The Adventures of Bindi Girl: (2012) Read Online Free PDF Page A

bargain), GO AWAY, sugar, cow, camel, monkey, dog, cat, and “My name is Erin.”
    First on my list for this week is “Where is the loo, please?”
    Vinod is of the Brahmin caste of Indians. Brahmins, traditionally the priests or scholars, are considered the “highest” caste in India. The caste system may be frowned upon in politically correct discussions, but is actually still alive and well. Of all the things that have yanked at my heartstrings in India, it is this underlying system of social class and respect (or lack thereof, rather) that has done me in most. There is a little boy who works here at the guest house, Ajay, from Bihar (the poorest state in India). Ajay is on duty 24 hours a day. From what I can tell, he owns one shirt, one pair of trousers, one hat, one pair of flip flops with about a millimeter of tread left in them, and one jacket. His family lives three days away by train; he is probably working to simply earn a roof over his head and two meals a day. We communicate through sign language and smiles.
    I am confused by the “servant” (or is that slave ?) treatment of Ajay. It hurts to see him ordered around like a piece of nothingness. I wanted to lend him my Walkman to play with, but the manager won’t allow him to use it. I want to give him a tiny bit of money, but something tells me not to—that there are things about India, and class structure, and servant “systems” that I simply don’t understand. The best I can do is observe, learn, send love his way, and treat him with respect and smiles.
    But even “lower” than the Bihari servant boy is the caste of “Untouchables,” the Harijans, to which Gandhi applied the name “Children of God.” The Harijans are the only ones that are allowed to clean toilets. I have to let the guest house know one day before I want my bathroom cleaned in order for them to find “the sweeper”—the Harijan boy. I, of course, took offense to this and immediately spouted off to Vinod that I certainly clean my very own toilet in America. When the sweeper-boy, with impossibly-thin frame and huge eyes bulging out of a skeletal face, came by to clean my toilet, I wanted to cry, hug him, and tell him that he is worthy, lovable, and most certainly touchable .
    Is it karma? Madness? What is madder than our own insanities and hidden class systems in the West? Can we compare? I don’t think so. India and the U.S. have their respective personal sorrows, their joys, their ways of dealing with the human condition. Is one better than the other? More civilized? Certainly these questions are part of the reason I am here, and I’m not sure there is an answer, let alone a correct one.
    As Rilke said, we must live the questions:
    “I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” (Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903, Letters to a Young Poet )

Body Wisdom
    15 th of December, Rishikesh
    It is said that by taking three full dips in the holy River Ganga, all of your sins are washed away. Can’t beat that ritual; I’ll definitely be partaking. Cold as that mountain stream water may be this December, it’s clean and clear here in Rishikesh, near the Ganges’ headwaters—much more enticing than downstream Varanasi, home of the cremation grounds, burning ghats and Shiva-knows-what floating down the river. I read in the paper that they have introduced a charred-flesh-eating fish species into the Ganges near Varanasi, to act as a vacuum cleaner for all the corpse remnants. As ghoulish as all this sounds, it’s another