams, who runs the kitchen and pantry there (and who has sampled Food Not Bombs cuisine), said that she relies on monetary donations and an annual stipend from the state. Food Not Bombs, on the other hand, relies on what would otherwise have been thrown away.

Rudi admitted that the lack of permit and paperwork, the stolen shopping cart, the street dumping and the state of the kitchen means that almost every aspect of Food Not Bombs is illegal. They’ve gotten in trouble with police before, Rudi said, and on Sundays, which are busier than Fridays, food is served outside of the park.

Rudi gets the impression that the police don’t really want to come down hard on them, which isn’t always the case at other branches. Food Not Bombs’ website says that co-founder Keith McHenry has been arrested over 100 times for serving food. On a more extreme level, the Los Angeles Times reported in March that the FBI’s Denver office listed Food Not Bombs as an anarchist group that may be associated with terrorism.

The cart was wheeled up to the southeast side of the park near the chess tables — the usual spot, Rudi said. People were hanging around, and a tall man wearing a woolen newsboy hat, patchwork pants and one of those cowboy jackets with two-way curving arrows on the breasts walked over. “The apple of my eye!” he exclaimed, and gave Rudi a hug. She greeted him by name — Manny — as he examined the food.

While they were talking, an older woman with thick blonde and gray hair walked over to the cart, inspected the contents, grabbed a bowl and served herself. Rudi, Rosie and Diane started serving as people lined up by the shopping cart. Once the initial crowd was fed, Pat, Diane and Rosie took portions for themselves.

It was a beautiful, cloudless day, temperature in the mid-60s. Rudi said that Food Not Bombs serves all year, rain or shine. In the winter, not as many people volunteer, but not as many people are in the parks either.

A man with a duffle bag slung over his shoulder and a boom box in his hand walked over. He acted as if it was his duty to provide music, and as soon as Rudi acknowledged his presence, he punched the play button and heavy metal music blared. The man nodded slightly and stared off into the distance. I tried to talk to him, but he just looked back, confused. “I can’t hear you, man,” he said, pointing to the speakers, “It’s right in my face.”

As AC-DC screamed through the stereo, another man who called himself “Black Jaximus” complimented the music and growled a few comical poems about himself, his sexual exploits and his warrior prowess. Amused by the ramblings, the man with the boom box told Jaximus that he had two questions for him, “What are you on, and can I have some of it?” Jaximus explained that he was about to run to the liquor store, and that he was willing to share.

Rudi realizes that some of the people she feeds have drug and alcohol problems, but said that it wasn’t her place to judge them. “The people that we serve in the park don’t eat healthy food like that otherwise, they don’t eat vegetables or stuff that’s good for them. The best service I can give to them is to give them healthy food once a week, and then let them sort their own shit out.”

Some diners help themselves.

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Commentary

Homelessness hits home

The fragility of the American dream.


The intersection of Telegraph Avenue and Bancroft Way on the edge of the campus at the University of California at Berkeley.

At the corner of Telegraph and Bancroft sits a guy, cross-legged, as if he is meditating the countless pedestrians that rush by on their way to the University of California at Berkeley campus. The man has a dirty face, a scraggly beard, and tattered clothes. He is homeless; he needs a good bath, and a nice warm meal.

Yet none of the passersby seems to notice him, even though his life is just as sacred as that of the success-bound college students with their Cal–emblazoned gear and khaki shorts. If you listen carefully, you can hear this man utter a greeting and a “God bless you,” at times sounding more heartfelt than the President of the United States during the state of the union address. There may be wars being waged on other political and social fronts throughout the world, but here, there is none against homelessness and poverty.

When I came to this country eleven years ago, I was shocked by the sight of homeless people on the streets. In the Netherlands, few people are homeless, and those you do see lingering in the streets at night are probably homeless by choice. So coming here, I couldn’t help staring at homeless people out of fascination. Why were they living under bridges and in the corners of monumental buildings?

Hanging out outside Crepes-A-Go-Go in Berkeley.

“Look away, don’t make eye contact”

That was the usual advice, since the last thing you want to do is provoke a homeless man. He could be mentally ill, after all. “Don’t mess with homeless people,” was the mantra of indifference rooted in the perception that homeless people were probably there for a reason. So I looked away, and lived out the American dream in a quaint suburban house with an American husband and two blond cherubs, my Dutch-American children. On our trips into the city, I no longer stared at the toothless faces and the grimy hands that extended towards us from below on the sidewalks. I even told my children to look away and ignore the problem.

Homelessness was as far removed from our quiet middle-class lives as the moon is from the sun.

But then, on a glorious suburban day, our polished world caved in during the dot-com crash. Within months, we saw our reserves dwindle. Paying the bills became increasingly difficult. And after two and a half years of unemployment, scraping by on menial jobs and macaroni and cheese, I realized how easy it was to lose everything. Homelessness was not exclusive to the losers, the outcasts and the mentally ill. Homelessness could happen to boring suburbanites who hit a patch of bad karma.

People like us.

Seeing again

We still had a roof over our heads, but the future of our house and our health insurance were the demons that kept us awake. We anticipated the abyss, an abyss I had become all too familiar while helping out in a soup kitchen.

At first I was too busy helping out with the cooking and serving, but as these tasks became more routine, I had time to observe the haunted souls who dropped in. For the first time in years, I did not look away, but stared and registered.

There was a single mother with three children who should have been in school at that hour. They were all coughing, and although they were probably living out of their car or sleeping in a flee-infested shelter, the mother insisted on manners – the manners of a society that had completely abandoned them.

“Johnny, put your hand in front of your mouth when you cough.”

“Ellen, darling, use your napkin.”

“Paul, say ‘thank you.’ Now listen, let’s pray and thank the Lord for this
food.”

The children put their dirty hands over the white paper plates, closed their eyes and surrendered to the tranquil moment ordered by their mother. My eyes wandered off to a boy my son’s age who walked in alone. I filled his plate and asked whether his parents would be coming. He looked at me, both suspicious and afraid. The staff had instructed us not to ask questions.

The boy was silent, so I did not press him for an answer as to why he was there. I was curious though, and bringing a second dessert, I sat down with him and asked him about school.

“Don’t go to school much anymore,” he grumbled. “Both my parents work, but there is little food in the house, and my mother thinks it more important to come here. This is my first hot meal this week.”

At the end of the meal, I looked up as a woman walked in, impeccably dressed in a pearl necklace and high heels – the kind of woman one might expect to see in a bistro downtown. I shot a glance at our staff leader for the day, a Vietnam vet whose stories could fill the pages of a novel, although he never talks about the war. When the woman walked away to find a private corner – some of which carry a urine scent so heavy it made me gag, the staffer told me, “You know, we’re not here to judge. We’re here to feed. God knows where she’s at.”

“Maybe she lost her job and has to pay her parents’ nursing home bills, while also having to provide for her own family,” he added. “Judging is easy, feeding is a whole lot harder.”

As he said this, a man scraped the food off his plate into a plastic bag under his table and returned to fill up again. That was against the rules, but I didn’t report it, for that would have been a form of judging too. If the bag of food would tide him over for the rest of the day, I didn’t care about rules.

I struck up a conversation with a couple holding a newborn baby in their arms. They lived on the streets, but were remarkably upbeat for people who were raising a baby in the elements.

“We’re okay, really,” said the 19-year-old woman, whose eyes were bloodshot.

“The worst part is that people in the streets don’t look at us anymore,” she said. “They look away as if we’re dirty, or worse, as if we’re air. The baby attracts more attention, but as soon as we catch someone’s eye, they look away again. We might as well be dead.”

An elderly woman thanked us for the meal as she walked out. Her mouth had holes where her teeth should be. Her hair is a tangled web. And her T-shirt proclaims: “Proud to be an American.”

“Interesting T-shirt you’ve got there,” I said, unable to resist in this basement of America’s downtrodden. She caught my irony and said, “Honey, I never bought it. Got it second-hand. Don’t care much for the text, but I like the colors. God bless you.”

A month later my husband landed a job with a software company. We have slowly been able to crawl away from the snake pit of potential homelessness and hunger.

Now, I make eye contact with every homeless person I see.

And if I happen to be carrying food, I give some to the man who’s sitting at the intersection of Bancroft and Telegraph.

He is always grateful and has the grace to acknowledge me. He does so even when I don’t give him anything at all.

He’s just homeless, and still human.

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Reviews

No Easy Walk

In Sweet Freedom, Doug Tjapkes recalls the long, faith-filled journey to overturn Maurice Carter’s wrongful conviction.


On December 20, 1973, off-duty police officer Tom Schadler was shot and injured at the Harbor Wig and Record Shop in Benton Harbor, Michigan. In a hotel room a block away, Maurice Carter, was just waking up. The unassuming and soft-spoken Carter was a high school dropout, down-on-his-luck and scouting the neighborhood in an attempt to relocate from the rough streets of his native Gary, Indiana. Local police picked him up as he exited the hotel and asked him to walk past the Harbor Wig and Record Shop’s front window, where Gwen Jones, an employee who had witnessed the shooting, declared that the light-skinned Carter did not resemble the darker-skinned perpetrator in size, shape or color—and he was released.

But the case remained embarrassingly unsolved, and Carter was arrested in 1975 after a friend perjured himself, fingering Carter as the culprit of the 1973 shooting in an attempt to escape drug charges. In spite of a dearth of physical evidence and flimsy testimony, the all-white jury sentenced Carter to life on a charge of “assault with intent to murder a police officer.” For two decades, he languished in prison—until retired broadcast journalist Doug Tjapkes walked into his life in 1992. In Sweet Freedom: Breaking the Bondage of Maurice Carter, Tjapkes recounts the painstaking fight to clear Carter’s name and bring to justice the true culprit, as well as the unlikely friendship that developed between activist and prisoner as their lengthy battle unfolded. “No arrest was made for two years, which was not a good thing in a racially troubled area where a black man had shot and injured a white cop,” says Tjapkes, who was introduced to Carter through Floyd Caldwell, another wrongfully convicted prisoner. “This case needed closure.”

Continue reading No Easy Walk →

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Commentary

Telling tales about India

Beyond poverty and spirituality, a student reveals the hidden side of India.


The Saturday market along the main road through tiny Fatehpur Sikri brings the whole town out in search of clothes, toys, supplies for the home, and more.

On the January night when I flew into Delhi, my ride didn’t show up at the airport. I flagged  down a cabbie who tried to get me as drunk as he was, and who tried to get me to switch accommodations to his choice of hotels. My arrival in Delhi was pretty typical — the stuff of many a travel story set in India. In the end, it wasn’t the nightmare it could have been.

My driver was an eager conversationalist despite his slurred, broken English. After assuring him repeatedly that I did not want a swig of the whiskey he’d received from a German tourist, and that I did not want to go to a different hotel, he went out of his way to find the correct address amidst the narrow lanes of Delhi’s Paharganj neighborhood. We parted cordially outside my hotel, wishing each other a happy new year. The experience typified what I both love and hate about India — the often threatening unfamiliarity and superficial chaos of the place; that friendliness could be either genuine or concocted to take advantage of me, a gullible foreigner; the allure of new sights, sounds, and smells; the joy that is often found once the inconveniences are overcome.

This was my third visit to India. My first trip had been thirteen years earlier, when I visited Chennai with my family. While Mom and Dad handled the travel arrangements, that brief trip whetted my appetite for all things Indian. After growing up in Washington, D.C. and small Wyoming and Iowa towns, it was my very first trip abroad. Without a doubt, it left a lasting impression. My next trip was five years later, as part of a semester-long college Buddhist Studies program. We spent the duration of our stay in the small town of Bodh Gaya in the northeastern state of Bihar. There, I was able to experience India on a deeper level than many travelers are afforded, although I was still granted the security of belonging to a large group of students and professors.

I could tell that this third trip was going to be different. Graduate school had offered two years of intensive reading, writing, and researching. In pursuit of my M.A. in South Asian Studies, I debated and discussed Indian history, contemporary politics, media, religious beliefs, social movements, literature, and cultural practices. After three years of Hindi language classes and dozens of Bollywood movies, I had set off to India as someone who no longer a tourist. I was newly aware of the preconceptions and ignorance I had carried with me on my earlier trips, and I was finally ready to see a new side of India.

I would also be on my own in a country viewed with awe and wariness even by seasoned globetrotters. Prior to my arrival in India, I had been visiting my brother in Vietnam. On a touristy boat ride in Ha Long Bay, a middle-aged American man who had lived for extended periods in the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam commented, “I’ve always wanted to go to India, but it seems like it would be so hard!” A Canadian couple told me, “We’d like to do some traveling in other places before we go to India.” A twenty-something Australian woman, halfway through a year of solo traveling, said she was impressed that I would be going to India on my own.

Having been there before, however, I felt I knew what to anticipate. I had even half-expected to be stood up at Delhi airport, but I still didn’t like it.

It was a warm winter day in Nawalgarh, Rajasthan. On a narrow side street, a group of boys played marbles. When I was asked to join them, I couldn’t say no.

The unfamiliar and the familiar

Every traveler to India has an “India-is-so-crazy” story (“There were people riding on top of the train!”). Just as many have an “India-is-so-enlightening” story (“Their way of life is so spiritual and real!”). There are numerous “India-is-so-poor” stories (“Begging children followed me for 20 minutes!”), and “Indian-culture-is-so-old” stories (“The temple is the same as it was a 1,000 years ago!”). Learning about India showed me the flaws and limitations of accepted Western understandings of this country. Perhaps it is no different than China, Russia, Brazil, Nigeria or any other country with a complex, vast or long-lived civilization. Even so, India stands apart in my mind.

I imagine our knowledge of India has not changed much since the days of European colonialism. The idea that the country is somehow timeless has created equally timeless stereotypes. India calls to mind images of poverty, exotic wild animals, destructive natural disasters, kings and extravagant palaces, religious fanatics, oppressed women, idyllic rural farm life, the horrifying slums of its megalopolises, and superstitious, uneducated masses trapped by the caste system. The failure of the Western imagination to evolve in this regard has resulted in the all-too-common tendency of travelers and writers to present an India that is exotic and alien. At the same time, it is easy to see why countless negative stereotypes of India persist in the Western mind. After all, stereotypes are inherently simplistic and superficial. In general, these things do characterize most foreigners’ experiences there, mine included.

As I dutifully traveled between the major tourist destinations described in my guidebook — Delhi to Rishikesh to Nainital to Agra to Jaipur — it was difficult to see the deeper aspects of Indian society. Instead, the glaring differences between Indian life and U.S. culture jumped out at me. In India, there were cows and monkeys and piles of garbage on the streets. I was regularly surrounded by noisy crowds unused to the concept of personal space. Shops, cars, trains, temples, and homes often appeared to be in disrepair. Temples and mosques and their openly religious followers were everywhere. Tenacious rickshaw wallahs, shop owners, and begging children confronted me every day.

Even after my previous visits and all my studying, and despite my love for the country, it was hard to feel fully at ease. I was acutely aware that my white face and red cheeks, brown hair, and blue eyes made me stand out in a sea of brown skin and black hair. I knew that I was ridiculously privileged, and that no matter what I did it would be impossible to see “the real India” — that tantalizing myth of the extreme travelogue. Street kids called me tomater, Hindi for tomato. I was cursed out for the United States’ treatment of Cuba. I was forever being overcharged for anything I bought. Sometimes I thought I might be better off ignorant of India’s history, languages, politics, cultural beliefs, and religious practices. My knowledge did not prevent me from enjoying myself, but it did make me realize that seeing India through the filter of stereotypes provides some comfort and assurance about the world, and one’s place in the world, that I was sorely missing.

New ways of seeing

A conversation with an amiable rickshaw driver towards the end of my trip proved to be a wake-up call. I was walking through the fabled Pink City of Jaipur in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, in search of lunch on a sunny and pleasantly warm day. Outside the magnificent City Palace, standing by his black and yellow rickshaw, was a stocky young man wearing a dark green button-down shirt. He watched me approach and we made eye contact.

“Excuse me,” he said in English. “Maybe you can tell me. Why are foreigners always so rude to Indians?”

Now, that was a good question.

I don’t know why I had a hard time answering him. Some foreigners feel like they’re often taken advantage of when they get into conversations with Indians during their travels, that something unpleasant — usually a sacrifice of their time or money — will be required. Did I feel some need to feign ignorance to avoid offending him, or was I thrown by his assumption that all foreigners (myself included) were rude? Before I could stammer an answer, he went on to tell me that one day, in a coffee shop, he had seen a foreign traveler sitting at a table with a thick guidebook. He approached the foreigner and offered his advice about where to go in the city. He was a native of Jaipur, had driven a rickshaw for years, knew all the sights, and was eager to speak with pride about his city. He had no intention to coerce the man into his rickshaw, he told me. It was his day off, after all.

Instead of thanking him for his suggestions, the foreigner flew into a rage. “Leave me the fuck alone!” he shouted at the rickshaw driver. “I don’t need your help! Get away from me!”

The rickshaw driver went on to describe many other occasions when his offers were rudely rebuffed by foreign travelers. “How would that make you feel,” he asked me. As I thought back to the times I had snapped at rickshaw drivers or pushy street vendors, I answered, truthfully, that it made me feel terrible. “Yes, it is terrible,” he agreed, insisting that rejecting a rickshaw ride could be done politely, with a smile and a bit of humanity.

And he was right. I had been consciously taking an even-handed approach with rickshaw wallahs, shop owners, pesky kids. They were all fellow human beings who didn’t deserve to be treated like servants or pets. But this conversation got me thinking seriously about how I appeared through the eyes of these people. I saw them every day. Even if I thought I was treating them respectfully, was I seen as just another bossy, tightfisted, standoffish, white foreigner with pockets full of money?

When I was the one bearing the brunt of a negative stereotype, it became easy to see the folly in thinking in terms of over-generalizations, no matter how convenient it might seem. People, and certainly entire countries, cannot be explained in such simplistic terms.

Everyday life in everyday stories

Now that I’ve returned home, I’ve changed the way I view and understand India, as well as the way I talk about it. I am much more conscious that the experiences I’ve had are minute tiles in a vast and ever-changing mosaic — that India is more than my shallow experience there. I make an effort to address the inevitable questions about its poverty, the caste system, and Hinduism, while also telling them something new about India that they’ve probably never heard before. Instead, I tell them something that is more familiar to their American lives. During my visit, I sat in a coffee shop in Lucknow with a crowd of locals watching India-Pakistan cricket matches — the biggest sports event in the country, and the equivalent of Superbowl Sunday in the States. I talk about going to the movies at Jaipur’s Raj Mandir Cinema, packed with locals for the opening weekend of the latest Bollywood hit Rang de Basanti. I relate how I spent many a morning in parks and restaurants reading the newspaper alongside Indian men, discussing the latest political news or sports scores. I talk about staying in a small town in the deserts of Rajasthan with a welcoming family whose 10-year-old son taught me to fly the small paper kites I saw over towns all across northern India. I reminisce about sitting around evening fires all along my journey, late into the cold night, discussing religion, friendship, marriage, family, and the mundane aspects of everyday life.

Such familiar activities are part of many travelers’ experiences, but they seem to fall through the cracks in favor of wowing friends and family with stories of wild adventures and foreign drama. Their stories further the myth that life abroad is utterly alien. Instead, the tall tales I tell are about how normal India can be.

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News

Shattered Glass

Will the real Ira Glass please stand up?


Ira Glass at Wordstock. (April Cottini)

Last night I went to a church in downtown Portland, Oregon and watched a radio show.

It was the last day of Wordstock, the city’s annual literary festival, and the closing event was billed as “An Evening with Ira Glass.” Glass, the 47-year-old creator and host of the perennially popular National Public Radio show This American Life, sat at a table behind a mixing board and microphone and proceeded to give a performance blending radio snippets, iPod instrumentals, and disarmingly personal patter.

“Okay, so this is probably more than you want to know about me, but I have operated an ATM while on LSD,” he confessed.

Glass, who told the audience that he began his radio career at 19 as an editor at NPR, specializes in mixing things up. He strode onto the stage sporting a sleek, gray suit and pale yellow tie, the very image of the smooth broadcast professional. But once he was seated behind the table, his thick dark hair and trademark Buddy Holly glasses took over — the visible signs of the proud geek that he is. He dispensed facts and stories with charm and aplomb, reminding listeners, “We’re on 500 public-radio stations, with an audience of 1.7 million,” more than once, and cueing music to enhance his own improvisatory chatter. But he littered his rapid speech with more “likes,” “you knows,” and “I dunnos” than a teenager.

He was entertaining a crammed church with the zeal of P.T. Barnum while confessing to that same audience as if it were a composite confidante, a Dear Abby sitting in the dark on the other side of the microphone. For most of us, listening to the radio is a solitary activity — we listen in the car, in the shower, in the bedroom — and while Glass is a regular on the lecture circuit, he understands the oddity of actually seeing a radio personality.

“When I was an editor at NPR, I’d spend all day editing interviews in a room the size of this table,” he told us, his lips moving but his voice emanating from the two tall speakers framing him on the stage. “And then, when I actually met one of the interviewers, like Bob Edwards, I couldn’t believe that the voice coming out of their mouth was the same one I listened to all day in the editing room. It was uncanny.”

Except Glass didn’t say it this way; what he actually said was something like, “It was, like, totally uncanny.”

Like his episodic radio show, Glass moved sporadically from topic to topic, beginning the evening with a radio clip about Jesus and Martin Luther King, Jr., before launching into a series of jokes and manifestos, tossed together like a salad.

His audience, a congregation of the converted, applauded both his humor and his opinions. They giggled at the increasing intolerance of the Federal Communications Commission (“Yes, Ira, it’s okay to run the piece about the hippopotamus with a leech up his ass.”) and cheered This American Life’s increasingly political slant, with episodes about prisoners in Guantánamo, sailors in the Middle East, and victims of Hurricane Katrina.

As befits the producer of a radio show that gained a following for its quirky, heartfelt stories about ordinary people, Glass asked journalists to stop falling prey to seriousness and start looking for “the surprise, the joy, the humor in life.” He blamed this epidemic of seriousness on the tyranny of the topic sentence, and then winsomely admitted that his demand for the abolition of the topic sentence was itself a topic sentence.

Glass also talked about how he compulsively analyzes television story lines, citing such popular shows as The Sopranos, Gilmore Girls, and South Park.  The recognition goes both ways. Glass re-enacted his own shock at hearing his show mentioned on Fox’s drama The O.C. by leaping from his chair. Then he played the TV audio: “Is that that show where those hipster know-it-alls talk about how fascinating ordinary people are? God.”

“I couldn’t ask for a greater compliment,” Glass beamed.

People love Ira Glass. He’s intelligent, funny and sexy in a nerdy way. And he demonstrates his trust for his audience by confiding in them and assuming they’re just as offbeat and witty as he is. Most public personalities guard their privacy with the ferocity of Dobermans. But Glass embraces his fans even from behind a mixing board.

During several of his serious interludes, Glass explicated the story structure used on This American Life. “It’s easy, it’s simple, and it works,” he said. “First you have an action, which leads to another action, and another action, and then you step back and have a thought about it.” His exposition turned into a lovely reminiscence about his childhood rabbi and a spiel about how rabbis and Glass really have the same job.

“You know a rabbi, or a minister or a preacher or a priest, is really good when the kids stay to hear the sermon,” Glass explained. His rabbi told stories from the Old Testament and then explained them in a way Glass found irresistible. “I’d be sitting there, thinking, ‘You know, this is pretty cool. You get to say your piece once a week and then people go out thinking about what you’ve said. That’s a cool job. That’d be nice.’”

But it was hard to tell how much Glass had really listened to his own lecture. He was precise about the story structure of This American Life, but his rabbi anecdote was a little fuzzy, with asides about his parents and a trip home to Baltimore that distracted from the original inspirational story of the rabbi. He mocked his own speech habits, saying that this is what he sounds like without the benefit of editing.

His entire talk — performance? ad-lib? — seemed both rehearsed and improvised at the same time. On tour to promote his show (and its upcoming television version on Showtime), Glass understandably recycles many of the same anecdotes. But does he also recycle the charming confusion he displays on stage? He’s a performer begging journalists to stop performing and start being natural. That’s impossible. Despite the intimate trust he’s built with his audience over years of radio shows, Glass will never be anything but a performer. It’s like, you know, totally unnatural to ask otherwise. But perhaps that’s the secret of his success.

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