MORATTANDI CHILDREN'S GROUP

I met a man who told me that he taught in a night school in a small village outside Auroville. The school itself was just a roughly thatched cottage with a concrete floor and a strip bulb, about the size of my bedroom at home. Every evening 50 children crammed in for help with their homework and lessons in English and Maths. There were only two teachers and children aged between four and perhaps 14, so things were rather chaotic inside. The children were so excited to see us, chorusing 'Hello! Vanakam!'. The extent of their excitement over small things- balloons, glitter, biscuits, was humbling and touching.

We visited at the weekends to play games and sing songs which got in as many English words as possible. On Christmas eve we made lanterns with empty plastic bottles. As we began cutting the tops off them the children looked worried. They'd borrowed the bottles from people around the village, but had promised to take them back. I realised the difference in the boundaries of what was considered waste- plastic bottles are a valuable and useful commodity to the people in the village.

We took paper and paints, glitter and cotton wool for snowmen, all of which the children excitedly transformed into a collection of pictures that covered the road outside. They were beautiful; houses, butterflies, christmas trees, snowmen (which they knew all about from the television). Local women gathered to examine them and eye us suspiciously. I wondered how they felt about what we were doing with the children and was aware of the huge gap in cultural understanding between us. Did they mind that some of the children went home with paint on their clothes? In a community where so much energy is focussed on making a living, doing creative things just for the sake of it isn't necessarily considered valuable.

SADHANA FOREST- AUROVILLE

The rich brown red of soil freshly broken, clumps under my bare toes, squelching warm against my skin.

Sadhana Forest is a reforestation project and part of the Auroville international community outside Pondicherry. The aim is to reforest the landscape with native trees and develop water conservation, soil erosion control and vegan organic gardening. We stayed for two weeks-sleeping in large communal bamboo huts, planting trees, cooking vegan food, riding bicycles down dirt tracks with no lights, bonfires by the edge of the mud pool, making close friendships, sun heated water showers from buckets, compost toilets (a profound realisation of the usefulness of our waste and how uncivilised it is to pump it into the sea as 'waste' when its the soil that needs it and can use it) and, of course, trying to find a way to live in harmony with the mosquitoes....and inevitably trying to squash the mothers whenever we could.

I planted my first ever tree and sang quietly to it...a song for growth. Tree planting seems such a powerful act yet sometimes we do it with no sense of wonder. Sometimes the heat, the sweat, the hard digging under the hot sun distracts my mind from the sanctity of planting and growing life. I step back, and see in the recently disturbed red gash below me, a small, fragile branch of green. Almost lost beneath my soil encrusted boots, this small, insignificant and fragile green is what I depend on. I thought I was here to 'help' nature, to look after these trees....only now do I see how they help us, how they look after us. This green, almost irrelevant in its smallness, has the power to grant life with its oxygen and soil nutrients. This work of digging and planting grows trees, but it is also nurtures us.

Auroville http://www.auroville.org/ (make your own mind up)
...a place of unsettling contradictions....they say we are united as they build their walls to keep the locals out, they say we are all equal as they make rules for special treatment....all these thoughts course through my mind as I look on the great ball of gold before me-the Matrimandir.

I have been here for a month, and still I do not understand this international community. Instead of community, I feel clear divisions between insiders and outsiders. Instead of a new humanity I see disturbing snippets of class and race divisions, the same story that has plagued humanity throughout the ages. But on this day, I finally arrange a tour to the Matrimandir...I finally make the effort to learn more about the foundations of this place. Amidst the cold-war world of paranoia and national divisions, Auroville was founded in 1968 as a "universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities. The purpose of Auroville is to realise human unity." With their own hands and money, people from all over the world came to build this city, founded on unity in diversity rather than national conformity, and live a life focused on developing human consciousness. The 'heart' of the community is the Matrimandir-a space for the meditation needed in order to sustain this search for a new human consciousness.

And so I walk slowly and silently up the stairs, into the open mouth of this golden globe. Inside the soft white carpets, white walls and soft green and red lighting create a sense of a cocoon, the womb, a sense of the source of life...and I try not to think of all the dodgy B-class sci-fi movies from the 1960's! We walk up in spirals and enter the inner meditation chamber...a circular room of white. At it's centre the world's largest crystal in spherical form reflects our inverted image back to us. No religious icons, no visual stimulants other than our own reflection. Just us, the deafening silence, and a solitary shaft of light streaming from the high ceiling onto the crystal. And so we sit, in the deepest silence I have ever heard, we sit, cut off from the world and life, we sit and we settle into the silence and all that it has to say...

"No fixed meditations, none of all that, but they should stay there in silence, in silence and concentration. A place for trying to find one's consciousness" (The Mother)

Stepping out into the day's sunshine later, it takes me a long time to fully return. I sit under an ancient Banyan tree and allow my mind to listen and absorb life again after the darkness and silence. I watch humans moving, breathing, sitting, laughing....I watch humans watching humans watching life...and I realise sometimes we need both the spaces of life and no-life in order to reflect. We have caves in which to cut off from life and enter the dark of our minds. And we have trees and sunsets and sea shores to sit by and reflect on the beauty of life and our place in it. And despite my positive experience inside the Matrimandir, I still cannot reconcile the doctrine of a new humanity to the globe before me- built in gold in one of the world's poorest countries. We have all this God made nature yet we seek to build our own spaces of worship....it leaves me wondering if it is God we are seeking to worship in these spaces or is it ourselves? Is it merely a temple to our own strength and ability we come to worship?

PONDICHERRY

Colourful markets and scavenging cows, ladies in motorbikes with free-floating saris behind, all interspersed with Western cafes and book shops. From the forest we would cycle, the caffeine craving pumping our legs on the 10 KM route through traffic crazed. It was our source of escape, cheap internet, a new book ,perusing pretty fabrics in the market, coffee, coffee, coffee. But also a good re-engagement with Indian life we had forgotten in the foreigner filled forest. We came to wander in the old graveyard, still full of life with women washing and children playing cricket. We came to wander through the streets, alongside the roaming cows eternally munching, rickshaws overflowing with children on their way home from school. We came to wander through the market, embracing the smells of heavy incense mingled with fresh flowers and rotten vegetables. We came to wander through the alladin's cave of material shops, touching longingly the beautiful intricate sari's we could not afford.

We were invited to the 'Maturation Ceremony' of a friends daughter. This event marks the passage of a girl into womanhood and is celebrated at the time of her first period. The new woman, dressed in a sari and decorated with jewels and flowers stood on a stage before the audience to be photographed and admired. Musicians played while people filed up to present her with gifts and shower her with rice. Later everyone was invited to a feast of traditional South Indian food, sitting in rows and eating from banana leaves, before leaving and being given the gift of a coconut.

According to some, the event seems to be a way for the family to formally announce the girls womanhood and put her on display for proposals of marriage. The stage was filled with mysterious symbols; a coconut, broken in two to display its pristine interior, flowers strewn amidst grains of rice and coloured powder, small bells and bowls of liquid. Someone explained to me that the coconut symbolised the girls future as a wife; two parts of a whole. It seemed potent to me as a symbol associated with the loss of virginity, its incredibly white flesh opened and on display, soon to begin to decay...


The Indian photographer...has the power to command all. I have seen him bully his way around auspicious moments, stopping time, forcing his subjects into unnatural positions only to blind them with his merciless, never-ending flash in a preserved moment of rabbit-in-headlights terror. He is not the artist my mind evokes with that sacred word I aspire to- ''photographer". Yet in the desperate climb to modernity, he is bestowed with a power and authority, above even the priest in a wedding ceremony. For he, unlike the simple priest, can stop time, he can make magic-preserving the stalked and stunned image of Granny forever more.

He came limping along, bare foot, body hunched, a look of desperate pleading on his young face. He signalled his hands to his mouth, begging for food. In an India where the population struggles to communicate over the myriad of different languages and cultures, the language of the street beggars is surprisingly uniform. I couldn't say no. At times I have walked past shrunken girls forcing themselves through circus hoops, their brother a painted clown drumming tiredly with his face a mask of childhood lost no make-up can hide. And I have given money to old ladies, tiredness etched into their deep wrinkles. And I have refused money and offered only food to people with limbs lost, limbs deformed trailing behind them....

But today I felt I would offer him any food he wanted... dinner, fruit, water-anything his tiny body craved.....

'Ice-Cream!'came the delighted response to my surprised ears. Are you sure you don't want something more healthy? Some rice? A substantial meal?

Íce-cream! Ice-cream!'

The promise of sugar already pumping through his body-gone was the decrepit stance and burdened shuffle. Instead, I found before me a boy, a child as all children should be, a look of excited glee spread wide across his cheeky face, his legs already skipping him ahead to the ice-cream parlour.

And as we talked (with the helpful translation of the ice-cream vendor) over the tutti-frutti colours fast disappearing, he told me how he slept with his mother outside the church on the street by the open gutters. His father had died long ago. His brother, a rickshaw driver, slept in the back of his auto. He says he went to school, but I don't know if he knew that is what I wanted to hear. His arms were covered with old scars....tales and tears I would never hear. As quickly as the melting ice-cream in the hot night, he was up and out of the parlour with sugar happy smile and a ''thank-you madam''. I gave him some money for his mother. I watched him half-skip, half-run back out into the dark, hot night, running back to find his friends and boast of his luxury. And my wallet, a little lighter now, felt useless, my money worthless. What good is this paper? Will it really change anything for him? For the countless myriad of nameless faces that I walk by every day? And I try to console myself that maybe treating him as human being was worth something. I try to reassure my troubled conscience that taking the time to make him feel special, giving him the chance to enjoy a childhood pleasure, had some meaning for him too....and not just me....

AMRITSAR

Within hours of crossing the border, we are wandering barefoot in the warm night air around the waters edge, listening to the soft chanting from inside the Golden Temple. Shoes are off, hair is covered...but so are the men's. The faces are friendly, semi-naked bodies bathe in the waters around the pool: Amritsar means Pool of the Nectar of Immortality. The shinging gold of the temple melts into the liquid gold reflection on the water.

Gigantic pots, echo their clangs around the clock...the 24 hour kitchen feeds over 30, 000 pilgrims a day. Sitting in rows of hundreds on the marble floor, we wait humbly whilst men scurry up and down with great buckets of dahl to slop onto our chappati. Food and a bed, or a marble floor, is free for thousands upon thousands of pilgrims daily all year round.

Built by the Sikhs around the 16th Century, it houses the 11th Guru of Sikhism. Amidst the marble echoes of shouting, washing, running, we rose at 4am with everyone else to see the 11th Guru, the Holy book, being carried into the temple. Gold, silk, deep blue velvet, rich warm voices chanting, bodies huddled tightly on the floor, incense and rose water fill the air.

After the man's world of Lahore, the streets of Amritsar open to me as a woman...I feel safe. I am walking alone, lost in crowds of families and groups of women enjoying the hot night, drinking tea, shopping, enjoying....And we are never alone, at every corner a god is watching, tucked and hidden in little closets on street corners, house walls, in tea-shops, lit by light, lit by candle, amidst the chaos, amidst the smells, amidst the cacophany of noise, the sacred in the everyday...

The temple of fertility...like a fair ground walking ride, I wind up and down and round again through caged walkways, past shining gods with flashing lights, mirrors of endless me's mix with the deities, cocounuts brought for blessings abound (are they the symbol of the desired unborn?) whilst young girls follow me, shyly giggling and practicing their English. Why are young pre-pubescent girls swarming a fertility temple?

Mirrored walkways round corners, mingle my reflections with images of the gods..

We wade through a water tunnel, surrounding by paper mache walls of cow print, and find the udders dripping onto fresh flowers at the end. The tunnel, the heat, the fragant smells, the water....is this meant to be a recreation of the womb?

An old Hindu temple in derelict state stills provides shelter for one man and his family. Instead of a high wage, his employer gives him a 'home' to live in. Dripping water from broken pipes, dimly lit stairways to balconies of clothes lines. Children on roof tops giggle and wave.

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The glitz and the glam of our first Indian wedding shining bright in the hot sun. Trumpets and drums surround the groom on the horseback-the days of elephants are gone.

From the blood of over 1500 injured men, women and children, from the insanity of one man, from the unthinking fingers of British soldiers...Jalliawalah Bag, once a site of masacre, has become a peaceful garden. April 13, 1919, Brigadier Reginald Dyer gave the command to open fire on a peaceful protest of civilans...ten minutes and 1650 rounds over a thousand lay injured or dying on the ground. Two minutes later he ordered his soldiers out and congratualted them on a 'jolly good job'.
Now, the memorial is almost obsolete at the back of a public park. The bullet holes are all marked on the wall, but people were more interested in us than the Brits of the past. Strangely upbeat Bollywood music was played loud around the site of massacre like some kind of twisted Disney land attraction...

It was only a simple line of children's shoes, yet it haunted me more than the memorial itself. I think of the empty shoes I have seen in other places, other times, other lands where blood has been shed, where children's innocence has been left lying as empty as the shoe waiting for the asbent owner never to return. I think of the everyday objects-the shoes, the bags, the children's toys, the objects of the everyday defunct and left empty in the bloody aftermath of one's man's command to shoot and kill. Reading further about Amritsar we realised what a significant place it was in the period around India's independance in 1947.

The border between Pakistan and India that divides Amritsar and Lahore was the sight of unimaginable atrocity. It was an area where the border divided a state of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs on the basis of religious majority...sometimes the majority of a mere 1%. The border, cut an abstract division through the land, forcing millions to leave their homes, the land their ancestors had cultivated for centuries in search of the relative safety of religious majority. The border was drawn by a British lawyer who'd never been to India before, never visited the lands he was to carve up and was given less than a month to permanently slice the land in two. Amidst the hysterical propganda of extremists on all sides, inevitably mass communcal violence erupted with militant factions from each of the three religious communities slaughtering whole villages of people who unfortunately found themselves on the wrong side of the border. Fourteen and a half million people crossed the borders and an estimated 500, 000 people were killed. Refugees moved in large groups through the countryside constantly threatened by ambush, food shortages and disease. Amritsar station saw the arrival of many of those refugees and is described in 'Freedom at Midnight' by Dominique La Pierre and Larry Collins as a 'kind of refugee camp, a clearing house for thousands of Hindus who'd fled from Pakistan's half of the Punjab...They swarmed around its waiting room, its ticket office, its platforms, ready to scrutinise each arriving train for missing relatives and friends.'

The trains themselves became an equally dangerous means of travel over the border. Many passengers were slaughtered mid journey. On the 15th August 1947 a train arrived at Amritsar station on which almost every passenger had been killed. Freedom At Midnight describes the story recounted by the station master Chani Singh, "The babbling multitudes packing the platform were petrified, frozen into an eerie silence by the sight before them. Singh stared down the line of eight carriages. All the windows were wide open but there was not a single human being standing at any of them. Not a single door had opened. Not a single person was getting off the train. They had brought him a train full of phantoms."

We arrived at Amritsar station in the hot evening, a red brick Victorian building, strangely redmniscent of rail stations all over England. I remember the excitement I felt to observe the seeming chaos of the platform and ticket office, people swarming around, groups crouched eating from cloths spread on the waiting room floors, lines of people asleep or slumbering next to enormous packages. At the time I didn't know much about the history of the area...but now the memory of those huddled groups are like the ghosts of the horrors past, still haunting the lives of India's mass of multi-religious communities.