dianne sharma-winter

Seasons and Reasons

noreply@blogger.com (Dianne Sharma-Winter) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 06:57:00 +0000

There is nothing like the choking poison of Delhi traffic or the stifling heat of Rajasthan to make me feel like I am in India. Arriving in Delhi I managed to spend the absolute minimum of five hours in the city before jumping plane to the verdant fields of the Kullu Valley. There was green and mountains misty with monsoon rains, rivers rushing towards the plains of Punjab and the feeling that time had not moved so much as the season since I left only a few months ago.
Life is so soft in the mountains. People work hard and punctuate their labours with local festivals, but there is gentleness about the climate and the Valley that is not evident in the sprawl of Delhi or the villages of Rajasthan.
Anyway, for a long time now I have followed the precept that every pilgrimage of India should begin and end with a visit to Pushkar Lake, until I have done that I don’t feel as if I have officially begun my India time.
So we hurtle down the mountains in a twenty-hour stint to arrive in Rajasthan at sunrise, a detour through Delhi confirmed my suspicions that traffic jams caused by the revamping of Delhi in preparation for the Commonwealth games continue even in the wee hours of the morning. Anyone having to catch a plane out of Delhi would be advised to prepare for delays of up to three hours, even at three in the morning.
But then at dawn, the trail of blue peacock feathers draping the roof of a Shiva temple announces the state of Rajasthan, spread out like an early morning picnic blanket before us.
Here the festival season is in full swing, This is the time for farmers to take leave and make a holy pilgrimage somewhere with the entire family To bathe in a holy lake, to listen to some guru, to sing and chant and dance and buy plastic toys for their children. To cook on fires fuelled by the cow dung fuel they carry with them and to sleep in the open by a busy roadside.
The first time I witnessed this local approach to festivals I used to think why on earth would anyone bother to load up a bus or a bullock cart with just about the entire kitchen, pots and pans and spices and cow dung, the mother in law and assorted children and then walk sometimes for miles to some event so that they could cook and eat and shit and sleep in the open. I mean for gods sakes, wouldn’t they be more comfortable at home? Holidays seemed to me like harder work than the usual round of gruelling farm labour.
I had to admire their commitment to having a good time. Life is hard for rural people in India generally and in particular for the people of Rajasthan and neighbouring Madhya Pradesh. The failure of the monsoon has crippled entire villages, bankrupted farmers and fights over water supply have resulted in a quite a few deaths.
So I don’t begrudge them their four am puja beneath my window every morning, after a few rolls and groans and attempts to force my eyeballs open I get up and watch from my window the magic tapestry of India, her people, their stories all played out on the ghat below.
There is a sadhu washing in the predawn light, Brahmins sweeping their temples, cows rolling through the changing shed, a widow and her son, his shaved head and the basket the carry indicate a close death in the family, a farmer woman from Harayana feeding chickpeas to the black faced monkey, a Brahmin shouting at a pilgrim for wearing shoes close to the holy water, a tourist taking surreptitious photos, a swarm of pigeons circling over, a baby monkey swinging on my window and another grooming it’s mother. A group of villagers line up at the waters edge and repeat word for word the shouted prayer of the pundit; two kids scream and run away when a monkey gets too close, a man grabs a cows tail to lead it out of his way. Saris flutter in the early morning breeze and neon coloured turbans twirl as they dry in the sun, there is the constant ring of the bell at the entrance to the ghat, the shrieks of the baby monkeys and the cries of the kids. The sadhu completes his wash and wobbles away on stick thin legs and now here comes a band! With drums and bells and people singing and clapping just to add a bit more masala to my early morning viewing!

Spinning Yarns

noreply@blogger.com (Dianne Sharma-Winter) — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 06:39:00 +0000

Chacha ji hs become my balcony buddy in Vashisht this year. That is he is someone to sit and watch the human traffic pass beneath and around us, to make the odd comment to or interjection about.
Chacha ji has the best balcony in Vashisht for this kind of gentle pass time. From our sunny corner we can watch the tourists struggle up the hill, the boys in the blanket shops ply their wares, we can tease the little boy Satyam on the next door balcony and almost reach across the street into two tourist rooftop resuaurants and in his own house behind us there is the shuffle shuffle clap clap of his daughter at the loom and the usual to-ing of any extended family. So there is plenty to feast our eyes on.
I understand probably about fifty percent of what he says and ninety nine percent of his meaning, while he probably understands fifty percent of my Hindi and absolutely nothing of my English. It hardly matters, we play our role like the two old guys on the balcony at the Muppet show or two birds on the tree of life. We bounce off each other for all that with a shared chuckle, raised eyebrows or the many handsignals which have developed over time when people want to talk about each other without being heard. One is the universal signal for crazy, the other is a dismissive downward gesture as if one were throwing away rubbish and the last most expressive one is the hand raised upwards int he shape of a lotus or curled slightly as if you were holding a small bird in the palm of your hand before releasing it. This says many things but a general approximation would be "What can you do? this is in Gods hands."
Chacha ji's hands are never still. For the last week while he sat and walked and talked around the village he has been making rope from goat hair. First he spun the wool onto a small hand held spool. When he had two spools of twine, he spun them together to make a strong twine. When he had three reels of strong twine, he sewed them togther to make a rope about the width of a bridle or reins.
"Strong, " he reckons, giving the half complete work a tug. "Last about fifteen to twenty years."
He looks so quaint as he totters around the village in his traditional Himachal clothes. The home made woolen jacket, the pyjama pants and his brightly coloured cap and his slighty bent legs give him the appearance of being a rather doddering old man. Tourists like to stop and take photos of his beautiful weathered walnut face and he nods encouragement with his bright inquisitive eyes. In fact Chacha ji is probably one of the richest and smartest men in this village. With rental properties all over the village and a large successful family, he remains as sharp as a tack. Alive and alert, interested but most of all amused by the ever changing worlda round him. He lets it all wash over him with a delightful mix of old age craziness and age old wisdom.

Curry in a Hurry and cheeky chapatti

noreply@blogger.com (Dianne Sharma-Winter) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 06:27:00 +0000

The test of any good Indian woman or wife to be is in the chapatti. I have watched enough Indian television to know this to be true. So I told Ommie that I would take over the kitchen once his brother went back to Omkareshwar. This was so that he couldn’t carry tales of my kitchen inefficiency ahead of me to the family.
But things rarely work out as you plan them. The day I made puri bhaji, his brother took one look and ran away before he even finished stirring the curry!
In the morning said he wanted to leave but we insisted he stay another day so as not to be travelling on a festival day and promised to cook ghee-laden food as a gesture to Lord Krishna whose birthday it was.
So in the middle of us all working to prepare the meal, Chacha ji called out to say that his brother had just jumped in an auto and left with his bags. Now, my puri are a bit rusty and nowhere near as light and flaky as a good Punjabi puri should be but I though the bhaji were pretty damn good. Anyway what’s wrong with saying goodbye?
After the initial period of disbelief, Ommie picks up the phone and rings not his brother but his mother and father and sister in law and tells them what his brother has done. There is about twenty minutes of shouting on the phone. I sit outside with Chacha ji, the grandfather of the house and my balcony buddy.
What happened, says the old man.
I made puri and he ran away in the middle of stirring the curry, I tell him.
The old man is more interested in listening in on Ommie's phone call than hearing about my dismal puri.
With dinner cooked and no body feeling like eating it, we sit on the balcony with the family and discuss the curry in a hurry departure of his brother. Suddenly the brother returns and parks his bag in the room gets out of his travelling clothes while Ommie tells the neighbours about his brothers behaviour. The brother defends himself in the debate of good manners versus bus timetables and him missing his kids. Eventually Chacha ji, like any good chief, decides that each has had his case heard and tells everyone to shut up now and get over it.
Later in the kitchen I said to Ommie, what happened? Couldn’t he get a bus?
No, he smiles. Mummy and Father told him he had to come back.
Amazing to think of a society where family still has so much power to resolve problems and adjust behaviour.
Scary to think that news can travel that fast in India these days. Already my crap puris are famous in a place I haven’t been to yet!
The family that Ommie rents a room from are now also eyeing me speculatively, frankly assessing my value as a wife according to their norms. While they haven’t seen my chapatti so far, they like to come into the kitchen and watch me cook as if it was some rare thing.
By that time the chapatti dough is prepped and sitting innocuously in a dish awaiting its final humiliation.
It’s a long time since I cooked Indian food for Indian people which is something like us watching an Irishman put down a hangi. Food is such a cultural reference for us all, no matter where we come from and food in India is still so very tied to survival. If you turn out a crap dish it doesn’t go in the bin and someone goes out for takeaways. It’s eaten anyway while its merits and deficiencies are discussed. To any cook the sound of people eating quietly means more than words, it is approval by digestion.
When I lived in the jungle temple with my guru ji, my first attempts at cooking were watched over by Baba ji’s eagle eye. People would eat with the “not bad for a firang” kind of attitude and I knew my food still had that desi taste
I remember the day I served a meal and noticed that the people eating were hardly conscious that the food was or should be or could be any different from the taste that they knew since childhood. They didn’t see my food as something from a firang but as if it had been cooked by Baba ji’s own hand.
Accustomed as I was by then to constructive criticism accompanying my food as predictable as chutney, I couldn’t help but notice the silence. What had I done differently, I wondered. What had changed?
In my exhausted jungle survival mode I had lost my own self consciousness and that in some strange way it reflected in the taste of the food. I had long since given up my struggle to be different, to remain an individual and surrendered mostly to the madness around me. In fact there was no longer them and me but all of us together sharing resources afloat on the sea of humanity.
If life is a feast then the best meals are ones made in the spirit of this kind of symbiosis.
In the meantime I will get to wrestling some divinity out of the chapatti dough.

Love in the Time of H1N1

noreply@blogger.com (Dianne Sharma-Winter) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 06:20:00 +0000

I watched on of those travel shows the night before I left home. In this series, a ‘personality’ is patched into an organised backpacking tour of a foreign country. Basically they get to interact a lot with the local taxi drivers, the odd random teashop dweller and the kind of characters one meets on the road and the result is filmed.
The episode I watched was set in India. A netball star coped with just a small film crew and her own resources.
It made me think about why we travel and how it is that we do so. For myself there is a curiosity about the people that draws me to a place, I want to know what makes them laugh or cry or stir to action, I want to understand the rhythm of their daily lives and find the bridge that exists between us. In the face of The Other I am looking for a mirror. What is it about us that is the same and how are our differences so different anyway?
I felt strangely sad to watch the travel show and realise that while I believe our urge to travel is about our urge to experience brotherhood in fact that simple heart connection between travellers and locals is rare enough these days to become the basis of a television series. Ironically the series is called Intrepid, after the name of the tour company.
To me an intrepid traveller is one of those god like Scandinavian mountain climbers strolling at altitude in the high Himalaya, or a solo yachtsman rolling on a forty-foot swell. These people are pimped and prepared and frighteningly intrepid. I feel more like Forest Gump by comparison.
These days, simply to travel is almost to be considered intrepid. I refuse to believe in Swine Flu or H1N1. First of all, please! Whatever happened to names like Cholera and the Plague and Consumptive Fever all perfectly romantic and tragic diseases. Heroines can die of cholera and its poetic, something to base a novel around, but swine flu just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
It’s something almost to be ashamed of. Or paranoid about especially when you
are jammed inside long queues at New Delhi Airport. Two planeloads of people are crowded in an area under the escalators, queuing and curling in a snakelike formation in order to pass through the temperature testers.
This seems to me to be Indian logic at its best If by chance someone in the teeming crowd of exhausted arrives did have some contagious disease then by the very manner in which the screening was organised, we were all potentially exposed.
In Kuala Lumpur screening of passengers was as subtle and efficient as one would expect in South East Asia. We hardly paused in passing through the temp checkers.
Someone near me started to cough. I notice that this coughing is also noticed by at least six people around me. I wonder if I should take the names of the people around me who cough or splutter or (god forbid) sneeze! I clear my throat nervously and hope like hell that I don’t have a hot flush.
After an hour or snaking and queuing and eyeing each other nervously, we form a single queue and the desk is in sight. I wonder if I can claim menopausal immunity to the test since hot flushes are random and or triggered by small stresses. Two men ahead of me are hauled off for temperature misdemeanours.
I imagine myself being dragged off for the crime of being hot and tired and human.
It hurt my feelings to think that Mother India with her generous visiting and entry rights should do this to her guests. So much for guest is god, I grumble to myself.
Suddenly its my turn, my hormones behave and for the lack of a single hot flush I am granted entry into the country and escape into the night.
Even better, within ten minutes I am arguing with a taxi driver, hot and tired, and totally human again. Intrepid as.

Consuming the Light

noreply@blogger.com (Dianne Sharma-Winter) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 05:21:00 +0000

"A good teacher is like a candle - it consumes itself to light the way for others."

Recent events in my lie have begun me thinking about the role of the various teachers I have had in my life and how blessed I have been to have had them.
In India the teacher is said to appear when the student is ready, the word Guru means dispeller of darkness. A teacher then is anything or anyone who reaches into your mind and does a bit of fine tuning, who leads you from the darkness of your own ignorance to the blinding light of ..well, Love actually.
There is a common misconception amongst people in the west that enlightenment is something you get after sitting at the feet of your guru, chanting and singing and dancing sometimes. While I have heard of these places and seen the fall out, my own experience in learning anything has always come from fire. My time with an Indian guru was hot and hard and passionate, tempestuous and mostly slightly crazy. There were rare moments of enchanted bliss but these were brought on from mental, physical and spiritual exhaustion rather than from any hard core meditation.
Everyone learns in different ways, mine seems to be always through some baptism of fire.
My first baptism of fire came in the form of a Mana Wahine called Jayne Matenga Kohu. A woman so fierce, so passionate, so brilliant that she honestly scared people! She was a warrior for women, for the rights of children and of family. She was an artist, a poet, a story teller and her voice would make the angels weep. Jayne paved the way for many women to come, inflamed us all in various ways to continue to dare to spark and blaze and be as brilliant as she showed us we could be.
But she burned herself out just a few weeks ago. She lay dead in her house for two weeks while her wairua went walkabout amongst all of us whose lives she changed, just checking that the spark was still ablaze.
Good teachers carry the very fire of creation within them, they burn and flame with a passion so huge, so explosive that the limits of the human body cannot confine.
It basically is the fire of love and teachers who work as a fire are working from a position of love.
"Throw away the shell and take only the pearl"said Sri Ramakrishna of the teachings of a guru.
The perfect gift of any teacher is a distant shore of becomming littered with pearls and light by the light of the fire of love.

KISSING KUWAIT

noreply@blogger.com (Dianne Sharma-Winter) — Thu, 01 May 2008 05:17:00 +0000

Rarely is a traveler met with anything more than a suspicious glare or a robotic nod when passing into a foreign country. In the sleep starved hour of four in the morning, the sight of singing immigration men is a wake up call like no other.
No steely faced officials, these Kuwaiti men. At this impossible hour they are welcoming the planeload of bleary eyed travelers as if we were guests at a celebration.
“Come here Pakistani!” croons a uniformed man, waving his arm towards the queue at his post, his smile as wide as the state of Kuwait.
As he stamps and sings, the immigration man interrupts himself to make side comments to his colleagues, pat a sleepy child on the head and scan the waiting crowd. A smile spreads like an early dawn across the arrival hall. It feels like a grand welcome home except we are a motley group of passengers from Mumbai; immigrant workers, the odd businessman and this sole tourist.
The immigration man, who sees to my visa, flirts in the way of screen star. Handsomely, politely as if we were at a cocktail party.
“Don’t be shy, give her one kiss in welcome!” shouts his singing colleague. Everyone laughs.
Thinking that anyone who can make a woman smile at this hour of the morning probably deserves a kiss, I enter into the State of Kuwait as if into a dream.
It’s a rich mans dream. Oil abundant deserts and a strategic location in the Persian Gulf that sweeps alongside Marine Drive from the airport, has helped to put Kuwait fourth place in the Richest Nation stakes. The wealth is richly understated. Buildings are austere and elegant, monochromatic in the pinky brown shade of desert storms, contrasting simply with the dramatic blue of the sky.
The sweeping curve of the highway is cut with the memory of old news reels. A line of burned out tanks, a sepia image of the desolation of war along this same road that now glistens with the shine of brand new vehicles, huge RV’s and sexy sports cars. Houses, wrapped in the patriotic colours of the national flag, flash by.
The Persian Gulf is as blue as the eyes of a child; walking along the boulevard I meet Habib. He invites me to see his city quickly offering to ring my hosts (which he does) to introduce himself. Also, he advises, the police emergency number here is 666.
“Kuwait is a very safe place,” he says, opening his hands to the heavens, “because we have all that we need and more!” These are a people to whom random acts of generosity and joy come almost as second nature.
As the day deepens into late afternoon, the women of the soil uncurl themselves into an evening of shopping and Kuwait reveals her fresh from the beauty parlour face. Approaching the city, building projects bustle for attention. The Invasion by Iraq is a scar they politely hide behind rebuilding everything exactly as it was before it was destroyed and then some. Flags are big in Kuwait, national pride like Mother Love.
Women, the womb of their future, are totally indulged. It is impossible to stand in a queue, men will usher you to the front as if you were doing them the greatest honour by pushing in. Traffic rules seem not to apply to women who are given the right of way at every intersection regardless of any road code. ......
TO READ THE FULL STORY CONTACT THE AUTHOR

A JEALOUSY OF BIRDS

noreply@blogger.com (Dianne Sharma-Winter) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 07:15:00 +0000

Spring arrives in the subtropical region of Nepal with a crack of daily thunderstorms rolling down from the Himalaya. Every afternoon there is a sudden scurry of wind, a burst of drenching rain from clouds that tumble down the mountains and dash away with dizzying speed across rice paddies to the waiting earth.
In the morning, before the light has hit the peak of Machapuchare, the day begins with birdsong, the scent of spring blossoms and a strong cup of coffee before the first stab at the working day. But the birds distract me and the flowers are teasing my senses.
I have to admit I am a bit jealous of birds. There they sit in branches or telephone lines, on fences and beside pools of water, a collection of fragile bones and feathers; unbidden and without any artifice, they open their beaks and sing to the rise of the sun or the departure of a storm. The bird isn’t thinking about recording contracts or audiences or even album covers. They sing because the song is within them.
Flowers I envy. Flowers also just do one thing perfectly – they bloom into their own beauty. This is the sublime message of Buddha who one day amongst thousands gathered to hear his voice simply held up one flower. The flower was the entire wordless lecture.
Most of the followers went away scratching their heads. I only wish I had been there because I would have put my hand up and said “Yeah but hang on a minute here Great Soul…”
Easy for him to say. The bird sings and the flower blooms because the ability to do so is contained within the seed of their becoming. It is a preset, non negotiable condition of their being.
The flower yearns in the dawn for the fingers of the sun to stroke her petals open because she took form for that very thing. She isn’t thinking will he love me in the morning and does my bum look too fat in this, she is just blooming beautifully.
“Such single minded devotion is not so easy when you are living in a human body,” I would have said to the Buddha.
Inside a human body is a universe of potential; of a song or a carving, a canvas swept with oils or an epic poem spoken through the limbs of a dancer. There is a supermarket of choice for the soul in a human transit: life is not so simple for us as for the flower. The soul in a human body must negotiate a physical, spiritual and emotional labyrinth in order for that potential to come into the light of day whereas the flower or the bird is already an intrinsic, instinctive part of that becoming.
They have already merged into the kind of conscious awareness that doesn’t come to the average human without a lot of mental exercise and privation.
“The bird doesn’t have to go the supermarket, make moral judgments or balance a bank account; the flower doesn’t have to think about day care or dentist appointments or meetings.” I would have whinged.
But maybe the very sight of the humble flower in the hand of the Buddha would have been enough for me to recognize that somewhere beneath the tangled layers of every human life there is also a seed which longs for the light of day?
Maybe under Buddha’s lotus eyed gaze, I would have looked at that flower not with envy but with the insight to see the truth of those quivering petals?
The human life is the seed which carries the potential for a similar unconscious outpouring of creativity, and every soul is a flower waiting to bloom in the first rays of the sun or a song preparing to carry a spring storm down a mountain valley.
By then I think I would have run out of arguments like someone with a Jehovah Witness on their doorstep. Human life is tough; we know it and you can’t say Buddha didn’t try to warn people.
You can’t argue with a great and realized soul.
Much easier to open your beak and sing, be blooming beautiful!

FIRST PUBLISHED http://www.sproutpublishing.net/

Cambodias' Latest Killing Fields

noreply@blogger.com (Dianne Sharma-Winter) — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 06:26:00 +0000

The chaotic streets of Cambodia’s capital give a sense of the turbulent history of this land of contradictions and surprises.
As our car nudges its way inch by inch through the melee, where motorbikes and luxury cars jostle with heavily laden bullock carts at the point where Charles de Gaulle Boulevard intersects with Mao Tse Tung Road, an emerald Buddha reigns with sublime benevolence from the sanctuary of the gold and gaudy Royal Palace of King Sihamoni.
Phnom Penh is a city that bears its history with a very oriental equanimity; there is little point, says the average Cambodian, in agonizing over things of the past. The future is on the doorstep and they want to grab it with both hands.
There is no doubt that the Cambodians are an industrious people, a mere thirty years after the soldiers of Pol Pot forced the evacuation of the city and marched the entire population into what is now known as the Killing Fields of Cambodia, Phnom Penh is as bustling as any other Asian metropolis, albeit as contradictory.
We are searching for Tuol Seng, formerly the Khmer Rouge S-21 prison, now a genocide museum, where over twelve thousand people were detained, tortured and eventually killed by the Pol Pot regime. Even the name connotes a terrible meaning in itself. Literally, the ‘poisonous hill where those who bear or supply guilt’, Tuol Sleng Prison was established in 1976 specifically designed to detain and exterminate anti-Angkar elements.
Previously a high school, the buildings were shut of from the world with sheets of corrugated iron reinforced with electrified barbed wire. The classrooms were converted into prison cells and torture chambers. Victims were taken from all walks of life and many different nationalities (New Zealanders included) were also interred there before being exterminated. Only seven people are known to have survived Tuol Seng.
The Khmer Rouge, with a weird attention to the imperialist bureaucracy they so despised, took photos and details of all the detainees. Today their faces stare back mutely in row upon row of photographic evidence of a world gone mad. Every face demands a witness but one stands out above all, a woman with her eyes firmly closed against her impending doom.
The Khmer Rouge managed to exterminate over two million of the citizens of Cambodia, turning the entire country into a concentration camp where everyone was forced to participate in the agricultural reform that was designed to liberate Cambodia or die.
The regulations still posted outside the gallows in Tuol Seng give instructions for behavior under torture.
“Do not try to hide the facts by making pretext of this and that. You are strictly prohibited to contest me,” advises the caution. “Do not tell me about either your immoralities or the revolution”, and “While you are getting lashes or electrification, you must not cry at all”.
I declined to visit the Killing Fields further out of the city, where the blood and bones of hundreds of thousands more victims of Pol Pot fertilized the rice paddies now brown and barren in the pre monsoon heat. Instead we made our way to the Killing Fields of modern day Cambodia and one where the same rules for behavior under torture still apply.
This South East Asian hotspot is attracting the latest threat to the new generation of Cambodians; it has become both a destination and a transit point for sex tourists and pedophiles seeking immoralities that are literally robbing Cambodia of its young and vulnerable, who also must not cry at all.
Svay Pak is easy enough to find, directions to it can be found on the internet. A rough dusty street, no longer than 100 metres jammed with perhaps twenty or more brothels is the latest gathering place for pedophiles from abroad. Accents from all over the world can be heard as men take a beer after their activities in ramshackle buildings made chillingly from the same kind of cheap air bricks that were used in cells in Tuol Sleng.
This is where life is worth no more than a three American dollars, where foreign men refer to child sex slaves as ‘players’ and where even police, with an average wage of $US25 a month, can be bought off to avoid prosecution. Despite the recent law changes in Cambodia which make this kind of traffic illegal, often raids to the red light districts are advertised well in advance giving the brothel owners time to flee across the border to Vietnam with their child slaves or move them into other cities such as Siem Reap, the service town for the Angkor Wat temples.
My driver, a young Cambodian man in his mid twenties is nervous, almost speechless with embarrassment. Suddenly aware that I am in a red light district with a boy half my age, I agree with him. We have seen enough. But unlike the woman at Tuol Sleng whose defiant eyes remain sealed shut, once your eyes are open to this modern day genocide, what to do?
A UNICEF survey concluded that unscrupulous brothel owners In Cambodia alone hold almost twenty thousand children captive, which is fully one third of the total amount of sex workers in the country.
Driving out of Phnom Penh towards Siem Reap, the scorched rice paddies await the first downpour of the monsoon from clouds that billow overhead; occasionally the sky is raked with fingers of lightening. Lining the roadside are ponds of farmed lotus, their pink flowers so favoured by Buddha. In a matter of weeks, these same fields will be as vibrantly green with new life as the emerald Buddha at the Royal Palace.
I say a silent prayer that the children of modern day Cambodia can rise up also untouched through the muddy Killing Fields like the eternal bloom.
http://www.reportchildsex.com/
http://www.safetravel.govt.nz/
http://www.thecode.org/
Published in The Christchurch Press 14 January 2008

Kathmandu. A little piece of peace

noreply@blogger.com (Dianne Sharma-Winter) — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 06:15:00 +0000

If Kathmandu is the face of a nation emerging from the chaos of a people’s war, her bruises are yet to fade.

Just eighteen months after a massive uprising of the people forced an end to the Royal Coup that gave rise to the Mao insurgency which often saw the city blockaded or shut down for days, it is hard to tell if Kathmandu is crumbling or struggling to rise from the ashes of the smouldering piles of uncollected rubbish littering the city streets.
Tourism and foreign aid are the first industries to enjoy the fruits of the optimistic peace promotion; visitors are up thirty percent but a quick scan of the daily newspapers reveals the cracks behind the thinly papered walls of peace. It is a peace that reads like lawlessness.
Almost twenty months of an interim Government with no election date in sight, the Mao are not giving up the ‘back to the jungle option’, doctors threaten to hit the streets to protest ‘government apathy and Mao high handedness’, Tourism operators are protesting the revival of forcing donations from trekkers by Mao, a temple is shut in protest over Mao behaviour. Jimmy Carter arrives on a peace junket, the Supreme Court announces that it will employ its own security personnel to guard courts in the districts and a Disappearance Bill is to be passed by the government in response to the surge of abductions in the country.
The news is reported in an almost clinical fashion, like an overworked intern discussing symptoms of a critical patient. The legacy of press censorship in Kathmandu is a thriving rumour mill, often the chief source of information and opinion in a city where journalists fear for their lives and democracy moves in and out like the tide.
I put the paper down and take to the streets, heading for the tourist area of Thamel where I have arranged to meet a friend living in the city after twenty years living abroad. Every foot step must be negotiated in the narrow alleys; I swerve in the slipstream of a bicycle, swivel my hips to avoid a direct hit from the side mirror of a motorbike, dodge a porter carrying a bed on his back, veer past groups of children sniffing glue, and pause at every street corner before small temples smeared with red powder and garlanded with marigolds beside which piles of uncollected rubbish fester in the afternoon sun. Shops sell gold and trinkets, pashmina shawls and the many masks of god, next to it another shop sells Nike, turn left down an alley and raw meat hangs in rusty tin shacks.
A small alley by a stupa leads me to Kantipath, a road that runs towards the Narayanhiti Palace. On the corner whispering widows with small babies and empty bottles beg professionally, UN vehicles flash by and street hawkers offer tiger balm and trekking. Nearer the Palace, the roads widen into broad avenues that saw the funeral procession of the entire Royal Family in 2001 after the Crown Prince allegedly went on a rampage over his parent’s refusal to allow his love marriage.
While the official story is that Prince Dipendra (who was right handed) shot himself in the left temple after a shooting spree that left ten members of the Royal Family mortally wounded or dead, the true story is never likely to be revealed.
Every conspiracy theory in Kathmandu centres on the Murder at the Palace.
“Did you hear,” says a Buddhist nun as we wait at the traffic lights by the Royal Palace. “That over one hundred members of staff at the royal palace were also murdered that night? They say the Ghats at Pashupatinath burned all night.” “No witnesses survived,” she mutters darkly before disappearing into the swirl of people and traffic.

“Indonesian commandos,” says my friend. We break straight into the rumour mill as we wait for coffee and chocolate mousse in Thamel. “They did the executions on behalf of...well, take your pick. The King, the Indian government, the CIA, there are theories for them all.” “And the palace staff? Did you hear...?” He nods, confirming the rumour at the traffic lights. “Only high ranking army who are loyal to the Royals survived.” The interim government? “Organised chaos designed to fool the outsiders; it’s just another farce of democracy. The fact is that the Mao had an ideology but are not really educated enough to understand or support the path to democracy. As for the old rule, the systems of privilege they belong to are ancient; they are not going to hand over their power so easily. So they bicker and fight inside the halls of power while we wait and speculate.”
“What about the story I heard about the American embassy?” I ask. The newly built US Embassy is directly opposite the Palace and twice as large. “Every brick, every nail was brought in from America!”He says, slapping the table. “And did you know that not one Nepali was employed in the construction?” “Nepal is paradise lost. Everyone is making money out of our situation except for the Nepali. Can you believe that a poor country like Nepal needs five or six casinos? NO! So, why?”
“To launder money?” I am warming to the conspiracy theories.“Even the beggars come from India!” He laughs in the way of glass splintering. I part with my friend at the edge of Thamel, taking the route that will lead me through the ancient Hanuman Dhoka square where the virgin child chosen as the living goddess Kumari is held in palatial cloister, nearby the glue sniffers of the afternoon are comatose around the temple steps, and the hijari ply their ancient trade beside the old palace walls.
A lone motorbike weaves its way around idols and temples as the noise of the city begins to fade into the mists of an early winter night. Kathmandu has finally exhausted herself.

PUBLISHED WHAKATANE BEACON 31 January 2008

Softly softly, catchee monkey

noreply@blogger.com (Dianne Sharma-Winter) — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 10:54:00 +0000

In a country where bombs explode at mosques and railway stations, bakeries and temples with depressing regularity (despite the Indian Anti Terrorist squad being one of the most experienced in the world at dealing with domestic terrorism), New Zealand’s entry into the War on Terrorism was totally ignored.

A bigger story this week in The Times of India was a piece about a city under siege from a growing internal threat that civic authorities admit is beyond their capabilities, even as the Deputy Mayor of the city of New Delhi is the latest fatality in a long list of deaths or horrific injuries attributed to the new Urban Terror.

The deputy Mayor fell to his death in a brave attempt to hold his home from invasion from the marauding terrorists of New Delhi, the same group known to be responsible for a savage attack on a two year old child that left her ear ripped off and half her cheek torn. They cause damage to property, attack women returning home with the ingredients for the evening meal, rob and pillage houses while the residents cower in abject terror and murder small children while they sleep.

But the Government is impotent to the very real threat to its citizens, “It is beyond our control, we have no one of any specialist training to deal with the growing menace.”

It is believed that this group has held training camps in the jungles that until recently were located a safe distance from the capital city. Now the terrorists are making incursions into the sprawling mass of Delhi’s economic and urban expansion with fatal results.

Where previously the citizens of the city could defend themselves with sticks and stones, and call the terrorists all sorts of nasty names (there is a religious and cultural imperative against killing monkeys in India but guerrillas are fair game), the terrorists remained impervious to civic threats and simply amped up their training in the jungles from whence they came until they now hold some parts of the city to ransom.

Or perhaps it is that the city has so far encroached on their land and traditional way of living that the monkeys have begun to practise ‘monkey see, monkey do’ in a direct reversal of earlier passive resistance techniques used to rid the Indian sub continent of another scourge sixty odd years ago.

The death of the Deputy Mayor has increased calls for the local Government to take action, but it seems that there is a shortage of people experienced in dealing with simian terrorism.

“We have placed advertisements in all the local dailies in areas of the South where monkey catchers traditionally come from but there are two problems. First, the monkey catchers are mostly illiterate and so can’t read the papers and then there is the problem of increasing urbanisation meaning that monkey catchers are sought after all over India. There is a shortage of monkey catchers and too many monkeys,” said one Government officer, who refused to be named for fear of reprisals.

I thought a letter to the editor might be helpful under the circumstances, cc’d to Helen Clarke.

“Sir

It is with great interest that I read of the recent terror raids on New Delhi committed by those self serving simians. Until recently we had a similar situation at home in Aotearoa, New Zealand and I couldn’t help but make comparisons.Our guerrillas live deep in the heart of the mountains where they mostly swing happily from hui to hui, hikoi to hikoi and are sometimes even seen shopping at the supermarket quiet brazenly as if they had every right to such essentials as food and water.

Once they reach the outskirts of the city they can be seen talking loudly in their own language, strutting down the street as if they used to own the very land where we now park our flash cars and wearing all sorts of weird tribal masks on their faces (which, like the burqa and the headscarf should also be banned in a civilised society). Their very presence seems to be designed to strike terror into the hearts of all our citizens who suffer from State sponsored historical amnesia and an underdeveloped sense of white guilt.

Thankfully though, our government (in an attempt to kiss American arse and improve our trade situation), recently organised a massive raid on the mountains and thoroughly trounced the simian threat in the first dawn raid outing of our Anti Terror Law enacted upon it’s own citizens.

During the raids, clothing and guns were seized, dancers and vegetarians and snail lovers were summarily charged with all sorts of criminal activities, trials were held in closed courts and all civic rights for these cheeky monkeys totally suspended.

Unfortunately for our Government and our overenthusiastic and underemployed Anti Terror Squad, the charges were subverted by the incoherent wording of our Anti Terror Act. It seems that the Act is as illiterate as your fullahs monkey catchers down South.

Since most of our country seemed to support the Anti Terror Squad in its recent actions against the Tuhoe Terribles, I am sure they would join with me in encouraging our government to arrange a peace keeping mission whereby we send our Anti Terror squad to rid the city of New Delhi of the very real simian scourge before these monkeys start wearing camouflage gear and talking about flying flambé banana into buildings.

The Indian economy is healthier and becoming rapidly wealthier than the US economy, and has a larger and growing consumer base in any case, and doesn’t seem to have a policy of bullying their trading partners, there could also be some beneficial trade spin offs from this kind of exchange between our two countries.

Meanwhile we have plenty of room in the Urewera for as many barrels of monkeys as India cares to send us.

Yours etc

Te Aniwaniwa

SHAMANIC RITUALS IN THE VALLEY OF THE GODS

noreply@blogger.com (Dianne Sharma-Winter) — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 07:42:00 +0000

Nestled in the semi tropical forests of towering deodar in the Western Himalayan Pir Pinjal Ranges, the busy tourist and apple growing township of Manali sits at the very end of the Kullu Valley in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh.
More commonly referred to as The Valley of the Gods, according to ancient legend this is where the gods tumbled down from the heavens in a great flood using the slopes of the Himalaya to break their fall. The town takes its name from the sage Manu who, Noah like, settled the world with men and rules to guide them.
As a legacy of the original flood from heaven, every small village of the Kullu Valley has its own resident god and Yognees or faeries still guard the river valleys, shrines and offerings to the guardian gods of the Valley are visible in every village.
Originally known as Dana bazaar, Manali was a halting stage for those accessing the mystic valleys of Lahaul and Spiti, as well as Ladakh and the Central Asian silk routes beyond the Rohtang Pass (3890mt), but now plans for a world class Himalayan Ski Village on fifty acres in the peaks of the Kullu Valley are moving ahead. Planned to be the highest ski resort in the world with the capability of hosting the Winter Olympics, the resulting infrastructure will bring roads, better hospitals and development opportunities for villages so long inaccessible.

But away from the multi million dollar plans to change the face of this mountain paradise, the more immediate schedule is the monsoon season, the time for every village god to be taken out and paraded around on decorated palanquins. Accompanied by the plaintive call of mountain horns and the ancient beat of the drum, the gods are given the seat of honour at every village square which then become the focal point for games and dancing.

We have been invited to a festival high in the Solang Valley at a waterfall known as Anjani Mahadev, named for the river than seems to plunge from the heavens down over a Shiva lingam, freezing in the winter.
The way is marked by red flags fluttering along the two kilometre walk. In the early light of evening with monsoon clouds obscuring the moon; we follow the sure feet of our local guide in single file. Below us, the Kullu Valley tumbles back into the world of man while ahead the waterfall roars down from the heavens. Our eyes are trained on the island of light that floats in the middle distance; it feels as if we are disappearing into a faerie land. Eventually we cross the roaring river and approach the festival site and we make our way to the tent where the devotees will sit and sing throughout the night.
A circle is formed around the sacred fire; the presence of the Swami Baba Prakash is marked by a photo with an altar laid before it. Brahmin priests feed the fire with lashings of ghee, the nutty smell swirls with the smell of incense and smoke. The musicians are tuning their instruments and talking. Gradually, almost imperceptibly the music builds and gains strength and sound as people join in singing devotional songs that will last throughout the night. Singers and musicians fall off and are replaced, food is served in relays, tea and water passed around but the singing never stops.

After twelve hours of sitting cross legged, cross eyed from the lack of sleep, dizzy with the smoke from the sacred fire and the excitement of the moment, men and women begin to leap spontaneously to their feet to dance, succumbing to the throbbing of the drums and the plaintive whine of the snake charmers flutes.
Toothless old women, dressed in the no nonsense style of hard working Haryana farmers sway and sashay their hips, hand movements as delicate as birds, their faces shining. One woman builds herself into a wide eyed trance by dancing and clapping with her eyes fixed on the image of the departed guru. Her movements become wider and wilder, she doesn’t blink when water is thrown in her face and is eventually removed by some attendants.
Meantime, a Spanish woman and a farmer woman have succumbed to the tease of the snake charmers and are dancing face to face, eye to staring eye, mimicking each others movements in a microsecond. One woman will begin a complicated hand movement, her eyebrows raised in challenge and before the move is completed the other woman has become the same movement, the crowd claps in beat to the drums and calls in encouragement. All eyes are on the women, their trance begins to affect the crowd watching, we sway in time with the drum, smoke curls around the ceiling, the fire flames and sparks.
The farmer woman’s glittering black eyes are fixed on the shy smile of the Spanish dancer, a crow is dancing with a dove. The music builds and builds until the crow falters and falls off, quickly replaced by another woman. The women dance themselves into a trance that is held together by the musicians and the clapping of the crowd.
People leap to their feet waving notes over the dancers before dropping the money into the musician’s pots.
In the corner a man begins to beat on a tabla, gradually the rhythm is transferred to his set of musicians and devotional songs begin to build as the snake charmers and the dancers begin to fade out. The energy built is then transferred into devotional songs of the bhkati take over.

Over forty eight hours the energy builds and wanes like the sea, but at the end of the ritual you feel like you have crossed some kind of ocean. It takes time to get your land legs back so to speak.

Walking out of the valley after the festival, the beat of the drum resonated in every step that I took away from Anjani Mahadev.

Published Whakatane Beacon, September 2007

Angkor : From Dream to Memory.

noreply@blogger.com (Dianne Sharma-Winter) — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 07:43:00 +0000

All civilisations rise and fall but at Angkor the remains of the great days of the ancient Khmer civilisation slumbered deep in the heart of the jungles of North Western Cambodia like a sleeping beauty waiting to be discovered for centuries.

Abandoned finally by the Khmer after being sacked by the Thai in 1431, Angkor slipped into a dream of history. The jungle breathed in and Angkor breathed out, silence hung from the trees like vines linking back to the beginning of time.

Temple walls retreated into lush green jungle, camouflaged themselves with thick vines and vegetation. Bats flitted in dark sanctums where entry was once barred to all but the high priests, trees wrapped their roots around crumbling buildings, gently prying the stones apart and children splashed and played in the sandstone lined Royal Swimming Pool of the God King.

Angkor is the sacramental creation of the oldest civilisation in SE Asia, carved from this dark forest, inhabited by the Khmer.

Initially an upland people, the Khmer lived in the forest and worshipped the animal deities of nature - the NEAK TA or ancestor spirits who are still worshipped to this day along with KRONG PEALI, the serpent deity, owner of the land and controller of all forms of water. Even today the spirit of Krong Peali will be worshipped before any new building or endeavor is begun, small houses are built as offerings to Krong Peali beside waterfalls and other sources of water.

Influenced by Hindu traders who blew here with the trade winds, exchanged religious ideas and philosophy as well as trade items, the god king JAYAVARMAN II who ruled from 790 AD to 835 AD and traced his lineage back to the sun and the moon, began a building era that continued through his descendants spanning hundreds of years.

Angkor Wat is the largest temple in the world and widely regarded as one of the most magnificent buildings ever created. Built by SURYAVARMAN II, more than one thousand years ago, the main temple was constructed as a monument to the Hindu God Vishnu and represented the mathematical perfection of the cosmos.

Then the city held over a million people, ruled over by a series of powerful kings. Each King expressed his power by constructing new edifices, creating temples to honour the god; in some cases the temples were built to honour the kings themselves as DEVARAJAS or God kings. The act of building was seen as an act of worship and each new king built his own state temple as well as other structures. Eventually the kingdom of Angkor spread to cover centuries and over three hundred square kilometers.

But then as suddenly as it rose, Angkor sank back into dream and slumbered across centuries until it was 'discovered' by the French explorer Henri Mouhut in 1860.
What he saw astounded and mystified him. The local inhabitants had no other explanation for the gigantic constructions than that they were the “work of giants” or else ordered by the “king of the angels”.

Wandering around today, giant blocks of exquisitely carved sandstone and laterite lie around the currently discovered Angkor city like building blocks of the gods or pieces of some celestial jigsaw puzzle. Every block tells a story of craftsmanship, pain and beauty but like the ever present Angkor smile towering over each of the four gates leading into the ancient city of Angkor, the bridge between dream and memory is a rickety bamboo structure of guess work and academic conjecture.

Sometimes though, you don’t need a whole lot of academic mumbo jumbo to wander around awestruck at the sheer size and magnitude of effort involved in creating Angkor. Imagination will place thick wooden doors at the crumbling entrances, a soft breeze will carry the rustle of silk curtains billowing in the pre monsoon wind and your own panting as you struggle up impossibly tiny steps will remind you that elephants once hauled these time worn slabs of sandstone to rest in this very place.

The very beginnings of the success of the Angkor period resides thousand of kilometers away on the Tibetan Plateau where the Mekong River is born.

Each spring brings a thaw to the glacial waters of the Himalayan glaciers which flood into the Mekong as she flows as sinuously through China, Myanmar, kisses the borders of Thailand and twists through Laos before entering into Cambodia. When combined with the monsoon rains, from June to October the Mekong bursts her banks bringing water and fertile red silt to the huge basin that has been home to the Khmer and their ancestors for centuries.
As the Mekong floods, Tonle Sap River (one of the Mekong’s main tributaries), also floods and reverses its flow, backing up and emptying into the vast inland sea of Tonle Sap Lake. Each year this lake more than triples in size to encompass more than one seventh of the total area of Cambodia, when the rains diminish, the lake shrinks back to its pre-monsoon slumber.

The waters from Tonle Sap, conducted into reservoirs and irrigation systems built around the temple city of Angkor, allowed the Khmer to modify their environment into a hugely productive agricultural area, providing a vast food bank for the Khmer both past and present.

Every year new mysteries of Angkor are revealed as the surrounding jungle gives up its memories to the modern day explorers, but the living legend is still seen today in the descendants. Having mastered the cycle of flood and drought, of sowing and harvesting, of understanding the ebb and flow of its waters, floating villages live in seasonal harmony with the movements of the sun, the moon and the stars that was understood and worshipped by their ancestors Ancient Khmer .
PUBLISHED AVENUES MAGAZINE, September 2007

KYA DEKH RAHE HO?

noreply@blogger.com (Dianne Sharma-Winter) — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 00:02:00 +0000

Extract from the (unpublished) book CHASING SHIVA

New Delhi streets are so bare of traffic that I could skip along the middle lane without even causing a disturbance. It is Independence Day, the day when India awoke to her tryst with destiny and threw off the yoke of colonial oppression. No doubt the shattering masses are gathered to hear the Independence Day speech delivered by the current Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee from the ramparts of the famous Red Fort. A dull muted roar can be heard over the rooftop of the city from the direction of Old Delhi but here in the centre all is calm.

At the less famous Ringo Guest house in Cannaught Lane, the tourists are all at a loss. This unforseen holiday has disrupted their travel plans and they are not impressed by the historical import of the anniversary. Something else that Indian and Maori have in common is a history of passive resistance against the British Imperialists. In fact, the Maori prophet Te Whiti-o -Rongomai launched the first campaign of passive resistance against the British invaders in 1879 when the Mahatma was still in short pants. We hold the Mahatma in great esteem since he managed to achieve what Te Whiti had set out to do sixty years previously and got the British off their land.

Among the usual weird collection of tourists lingering around the courtyard is an Australian woman, Sue who is en route to Manali to bail her drug addicted daughter out of jail. She is shows me the bargain jewellery she picked up en route in Sri Lanka; the sale of which she hopes will recompense her daughter’s stay courtesy of the Indian Justice System. Punkej is a foreign returned Indian man and Chris The Brit has arrived with me straight from the airport. Chris has limited time in India and is as keen as I am to get out of the city. Punkej is heading to Rishikesh, Chris is heading to Rishikesh and after listening into their conversation for a moment or two, I decide that I also am going to Rishikesh. Punkej has an air-conditioned car and will share expenses. Even if the road from the Capital city to the veritable Gateway to God is as rough and as crowded and uneven as any country track and marked with the passage of my grief, there is nothing more depressing than being in a city unless it is being alone in an empty city.

Haridwar is lit up like a princess at a party, seducing us to stop and make puja on the ghat with the first greedy pujari we spot. Across the river, a three- story statue of Shiva watches over the city of his lover Ganga, I think of my own mad pilgrimage only a year ago and wonder if I should make a courtesy call to the Akhara. I doubt that Chandon Giri would be there, but perhaps they could direct me to him? I look at my companions and decide against it. We drive on to Rishikesh where I take a room at a guesthouse and settle on the balcony to watch the view. Chris and Punkej go out to drink whiskey leaving me to contemplate the rush and roar of Ganga Ma.

A woman dressed in the robes of the ashram of Pune joins me on the balcony outside our rooms. She is in Rishikesh, she tells me, to sit in the hope of darshan with some Guru whose name I don’t quite catch. Every day she sits at the gates of the ashram where the guru is currently in meditation as an expression of her devotion. So far she has sat for fifteen days.

‘Pune is finished for me now, I am looking for a new Guru,’ she declares. We begin a desultory conversation about the problems of being a woman alone in India and having to deal with all the pent up sexuality of millions of Indian men. When I confess that I am working on converting my own sexual energy into creative energy, she refers me to an Osho lecture and brings me the literature from her room.

‘Shiva gave Parvatti a meditation where she was to use her breasts as her middle eye, you want to try it.’ We agree in the end that celibacy comes from an emotional and spiritual state before it becomes a physical expression then wish each other good night and creep off to bed like nuns. I briefly imagine how it would be to literally walk down an Indian street with eyes painted exactly at nipple level. Just for luck, I meditate from my breasts and fall asleep.

At some point during the night, I wake and think; ‘What is this strange lump in my bed?’ Perhaps a dog had slipped in unheard to seek shelter from the monsoon? Poking the shape with taut fingers, I discern teeth then – in one horror movie moment that set the hair on the back of my neck on end – hair! Leaping for the light switch, the full glare of harsh fluorescence reveals a man in my bed. For some reason my mind is unable to deal with this reality and wants to focus instead on a story I read one cold Delhi winter when the papers reported that mangy street dogs were slipping into unoccupied hospital beds in the TB ward of a public hospital. Slapping this particular mangy mutt to wake with my shoe, I scream at him to get the hell out. The intruder, playing for time, manages to look more stunned and confused than I. I recognise him to be the man assigned to sleep upstairs and guard the guests. Suddenly I see myself peeking out from behind his jungly eyes. A foreign woman travelling alone draws it’s own implications but I had arrived with two whiskey drinking men so obviously I was a woman of very loose morals. Obviously gagging for it. I scream and slap him some more while I think of what to do next. Too late, I remember my trusty pocketknife which could slit a sleeping mans throat but alas! Before I can reach for it, he gathers his trousers and flees into the night. I dress, covering my traitorous breasts.

That’s the last time I ever try a bloody Osho meditation, I mutter to myself as my mind skitters around the room like a rat to find his point of entry - a half-hearted latching of the balcony door. Angry with myself for being so sloppy, I consider my choices - to make a fuss or to not make a fuss. The fact that I could choose not to make a fuss seemed to make the most sense, I could lock the door properly and get some sleep, leave without a fuss in the morning. But there comes a point in the life of a lone woman travelling in India when the behaviour of ignorant junglys reaches saturation level. I decide to fight back for myself and for every woman in India. Slamming down the stairs to alert the family, I begin yelling. ‘Call the police this white woman is gunna kill somebody!’ Indians like a bit of street theatre. I bash on the door of the manager’s family. Lights click on and hurried movement is heard beyond. ‘O bhaisaab!’ I shout. They reluctantly unlock the door. A short interval while the story is related to the ten or so family members, who peer out from behind the door. I see the dilemma reflected in their eyes, after all the only right to moral outrage I can legitimately claim in these circumstances is an economic one, this is bad for business but the woman herself is not stainless. It’s a seesaw of righteousness until I claim the universal privilege of tears. I win. I am sent back to my room while a search is begun. I show my escort the knife. ‘If you don’t find him,’ I declare, ‘I will! Then I will slit his bloody throat!’

The escort flees down the stairs no doubt to warn them that this crazy woman has a knife. Eventually, after much excitement, the unrepentant Romeo is found hiding in the bushes and dragged back for a positive ID.

‘Madam, please tell if this is the man who was in your room.’ ‘It is he.’ ‘Madam, this man is saying that you went to his room.’ I am still walking towards the man when these words register, in a flash of rage I grab his ears and bring his lying nose down to my upraised knee. This is a very handy self-defence asana taught to me by my karate sensei, designed to break the nose of your attacker. My rage empowers me. I attack him like a madwoman. He is every ignorant Indian man who has ever tried to cop a grope or behaved with insulting prejudice towards me. The crowd is alarmed and urges me to stop. They hand me a hefty pole. ‘Madam, beat him with this stick.’ This is summary justice Indian style, and something to do while waiting for the police to attend such outrages. But my original fury has been exhausted so I hand him and the stick over to the sisterhood who proceed to beat him some more, while I walk a little distance away to throw up discreetly into the garden.

A day later, on the bus to Delhi I reason that even though I had missed the opportunity to slit that mans miserable throat and was suffering from bruised and aching hands as a result of the beating, at least justice was seen to have been done and that’s more than most women can hope for anywhere in the world, but most especially in India.

Published in support of the modern day action super s/heros of the Blank Noise Project. Rock on Wahine Toa!

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PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST IN ACTION

noreply@blogger.com (Dianne Sharma-Winter) — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 02:00:00 +0000

When does three sacks of dirt constitute a work of art? Or a row of burning cars? Or even a submission written on an old blanket?

Maybe the former Minister of Maori Affairs, Doug Graham, can answer that question since the blanket now hangs framed in the Treaty Settlement Offices in Wellington.

“I keep sending them a bill for it,” says Tame Iti of the Tuhoe Nation. “Ten thousand dollars for the original work of art with interest accruing at twenty percent annually.”
A quick calculation brings us to the realisation that, since it was presented in Opotiki at the 1996 Fiscal Envelope round of consultation Hui, the work has doubled in value.
“A bit like the land,” I venture.
He nods, “Like the land.”

The burning cars?
“That was for the opening of Te Urupatu, an exhibition in Tuhoe. We arranged these cars along the road leading into town so they represented the foot soldiers, we set the cars alight to remind people of the Scorched Earth policy.”
Iti was sent a bill from the district council when they removed the wrecks; the then Mayor Colin Hammond eventually paid the bill for Iti and accepted a painting from the artist in kind.

With rolled up sheets of building paper under his arm and a paintbrush in his ear, Tame Iti believes in art that is as mobile and adaptable as the artist himself. He currently paints on building paper because “It’s easy to move around with.”

“I believe in taking art to the streets, to the paddocks, to wherever it is accessible to the people. It’s not so much about the artist but that the stories are being told. For Tuhoe it is important that our stories are recorded.”

“What this means in terms of art is that we need to represent the whole story. For instance, James Carroll, the man who supported the Government in the Tuhoe confiscation, is painted into the history of Tuhoe. You see his figure there on the back wall of our Marae. Know your enemy; know who you are dealing with. Don’t forget.”

This theme carried over into his most recent exhibition “Lest We Forget”, held at the Te Karanga gallery on K Road.

"All these works are based around the Tuhoe raupatu, the things that happened more than 100 years ago that Tuhoe has not forgotten about. It's all based on Tuhoe evidence given at the Waitangi Tribunal hearings," Iti says.

Best known for his ability to turn the mirror back on itself, Iti is more than aware of the theatre involved in his sometimes novel perspective and protest actions from appointing himself as the first Maori Ambassador, to the “exercise in dispossession” that the theft of the Colin McCahon artwork was supposed to have taught the nation, and the more recent ‘performance piece’ at the powhiri for the Waitangi Tribunal when it sat to hear the Tuhoe claim, Iti is not afraid to challenge perceptions.

“I don’t just paint for the sake of painting,” he says. “I live it.”

He began to paint seriously ten years ago when he was included in a group of Tuhoe artists invited to exhibit at the Whakatane Museum.

“The bags of dirt were part of my first exhibition. I dug the dirt up from the confiscation line (a disputed boundary line between Ngati Awa and Tuhoe), put it into paper bags and painted chocolate box housing estates representing the exchange, what we were trading. All the main players of the drama at that time were named on the bags of dirt, and invited to come and take their bag of dirt. It was a challenge to them.”

Being mentored in his early days by fellow Tuhoe artist Chas Doherty is something Iti credits as being exceedingly helpful. Working in collaboration with other artists such as George Nuku, Daniel Tibbet and Tracy Tawhio, moonlighting as Dr. TuTu on a few CDs as well as turning up in the odd film and award-winning documentary (“Meet The Prick”), Iti practises a lived-in kind of creativity and is not afraid to manipulate his profile in order to have it work in his interests. “It’s a strategy plan.”
It is by using art as a space to provoke that Iti manages to force participation, “It’s interesting,” he says, “to bring different ideas together.”
Such as inviting Gerry Brownlee to open an exhibition held earlier in the year, titled “Meet the Prick”.
“Actually, the prick was representing the loss of the ure in Maori art due to colonisation, so for me it was interesting to have all these elements in the same room. Brownlee, Georgina Te HeuHeu, the art that told the story of that and so on…”

Examining the elements of that little drama gives you an insight into the artist’s viewpoint. While some may have come to see the paintings and others may have come to see the artist, the real art had already leapt from the canvas and into play with Iti holding the brush.
That was more than enough for Georgina, who apparently did a quick waiata on behalf of her mate and fled into the night.

“Maori art is too conservative by far.” Says Iti. “What happens is that there is a failure of the institutions to dare to take creativity to another level. In fact, 19th century Maori were far more creative than artists today, Maori then didn’t have to spend twenty or thirty years unravelling stuff taught to them by institutions in order to get to their core expression.”
Iti doesn’t have so much to unravel, although he does have some formal training.
“Few people know that I went through the Trade Training programme, and am a qualified housepainter. So I already understood the medium.” He says with only a trace of irony. “ All the houses in those days were oil based paints so I got an understanding of how it worked, what it would do.”

“It’s all about telling our stories so that people can read it, smell it, feel it.”

While mainstream media attempt to decode the hidden message of his art, Iti is already moving ahead to the next gig, confident that his message will some day filter through like the slow drip of a percolator.
“I haven’t done my best work yet,” he says. “The best is yet to come.”

The next exhibition Iti has planned will be a mixed media representation of “Weapons of Mass Destruction.”

Letter From Ladakh

noreply@blogger.com (Dianne Sharma-Winter) — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 01:59:00 +0000

It must have been the altitude. As our jeep hurtled free of the rugged mountains and onto the high altitude desert plains of Ladakh, I had to stop my self from shouting, “Stop! Stop! Why are we still travelling when we have obviously already arrived in paradise?”
For those who take the journey across the second highest motorable pass in the world to enter into the moonscape of Ladakh, the reward is dizzyingly gratifying.
My previous life dropped away at the sight of Ladakh. I knew in an instant that I was meant to be an artist, that I would abandon at once all previous life dreams and concentrate on this one panorama. I would sit alone in this high alpine terrain for as long as it took me to realise that the landscape has no need to be painted; that it creates itself afresh each day depending on the mood of the wind and the clouds and the upward surge of the tectonic plates deep within the earth.
If the mind of a Zen master had topography, I decided, then it would be this. Elevated, untouched and unconcerned with temporary concerns like lunch and where to sleep that night. Romantic dreams have a way of fading into reality very quickly for me with the first hint of physical discomfort or worse, hunger. I decide to keep my thoughts to myself. For someone who has doesn’t ‘do’ cold or mountains or meditation, my mind had obviously become unhinged by the seventeen-hour jeep ride across the highest road in the world.
Passing snow drifts higher than our hired jeep, shuddering at spectres of Nepali and Bihari road workers in impossibly thin clothes working in even more impossible conditions who cheered as we passed through, we are one of the first convoy of vehicles to cross into Ladakh this season. In any case how could I begin to paint a land that is still forming?
In geological terms, this is a young land, formed only a few million years ago by the buckling and folding of the earth's crust as the Indian sub-continent pushed with irresistible force against the immovable mass of Asia. Its basic contours, uplifted by these unimaginable tectonic movements could be said to be nothing more than wrinkles on the face of Mother Earth and have been modified over the millennia by the opposite process of erosion, sculpted by wind and water.
Lying between the Himalayan and Karakoram mountain ranges, cross sectioned by the multiple hued mountain ranges of Ladakh and Zanskar and interspersed with bright slashes of green valleys oozing wild roses and lavender, mustard flowers and summer gardens tumbling down to fringe the Indus River; Ladakh is the last Shangri La, virtually untouched the outside world from which it remains isolated for six months or more of the year.

The capital city Leh gazes down on the Indus River from a height of 3,500 metres and is the undeniable hub of all traffic in the state even if it is no longer an official part of the Silk Route, it is home to an ancient indigenous Tibetan-Buddhist cultural community. Buddhists from all over Asia come to explore and to pray at the region's 16th- and 17th-century Tibetan-Buddhist monasteries, while Western tourists come to trek across some of the best hiking terrain in the world. Adjusting to the altitude takes a few days. Okay I am lying; it took me two weeks of struggling for enough oxygen to brush my teeth, getting tearful at the thought of having to climb a few stairs before my lungs adapted which I am told is average, and not anything to do with a summer spent scoffing Mohitos in Goa.
In any case, I am totally unprepared for the kind of extreme trekking that other foreigners seem to delight in; the sight of their sun bronzed faces and heavy packs exhaust me to the point of tears and that is just watching them struggle up the hill from the bus stand.
As the city of Leh fills up with more and more tourists, I begin to sense that if I don’t trek or learn to meditate or consult the local oracle or volunteer at the Monastery then I will be exposed as a fraud and a wastrel, the pressure to conform becomes intense. Hearing that the Hemis Festival would begin in the tiny hamlet of Hemis, I take a local bus a week before to soak in the feel of the village and acclimatise by tackling some of the more humble hills in my spare time without any of the accompanying humiliation of being observed in a knee trembling, lung revolt before I even started to climb.

Founded in 1672 AD by the then King Senge Nampar Gyalva, The Hemis Monastery is built in the upright Tibetan style and juts out from the surrounding mountains effortlessly. Concealed in a deep ravine of the world, the Hemis Gompa (monastery) reveals itself as our bus rounds the mountain, which I eye nervously. Is everywhere in Ladakh on the top of a bloody hill?

Since I am so early for the festival, accommodation is no problem. The monk in charge of the Monastery assigns me a room in the very deepest darkest bowels of the monastery. A thin prison issue blanket is the only protection against the bone chilling cold of my first (and last) night of monastic experience; the next day a local family agrees to rent me a room in their house and I happily depart the most famous Monastery in all of Ladakh for the unrivalled warmth and comfort of a family hearth.

This two-day Hemis festival depicts a dance-homage to the birth anniversary of Guru Padmasambhava. The dances are accompanied by discordant sounds of brass trumpets that are three meters long. Lamas with red-robes and tall tufted hats bang on drums and crash symbols together as others gyrate and leap to fight off demons. Horned devil-masks and padded brocade outfits come to life as they play out the scripture battles between good and evil spirits. The brilliant colour of the robes and artwork bounce off the seemingly monochromatic colours of Ladakh.
The festival clothes reveal a Tibetan heritage; bright cummerbunds on quilted coats adorn the men while the women wear the elaborate turquoise headdress known as the perak, which is also woven with threads of silver and semi precious beads as well as the odd button.

On my last day in Hemis, I struggle to the top of the pass which takes trekkers over into Hemis National Park. Amazingly, somewhere within that melange of mountains is a vast army of foreign trekkers tackling passes roughly the same height as Mount Cook and sleeping in cosy Ladakhi home stays at night. Home Stay trekking is the latest Ladakhi innovation for trekkers who like to sleep in beds and tourists who have spent too long in Goa saluting the sunsets with a glass. No matter what your level of fitness is, Ladakh will entice even the most dedicated lounge lizards into the greatest outdoor location since Middle Earth. Next time I will bring my boots and leave the landscaping to the first artist, Mother Nature.
First Published: North & South Magazine, October 2006

Mera Kismet

noreply@blogger.com (Dianne Sharma-Winter) — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 23:14:00 +0000

Do not be afraid to find yourself dead, you are.
You are gone from us now.
Let go.

You are a single note searching for The Song.
You are dead and you have broken free.
You can’t understand this with your mind, it’s too much.

The sea runs in your veins
your eyes are in the stars and
the cloak of heaven is upon you.

Today you went down to the sea, it swallowed you up.
I can’t understand this with my mind, it’s too much.
Your lunch is still sitting on the table.

We wait and minutes fade like long dead stars.

There is No Hope.
This is the beginning of Hope!
I am listening for you, are you listening to me?

I am a voice inside my head telling you goodbye.
You are a pair of eyes inside my mind,
I can see the world in your eyes.

My eyes are fixed on the straight blue line that moves
from that hill to this. The sea.
Come home.

Don’t cling to the shoreline Lover,
strike out towards the horizon.

Think of a stone dropped into the middle of a still pond
Are you on the outer ring
Or radiating out from the centre?

Each day is a slow ballet through water.

Shhh.The dawn rolls onto the beach.
There, there. Have him now.
Shh shh shh.

You looked so beautiful lying there.
You looked so beautiful with mussels in your hair.
The fishes took your face.

You will never be afraid or cold again.
Yes, sign the form, this is my husband, my lover.
Son and friend and brother.

I lied, of course.
My husband is the light in the crescent moon
My lover moves in waves through long grass in the paddock.

I wake and immediately I leap to standing.
My feet hit the floor simultaneously my brain registers that you are dead.
A shocking way to start the day.

But if I roll and drowse,
the same knowing comes seeping in like the harbour tide
gradually I wake to drowning in stinging salty tears.

You must eat, I am told.
I am not in the land of the living.
I am moving with you through the darkness.

We are hand in hand in the darkness between worlds.
You are chattering and excited, your dark eyes swim.
We are heading towards the light of a fire with the innocence of children.

Soon you will lift off into that light and be free.
I will turn to find my childs body gone and
tread like an old crone back into the world.

People are kind they come, their eyes an ocean.
How can it be, how can it happen
just like that, they ask?

This is how we die, just like that.
Running laughing breathing one minute,
then gone. God calls.

I don’t ask how can it be that you are dead,
although sometimes at odd moments
other questions surface.

Like how can it be that I will never run my fingers across your chest
to stop over your heart then
cup the beat of your life in my palm?

How can it be that I will never touch you again?

The ocean of tears that separates us
is what unites us also.
You become the ocean, I will be a tear your cheek.

People try to catch hold of me.
Anchor me with words. They gurgle.
I nod like a vacant lot, my ears are full of sand.

I am with you in this dark silent profound space.
We are inside a bell and the sound is a hint of a hint of an echo
of the sound that began the universe.

It’s the middle space that occupies my mind.
They call it a split second
but it’s more like a lifetime.

This is what we have left now.
Soon your innocence will be the light all around
and you will lift off.

I won’t even know the point of goodbye
so effortless will it be.

It’s raining.
The first rain since That Day
I watch the sea build.

The sea is not my enemy nor even yours
The brown frothing murky sea that took you
is the same saucer of blue ink lit by moonlight.

The sand that shifted beneath your feet That Day
is the same sand we rolled on laughing until we cried
a day before.

Something woke me this morning, a flash.
Did you take a photo of me with your heart?
Are your near the leaping off place, Lover?

Tonight, looking at the moon I saw
that her face was your face and your face was the moon.
You are gone. Gone from me you are.

My heart leapt! It wanted to catch you.
I wanted to say Too soon! Too soon!
But I knew it was time.

I felt almost jealous of you then.
What I do?
What I do now?

A butterfly is a butterfly being a butterfly
but if it dreams
does it see its face before it was born?

Or does it just have butterfly dreams?

The thousand and one expressions of your face
flash before me at random moments
conversations and harsh words we have shared.

The pain that squeezes my heart, my stomach, my lungs
washes over me like a sudden spring tide at midnight.
I feel robbed and lost and violated.

My body has begun to feel this
It feels safer to stay inside my head
I am grief on a broomstick riding the empty night sky.

I don’t live in the house anymore
I live out here on the porch
Watching the sea.

People still come.
Every day is another version of your death.
Waves of huge sorrow wash over me.

Your life was a poem
God has perfect symphony
to bring you down this path.

Beyond this tragedy there is
your soul gone like a warrior or a bride
to God.

Only the very patient ask the right questions
Or sit long enough to hear about the me
You left behind.

The sand has shifted on the beach again.
Great pools have formed, warm in the afternoon sun.
They make me think of your eyes.

The infinite calculations of If Only don’t make it any easier
but like a carrion photographer I move from angle to angle,
freeze framing a nightmare.

In my minds eye I am roaming through the land of memory,
dwelling in pools of regret,
tip toeing around the silence.

Its the space you used to inhabit, I fall into it
like a pocket of air, like a sigh withheld.
Like forgetting to breathe.

Like a bird dropping into a thermal current.
The sky is bruised with disappointment today
It’s not a good day for flying.

A small brown bird flutters exhausted down to land.
I feel like a cancer patient - the living dead
or a mental patient - the dead living.

There is a fine line between a saint and a lunatic.
The saint sees her fellows in a state of ignorance and feels compassion
the lunatic shakes them by the throat!

The saint practises detachment, maintaining dignity.
The lunatic is attached to the madness of society.

What was us is now I.
What was we is now only me.

A society of One.

Every day we lived,
every turn we took on the road to here
was leading to That Day.

Every breath brought us closer.
Floating hand in hand, looking at the stars
thinking about Vishnu in the great cosmic ocean, rising and falling.

Meanwhile, far out to sea a wave began to gather.
There is no If Only, no Might Have Been. .
Innocence offers no protection. What is always was.

The water that laved the shore of our dreams
is the same water that filled your lungs.
Manawa kiore transmutes to a babies cry.

Tihea mauri ora.

Wherein lies the difference between great pain
and great joy?
The physical sensations are the same.

Whether the heart swells like or a red, red rose
or a mushroom cloud of doom,
is only a matter of opinion. It swells.

The surge springing from the belly to the mind of the heart
of the lover is a super nova
or a cluster bomb exploding.

Between Creation and Destruction
runs the thin blue line of our lives.
Epiphanies and desolations amount to nothing more than that.

What to do? This is Life.

Someone, meaning kindness,
talked about visiting a medium, a spirit guide.
That's like calling a plumber to re roof the heavens!

I know where you have gone.
Its where I am that worries me.

I watched myself from a distance yesterday
thinking about opening the car door
to tumble free.

My head was a black space
in the middle ground.
How close you are and how far away!

It is only time that separates us now.
Or is it?

Looking at your watch on the dresser
is the strangest thing,
my whole body becomes a question mark.

I am in a silent space then
with unspoken questions echoing inside.
Tick tick tick.

Ticking our life together away
marking seconds, minutes, hours and days that
you are gone from.

I think that if that ticking would stop
I might hear the sound of eternity
You are in that silence.

It is the New Year now.
Whatever that means.
I lit a fire outside and wore your watch at midnight .

It was a quiet night, the crickets sang in the grass
the sea in the distance, the house sat creaking
in the silence.

Just me sitting by the fire
with your watch
wondering about time.

Your friend came back from the beach
kissed me and wished for me the courage
to move into the new year.

You had a good year, he said.
It just ended badly.
Then we wept. For loosing you.

How many lifetimes have I lived?
It feels like a lot just lately
they weigh on me heavy like a winter coat.

All the time my vanity has been
peeping out
from the snugness of that interior world.

You took a shortcut to this.
One profound experience cracked open that shell
to reveal you as a god, all the time only taking the form of my Lover.

A painful process, peeling back the layers
to reveal absolute nothingness.
I wish I could shrug it off like a coat.

Like you did.

The panic sets in.
It hurts to sit here day after day
talking to you inside my head, forgetting to breathe.

In the meantime there is a physical life waiting.
Every day has been one long saturday since you went.
I need to pick up That Day, bring it forward into sunday, onward into life.

How can I change my life
when my days are impossible?
I let them wash over me like a wave.

My world is a grain of sand
on the shore of the infinite ocean.

Our moko turns one on Sunday.
That Day on the beach, amid our screams and tears
he laughed! Then back at the house he walked.

His first steps! O for the wisdom of a baby.

The evenings are the hardest to fill.
The companionable time,
playing chess or smoking on the porch.

In Goa we lay on the beach
counted stars beneath the coconut trees.
In Pushkar we watched bats from the rooftop.

I wish winter would come!
Night falls quicker then.
I feel better in the shadows.

My world shrinks to the size of candlelight
I can move around in the dark.
Nights soothe me.

These heavy humid days weigh me down.
I’m caught in the glare of the sun, too weighty to move
like a turtle in the noonday heat.

I am not angry that you died.
Not angry at you.
But I am angry.

Perhaps I am angry at others still living.
Its irrational, I know.
I am on a rocky roller coaster ride, excuse me if I scream.

My boat is a long way from shore
riding a high sea of rolling angry waves.
It demands my attention, I give over to it.

Towards others still living I have thoughts
callous and cruel, pompous and painful
wild and wicked.

Then I feel bad and sad and make an effort,
make coffee and small, small talk.
About good days and bad days.

The world passed by our gate, travelers rarely deviated.
From the sanctuary of this porch,
we tracked the lives of two spiders, observed life intinimately.

Summer has moved on
the sun slants viciously down
there is no sanctuary in daylight on this porch.

I have been out in the world
but scurry back to solitude and shadows,
the bees making love to the flowers.

The garden we planted has bloomed and died
the tide is still the tide
and always the sound of the sea.

Blue moon dawn
the mist in the valley as the day awoke.
The morning air sighs.

The first dew.
Soon the monarchs will float by
on their way to autumn days

The cows wind slowly up the hill
to be milked,
the sea imperceptibly changes colour.

You are dead
and I am still alive
What does this mean?

An earthquake in the middle of the night.
I woke
There was no one to tell.

It was only an earthquake
but it felt like death.

There is an island of peace
where the trees swoop and sway
and forest tendrils curl over your toes.

Where paths are lit by moonlight
where the breezes are silk
and bees die full of love and pollen.

All these places are alive inside of me
I hear them calling,
Let Go! We’ll catch you! Fall!

Although I am assured a safe landing
my hands refuse to unclench.
I am a rabbit frozen in the headlight of an oncoming car.

Its because of breathing
I keep forgetting to.

What do you know
now you are inside the mystery looking out,
and I am on the outside?

Alice stepped through the looking glass
through to the other side.
It was inside her own house.

I look at the mirror on the wall
I see only my Self.
Is there a way in?

Where is the point of entry
that time and tide deny to those of us
still breathing?

Within or without?

We are the ants working ceaselessly
the drone of the bees,
the fragile bones of a bird in flight.

We are a part of all those things and they a part of us
And yet
We don’t remember. So we suffer.
The sum combination of all that we see
all the unknown galaxies expanding eternally amount to a
mere speck of dust floating in the air of Gods dream.

Neither this nor this.
What a relief!

You have thrown off the interruption of this life.
I roam from east to west across the universal sky
searching for a point of entry.

This physical body is my only baggage
but it is too much,
it bars my entry at every door I knock.

I am beyond this society of pity and patience,
it bows me over.
I feel like the Ancient Mariner at a wedding feast.

Then I was turning your picture this way and that
in the candlelight, for a moment you
almost moved!

Everything dissolves!

The monsoon thunders down
the streets are rivers and the river
is a highway.

God is taking snapshots of us from heaven,
the light is blinding!

Ganga ji hungers and rumbles
the valley sweats in the torpor of her sighs.
Your ashes in one swift swirl became the hungering mother.

She took you home.

The jewelled green fields
have turned with the harvest
to a warm blanket of brown.

Who is it that bears the fruit of such labours?
The farmer or the rice itself
or the worm in the ground?

The small life in the soil,
the rain that falls
or is it the Lover?

One small grain of rice
yet even this cannot be separated
from the eternal round of existence.

Today in the mountains,
drunk from sharing the same air as God
speech returned to me momentarily,
Ram Ram!

This is why birds sing!

There was nothing but God dreaming us into existence.
A river of infinite life, rushing endlessly
tumbling down to the world below.

I trod carefully lest my footfalls awake The Dreamer.
Sleep on Beloved.
How I longed to turned and catch sight of Him!

The pregnant Indian sun gives birth
to me cycling alone in the early morning jungle
where Krishna has coloured the birds from his paintbox.

I am weeping and laughing
for joy
and sorrow.

Life is a circle a beautiful mysterious orb
of magic and delusion.
The clues are everywhere!

If all this beauty and wonder is as nothing,
What then is God?
Imagine that!

I was jealous of you, Lover.
Jealous that you went to God
but here He shows me again and again, He is everywhere.

Everywhere is Him.

I am thinking about Gods hand
and how he guides us always.

He deigns to notice
our own insignificant selves.

He’s dreaming us up!

Is this what you noticed about God?
Or was it his sense of humour?

If I think of the word courage
I know it is a word for the heart.
My heart is a lion sleeping in the long grass.

One day I will wake up and believe in the future
That will take courage.
At the moment it feels like the utmost arrogance to make plans.

But I suppose that eating toast in the morning is an act of faith
that your body will need the fuel until lunchtime.
Like buying a ticket and assuming you’ll get there.

Keke Keke

noreply@blogger.com (Dianne Sharma-Winter) — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 23:12:00 +0000

In the forest of the endless beginning, there is the precise foundation of knowledge from which to build a mortal life in remembrance of the Gods.

There is the smooth brown plain of learning and the fibre of the flax weaving the taniko of every interconnected life, there are the vines creeping and yearning and the whisper denoting increase. There are the long standing trees and the creak, creak, creak of branches in the forest. Except the forest is now a rafter, around which is slung a rope.

Swinging there is the body of every woman who ever had her fathers’ hand, her uncles’ lips, and her brothers’ penis in places on her body where they shouldn’t even have laid their eyes. She is swollen with the bitterness of self-loathing and long hours of neglect.

She has run through the forest of the night to escape him and found him everywhere. As often as she denies his existence, he multiplies and increases. He is like fingers of mangrove, his hands on her body, creeping over wet mud poking up everywhere. Or vines creeping and strangling he is sucking her life away and begging her to forgive him.

She despises herself for being frozen to the earth, he creeps all over her.
She reaches into the night long past and wraps her fingers around a tuft of hair from the topknot of Hine Nui te Po.
It opens her to another level.
There she is no body, no body at all.
She can look down on this pitiful scene and wait like she is waiting for a bus.
Hine Nui te Po holds her there like a kite.
She is floating over time and space.

She remembers when she was the light that shimmered in the first breath of day, when she was the innocence of a new born baby and the utter miracle of birth.
She remembers when she was fragile and precious and imbued with the energy of the goddess, she remembered her life from the yearning through to the desire to the conception and increase.

She was the daughter of the dawn and as beautiful as the delight of discovery. She was the shine in her fathers’ eye. She was the only female who loved him unconditionally, and for this he made her a woman.
Shh, be still. Shh.
Hine Nui te Po tells her secrets, she listens while she is waiting.

"It was the fierce thrusting of Tane that rent heaven apart from earth."

She goes there in her waiting dream.

"Women are the waaka that carry men across the ocean of existence."

He is thrusting and fumbling, breathing in her ear.

Her eyes are squeezed shut.

His sweat is stale and it stinks.

Her head is hitting the headboard; he turns like a rat and pulls the body further down the bed.

There is the sound of creak, creak, and creak.

In the classroom, she is the child with her head drooping on the desk. She has already left her tired childs body.

" See Jane run. Jane runs to Dad."

Tane gave life to woman and pulled children from his daughters’ womb. She is not paying attention in class. She is sly and she lies and she cries. She is altogether disruptive.

Tane knows a karakia to allow him entry to his daughters womb.

She doesn’t go to school any more. She still is shy and sly and still lies. Never cries. She is the girl with a plastic bag on her face, a fifteen year old in an empty playground. Swinging on a swing.

Creak, creak, creak.

" See Hine run. She runs from Dad."

The karakia took him down through the centre, he didn’t touch the sides. When she is older and putting up a bit of a fight her will spread eagle her to the four corners of the bed and tie her there.

Hine Nui te Po covers her body like a blanket.

She tells her secrets again. She comes from the centre, she gives her advice.

"Hine Titama froze the karakia in Tanes throat to save all her daughters. It is his weak spot."

She is the repository for all his anger and insecurity; she is the vessel of his loathing. He stinks of booze and stale cigarettes. He spits seed into her.

Hine Nui te Po takes her hand and turns it into a patu.

She moves in the unoccupied body of the girl, springing a surprise attack. One sharp blow to the tenga and his windpipe is crushed, he is gasping the way he usually does only this time will be his last.

He is in the shadow of every man she will ever meet and greet and have to talk to for the rest of her mortal life. This puts her at a disadvantage.

He is in the shadow of the judge who will hang her. He is the man who will employ her so he can rub his hand on her backside. He is the taxi driver who wants a blowjob for his fare and the punter in the parlour.

She goes for the rope by which she will descend to the realm of Hine nui te po. Climbing onto a chair, she swings from the rope and leaps free. From long practise, she is able to shed her mortal body quickly like a coat.

She moves quickly towards Reinga, diving like an arrow into the waters below. Flying over the sea towards the magical homeland of Hawaiiki, she passes the last post of her fathers house where sits the taniwha Parata.

He is opening and closing his mouth on the tide of man at the place known as Te Waiora a Tane and there is Tane the originator of all life, endlessly washing away the sins of man.

She absorbs him and carries on.

PUBLISHED in Huia Short Stories 4, Contemporary Maori Literature, Huia Publishers, 2001

noreply@blogger.com (Dianne Sharma-Winter) — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 23:07:00 +0000

This is the story of Mahuika, healer of wounded warriors.
Soon after the separation of Rangi and Papa, the gods fell to fighting in order to establish territories, political divisions and mandate. This was based on the knowledge that from chaos came order and also gave them the excuse for a rumble.
The world shook for centuries whilst Tawhirimatea battled with Tangaora and Tangaora with Tane Mahuta and Tu matuenga with them all. It was driving Papatuanuku mad! Here she was, suddenly, shockingly separated from her darling, a solo mother no less and all these scrapping kids!
She boiled with longing for her husband and rolled earthquakes across her thighs as she slept. The heat provided from the wispy remnant of one sigh of longing was enough to cook a hangi for hundreds continuously. Dotted all over the land sighs escaped from vents in her flesh, and bubbling pools rose to the surface which hissed and steamed when fed with the tears of Rangi for his wife.

Thus Papatuanauku knew the red hot anguish of bereavement whilst her sons rumbled on oblivious to her distress. Her daughters were more sensitive to their mothers’ plight and this is why you don’t hear any tales of female goddesses from the time of then. All the daughters of Rangi and Papa fed their lives back into the cycle of creation by throwing themselves alive into the boiling fires of Papas desire. Thus the mauri of the fire that feeds the world was born. This is the original source that provides such things as the steam off a hangi, the spark in a lover’s spat and the deep release of a ngawha; it is the original flame which springs now in the hearts of lovers, drips in beads of perspiration on their skin, is the heat between them as they sleep.

There is a place now hidden from us by the mists of time; a mountain of desire formed by the endless longing of Papatuanuku named Te Puia Awata kia Rangi. It was there on the sacred peaks of that maunga that Papa opened herself to Rangi like a flower as his tears rained down on her. In this manner Mahuika was conceived and grew to longing within. One day the mountain could no longer contain the life which throbbed within, it cracked open with an earth shattering sound and out sprang Mahuika, Fire Goddess.
She stood nine feet tall, her hair coiled licks of fire over her cheeks, when she rolled her eyes sparks flew from them. She was so beautiful it seemed as if another sun sung in the sky as she swayed her hips in mesmerising motion.
The gods left off scrapping and gaped in awe, their jaws dropped on the ground! The women trembled with anxiety when they set eyes upon the lusty Mahuika, old grandmothers slapped their thighs; the combined twinkle in the eyes of the koroua lit up their entire corner. Mahuika danced the dance of desire and sweet slow seduction, her hips rocked the cradle of creation, her buttocks rolled, firm as gourds. They left off their fighting to woo her.
But Mahuika was unperturbed by the slavering devotion of the gods, she danced for her own pure pleasure, she sang for joy and she loved the way a fire burns, in an all consuming manner. The gods were mesmerised, they could have stood there and watched her swaying and swinging those hips for years or perhaps it was centuries, but then one god happened to break free of his trance to notice his brother gazing in open admiration at the object of his desire and thumped him on the chest! All of a sudden fighting broke out again only this time it was over ownership of Mahuika. Blood was spilled and the gods raged for many more years.
Mahuika danced and sang and swung her hips, she gathered the wounded to her ample bosom and lulled them back to vitality. She danced in the battlefields of the Gods to spur them on to feats of bravery, she sang to them to give them courage, she healed them in their dreams. Revived, they swore to possess Mahuika and fell to fighting with their brothers yet again.
It is from this time that Mahuika gave these as gifts to the world the healing heat that resides in rongoa, the warmth that coddles a newborn baby and the slow combustion in your veins as life courses through you. She is the spark in the song of a ringawera and the heat in the heart of a kitchen; she is the dance within the flame of fire as it burns.
Out of jealousy and insecurity the women busied themselves to spreading vicious scandal about Mahuika. Before long even the gods themselves began to realise that Mahuika alone was responsible for the troublesome fire which boiled in their veins. They hatched a plan to do away with her.
A handsome young man named Rangitoto was selected to woo Mahuika then steal her powers whilst she slept the sleep of an exhausted lover.

One day Mahuika was dancing on clouds and melting them with her feet when she noticed a handsome young man approaching. As he drew near, he leapt in the air and landed like a bird, she rolled her hips in response. He crouched low and advanced she crooned at him like a kereru. He rolled his eyes and stuck out his tongue, she made a motion with her thighs and shook her breasts. Closer and closer he advanced, entranced. She held her ground and her breath; he was so handsome she felt she might scorch him with the heat of her desire. So close now she could feel the warmth of his breath on her skin. When they touched it was like larva melting into the earth.
He was swallowed by the red sea of her sex, pulled under until he thought his lungs would burst then breathing under water. He was somewhere between pain and pleasure, she opened and closed on him like the eternal lotus, his heart was on fire and his loins would surely burst. They rolled like mountains and created larva spill which now form valleys in your mind; they clung together for years.

Finally Mahuika was satiated, she slept smiling. It was time for her lover to make his move and totally disarm this temptress but when he looked at her in the fading light of dusk he realised that Mahuika had quite melted his heart. It was all that he could do to pluck one small fingernail of fire from her and take it back to the world. When Mahuika awoke and saw that not only had her lover gone but that he had ripped her off as well, her anger was a rumbling earthquake. The earth shook, the westerly wind scorched the fresh young leaves of the kumara plant, a geyser erupted!
The tribe was hardly satisfied with Rangitotos’ results anyway and sent him straight back as he had hoped because by now he was madly in love with Mahuika.
When her lover returned with sheepish smiles and promises Mahuika stormed and wept but he stroked her and wept too. She smouldered, they made love for months until once again she slept and once again her lover slipped off with another nail of fire. There was an explosion that gave birth to an entire island and the errant lover scurried back to the heat of Mahuikas’ fire. She stormed, he wept. She loved him up like fire and welcomed him into her bed again. She burned for him.
He couldn’t live with her and he couldn’t live without her. He wanted to possess her but she closed off from him like a flower. She promised him nothing and gave him everything. She rolled her hips and he was destroyed. Caught between love and fear, Rangitoto blew hot and cold with Mahuika, it hardened her edges.

So passed the years of Mahuika as she fed them to Rangitoto like logs on a fire while he betrayed her again and again until she had almost burned herself out with loving him.
No longer was she the proud vibrant woman of her youth, the personification of the fire of life burning in us all. Her fire had dulled to a small glow of a flickering candle and her hips swayed rather sadly as she danced, she loved the mortal man but she learned that she could not to stay in his world.

She realised that her desire for Rangitoto was an island frozen in time. She drew the line. Rangitoto made love to her one last time and she sent him running back to the world with his ure on fire. Nothing burns more white hot than the scorn of a wronged woman, Mahuika really let off steam!

She threw fire around like a knife thrower at the circus! As a legacy to this day we have the scorch in the steam, the sting in a kuias’ tongue, the sizzle in passionate lust, the heat in self-loathing and the fire that burns in murder. Poisoned by irony, bent over with the bitterness of discovering that generosity and forgiveness (unlike love) did not last forever, Mahuika trudged off to the world of the night long past.

Report From The Tsunami Coast

noreply@blogger.com (Dianne Sharma-Winter) — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 22:53:00 +0000

Before the beginning of time, according to local legend, there was no land where I sit now writing this report, only the vast Bay of Bengal stretching into the endless ocean.

One day the Creator asked the God of The Oceans to recede a little bit so that he might have a small piece of land; "In years to come when the entire world is in turmoil, when thugs and ruffians rule the land and violence is the order of the day, I want to see all my people in one place where the could live peacefully, with harmony prevailing all around. They may belong to different cultures and races but they will look upon each other as brethren. In short, the
land will be a sanctuary of peace."

The God of the Oceans agreed, the water receded and the land mass now known as Pondicherry was born.

Millions of years later on a clear winter morning and with no warning at all, the sea came back and with a huge hungry hand, reached into every village along the Tamil Nadu coastline taking lives and livelihoods in the space of two short minutes.

Someone from home asked me the other day "What’s it like living in the middle of a disaster area?" and I was stumped for an answer. Away from the images that are fed to the world at large by the carrion birds of the media, this tragedy is not felt on a global scale
rather as an individual tragedy that visited tens of thousands of people who populate the coastline of Tamil Nadu. So while you at home are burdened with the sensationalised view of the macrocosm, I have had the privilege not only to survive but also to witness this on the more personal level of the microcosm.

Every tragedy, every loss is personal and particular to every individual; the mother who stood screaming on the shoreline that day in disbelief and horror did not suffer less to know the scale of loss that day.
So in answer to my friend, I am not living in a disaster area, I'm just a silent witness who found herself in the wrong place at the right time.

I came here to escape the cold, the crowds and the anarchy of Northern India in the winter season and lured by nothing more than the sound of the sea and the promise of the "best croissants in the world".
Auroville is an International Community that was founded in the late sixties by the followers of a French mystic known as the Mother. The Mother herself came to Pondicherry to meet the famous revolutionary Saint Sri Aruobindo whose particular yoga was dedicated to freeing his people from the tyranny of British rule.

Sri Aruobindo established an ashram in the city of Pondicherry and it wasn’t until after his death that the idea of an International community where everyone could live in peace and harmony was raised again.
So in the late sixties pieces of whenua from all over the world (including a handful of our own Papatuanuku) was deposited in the soil of Auroville and the international community of Auroville was born.

Forty years later yours truly arrives on the scene with visions of Tino Rangatiratanga yoga in her head and puku rumbling for the taste of croissants after ten months of cake shop deprivation.

Imagine my surprise to see the modern day followers of the Mother swanning around Pondicherry in Gucci sunglasses, Rolex watches and loads of makeup fixing varying degrees of pious ness to their otherwise expressionless faces. After years of trailing around the jungles of India in the company of their holy men (The Naga Sadhu) I was quite taken aback to realise that there was a five star approach to liberation!
Onto the beach community near to the International village of Auroville, 6klms from the city affectionately known as Pondy.
The place my friend chose as the pace to stay is a guest house business which is part of the Auroville community although it remains apart from the original vision of the town expanding out in a spiral, it belongs to the community all the same and in addition to the normal high season room rate, another daily "contribution" is required to be paid to the Auroville trust.

Having settled in our bungalow on the beach I then started making enquiries about the community, the fact that this guest house was sited on a still functioning cremation and burial ground and most importantly for me, the relationship between the locals and the Newcomers or Aurovillians as they like to be known.

"They only bury people there to piss us off. " Was the response to my questioning about the burial ground.
HMMMM. And the signs on the beach, in English and not the local language? "O that’s to stop the locals from perving at the women when they want to take swim"
HMMMMM. And the relationship with the locals was evident in the demarcation line between dwellings. The locals live in humble whares made of coconut fronds, mud brick and biodegradable materials in areas known as villages while the Aurovillians live in mansions in areas known as communities guarded by watchmen and dogs and huge walls.
So within forty hours of arriving, the croissants had turned to dust in my mouth and my mouth had declared the whole set up to be yet another story of colonisation.
It all seemed too eerily familiar to our own situation at home, the loss of the foreshore, the people who want to build on our own burial ground. But it is also what saved me since we moved the night before the sea came in with a thirty three metre wave and swamped the tourist resort that sits on the burial ground.

The day the sea came in, the first clue that something unusual was happening was villagers running along the street and a general air of something is up. Since trouble is a spectator event in India we also ran with the villagers to see what was happening but by the time we reached the beach, the wave has retreated in the way that any ordinary wave does leaving behind some very disturbed Aurovillians.

Righteousness is not a pretty thing folks, I am ashamed to say that my first response to the sight of the Gucci crowd dripping water instead of jewels was to laugh, travellers cheques and American dollars were already pegged out on clotheslines. A little further down the beach was another story and hard to believe that in two minutes so many children, women, men and boats and nets had simply been swallowed up by the retreat of the sea.

Every hour another report would come filtering in from a little further down the beach, the next town, the next city and then the rest of the world. The story radiated out in shockwaves to encompass the entire globe.

But you can only really deal with this on the scale on which you live and that is on a local level. Even if the sea didn’t come like a hungry hand into your life that day, it came into the international community in which we all live- planet earth. And it didn't
discriminate between rich or poor, white or black, the sea is impervious to the idea of different nations or cultures; she doesn’t have the boundaries that we build up in our minds.

I don't believe in a vengeful God, I believe in the hungry heart and I believe that cause is effect concealed and effect is cause revealed.
If we project our own limitations onto the world and if world is Gods own eye on man then how much has our own consciousness fed and will continue to feed on this tragedy which is really the tragedy of our own limited consciousness?

We live in this beautiful world like it is our jail, the bars to our cages are our own fears and desires, so if we are currently working from a state of fear, from the belief that there is something out there to be terrified of then we have certainly proved that to be true.
But the sea is not my enemy nor even yours, the same saucer of blue ink now lit by moonlight is the same sea that swamped the lives and loves and lungs of hundreds of thousands of people that day.

I want to imagine now a world where we recognise what the sea has known since time began, that there are no boundaries in this lovely planet of ours that we don’t set up in our own minds first. I want to imagine a world where we begin to work from a state of love and knowledge that there are worlds ready to spring into existence, that our international community to which we all belong begins the moment we step outside our doors and then we all might be able to help our planet regain her balance in a world gone mad with desire.
FIRST PUBLISHED PUKAEA IWI NEWSPAPER JANUARY 2005

Tantra Monks, Ladakh

noreply@blogger.com (Dianne Sharma-Winter) — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 08:10:00 +0000

Shopping for C cups in SE Asia

noreply@blogger.com (Dianne Sharma-Winter) — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 08:22:00 +0000

It is not until you shop for underwear in Asia that you become aware of the differences in body types between our Asian sisters and ourselves. While Kiwi women of my generation were force fed milk at the school gates, and stuffed to the gills with mutton and three veg every Sunday; our sisters over the seas were partaking of a more humble diet, eating whatever the gods of the seasons provided.
The resulting differences in our body types is as obvious as being a big brown moth at a butterfly ball, which is how I always manage to feel after about fifteen minutes in Asia. Worse, the kind of loose modest clothing required of women in the East only serves to advertise my incredibly hulky size 12 frame and so I am constantly caught in a kind of stylistic nightmare, which I relieve by wearing outrageously sexy underwear.

Six months in India is hell on your clothes especially if you travel with the bare necessities as I do. I allow myself three bras since a bra has a shelf life of six months, which is the length of my visa, I don’t foresee any problems when I pack my bag.
The lingerie news in India is not good. While India may be an emerging economic giant in the East, her knickers are trailing well behind. ‘Sexy’ and ‘Underwear’ do not go together within the mind of Indian underwear manufacturers. Underwear is rarely seen and never discussed.

It hasn’t been so many years since travellers from the West hoping to make some cash in India could arrive in Delhi at the beginning of the wedding season with a couple of suitcases of Victoria Secrets collections, book a room in a Five star hotel, advertise discreetly through wedding planners and be stampeded within hours by hordes of Punjabi wedding possies in such high states of excitement that a male friend of mine who did that once, still shakes uncontrollably when he recounts the tale.

Meanwhile back in the village where I mostly live, such delights have not even entered into the consciousness of desire within the hearts of the women I know. Their underwear is as serviceable as a nuns and not a topic of civilised conversation in any case.
A trip to Kathmandu to sort out another visa is going to be my opportunity to replace the original three with something a lot less serviceable than is on offer at the local market.

Despite the overwhelming political difficulties of the Nepali people, the crippling poverty and overwhelming hardship of life, or perhaps because of it, Kathmandu is the high altitude playground of the restless West. While a peoples war rages in the hills around Kathmandu, tourists remain untouched by the tragedy and move around under the protection of both warring parties.
Consequently it is possible to stuff your face with chocolate cake within three hundred kilometres of a war where the people caught between are living on the verge of starvation.
The gap between the rich and poor in Nepal is reflected in the plate glass windows of the five star shopping area where Dior objects are displayed beside other more generic labels of the west. Politics aside, that’s where I am headed on this day to track down underwear that reflect all the style and classy sexiness I have come to expect next to my skin.

At first sight, the ground looks promising. A department store selling plastic junk, flash labels and everything else we think we need in the west. The bras and knickers are easily found and sparkle before my eyes like forgotten jewels. There is colour and sexy cut and even bling! After feasting my eyes for a dizzyingly gratifying second, I plunge into the racks in search of my perfect fit.
“Madam is what size?” The assistant materialises at my side. She is half my age and half my size, suddenly I feel like a big brown moth at a butterfly ball.
“36C,” I respond.
Her eyes slide towards her friend as she approaches. They whisper together behind hands the size of butterfly wings while I exclaim in surprise at the feast of lingerie beneath my hands, what I see is bloody marvellous! I will be home by lunchtime as the saying goes.
I remember that I don’t know how 36C translates to a metric number; perhaps that’s why the girls are whispering together. But they seem to understand my request, but appear a little uncomfortable about it. Nepali hate to refuse a request, it takes ages to get a simple “no” out of them. My delight at the find of the year begins to dim.
They call in the supervisor and as they whisper my request, I slowly come to realise that my bra size has been lost in translation.
“No?” I prompt them for a straight answer. I am, as usual, too direct.
“No, no, no,” they assure me in the negative. “What you need, Madam is the upstairs department.”

The upstairs department is the baby and mother department. I look at a variety of maternity bras; decide that no matter how inventive I get with the fold down flap, they will just not do. I shake my head and slink down the stairs where the wraithlike shop assistants still huddle together with the shock of my outrageous request.
“Yes Madam?” They enquire. I shake my head. From the reactions of the sales assistants so far, it would seem that 36C is a temporary aberration brought on by pregnancy or a freak of nature. I remember that I am the latter. The karma of a lifetime of being a force-fed carnivore weighs heavy on my chest.
In a fit of rebellion, I grab a handful of sexy little knickers, ignoring the sales girls rounded eyes and raised butterfly brows as I pay and leave. It’s not until I get home and discover to my horror (and my French lovers delight) that they have no real front to the damn things that I understand the muffled giggles I heard from the shop assistants as I left and headed for the Chinese market on the further end of town.

Surely, I tell myself, somewhere amongst the flood of Chinese goods making their way across the Himalayas into Nepal is a cancelled export order of Chinese made bras that some enterprising Nepali has turned into a business opportunity. All that happens there is that I garner the sympathy of more reed slim shop assistants and end up with a surplus of rebellious knickers.
The sun is sinking over the horizon as I head for home with the sloping tread of defeat.
At last I spy an entire city street given over to stalls selling the export order I dreamed of! Diving in, I rush from stall to stall like a mad woman to discover to my crushing dismay that everything over an A cup is actually just optimistic sizing and evidence that no Asian bra designer have ever even laid their hands on a genuine C cup. Sorting the chaff from the c cups, I am left with two serviceable nun like bras which squash my breasts into sausage roll shapes seriously undermining my confidence for the next four months and limp back to India.
Later Bangkok, the city of Botox and boob jobs promises more. I reckon that the growing boob job market is good news for C cups but alas, it is not a promising start.

As I wait for a taxi to take me to the mega mall shopping area of Bangkok, a flutter of nothingness catches my eye. A dress no bigger than the kind of scarf I wear in India, light and breezy, impossibly sexy and totally inappropriate drifts out from the clothing stall where I wait. I admire the lightness of the fabric and briefly imagine how it would feel on my skin in a tropical breeze.
“No hab.”
An old woman squatting beside her stall assesses me over a bowl of noodles.
She startles me back into reality.
“No hab what?”
The chopsticks hover before her lips.
“No hab your size,” she shoves the noodles into her mouth and chews for a few seconds. “Try jumbo.”
Dismissing me, she turns her full concentration on her lunch.

In retaliation, I rattle around her dress rack, determined now to upset this bloody smug A Cup until I find something long and loose that will be wearable in India even if I wouldn’t be caught in a bus crash in it at home. But my triumph lasts three weeks of people enquiring about my baby to realise that she had sold me a maternity dress!

The shopping area of Bangkok is a multi orgasmic feast of consumerism gone troppo, so I hold high hopes as I emerge from the taxi. This, I decide, is going to be a Big Bra Day.
The first few shops don’t seem to understand my request, they send me to a sex shop. I didn’t like the colours. I ask again and get sent to another sex shop but I explain that the point of having a bra is to cover your nipples.

Then I find my lifelong friend, Patrick the sales assistant who currently occupies the 'between gender' gender. As a fellow fish out of water, I sense a sympathetic soul. When I explain my outrageous request for a bra that is sexy but not from the sex scene and he murmurs in full understanding, I know I have made a sympathy hit."A bra that will take the 36C weight from my shoulders without calling in construction crew," I cry. He nods like a nurse in a hospice, I am totally encouraged.
"A bra that will say beneath these old-fashioned clothes beats the heart of a siren!" I think I shouted this last piece but he remained orientally disciplined as he gently took my hand and led me to the widest range of C Cups I have seen in South East Asia and the entire Indian subcontinent. I buy all three of them on the spot and I am home by lunchtime..
Published on 8/7/06 Thingsasian.com

Me and Guru Ji

noreply@blogger.com (Dianne Sharma-Winter) — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 22:30:00 +0000

Maori are intrepid travellers and have a knack of turning up in the most unlikely corners of the world. One Ngati Awa woman has managed to live unnoticed and unremarked amongst India’s most famous holy men. Currently she’s back in Matata in the Bay of Plenty, writing a book about her experiences of living with these rather fiery men and planning her next trip back.

Dianne Sharma-Winter of Ngati Hokopu ki Hokowhitu explains that the Naga Sadhu of Nerenjeni Akhara are the military sect of the sadhu whanau that has existed since ancient times. “They are the warriors of the otherwise peaceable band of wandering sadhu, the renounced and rejected holy men of India,” she says. “In earlier times, they raised armies to fight Muslim and British invaders. “They worship the god of war and are not the kind of holy men that people in the West might imagine.

In fact, for the Naga (or naked), everything is ‘open’. That means scant clothes, no money, little or no personal possessions and no pretence.” The desire to travel took Dianne to India via Kathmandu some 12 years ago. ”I was a solo mother with two kids and thinking of the furthest away place I could go once I had raised my whanau,” she says. “I told them that when they were 18 they had to leave home cos I was going to Kathmandu.”
She did that when her younger child was 16 and boarding at Queen Vic. “I was 36 at the time and had been left some money.” Since then, Dianne has been back and forth between India and New Zealand as soon as she has saved the money and as whanau concerns demand. She now has four mokopuna.
“To get the money I have worked in film, hospitality and on the roadworks! My whanau are okay with this, although they would like me to be more available for babysitting,” she says.

Dianne’s sadhu friends live mostly behind the jealously guarded thick walls of their akhara (literally ‘wrestling place’), or they move endlessly from place to holy place in eternal pilgrimage, sometimes naked except for a covering of ash. The akhara, as Dianne discovered, is not the place to withdraw from the world, but a field of combat where all comers are expected to be equal to any challenge.

“The kawa is similar to that of the marae atea where all comers are challenged and if found wanting, usually chased away with sticks. “The legacy of their early military history is visible today in their great bellowing arguments, passionate discourses and squabbles as well as in the sword-like sweeps of their stick at anyone who may have roused their temper and in their passionate insistence on instant blind obedience of their (sometimes irrational) orders.”
So how did a lone foreign woman get mixed up with these fierce holy guys?
“The Indians say that when you are ready for your guru (teacher) he will appear,” Dianne says. “I fell into being a cheli (student) from an overdose of homesickness and curiosity. I think that God has a great sense of humour to send me to these guys, but there’s nothing like a homesick Maori and when we are far away from everything familiar, I think we search it out."

“I was looking for a change from restaurant meals when a friend suggested that I buy food and take it to a sadhu as a kind of koha. The sadhu cooks the kai on his sacred fire (dhuni) and shares it with whoever comes. They are the best cooks too, so it’s where you get the best food! “The day of the sadhu is set by ritual, with the tikanga adhered to for centuries and a kawa fiercely enforced. Visiting a sadhu is the same as visiting a god and so the whole process is surrounded by tapu and noa which includes forms of address, how you pass things, even how you sit. “There was so much about sadhu life that reminded me of home - the communal living, the sharing of resources, the endless cups of tea."

Dianne wisely chose to visit the sadhu who had the most visitors. In fact this sadhu was to become her ‘Guru ji’ - the wild and free Chandon Giri.
“He looks like a K Road drag queen on a full moon Friday night!” she laughs. “There was never a dull moment around this guy!” When the sadhu decided to move location, Dianne followed him to the ancient Shiva site of Omkareshwar on the banks of the sacred Narmada River, site of a long-running controversy over a dam project that has displaced villages and will render thousands of people homeless. Reducing her possessions to one small shoulder bag and a blanket, Dianne moved into a jungle temple with the guru and other sadhu and hordes of Indian pilgrims.

Sleeping in the open, cooking on the dhuni, washing in the monsoon swollen river as well as dealing with the lack of common language and chasing marauding monkeys away from their kai, life became a daily test of survival. Eventually she aroused the concerns of the local police, who had concerns about her safety.

“Basically in order to avoid a rather unpleasant situation escalating into a night in an Indian jail cell, I claimed the sadhu as my Guru ji and so became the cheli (student) of a half naked man who lives in the jungle of India! It got me out of the police station but committed me to a lifetime relationship, and with two cops and a holy man as my witness, it was pretty much set.”

Since then, she has been accepted into the Akhara and into the brotherhood of the organisation of Nerenjeni. “My status is that of a cheli; the sadhus understand that it is impossible for me to ever become a sadhu and never pressure me about that. I come and go between India and New Zealand. Whenever I turn up, they act as if I have been away no longer than a week and life just goes on,” she says.
Dianne says she is clear in her own spirituality, and is not looking for a ‘saviour’. She just feels a deep sense of connection with the sadhu whanau. “I am the only foreign female cheli of any long standing - I have been their cheli for seven years now,” she says.

Like any female, what to wear, has always been a bit of a dilemma for Dianne especially among the lightly clad and sometimes naked sadhus. “I’ve opted to wear what is known as an Indian dress -a long dress over wide pants, just to help me blend in,” she says. The cheli’s day begins early. “Rising before the sun, my job is to first see to my Guru ji; he is usually shouting for tea, so after washing, I milk the cow and make the tea for the sadhus. After breakfast I pick the flowers and dress the temple for morning puja (karakia) that the sadhus perform twice daily and then I have another temple to care for down the road."

“The sadhus farm the land that they hold for their organisation but it’s very subsistence farming, even with their comparatively large holding of 50 acres. The day is taken up with farm business and visitors, and preparing our one meal a day which we take in the evening after puja.”

Dianne admits that people may think her mad to have taken the risk of living with the sadhus. She knows of foreign women who have travelled with so-called holy men who have turned out to be criminals or hiding from the law. “It is not uncommon to see a foreign woman travelling with one of these sadhus and to hear that she was robbed, raped or murdered. I know of two such cases personally,” she says. “But I had studied this guy Chandon Giri for some time and was more than confident in my own abilities to protect myself.”

The Naga may have a reputation of being a fierce ‘take no prisoners’ kind of holy men, but for this Ngati Awa woman, they are the burning heart of Hinduism.

FIRST PUBLISHED IN JUNE 2006 MANA MAGAZINE