I’m entering an Idea I’ve had about sustainable, carbon neutral shipping on sailing vessels into the Dell Social Innovation Competition, http://www.dellsocialinnovationcompetition.com/

If you think the idea has merit, follow that link and vote for my idea!

I returned to Meerut, Modi, Mittals

on the day of the solar eclipse.

Kushagra stood in the courtyard

holding an old x-ray image of his knee.

By turns he squinted skywards

and then peered at his watch.

The road had been dusty and loud,

filled with oddities

- but -

never had I seen a thing such as this

a man looking through his own kneecap

at something that wasn’t there!

The glass is thick. Only a faint humming of pipes, the rustle of papers. Library noises, library faces. Bearded, bespectacled professors of a forgotten reality gaze down on me from their gilded frames. I cannot hear the wind. Dust and gilt oak and old leather chairs, a tomb for dead books that nobody reads anymore. Out over the silently swaying treetops, away across the valley, car windshields twinkle at me from the grocery parking lot. Behind rise the low slopes of the Ithaca hills, dappled the familiar dark and green and gold of late fall. They rise in rolling folds toward the silhouetted heights where I taught cross-country skiing last winter. It seems so long ago.

This is what it comes down to, then. Me. A window. Hills. Bells in the background, tolling the hour. In past years I used to stare at those maple-capped ridgelines, at the long gentle valley that leads off toward Pennsylvania. Beyond them was something, I wasn’t sure what, but it was important. I’m back here looking at the same hills, now, and for the first time I can really see them. A field is still green despite the season and the altitude, a little emerald adorning a throat of tree-covered glacial stone. Afternoon sunlight glints on the roof of a house built in my absence. A new radio tower went up. A flock of birds darts this way and that like a school of startled reef fish before disappearing into the rooftops of the town. Cars crawl up the grade on the lakeside road to Geneva. Life goes on.

The first euphoria of getting back to the States has subsided, the first blush of sociability replaced by distance and reflection. I can act normal when its needed but its just that – an act. Perhaps if you keep acting long enough you become the part, you live it, you are your character. Perhaps not.

When I walk the college-town streets – strangely empty after the overcrowded bustle of India – I find “for rent” signs on houses my friends had not even moved into when I left. In the dusk I walk alone through a landscape at once familiar and heart-wrenchingly different. Always, though, the skyline is the same. The hills are reliable, their slow seasonal changes just enough to keep them exciting, colorful veneers on an immutable core. Their promise is changeless. No doubt we look the same to the fruit flies in our kitchen.

Though it’s only half a month away, the media’s gone

An entertaining scandal broke today, but I can’t move on

I’m haunted by a story and I’ll do my best to tell it

Can’t even give this stuff away, why would I sell it?

…so I’ll be leaving soon.

I’ll be leaving soon.

-BNL, “Helicopters”

Its a long time since I cried, but there were tears in my eyes last night. So funny what brings these things on. I took in three days of misery and sorrow with dry eyes and a steady hand, yet a stupid Bollywood song on the night bus to Patna left me sobbing into my grimy backpack. The garroulous construction boss beside me had the good sense to be asleep, so I had privacy in which to watch the rice fields slide by, doubly blurred by tears and late-evening mist.

What fluttered through my mind? Not the man who snatched the packet of hi-cal biscuits from a child’s hand at the distribution point and ran off stuffing them in his mouth. Not the little boy who lifted up his ragged skirt to show a scrotum that was rotting off his body in a cloud of flies. Not the lines of Oxfam tarps strung out along the roads, so many that the eyes glaze over and the mind loses focus after the first twenty minutes.

It was a little girl that I thought of, a little girl who came to the medical hut to do nothing more than hold her baby brother in her arms and smile and smile and smile.  It was Jitu and Shaitan, taking the time to make sure I got on my bus even as they gathered up their mosquito nets and headed back into the gathering dusk of the flood zone. It was the broad, moustached grin I got from the ragged man providing free ferry service to all in his old boat. It was the genuine warmth in the smile of a woman who had given up her professorship to work for others and asked nothing, not even recognition. It was the nameless farmer who turned back to guide me through the thigh-deep waters of his drowned village.

It was goodness for which I cried. Pain and chaos and suffering and greed happen and we must deal with them as facts of life – but how are people so good? What moves them to it, in the middle of their own troubles and cares and desires? I cried at the impossible wonder of human strength and generosity, as an artist might cry at the beauty of his teacher’s masterpiece. I am not a religious man, but I believe in miracles. I have seen the greatest that there is: love without question, beyond pain, beyond faith, beyond reason.

I’m at an internet cafe in Patna, Bihar, and am now pretty much convinced that I’m the only foreigner in the region. Still, nothings been stolen yet, its daylight, and i have my train ticket to delhi, so it looks like i’m about 95% out of the woods as far as this highly corrupt, very poor, high-crime, and almost completely  non-english-speaking piece of the country is concerned.

I spent the last three days in Supaul district living in the aid worker’s camp. i saw a lot of refugee camps, flooded villages, and desperate unhappy people. I also saw a lot of amazing kindness, generosity, and teamwork. people are good, people are bad, people are people. it was intense, I will write more when I have time & emotional energy to spare. right now i’m focused on getting back to my part of the world in once peice with my passport, photos, and journal sti;; in my possesion.

I’m doing ok. I’m in Roghepur, in Supaul district, Bihar, about 15 km from the Nepal border, in the Koshi flood zone. I’m living in a Gugarat-based NGO camp for now, spending daytime distributing medicine and taking pictures, nighttime living in canvas tents with some truly, sincerely good people. There are about 200,000 people in refugee camps here, and the conditions could be worse but they could be a lot better too. Its so sad. So so sad.

I was never a glider pilot. I did some solo time in light planes during high school, but have flown a glider only once. It was a cool Massachusetts evening in early summer, the kind where you wish you could hug the chirping bugs in the grass by the airstrip. Our friend Roy showed me the ropes in an old two-seat trainer, the low sun glinting on the canopy as we took off behind the towplane. The controls were light and graceful, the silence magical once we dropped the cable. Free. Edging east, we searched for lift. The idea is that warm air rising off a field or parking lot will carry the glider upwards faster than it sinks towards the ground, though the evening cool meant convection was tapering off.  Nonetheless, before too long we felt a bump and the aircraft changed under my hands from blushing waltzer to tipsy disco chick.  Lift. There was little enough, but we got what we could out of it and then entered the base leg of our approach. The swish of air was replaced by the rumble of rubber on dirt, and we were earthbound once more. Before I thanked Roy and we headed homeward, he said something that stuck in my mind. “What you prop-plane people call turbulence – we call lift.”

I’m right back where I started four months ago, at the International Guest House near IRRI’s office in New Delhi. They put me in 212, just a few steps from the room I shared with William when we first arrived in June, jet-lagged and green as little rice seedlings. I weighed 155lbs, was cleanshaven, ate with my left hand, and knew less than a dozen words of Hindi. Aj, meh righty hai at mera khana, mera Hindi tora-tora hai lekin Bharat ke log ke English acche hai, thanks to the beard and blue eyes I’ve been asked if I’m a Muslim from Afghanistan (I’m not kidding), and I don’t want to guess how much weight I’ve lost. There have been rough times – a lot of them – but there have also been plenty of good ones. I’m going to miss a lot of people when I leave.

Today I presented my data at the IRRI-India office, and they were kind enough to find me a room here for the night. Tomorrow is the train to Patna in Bihar, where I plan to stop and pick up information before working east into the region affected by flooding in the wake of the Khosi river breach nearly a month ago. After that, I’m going to break down and play tourist at the Taj, collect a wee bit more data in Modipuram, say a lot of goodbyes – tough ones, for I really don’t know when or if I’ll ever see some people again – and head back to Delhi for the longest day of my life, a day that will begin in the dusty streets of the third world and end 33 1/2 hours later in the pristine calm of my late grandfather’s living room.

Turbulence. Its bumpy, but it keeps you in the air and the view only gets better as you gain altitude. Its the only way to fly.

I lie on my back watching a bat fluttering in endless swooping circles around the spinning ceiling fan. Round and round and round and round. Bat goes clockwise, fan goes opposite. Tuck and roll, fighter jets would fall from the sky, but Bat changes direction. Round and round and round and round. Sometimes high, sometimes inches from my face. Never a collision. We first met some weeks ago during a power cut. I awoke to find it on top of my bed net, briefly perched perhaps eighteen inches above my stomach. I opened the doors and let it out into the courtyard, but, ever alert, woke to find it had returned a couple of hours before dawn. I worried about rabies, but have since concluded there is little danger; peaceable old Bat seems perfectly healthy, and is quick to fly back to a hole in the paneling when I flick on the lights. It keeps to itself, silently ridding my room of the threat of malaria, and unlike most of my other acquaintances does not make my business its personal concern.

More than this reserve, though, I admire Bat’s intelligence. The sleeping room has screened doors and  windows on three sides, so my breath and body heat are well known to the local mosquitoes. Every night they slip in through drains and chinks and holes and briefly opened doors, only to find themselves blocked by the wispy bed-net carefully tucked in around my mattress. There they wait for the rest of the night; I counted more than forty just after dawn one morning during the early monsoons. These make a fine meal for the furry flier; while others try their luck in the open, my bat is eating a fat meal with little effort. Though usually alone, every now and again I wake to the barely audible flutter of my bat. I have come to enjoy its undemanding, quiet company. 

The lizards are less fun, though I usually don’t begrudge them their glassy-eyed immobile solitude. Like the bat, they leave me in peace as I go about my business, and for my part I try not to disturb their tranquility. There are blessedly few insects aside from ants, and I give full credit to the lizards. Still, as in any long companionship, I sometimes grow annoyed at trifles. Do something, I want to shout, stop sitting there looking smug! Don’t you want more in life? I’m leaving soon, in three weeks you’ll never see me again – do you care? Did you even notice I moved in? Beady eyes look back without expression. 

The hopping insects of evening are the simplest members of our little family, but in their simplicity they are also the most profound. Like the laborers and anyone else passing though the IRRI site office, they flock to the glow of my computer screen. To the insects is is only light, all higher meaning lost on them. To the people who peer over my shoulder or go through my files while I am busy in the lab, it is unconnected glimpses of places and ideas unimaginably foreign from the present, impossible to place in concrete relation to their current lives. To me, it is a connection with much of what I hold dear, a useful tool, and a creative outlet. I like to think I understand the full meaning of what is conjured up before my eyes. Sometimes I wonder, though. I’m no god, no devil, no genius. Perhaps nothing more than a bug on a bigger screen, says one voice, and another says, so what? Bugs don’t need to read what I’m typing.

We haven’t had email at the university in a week, and electricity works only a few hours a day. There’s plenty of water, though, and thanks to the rains its been cooler lately. The hole with the severed internet cables in it is slowly filling with water. I’m pretty sure thats someone else’s responsibility, though, and so is everyone else. Thats about all I have to say, since this doesn’t strike me as the kind of internet cafe where you can safely use a flash drive. I’ll be back in the states the 10th of October.