Family

We started the day with dosas (potato and onion filled "burritos") and vadas (savory "donuts") with several chutneys and then headed to the Chowmahalla Palace of the Nizams. It's been turned into a museum that tells the history of the family and houses collections of china dishware, armory, and cars they once owned. The inside of many of the buildings has been restored/maintained, and the outside of the main building is being cleaned and repainted. As with much of this part of the world, though, it appears to be a constant battle to keep the harsh elements from deteriorating the outsides of buildings. Facades seem to crumble and/or blacken at a remarkable speed.

At one point in our wanderings through the complex, we passed through a giant wooden gate into an overgrown garden with gazebos flanking a fountain. It was clear this wasn't part of the guest experience, but there was no indication we couldn't enter...until the guard blew his whistle at us to let us know we'd ventured too far. He was monitoring the exhibit we were trying to reach, the collection of the Nizam cars, and he quickly turned from guard to guide telling us with great pride about each of the vehicles. The best was the story of the time the nizam visited England and decided to purchase a Rolls Royce. The dealer told him he had neither the appearance nor the means to own the car, so he left and send his aide to buy seven of them. He had two assigned to clean the streets of Hyderabad and two designated for garbage collection. When the owner of Rolls Royce heard, we flew to India to deliver a personal apology.

The rest of the day was spent in Adi's home preparing for a great feast. His parents and aunt and uncle invited 40 or so of their closest relatives and hired a cook to prepare food in an extraordinary quantity. I got to watch it all in the works. A three foot diameter pan of chicken in a sauce of 20 ingredients that was a fusion of India and England (cardamom, ginger, cumin, ketchup, Worchestershire sauce, etc) and a perfect blend of awesomeness. A tomato and chili based dish that was an intensely mature roasted soft emulsion of all of the seasonings.  Kebabs dusted with a mix of spices predominated by cardamom. Biryani...a giant bucket of biryani. The cook set up a giant (I can't overemphasize giant) pot of rice to boil and methodically layered rice of increasing tenderness over a layer of seasoned goat so that as it all continued to cook, the rice nearest the heat wouldn't overcook relative to the rice at the top. He then stretched a rope of dough around the edge of the biryani pot and sealed it with a huge platter.  As with everything, that cooked on a stand over a roaring woodfire. And dessert was a fried bread pudding soaked in a sort of mango pineapple flavored condensed milk with raisins and nuts and foil leaf.

And then the guests started to arrive with all of the women in their fine evening saris. It was an array of colors and patterns with beautiful embroidery. Adi's mother wore the most recent of her collection of hundreds that she just finished stitching yesterday - aqua with clusters of red flowers and threads of gold accent. We all ate wherever we could find a place to park, and the men circled with bowls of food to refill empty plates. I realized that if I didn't want to end up uncomfortable, I needed to not be overly polite and finally turned away the fourth offer to heap more biryani and kebab on my plate. A need to save room for dessert seemed the perfect excuse.

After dinner, his family gave me a great honor as their guest. His aunt, a sincere and obviously wise and caring woman, applied a dot of vermillion to my forehead, wrapped my shoulders with a woven shawl, and draped my neck with a fragrant garland of chrysanthemum and roses. A few of his aunts then generously offered me small gifts, and members of the family gathered for pictures. And pictures. And pictures. It was all wonderful. The warmth and comfort in the room increased throughout the evening, culminating in this final burst of laughter and love. I can't wait to come again. I can't imagine a better introduction to India than the feeling of family.

Devotion

Yesterday we had a slow start to the morning and then jumped in an auto rickshaw to dart across town for lunch in a hotel restaurant that had a big buffet assortment of North and South Indian dishes. Since Indian food is tied with sushi as my favorite, an Indian buffet in India is pretty much a dream. The char grilled paneer with mint and cilantro chutney stole the show.

Traffic in India is a dervish of excitement or terror, depending on your perspective. The roads are a river of vehicles of all types, and traffic lights are mere suggestions. Traffic cops must get good insurance - their primary job seems to be to shepherd small groups of people through the constant flow of traffic. Otherwise no one would ever cross some intersections. Most intersections are rotaries rather than four way stops, but the traffic seems to go around the rotary in BOTH directions. So once in awhile you get a stream of vehicles going one direction and a stream of vehicles going another, and you find yourself looking through the open door of the rickshaw at the flat face of a bus just inches away. Somehow everyone manages to wiggle through the chaos with horns ablaze, as if that will do anything to move the traffic faster. I am always tempted to reach out and shake the hand of someone in the vehicle next to us, just because I can.

After lunch, we took a car across town to the fort and tombs of the Quli Qutb Shah dynasty. The tombs are beautiful Indo-Persian design with minarets, intricate carvings, and giant open domes. The acoustics are perfect, a theme of the day. The echo inside the enclosed space of one of the tombs of the queen carries longer than any echo I've heard. The outer columns and supports of the tomb are giant pieces of granite carved into perfectly interlocking slabs. The tomb itself was constructed of brick overlaid with 2 inches of composite plaster and then a layer of smooth limestone plaster. They're all in reasonably good condition but blackened with mold and with some deterioration of the facade and adornments, but they're in the process of restoration and will once again be totally spectacular.

We didn't have much time left before the official close to see the Golkonda fort high on the hill above the tombs, but we got lucky that security allows guests with a guide to stay until dark, so we hired a guide. The fort grounds are enormous and stretch up the side of a large granite hill, hugging huge boulders to crown the top. It must have been spectacular in its prime of the 1500s. The entire fort was built in 62 years to house the Qutb Shah dynastic capital. I can't do it justice by explanation, so I'll pick a couple of key highlights. The treasury was once converted to a prison to house the treasurer who had taken a "loan" to build a Hindu temple in a nearby city. The shahs were Muslims from Persia, so the current shah was less than pleased when he found his money had been taken for this purpose, and he imprisoned the treasurer until the debt could be repaid...for 12 years. Many of the people who worked for the Qutb shah were Hindu, including this devout treasurer. For 12 years he carved a shrine to Hanuman, the devotee of the Hindu Lord Rama, with nothing but his hands. I didn't want to take a picture, so I found one here online.

The sounds of Golkonda fort are spectacular. It was designed to be acoustically perfect for communicating over very long distances. Our guide clapped in several places to show us how the sound moves through the fort. I think that the craziest was one place where he clapped, and the echo was returned from a perpendicular direction, and it doubled. Two claps could be heard returning from the left of wherever the faced while clapping. And this was all designed in the 1500s.

The other spectacular sound took me back to the early morning waking in Jordan to the sounds of Muslim call to prayer. There are more than a dozen mosques encircling the hillside of the fort, and we could hear all of them start, slightly off timing from one another, in a haunting call that reaches into the soul of even someone who isn't a follower of Islam. As the sun set and the lights flickered on all around the vast expanse of Hyderabad, I stood entranced at the remains of the shah queen's roof top garden. I'm not sure when I'll hear that many calls all together again. It's beautiful and once again very mediative.

We finally made our way back down the hill and down a long corridor that ran next to a series of chambers alive with the squeaks of thousands of bats and into a courtyard set for the light and sound show. The fort is lit with dozens of colored lights that are controlled in synch with a story of the history of the fort. It's really a beautiful show and pulled together everything that our guide had told us as we wound through its steps. If only there weren't other people disobeying the request to put their phones away and not try to videotape the show...which wouldn't turn out well and would probably be stored somewhere and never watched again. And then it started to rain, and everyone rushed away. That made the show an order of magnitude better. Adi and I sat through the sprinkles for a little while until we realized that the "mist" gathering around the top of the fort was actually heavier rain cresting the hill, and we rushed for cover under a walkway. But the show must go on even with no seated audience. From a large arched window where I was protected from most of the downpour, we watched the end of the light display with the few remaining people. And the rain stopped just in time for us to make it back to the waiting car to return home to another huge spread of Adi's mothers curries.

Traveling meditation

The flight into Hyderabad from Singapore was the first meditative travel experience of this trip. I woke just in time to look out the window and see Orion’s Belt as clear as could be, a spectacular lightening display from above, and a shooting star. It was like the time I was waiting for the Hood Canal bridge to close as a submarine passed through on its way out to sea with the American flag raised, and a freaking bald eagle flew past as if on cue.

I’m staying these four days with my postdoc’s family…just about all of them. The families of three brothers live on the same property that’s been in their family for eight generations. They say that they are the last descendants of civil servants of the Nizam monarchy of Hyderabad who still live in the original old part of the city. The cluster of houses are on narrow paths behind a common gate and range in age of modernization from the original home that the brothers were raised in, which is painted three shades of the ocean and has all the signs of ancient construction, to this house that was re-completed just over a year ago. Each morning I’ve awakened first to the sounds of the Muslim call to prayer broadcast at 5 am from a mosque about a quarter mile away. It’s easy to fall asleep again and to be awakened a couple of hours later by the sounds of cooking and cleaning in the kitchen and the music played by the woman who helps Adi’s parents with the house. I haven’t felt this peaceful in ages.

Yesterday after breakfast, we went into the center of this old part of town to see the Charminar monument and to walk about the markets. The Charminar is a four-minaret monument that was finished in 1591 to commemorate the end of a great plague. In all four directions from the Charminar, the streets extend through shops selling traditional Hyderabadi bangles in one direction and pearl jewelry in another. It seems strange that the almost geographic center of India would be known for its pearls, but it’s apparently a centuries held tradition dating back to the monarchy. The bangles are the craft that predominantly marks Hyderabad today. They’re set about a metal loop that is coated in a sort of laquer and set with dozens or hundreds of small glass rhinestones. They’re in all colors and patterns and line the forearms of Indian women. No doubt many will be coming home with me.

Food…all of it. My first food experience wasn’t a sensation of taste but rather of sound. Adi guided me toward the sound of perfectly rhythmic pounding in a small street front shop with a man sorting stacks and stacks of papers and two men on the floor behind him each repeatedly striking a thick piece of what looked like leather with a small mallet in perfect alternation. The stacks of paper are interleaved with ultrathin sheets of silver foil. It’s one of the few remaining shops that manually pounds pieces of silver into the thin sheets that get laid on top of many of the traditional Indian sweets. I stood there for a moment listening to the rhythm with my eyes closed to appreciate this third meditative travel moment.

More food with milky chai, and lots of it. Warm samosas with spicy lentils, potatoes, and onions. Osmania biscuits that are slightly sweet and a little salty and a lot of perfect. A delectable pillow resting in pistachio/saffron/cardamom cream that first has the texture of a grain pastry and gives itself away as cheese curd only when it squeaks slightly between your teeth. And Adi’s mom’s curries…she’s an amazing cook. Even the goat testicles and kidneys were palatable (sorry to those of you who were so enjoying my food descriptions until that last one.) Each day they are giving me a “challenging food” to test my adventurousness. If they hadn’t told me I was eating testicle, I could have put back several, because they were so well-seasoned.

All is wonderful except for the mosquitos. They're bastards. I'm not taking an anti-malarial in part because I could also get dengue or Chikigunya, so I might as well just do my best to not get bitten. This place is a real test of mosquito repellent, and I do seem to have an invisible shield of about six inches around me that keeps them buzzing near but not too near. It's like having an annoying sibling flying about constantly saying "I'm not touching you. I'm not touching you..."