“Agni days” and some words about diet … and animals too!

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April 26-June 30

“Agni days” and some words about diet …

It’s been a couple months. I had really gotten almost no more interviews done in May, but I had planned for that: May is ‘dead month’ here in Auroville- most of the non-native Aurovillian people take the opportunity to go back to their native countries for a month, or more (one Aurovillian family I know spends 6 months in, and out, of Auroville). Fortunately June is shaping up nicely, and I am back on track as far as that goes.
Also, I have begun to look for my next work gig. I’m thinking of setting up for a few weeks at a time in different places, rather than the long-term stuff I had done before, since it got really repetitive.

The past couple months have been summer. Those were the Agni days, named for the God of Fire, and for the wind that blows hot during that time. It lasts a month, actually, May. Every minute of it is pretty fierce, and according to the long-timers, it used to be worse. I’m very glad to have come now, rather than say, even 10 or more years ago.
B did indeed arrive back in India at the end of May- the worst of the heat was over, but it still was (and is for the most part) really hot. There are days that I have just spent in the hammock, praying or a breeze, only to have the breeze arrive and be hotter than the air. Those days are gone, at least.
Unfortunately, our friend Kate came to visit just after those worst of the worst days, but she still got the just about worst. Over 40C (104F) still while she was here. It started to cool off after a month, just after she left, unfortunately. Still, it was nice to have a friend here before B came back, and then while B was here too.

While K was here, we were offered the opportunity to participate (mostly through observance) at one of the local school summer programs, a sort of day-long intensive for kids of varied ages from about 10 up to late teen. We got some great photos of children learning Yoga, local herb lore, traditional folk songs, bamboo crafts and recycling paper into useful craft items. It was pretty cool.
Now it is just B & I again, and we have been sleeping on the porch under mosquito nets (while K was here, it was two mosquito nets) and being serenaded by the abundance of frogs in our frog pond every night.

Also of interest in the wildlife venue: B & I saw our first Viper this past month. We were riding a friend’s electric scooter (borrowed while she is in France) and a long, vibrantly green snake with an exaggerated arrow-shaped head glided right in front of us. It had a narrow, long body (maybe just shy of a meter) and a bright yellow belly. I had an absurd urge to jump off the scooter and catch it for one wild moment, it was that cool looking. Later we looked it up, and I was glad wisdom is at least sometimes winning out over my impulses: Bamboo Pit Viper. Painfully venomous, but not lethal. Neat. No cobras yet, though… although really, the rat snake I saw one evening at Windarra Farm could have been a cobra…

Diet. Since I have been here in India, I have been vegetarian, aside from eggs. No fish, meat of any kind, and no dairy (aside from a couple ice creams, grabbed opportunistically). I have been told that the climate here is rough on Westerners. I can’t help but agree. I frequently am sick here, usually some kind of exhaustion from the heat or lack of sleep (less of the latter since moving out of Ganesh Guesthouse in February). I seem to have less strength too, and I am often lethargic. Still, I have been able to lump out lumber, cut and trim trees, weed large fields, build various garden enclosures (raised beds and the like) and do some permaculture stuff.
Somewhere along the way, it occurred to me that maybe the diet had to do with it. Now, my reasons for being vegetarian while here are not simple. One reason is a lack of trust in sanitation; even in AV there are often sicknesses of the gut and food related illnesses among the population. Another is the ethics- I’ve been a mostly ethical meat-eater (free range, organic, that kind of thing in meat purchasing), aside from some restaurant purchases. The definition of ‘organic’ here is only loosely defined. And it is not monitored, at all. Goats eating trash alongside the road, and drinking water that is run off from pesticide sprayed fields and gathered in petrol-laced puddles is still called ‘organic’ here. I have flirted with eating veggie in the past, and this was a great opportunity, since there is a huge vegetarian population of locals and immigrants.
I was recently in a café here in AV, and B had ordered roast chicken. Something in my cells was screaming at me: “EAT THAT!!!” so I tried a small piece. Ok. No problem. I let it be. A week or two later, I actually broke down and ordered the same dish for myself. That craving was instantly replaced with revulsion. I ate a couple bites, and gave up. B & K were taking the scooter off for some errand, while I was heading back to the house. On the way home, I vomited. I barely made it back before I was thoroughly sick.
No more chicken for me, thank you.
I do think I’m getting enough protein, but only just. Rather than the excess we have back in the USA. I’m already thinking of what I can do about my diet.

Anyhow.
I have a neat side piece for you, my loyal readers, from a guest writer. B usually posts the pics, and I do the writing. Well, I do sometimes take pictures, and sometimes she writes. I present to you now an entertaining piece she wrote about the wildlife of AV:
I’d like to take a moment to focus on the animals of Auroville.

1. Fuzzy Caterpillars: So our friend Sarah showed up at La Terrace with this remarkable scar on her face. I thought it was a burn, or a birthmark, or maybe the scar left behind from the removal of a hairy nevus. Surprised I’d never noticed it before, I simply politely ignored it, and our conversation carried on.

Later I learned that this was in fact the remains of the scar from one of the Fuzzy Caterpillars, these white, innocuous little creatures that often undulate blithely along or hang out quietly in the heat of the day with the rest of us. What’s remarkable is that these things leave an astoundingly painful burn on one’s skin at the lightest tough. Gods help you if you’re actually allergic to them. Then the site gets particularly nasty.

One of our friends had one in his towel after a shower. Needless to say, this went poorly.

The best cure for this is to piss on yourself. The wound, actually. What’s nice about India is that it’s really no big deal to haul off and do this on the edge of most streets.

2. Spiders: So Kate, River and myself were riding along home, Kate and I on the scooter and River on his bike, when he stopped with a resounding “OH MY GOD.” What? we both asked. Well, he kept talking about these little sparkling lights along the side of the road, and he just had to finally pull his bike over to see what exactly he was looking at. Spiders. The glowing eyes of huge, hairy brown spiders coiled for a pounce. Their eyes reflect lights in the same manner of cats. Except you can generally see cats, and cats don’t bite you in the darkness (generally speaking).

What’s truly magnificent about this is that you absolutely cannot see these little monsters unless you are wearing a headlamp or actually hold a flashlight against your forehead, loser-style. Then the landscape comes alive with tiny sets of glowing eyes (two each, strangely). One just doesn’t know what one’s been missing out on.

3. Scorpions: Well, who doesn’t love these? They’re black, naturally, and abnormally huge. They’re of the size most countries say, “No, they’re certainly not that large here!” They’re that large here. I saw my first one on the road today, standard prank-sized black scorpion I’d only ever previously seen in a rubber model with other joke insects around Halloween. It was crushed on the road, and every bit as large as a Looziana crawdad. I was shocked, and hoped to hell this was an anomaly.

It’s not. It’s India.

So tonight Kate and I were fucking around looking for her key after dinner in the village, while standing on the path to Gaia. It was quickly determined that she’d left her key at the restaurant, and we needed to go back to get it. While we were there, this nasty black insect came by. Stacey took a closer look and lo! It was a type of scorpion. This thing had little fisticuffs tucked up near its head, and when antagonized, it thrust them forth menacingly. Yup – it was a type of scorpion.

So on the way back home after going back into the village to fetch the key (and rs100) from the floor exactly where she’d been sitting, we were very carefully making our way around these singularly angry insects brandishing their claws and wiggling their disgusting little chubby-stingers behind them.

4. Slugs: What kept throwing us off this evening was the presence of these large (3” or so) black slugs that were on the ground. They were the approximate size of the inadequate scorpions, so it was a start to see each one. Kate was freaked out, and I unhelpfully recalled a movie I’d seen long ago. “Oh! Hey – I wonder if these are actually tree leeches?” I wondered aloud. “Do you remember that movie, Stand by Me?” Well, Kate had yet to be born when that movie was giving me nightmares, so no, she didn’t, but she certainly caught the phrase “tree leeches”.

“Oh GOD.” She warbled. “I wanna go HOME! I HATE THIS COUNTRY!” and off she went, going on about infrastructure, scorpions, tree leeches, all kinds of things… I poked one with a stick, watching it retract into itself to the size of a flatish buckeye, and noticed it’s fun little eye-stalks. “Nah”, I said. “See, it’s got eyes like a snail! Leeches don’t have these cute little eyes – we’re ok. Oh fuck, careful, there’s a scorpion…” and on it went, all the way home.

5. Rats: So there were rats in our ceiling. It’s not so bad, except they sound like toddlers banging around wooden blocks when they’re up and about all night. It’s pretty unbelievable. But hey – they’re Indian rats.

So we got some poison, hoping to kill them off that way after they worked out the traps too well. Stacey mixed the poison with nut butter and smeared it on some bread, poking it up into their home. This seemed to work. But last night…

Kate has moved out into a new home. It’s nice to consummate life with my husband again with wild abandon, per usual. So last night, we’d watched a movie to distract me from (chewing my hands off waiting to hear news about) my friend’s surgery, and after this, we laid down to listen to the night and await some news. The night answered with a gurgling shriek in the yard some 4 meters from our screened in cabana. Stacey ducked under the screen (“Don’t go out there!!!” I hissed) and shined the light on our little white cat neighbor. She was braced in a feral stance, her scrawny legs locked in a sort of macabre “A” shape and her normally bored little face a rictus mask of fucking death. Clamped in her jaws was the spine of a rat, crushed through its neck as it twitched its last. My Tamil shout of “HEH!” changed to a coo-sqeee of “Good girl!” Stacey joined in. Good Girl brought her dinner up to the deck to share with the humans, and Stacey gently shooed her off. She went into the kitchen instead. Crunch-crunch. This morning, naught but a head and a pile of guts greeted us. Stacey nearly lost his pre-breakfast cleaning that up, while I connected with Chris about his surgery. I have an amazing husband.

6. Ants: they are just a way of life here. All shapes and sizes, they greet you in droves in the kitchen in the nighttime, or the morning. I’ve learned to ignore them as they swarm over our counters and floors by the score, zooming preternaturally fast. There are teeny little ones for computers, there are big fat ones for the kitchen, there are red ones that like to drop out of trees while you dine or while you’re in the outdoor shower, and sort of smallish ones for the porch. They’re so all over the place they’re just no big deal anymore.

7. Tiger-striped cockroaches: The only thing I enjoy more than squatting like a savage over a suspect hole in our charming hut-like outhouse while swatting away flies and mosquitoes and trying not to piss on my ankles while madly smoothing down the blowing curtain in the window (wanna see?) is the probability of getting one of these exotic cockroaches in my hair. They frequently drop from our provincially constructed coconut-leaf weave (keet) roof/ceiling. It’s braced upon a bamboo frame and these cockroaches love to live in them. That, and the porcelain squat-toilet. Trying to dance around one of these as they come up out of the drain or out from under the rim while not getting something on your ankles is a challenge.

8. Wasps: it has been explained to me that the way to handle these alarmingly huge hornet-like creatures is to give them a real hefty swat with something. They’re large. They sort of make a Yankee think of a cicada, but instead, it’s a huge yellow-and-black-striped wasp thing. So yes, if it’s in the kitchen, it’s probably looking for a home. Take the cutting board, mind careful aim, and smack it’s shit up. It’ll be a bit confused, leave… think about it, then come back hoping it was just making a small mistake. Hit it again. The worst thing that will happen is that it will sting you. Well in that case! It will seem a bit hurt, a little baffled, it will think about it. Hit it again. It will probably leave. No. Hitting it three times with a large board will not kill it.

That is part one. We’ll post more next time!
Ok, back to the blog…

I don’t want you all to think I haven’t been busy- I have- but a lot of my busyness has not been of the interesting and noteworthy kind. We have made a lot of new friends, and really spent some quality time getting to know people during the ‘slow’ time of AV. Soon, though, things will pick up again. We plan on more work days, more interviews and a lot more workshops too.
As we do these workshops, we’ll post interesting tidbits from what AV considers important to teach to guests and other Aurovillians. We’ll also share some more of the projects that AV has revealed to us too.
Kate has made it safely home, and B has made to safely here, and we are all well. We miss you, friends, and we look forward to seeing you after our return.
Peace,
Stacey & Beryl

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