Letter from Paris

(Once again, these blog posts are out of order.  This should actually have been the first post.  Please pay attention to the dates at the tops of these posts)

June 15, 2012

  On an impulse, I bought a ticket to Paris. A friend of mine has been living here for a year so I decided to visit her. Visiting her was just an excuse. Subconsciously, I wanted to travel alone; to test my mettle; to see if I could get around France by myself.

I was here four years ago, for four days at the end of a whirlwind European tour. I was a little sick then, and Paris seemed like a big noisy blur. The food seemed ordinary, perhaps because my traveling companion had no appreciation for it and insisted on going to the cheaper places. Or perhaps because we were staying in the St. Michel area, full of tourists.

But this time, it is a different story. The friend I am staying with is busy with her studies, which turns out to be a blessing in disguise, for I am all alone, wandering the streets and noticing things I did not notice before.

The very first morning, I awoke naturally at 5 a.m. I could not figure out my friend’s stove—I spotted the valve on a vertical pipe you had to turn on to get the gas flowing but I could not fathom what was wrong with the burner. So after waiting for three hours, I headed to the café next door.  Superficially, the place seemed like a diner back home but quickly I began to notice subtle differences.

The waiter, a towel flung over his shoulder, asked “Café?” as I entered. He was single-handedly serving the tables, even occasionally pulling the broom and dish pan out from behind the counter to give the place a sweep, working with such alacrity that I could only marvel. American service was the best in the world, I had always thought.

I was wrong.

When I said “thé?” in response to his query, guessing the word for tea, which, in Spanish is “te,” he brought me a teapot with hot milk on the side. The water was just the right temperature, the milk frothy and rich and in that moment I understood why the French feel frustrated with the rest of the world.

French sensibility dictates that things have to be done just right.

I notice this everywhere now.

I walked next door to the boulangerie that first morning and bought myself a croissant, something I never eat at home because of the carbs. But the thing was light and fluffy, not heavy and rich like American croissants and it just melted in my mouth. I decided to bring home a salmon and avocado sandwich too, a long thing that, when cut, became two sandwiches—a CEO from Subway must have come to France and decided to fashion his product after the French idea—and it too was a thing of artistry and perfection. The bread was not chewy like some of Bay Area’s best French bread like Semifreddi’s, but soft, and, once again, light. 

A waiter in another restaurant, this time near Napolean’s tomb, explained it to me this way, “Bread doesn’t make you fat; it fills you up and has very few calories. It depends on what kind of bread you eat.” 

So we discussed supersizing and American food versus French food. American food was big, he explained, French food was served in little portions. He was right of course.

The dinner and lunch courses everywhere are a sensory treat, the food cooked to perfection. And the French walk a lot, speeding through Metro turnstyles as if they are on rollerblades.

My waiter declared with some flair, “I propose to you a Panacotta for dessert.” And when I left the tiramisu half eaten, he pointed out that the French would never imagine leaving a plate of food uneaten, nor would they ask for a doggie bag. 

I felt guilty.

I am beginning to understand what France is all about. You get the sense of living inside a great civilization in which there is style and history and identity. Where you don’t have to give a tip because waiters get salaries. Where the façade of every official and academic building is engraved with the motto “Liberty, Egalite, Fraternity,” the legacy of the French Revolution.  Where the way people hold themselves in spite of the economic downturn, you sense pride and grace.

It is the way people treat one another that distinguishes the old world from the new, I suppose. You get that sensibility in India; you get it among the Maya in Mexico and Guatemala. And you get it in France.

During a boat trip on the Seine, a man on board had a medical problem so we docked by the riverside. The ambulance boat came. The paramedic ran to the road to wave the ambulance van onto the pier; the police arrived in a tire-raft kind of a speed boat. It was all done so efficiently and so cheerfully! Afterwards, the policewoman, who looked like the boss of her crew, kissed the chief paramedic on both cheeks the way the French do. The French have a sense of style, an etiquette and a way of doing things. No wonder they frown upon the rest of the world.

You see that kind of etiquette in personal interactions in India too.

I decided not to do the touristy thing this time but to sit in cafes like Hemingway, and in more recent times, Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker staff writer.

With such illustrious traditions, how could I not be a writer in Paris?

As I sit alone in the cafes or t'he Luxembourg Gardens where old men—and an occasional woman—play a game of boules, I experience the kind of poignancy I have not experienced before. Being alone here is beautiful. I am much more alert and observant. My isolation makes me feel sensitive in a way that I am not with company. I notice a vacuum beside me; I miss the person who is not there. I am forced to appreciate everything just a little bit more. The life around me seems fuller and richer. 

In the past, whenever I have heard people talk of making a “bucket list,” of seeing certain places before they died, I have wondered what the point was if you were going to die anyway. Would you remember what you saw in the afterlife? 

Was there an afterlife?

Now I realize that it not about seeing places but about the adventure of getting there. I have only gone on one organized tour in my life and I hated it. Traveling on my own, on the other hand, teaches me to be brave, to observe and learn and explore. What is the point of that, you might ask?

The point is that I can use the lessons I learn this way in my journey through life. After all, I am not dead yet; I might yet live for decades. 

I am Gulliver, I am Sindbad

July 15, 2012

When I was a little girl, I loved adventure stories. There was a Marathi magazine named Chandoba, which means "moon," and in this magazine, I discovered a faraway, magical world. The first time I read about Sindbad, I was mesmerized. The magazine had colorful illustrations and I remember one in which Sindbad had fallen into a well full of human bones.

Later, I discovered Gulliver and the Lilliputians too.

I was a dreamer and what I dreamt of was traveling to faraway places. Why is it that some children dream of leaving their homes, and others want to stay close to the hearth? My own children do not wish to go away. Perhaps because they went camping even before they were out of diapers; they traveled to Canada, India, and Mexico at young ages.

Whatever the reason, I dreamt of leaving home. Later, as an adolescent, I read Somerset Maugham. I remember a novel in which a young man travels to Malaya, Zanzibar, and Singapore. I believe he comes to a sad end. In my mind’s eye, I see him standing on the deck of a ship, watching a tropical sunset. I wanted to be that young man. I wanted to get on a ship and travel across the seven seas. The trouble was, there were no stories of seafaring girls. Sindbad was a man; Gulliver was a man; Robinson Crusoe was a boy; Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were boys too.

So I wished I were a boy. I acted like a boy too. I paid no attention to my looks; I did not put on makeup or jewelry. My brain, my courage, and my competence were what I wanted the world to acknowledge.

When I embarked on my solo travels across France recently, I felt confident, self-assured. When I searched for role models from literature, however, I could not come up with anything inspiring. I read Hemingway’s Movable Feast, a book about his life in Paris as a young   writer, but we had little in common.

Today, when people think of women traveling solo, they think of Eat, Pray, Love. Even though I haven’t read the book, judging by the author interviews I have heard on NPR, the message of the bestseller is quite clear, a woman adventuress cannot be complete without a man to round off the happy ending.

That the journey could be an end in itself, that one might find, at the end of a voyage, not love for a man, but love for oneself, is not seen as an appealing idea. This is sad because the truth is, no man or woman can ultimately fulfill us; ultimately we have to find inner peace, inner love, inner happiness.

For me the moment of such self-awakening came in St. Jean de Luz, a picturesque town in the Basque country of France. I had gotten used to the French routine of visiting the Boulangerie in the morning to buy a croissant and sometimes a Chocolatine, and then sitting at the café next door with my Kindle and my small Gateway computer.

As I sat there one morning, watching the locals get a café before work, a strange sensation overcame me. It was happiness. Not the kind of happiness I had experienced when, long ago, my husband had told me that he had fallen in love with me, or when I had gotten word that I had been admitted to grad school at U.C. Berkeley.

Rather, it was a feeling of completeness. All throughout my three week travels, people had been watching me as I took my place at a single table at a bistro or a salon. Occasionally, I had felt a pang. Not because I was lonely, but because people thought that I must be lonely.

At a restaurant near the Invalides in Paris, I was talking to a couple at the next table when I explained that I was visiting a friend of mine in Paris. The woman said, “Oh, good! I thought you were all alone!” I felt she had slapped me in the face. So much so that I did not tell her that, in fact, the next day, I was embarking on a solo journey across the country.

Why do people assume that being alone is a less than desirable state? When in fact, in many cases, it is better to be alone than to be with the wrong person? Do people do so to justify their own marriage or partnership?

I suppose I must have internalized the exchange with that insensitive woman, for, as I rode trains, walked into strange towns with my bag, or checked into a hotel, I imagined that people were wondering who I was and why I was by myself.

It was in St. Jean de Luz that I finally lost that feeling. I just did not care what people thought.  I realized that if they were looking at me at all, which probably they were not, they were simply trying to place my ethnicity. For throughout my travels, no one had identified  me as Indian, assuming that I was Spanish or Italian or Iranian. More importantly, I simply did not care about people’s judgments. I felt contented, complete, blissful. For I could write. I could read. I could observe. I could pick up conversations with strangers. At the last moment, I could decide to travel to San Sebastian, Spain. I could stroll up the hill hugging the Bay of Biscay to watch the sunset and wait for the miracle of the Green Flash to occur.

Back in my hotel room, I could write my blog. I could browse the web to decide my next destination, and, thanks to Google Translate, send messages to hotels for last minute reservations. Sometimes I did not even know where I was going to spend the next night or what train I was going to catch.

That was the exciting part. My travels were a far cry from Overseas Adventure Travel, where everything is planned, where the adventure is only in the name. I fulfilled my desires spontaneously, without having to negotiate them with anyone.

I was free. I was in a surrealistic dream. I was floating, unseen, unheard, alone. And because I was alone, the world was my oyster.

And the world embraced me. In my freedom and solitude I was able to love the world in a way that I had never loved it before. And the world came to love me. Never once did I lose my temper or felt despair. For, at every turn, guardian angels showed up to assist me. Every time I needed help, someone came to my aid, whether it was just to talk to me or to show me the way into town.

Why did this happen? Because I had sailed my ship alone across the seven seas. I had become Gulliver and Sindbad. I had fulfilled my childhood dream.

The trouble with being Gulliver or Sindbad of course is that you feel compelled to set off again, no matter how perilous your last journey. 

Abundance

Abundance

June 27, 2012 (The dates on all these blogs are scrambled up.  Actually they start on June 18^th and go on from there, almost every day or every other day.  I messed up on that.)

My friend Adria always says that one must have a sense of abundance.  That if one is miserly, one does not obtain riches.  On the other hand, if one has an attitude of abundance, she says, one will never lack for anything. 

The first time she told me this, I had an uncanny feeling that for once, someone had understood me perfectly.  For, I always act as if there is abundance in the world. 

Yet, I grew up in a poor family in India.  I was malnourished as a child, partly because my mother, even though a good cook, just did not relish feeding anyone, even her own children.  She herself did not enjoy food; she only craved sweets.  So it was impossible for her to imagine that her daughter might be hungry. 

It was a different matter with my brother Prakash, however.  Perhaps because he nearly died as a baby – of diphtheria - perhaps because he continued having illnesses like sunstrokes, or simply because he was a son, an only son, he got fed all the time.  We always gave him the best of everything.  I thought it was natural, I did not mind it. 

But the overwhelming feeling I remember of my childhood is that of being hungry. I was very thin, and as I became an adolescent, anemic.  Whenever there was anything in the house to eat, I raided the cupboards.  My parents called me khadad – the greedy one.  They paid no attention to the comments the school and college nurses wrote in my folder every year to the effect that I needed “improved nutrition.”

This is all by the way of explaining why I have always practiced the notion of abundance, not consciously practiced it, but intuitively, I have always understood that if one spends money, one gets money.  If one thinks that there will be plenty, then there will be plenty.  That there will be plenty of food in particular. 

I know Americans – particularly some Americans who grew up rich - who are so miserly you wouldn’t believe it.  Of course immigrants are miserly for a reason.  Either way, people’s cheapness always bothers me.  For, most of the time, their policies result in the old adage of penny wise and pound foolish.

In contrast with such people, what I have enjoyed throughout France is a natural attitude of abundance.  In America, traveling for business to different cities like Chicago or Atlanta, I have had trouble finding any food in the center of the town, particularly fruit.  American cities are like deserts, all you can find inside them is a CVS pharmacy, that is if you are lucky.  CVS was where I used to buy milk for making tea in my hotel room in the morning on my business trips.  The only thing American hotels have going for them is the coffeemaker which can be used for making tea. 

So at first I missed the coffeemaker in France.  I had access to a teapot in the B&B in Amboise and so I kept thinking that I needed that everywhere.  What I did not realize was that it was more fun to walk to a boulangerie, buy a croissant, then eat it with my tea, sitting at a café.   It is not just the tourists who do this in France, but locals too.  So one can watch people while eating breakfast. 

What a civilized world this is. 

At first, I was hoarding food during my travels in France.  It is a lifelong habit of a person whose one fear is to go to bed hungry.  So I carried with me on every train and to every hotel room cheese and bread and fruit and prepared foods, so much so that I had to throw some of it away.  Until I realized that in France you could never go hungry anywhere, particularly in small towns where streets are full of produce and cheese and bread and chocolates and biscuits and pate and foie-gras and you name it.  As if this were not enough, they have market days once or twice a week when food overtakes the village, when abundance acquires a new meaning.  These markets are not for tourists, but locals, who get into living with abundance with such a flair, I don’t think I have seen anyone love food as much as the French do.

India has markets of course but the presence of poverty is never too far in India.

In France, I have yet to see poverty or even a hint of it. 

 I became conscious of this after I took the train to San Sebastian two days ago.  I was actually looking forward to the visit.  Ever since I went to Spain in the nineteen nineties and saw San Sebastian on the country’s map, I had wanted to go there.  Partly because the town was named after my son; partly because I had this mental image of an exotic coastal Basque town. 

So I took the SNCF train to Hendaye, a French border town, where Hitler apparently met Franco after the occupation of France.  The idea was that Spain would join in with Hitler.  But upon meeting Franco, Hitler thought of him as a buffoon and so the collaboration never took place, perhaps changing the course of history. 

Everything was OK until Hendaye.  But then I rode the so called Eusko train (no doubt a Basque name) across the border.   I was exhausted and closed my eyes for a second – the Eusko Train runs like a milk train, one can literally hear the wheels grinding – and when I opened them I noticed that we were crossing over what looked like a sewer canal.  The sight was so unfamiliar after over two weeks of not seeing any urban squalor that my stomach turned.  Walls of buildings were marked with graffiti; facades of edifices had black moss growing on them.  The countryside lacked charm.  It was as if I was back in the third world.  For a moment I thought I was in Latin America, even though at the back of my mind I knew that Ecuador or Peru would probably look a lot poorer, that if a Spanish person heard my thoughts he or she would be horrified.  It was just that my eyes had gotten used to clean streets; I had begun taking the shiny paint on ancient buildings for granted; I had gotten accustomed to the utter lack of dirt or poverty here in France. 

I felt a little sheepish.   Here I had been longing to be across the border where I could speak Spanish; I had been waiting to be with a culture and people I feel more comfortable with.  Just that morning, sitting in my favorite café in St. Jean de Luz, I had been moved by a melody streaming on to the sidewalk from the bar, a familiar song from the Buena Vista Social Club, of which I have a CD at home.  The tune was what prompted me to make the journey to San Sebastian. 

And yet I thought, “Spain is poor,” as I rode the Eusko Tren into the country. 

And in that moment, the problems of the Eurozone became obvious to me. 

Still, I hoped it was just the Border Town syndrome, like you feel when passing into Tijuana from San Diego. 

But it was not.  When I got off at San Sebastian, two American women from Los Gatos guided me into town.  It had taken me a while to realize they were mother and daughter.  The pavement was radiating heat, even though we were walking by a so-called river.  It was a typical European river, its waters contained within a high embankment.  It exuded no moisture, no cool breezes came off its surface, no trees shaded its banks.  There were bridges across it of course, marked by golden pillars.  In the distance was a glass monstrosity, and beyond it, the beach.  Even though it was only a half a mile away, it was hard to imagine that anything as natural and vast as an ocean could reside anywhere in the vicinity of so much concrete and stone and metal. 

Was it the quality of the light that made the place glare so?  I hated the look of the place and was glad I had chosen to stay in the small town of St. Jean de Luz across the border. 

The idea of abundance was gone in Spain too.  I mean the center of the city and the old town were full of ice cream shops and restaurants but they seemed about as appetizing as an American hardware store.  The foods exuded no particular aromas; the products just did not have the texture and look of actual food. 

So sitting on a bench in the one hundred degree heat, I ate my apple. 

This is one of the things that has always puzzled me about Latin America too.  I have often wondered as to why given such beautiful weather, they do not eat more fruits and vegetables, why their diet seems rather sparse and monotonous, full of meat and potatoes.

In San Sebastian, there was the obligatory cathedral in the old town, and a Constitution Plaza.

But the place was noisy.  I guess that is Spanish character for you, loud, vibrant, full of energy.  The French, on the other hand, probably follow the English dictum of “children should be seen and not heard.”  For, even in the most public of places you do not hear children shouting in France the way they do in San Sebastian.

All these thoughts made me feel as If I was betraying my adapted culture of Latin America.  But the truth was, I couldn’t wait to get on the Eusko Tren and head back to France.  

On the way back, I noticed that the graffiti stopped as soon as we crossed the border. 

I thought of how, once upon a time, the Italians and the Spanish were the underdogs of Northern Europe, as depicted in numerous E.M. Forester novels.  They were the third world for ordinary middle class Northern Europeans like the French and the British who happened not to have any colonials like Indians or Algerians around to beat up on.  In John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers, made in the nineteen sixties, the Spanish servant was the comic equivalent of the Mexican illegal immigrant in the Hollywood of today.    

Now with the Eurozone falling apart, perhaps they will go back to being that way again.

I am in a bubble in France; I can’t talk to anyone because the French refuse to acknowledge that other idioms exist in the world, even if it means dying with their dying language.  But that has made me a better observer.  In the Spanish speaking world, I fit among the people so I observe less and learn less. 

So what am I to do?  Learn to speak French?

Once back in St. Jean de Luz, I ate my leftover food from the market day in my room, then went for a long walk along the promenade.  The sun was bright, the breeze cool and soothing.  I waited for the Green Flash.  It did not happen.

Green Flash or not, I was back with abundance.  I am glad the French allowed me to experience something I had always longed for. 

Guggenheim Bilbao

Guggenheim Bilbao

June 28, 2012

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is like an enormous golden flower blooming by the side of a bridge upon a river.  I suppose it would have been a great idea in Norway or Sweden, where the light is muted, where the reflection off of Frank Gehry’s metallic surfaces would have shone on to the surroundings, bringing sunlight into a somber, subdued, darkening winter afternoon.   But the Guggenheim is in Bilbao, where the light is a flat white, where there are hardly any shadows, where trees do not line the riverbank, where what one longs for is not glitering golden metallic surfaces reflecting the heat from the pavement and radiating it back on to unsuspecting passersby already wilting under the sun.   I don’t know why Gehry chose to build such a monstrosity here of all places. 

Why did he choose this particular style of building in a place like Los Angeles (for its Symphony Hall) or for Bilbao, where heat and light are scarcely in demand, where what one longs for is shade and muted colors?  Where the sun already blinds you so that you don’t need an over-large, shiny, metallic object towering over you and zapping you with concentrated heat rays?

Modern Bilbao to me looked like a city made by a child out of blocks of Lego.  In fact, now that the city is striving to meet Gehry half way, decorating the bridge next to the museum with a bright red screen that looks exactly like a large Logo block, the place looks more like Disneyland than a real city.  Perhaps they did get that bright red object out of Legoland, in Germany.  Everything in Bilbao is metallic, even the benches at the bust stop, where I nearly got second degree burns on my bottom by sitting down in my sundress.  The temperature outside was 40 degrees centigrade even though it was only June. 

Everything looked washed out, preposterously artificial and unnatural.  And to top this illusion of technology and space age, there stood in front of the Guggenheim museum a sculpture of a puppy dog so garish and large, it made Gehry’s building look diminutive, if such a thing were even possible.  Why a puppy dog?  Why in front of the museum?  Was the idea to make the preposterously large building appear small?  Was the aim to humanize it in some way?  I really have no idea, not having read anything about it since it was first built. 

The fact that the dog was made of real plants growing real flowers in yellow and white and red did not make it any less unnatural.  I am not sure who was trying to play a joke on whom.  Did someone deliberately try to give the finger to Gehry by allowing this hideous creature to tower over his masterpiece?  Or did the city of Bilbao just throw its hands up in the air and say, “We want to be famous, at any cost, even if it is just for our grotesque public monuments.”

Looking at the museum and the dog, I couldn’t help thinking of San Francisco, in gratitude.  Our symphony hall and our library are, in comparison, modest and tasteful.  Even the De Young Museum, which almost no one I know likes because of its upside down shape and because it looks like a building still under construction, is not as overpowering as Guggenheim Bilbao.  Its steel mesh construction blends into the trees of Golden Gate Park. 

For me the effect of Bilbao was silly, gaudy, irreverent, and ultimately, unaesthetic. 

Much of modern art is like that, I suppose.  I struggle to understand it, and then give up.  If it doesn’t appeal to me immediately, I wonder why I should bother with it. 

Inside was an exhibit by a painter named David Hockney.  I knew nothing about him.  In the first gallery were his outlandishly large paintings of Yosemite valley made on an I-Pad.  The colors were unreal, the proportions too huge.  You had to step way away to get any perspective on the pictures.  But then I saw a movie about him in the hallway; watched him stand in the cold English countryside – he is from Yorkshire – and try to paint the branch of a tree over and over again.  It was then I got fascinated by him.  In my eye, I was still seeing the realistic, mystical impressionist paintings I had seen in the D’Orsay only a week or two ago.  Comparing them with Hockney’s garish colors and larger than life canvases was hard at first. 

But when I went into the gallery displaying his Yorkshire paintings, I got mesmerized.  For he had painted the same grove of trees, the same road, the same canopies, over and over again, to reflect the different textures and colors and hues of different seasons.  What I loved about Hockney’s work was his dedication to the observation of nature, and to trees in particular.  I recalled the group of painters I had met at the Mission in San Juan Batista (made famous by Hitchcock in Vertigo) on way to Pinnacles recently, who explained to me the French Plein Air movement started by the impressionists.  Apparently, with the advent of paints in tubes, as opposed to the age old method of mixing them and grinding them from raw materials, and the invention of the steam engine, painters discovered a new freedom.  They could now travel to places on trains, paint outdoors, and create their visions of nature, while before, they had strictly drawn portraits.  This was how the impressionist movement began.  But the fact that the original movement still survives was new to me. I wanted to join the group and make sketches of beautiful places (I can do a decent sketch, particularly from a photograph).  One of the old ladies, who had been an art teacher, told me it was acceptable to paint or draw from photographs, in fact, in the beginning stages, that is what they want you to do.  So I might do this when I get back to California.

I thought David Hockney has created a new impressionist movement of the twenty first century, one that relies on, what else, technology of course, but one that encourages us to see art and nature with the new millennium’s eye.  That is quite a feat.  He uses composites of photographs, I-Pad drawings, and other techniques, painting parts of a landscape on multiple canvases and then putting them all together.  His work is very technical in some ways, he breaks it down into recognizable pieces so the mystery is gone.  At the same time, one wonders how he can keep such massive pieces into his head in order to be able to integrate them. 

The other exhibits at the Guggenheim were not worthwhile but I got inspired by David Hockney.  I felt as I had felt when I had first gone to the Modern Art Museum in the Smithsonian, right after graduating from Berkeley, and  seen works by Alexander Calder, Salvador Dali, Paul Klee, and Miro.  I didn’t like all of them, but I began to understand what they were trying to do.  When I went to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh (he was born there but never wanted to acknowledge it), I began to understand him a little more too.

So David Hockney introduced me to a new dimension of art.   His paintings slowly grew on me and mesmerized me until I wanted to be in that room, surrounded by the large canvases, forever.  It was as thrilling as being lost in  a real forest.

Abundance

Abundance

June 27, 2012

(The dates on all these blogs are scrambled up.  Actually they start on June 18^th and go on from there, almost every day or every other dy.  I messed up on that.)

My friend Adria always says that one must have a sense of abundance.  That if one is miserly, one does not obtain riches.  On the other hand, if one has an attitude of abundance, she says, one will never lack for anything. 

The first time she told me this, I had an uncanny feeling that for once, someone had understood me perfectly.  For, I always act as if there is abundance in the world. 

Yet, I grew up in a poor family in India.  I was malnourished as a child, partly because my mother, even though a good cook, just did not relish feeding anyone, even her own children.  She herself did not enjoy food; she only craved sweets.  So it was impossible for her to imagine that her daughter might be hungry. 

It was a different matter with my brother Prakash, however.  Perhaps because he nearly died as a baby – of diphtheria - perhaps because he continued having illnesses like sunstrokes, or simply because he was a son, an only son, he got fed all the time.  We always gave him the best of everything.  I thought it was natural, I did not mind it. 

But the overwhelming feeling I remember of my childhood is that of being hungry. I was very thin, and as I became an adolescent, anemic.  Whenever there was anything in the house to eat, I raided the cupboards.  My parents called me khadad – the greedy one.  They paid no attention to the comments the school and college nurses wrote in my folder every year to the effect that I needed “improved nutrition.”

This is all by the way of explaining why I have always practiced the notion of abundance, not consciously practiced it, but intuitively, I have always understood that if one spends money, one gets money.  If one thinks that there will be plenty, then there will be plenty.  That there will be plenty of food in particular. 

I know Americans – particularly some Americans who grew up rich - who are so miserly you wouldn’t believe it.  Of course immigrants are miserly for a reason.  Either way, people’s cheapness always bothers me.  For, most of the time, their policies result in the old adage of penny wise and pound foolish.

In contrast with such people, what I have enjoyed throughout France is a natural attitude of abundance.  In America, traveling for business to different cities like Chicago or Atlanta, I have had trouble finding any food in the center of the town, particularly fruit.  American cities are like deserts, all you can find inside them is a CVS pharmacy, that is if you are lucky.  CVS was where I used to buy milk for making tea in my hotel room in the morning on my business trips.  The only thing American hotels have going for them is the coffeemaker which can be used for making tea. 

So at first I missed the coffeemaker in France.  I had access to a teapot in the B&B in Amboise and so I kept thinking that I needed that everywhere.  What I did not realize was that it was more fun to walk to a boulangerie, buy a croissant, then eat it with my tea, sitting at a café.   It is not just the tourists who do this in France, but locals too.  So one can watch people while eating breakfast. 

What a civilized world this is. 

At first, I was hoarding food during my travels in France.  It is a lifelong habit of a person whose one fear is to go to bed hungry.  So I carried with me on every train and to every hotel room cheese and bread and fruit and prepared foods, so much so that I had to throw some of it away.  Until I realized that in France you could never go hungry anywhere, particularly in small towns where streets are full of produce and cheese and bread and chocolates and biscuits and pate and foie-gras and you name it.  As if this were not enough, they have market days once or twice a week when food overtakes the village, when abundance acquires a new meaning.  These markets are not for tourists, but locals, who get into living with abundance with such a flair, I don’t think I have seen anyone love food as much as the French do.

India has markets of course but the presence of poverty is never too far in India.

In France, I have yet to see poverty or even a hint of it. 

I became conscious of this after I took the train to San Sebastian two days ago.  I was actually looking forward to the visit.  Ever since I went to Spain in the nineteen nineties and saw San Sebastian on the country’s map, I had wanted to go there.  Partly because the town was named after my son; partly because I had this mental image of an exotic coastal Basque town. 

So I took the SNCF train to Hendaye, a French border town, where Hitler apparently met Franco after the occupation of France.  The idea was that Spain would join in with Hitler.  But upon meeting Franco, Hitler thought of him as a buffoon and so the collaboration never took place, perhaps changing the course of history. 

Everything was OK until Hendaye.  But then I rode the so called Eusko train (no doubt a Basque name) across the border.   I was exhausted and closed my eyes for a second – the Eusko Train runs like a milk train, one can literally hear the wheels grinding – and when I opened them I noticed that we were crossing over what looked like a sewer canal.  The sight was so unfamiliar after over two weeks of not seeing any urban squalor that my stomach turned.  Walls of buildings were marked with graffiti; facades of edifices had black moss growing on them.  The countryside lacked charm.  It was as if I was back in the third world.  For a moment I thought I was in Latin America, even though at the back of my mind I knew that Ecuador or Peru would probably look a lot poorer, that if a Spanish person heard my thoughts he or she would be horrified.  It was just that my eyes had gotten used to clean streets; I had begun taking the shiny paint on ancient buildings for granted; I had gotten accustomed to the utter lack of dirt or poverty here in France. 

I felt a little sheepish.   Here I had been longing to be across the border where I could speak Spanish; I had been waiting to be with a culture and people I feel more comfortable with.  Just that morning, sitting in my favorite café in St. Jean de Luz, I had been moved by a melody streaming on to the sidewalk from the bar, a familiar song from the Buena Vista Social Club, of which I have a CD at home.  The tune was what prompted me to make the journey to San Sebastian. 

And yet I thought, “Spain is poor,” as I rode the Eusko Tren into the country. 

And in that moment, the problems of the Eurozone became obvious to me. 

Still, I hoped it was just the Border Town syndrome, like you feel when passing into Tijuana from San Diego. 

But it was not.  When I got off at San Sebastian, two American women from Los Gatos guided me into town.  It had taken me a while to realize they were mother and daughter.  The pavement was radiating heat, even though we were walking by a so-called river.  It was a typical European river, its waters contained within a high embankment.  It exuded no moisture, no cool breezes came off its surface, no trees shaded its banks.  There were bridges across it of course, marked by golden pillars.  In the distance was a glass monstrosity, and beyond it, the beach.  Even though it was only a half a mile away, it was hard to imagine that anything as natural and vast as an ocean could reside anywhere in the vicinity of so much concrete and stone and metal. 

Was it the quality of the light that made the place glare so?  I hated the look of the place and was glad I had chosen to stay in the small town of St. Jean de Luz across the border. 

The idea of abundance was gone in Spain too.  I mean the center of the city and the old town were full of ice cream shops and restaurants but they seemed about as appetizing as an American hardware store.  The foods exuded no particular aromas; the products just did not have the texture and look of actual food. 

So sitting on a bench in the one hundred degree heat, I ate my apple. 

This is one of the things that has always puzzled me about Latin America too.  I have often wondered as to why given such beautiful weather, they do not eat more fruits and vegetables, why their diet seems rather sparse and monotonous, full of meat and potatoes.

In San Sebastian, there was the obligatory cathedral in the old town, and a Constitution Plaza.

But the place was noisy.  I guess that is Spanish character for you, loud, vibrant, full of energy.  The French, on the other hand, probably follow the English dictum of “children should be seen and not heard.”  For, even in the most public of places you do not hear children shouting in France the way they do in San Sebastian.

All these thoughts made me feel as If I was betraying my adapted culture of Latin America.  But the truth was, I couldn’t wait to get on the Eusko Tren and head back to France.  

On the way back, I noticed that the graffiti stopped as soon as we crossed the border. 

I thought of how, once upon a time, the Italians and the Spanish were the underdogs of Northern Europe, as depicted in numerous E.M. Forester novels.  They were the third world for ordinary middle class Northern Europeans like the French and the British who happened not to have any colonials like Indians or Algerians around to beat up on.  In John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers, made in the nineteen sixties, the Spanish servant was the comic equivalent of the Mexican illegal immigrant in the Hollywood of today.    

Now with the Eurozone falling apart, perhaps they will go back to being that way again.

I am in a bubble in France; I can’t talk to anyone because the French refuse to acknowledge that other idioms exist in the world, even if it means dying with their dying language.  But that has made me a better observer.  In the Spanish speaking world, I fit among the people so I observe less and learn less. 

So what am I to do?  Learn to speak French?

Once back in St. Jean de Luz, I ate my leftover food from the market day in my room, then went for a long walk along the promenade.  The sun was bright, the breeze cool and soothing.  I waited for the Green Flash.  It did not happen.

Green Flash or not, I was back with abundance.  I am glad the French allowed me to experience something I had always longed for. 

Katherine Hepburn in Venice

June 25 2012

Dialing the TV channel years ago, I stumbled upon a Katherine Hepburn movie.  In my memory, this movie is in black and white, perhaps because the TV was black and white. What a silly movie, I thought at first, expecting it to be yet another romantic comedy.  But then the movie grew on me.  All I remember is Katherine Hepburn wandering through the lovely streets of Venice, popping into little glass shops, and longing for, what else, love.  When I finally went to Venice a few years ago, I was disappointed that Venice did not quite look like it did in that particular movie, even though it was fabulous.  Maybe it was in color, and not black and white.  Maybe there were too many people compared to in the movie.  The Venice of my imagination will always remain Katherine Hepburn's Venice, even after seeing the real thing.  

Suddenly, I thought of Katherine Hepburn today as I walked by the seaside of this little town named St. Jean de Luz in the Basque region of France.  I was returning home from the beach to the hotel at about 8:30 PM when I thought of exploring a side street which seemed to have quite a few shops.  So I walked, carrying a zillion bags with me.  I had taken to the beach a towel and a water bottle and a computer and a Kindle.  In my hand I had my dinner in a plastic bag; I had been hoping to eat it at the beach but then  I just hadn't felt hungry.  I also had a bag with some cheese I had bought at a store and another bag with some face lotion I bought at a pharmacy because I forgot mine at the last hotel. I need to be careful next time I pack.  I managed to leave my adapter there too; thankfully I had brought two with me. 

It is this darn sleep that I am having so much of here in France.  I seem to sleep ten-eleven hour nights at times and on top of them, need a nap in the afternoon.  Perhaps it is the constant change of weather from place to place.  Or it is just the emotional exhaustion of traveling alone. 

So with my heavy backpack on my back and three bags in my hand, I ventured out into the strange street.  Slowly restaurants gave way to hotels and hotels to a promonade.  I kept walking.  I just did not know that on the other side of the beach was this path along an embankment.  It rose slowly up to a hill and beyond, to a little grassy area and then a park.  I did not go all the way because it was getting to be past nine.  But when I looked over my shoulder at the curve of the bay, my heart stopped.  For, in the distance were the Pyrenese mountains and in the foreground white buildings of St. Jean de Luz hugging the bay.  It was a sight so moving, that my loneliness became larger than life.  And suddenly the image of Katherine Hepburn jumped into my mind.  I was Katherine Hepburn, longing for love.  Why I thought of Katherine Hepburn in that moment, how her image came to me, I don't know.

Why?  Why did I not have love?  Walking past a window, I caught  my reflection.  My new colorful sundress enhanced my figure; I thought any man should be lucky to have me. 

All I remember about the movie is that she found out she was in love with a married man.  Venice was her fantasy.  How poignant she was, so vulnerable, so genuine, so human. 

In that moment, overlooking the Bay of Biscay, a place I had never planned to visit, I became Hepburn.  Yet, deep down, I knew that I was Hepburn and I was not. Because I have not been a spinster.  I have had love. I still have love.  I have two sons who love me very much.  Ravi and Sebastian are always telling me to have a good time; they are happy when I am happy.  And I have had the love of my parents.  Such selfless, endless love.

A few years ago, I did a workshop, you know one of those self-help new-agey, California type workshops.  It lasted for two and a half days over the weekend and on the last day, we did a guided meditation.  The leader's voice was very deep, very powerful.  He asked us to lie down on the floor, close our eyes, and imagine that we were leaving this world; we were dying.  Slowly, I saw myself saying goodbye to everyone I loved,  Slowly, my soul left my body.  I looked down upon myself and saw what unfinished business I had left behind me.  The workshop leader played the tape in which a man says "I have been loved."  My body began to shake, so violently that the man next to me had to hold my hand.  I cried and cried and cried. I was crying for the opportunities I had lost to love.  But I was also grateful that I had been loved.

Yes, I have been loved.  Which is perhaps why I can do such a journey by myself.  I have the inner strength to love what I see, because I have been loved, because I love myself. 

So this evening, as I began to think of Katherine Hepburn, I also saw the woman I had met in the Bed and Breakfast in Amboise in my mind's eye.  At day's end, I was sitting in the garden as usual with my computer when slowly the other guests began to stream back in.  The American military man, his wife, and two small children returned.  I asked them what they had done that day.  We started talking.  The man and the children finally went away but the young woman lingered.  I don't know why but I mentioned that I was glad I was alone because if I was with someone, I would have to negotiate.  This time, since I was by myself, I said, was satisfying my own desires and fancies. 

Suddenly, the woman blurted out that she had to compromise a lot with her husband.  He was a military guy (stationed in Germany) she said and was gung-ho about seeing all the military museums and installations.  So after making a one day token visit to the Loire to satisfy the wife, they were planning to stay for 3-4 days at the D-Day beaches.  As the woman spoke, I could see the sadness inside her.  The man seemed pleasant enough but I could tell he was perhaps a bit hard to deal with.  I wondered if, behind the closed doors of their house, he was like the Great Santini, played by Robert De Nero. 

Yet, when they had first arrived, I had been a bit envious of their beautiful family.  Now I knew that perhaps there was trouble ahead. 

The next morning, I heard a sound outside of my window and saw the military man dressed up in his riding gear, uncovering his bike.  He was gone for several hours, leaving his wife in charge of the kids.  I don't know if I would want to be with such a man. 

I thought of all of this tonight as I walked up the bluff overlooking the bay.  When I came upon the top of the rise, I saw that on the other side, a vast ocean stretched ahead of me.  Suddenly, I knew why I was alone.  Because I was supposed to learn something precious, something that would carry me into old age and death. 

In Leonardo Da Vinci's Garden

In Leonardo Da Vinci’s Garden

I sit in the garden of my Chambre d'Hote in the Loire Valley, and surprisingly I do not feel sad. I just ate my dinner here at the outdoor dining table, a hodgepodge of taboule (which really was couscous - the French don't seem to know the difference between the two), lentils, chevre cheese- the same exact container I buy at Berkeley Bowl - and some greens and a carrot salad, all purchased at the Carrefour, a French supermarket. Now, for the first time in days, I feel well. I have been feeling exhausted; perhaps Paris does that to you, with its noise and tourists and the subway system in which you have to run up and down stairs.

I went to the Leonardo Da Vinci house this morning. Before coming here, I did not know that Da Vinci died in France. I have yet to understand fully the Mona Lisa myth. At the Louvre last week, I had trouble locating her. And when I finally did find the Grand Gallery, so many people had thronged her, their I-phones held over their heads for a quick snap, that I could not even get a good look at her, let alone understand her power. Did these tourists really know anything about art, or were they simply acting like sheep?

 But today at Leonardo's chateau, I understood his genius. There were the tanks and the airplanes and the swing bridges he had designed, all in model scale of course, but they gave a hint of his powers of analysis and imagination. He had even designed a canon running on steam. Alas, he just could not make the leap to a steam engine. For that he would have needed a whole scientific revolution which did not exist during the Renaissance. It just goes to show you that scientific advances need a whole movement just like art does.  During the renaissance, so many artists were stimulated by each other.  In fact, Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci were contemporaries.  Both homosexuals, both esthetes, both artists par excellence.  A person cannot do art in isolation.  And the same goes for science. 

I am particularly drawn to Leonardo because he was both an artist and a scientist. Americans often ask me how come I am a writer when I was trained as a physicist. They start talking of right brain and left brain. I tell them that I have only one brain. I tell them that historically there has been a tradition of intellectual individuals pursuing philosophy, literature, mathematics and art. Take Bertrand Russell for example. Not that I want to compare myself with Bertrand Russell.

The Loire Valley is a magical place. And yet I did not make it to most of the sites. What I really enjoy is just sitting in this lovely garden or walking the streets and browsing at little shops. That is what the French countryside is all about, after all.

Finally I am feeling content to be here alone. I never thought I would feel this way. Sometimes, when you have bad company, you realize that your own company is preferable. That is what happened to me on this trip. Now I know why people say that it is better to travel on your own. Because you can take things at your own pace; you can indulge yourself to linger where you want; you can eat when and where and what you want. You can reflect, you can read, you can muse. You can be active or lazy. You can reach out to people. I wish I had learned some French though. I do have the dictionary but the app on my cellphone does not work. And I am afraid to make it work because of fear that it will gobble up all my minutes on the simcard.

 Who would have thought that I would be traveling all alone around France one day? Not in my wildest dreams - or nightmares - would I have imagined such a fate befalling me. But now I realize it is not such a bad fate. There are worst fates than this. Of course it is costing me a pretty penny because I am not sharing the room with another person. But then again, do I really want to share a room with someone? Give up my privacy and my realm? I have been having naps every afternoon, something I perhaps would not be able to do with another person.

Then there is the whole sightseeing mania one gets drawn into when one is with company; one ends up seeing sights that do nothing for one's soul. But most of all, I am learning to be comfortable with myself. I am learning to cope with a foreign culture on my own. I am learning to survive the trains and all the little inconveniences. And yet I can't wait to leave this town and embark on another journey tomorrow morning to the Dordognes. Hopefully the hotel there will be as good. Hopefully, I will have just as much of a good time as I did in Amboise. I was so afraid of coming here alone and it turned out so very wonderful!