reunion

We arrived in Bengaluru, which everyone still calls by its old name Bangalore, around dawn after a bumpy and unpleasant ride on a sleeper bus.  Sleeper buses have two-tiered beds instead of seats.  I would never recommend riding on a sleeper bus to anyone – on the rough new highways still under construction, I was nearly flung out of the bed and onto the floor 6 feet below when the bus hit a particularly nasty crevasse at around 3am.  It was a “close call” and a hell of a way to be woken out of an already fitful sleep.

But when we finally arrived at the home of Arshia Sattar and Sanjay Iyer, two of my former teachers, it was clearly worth it to make this lengthy detour.  Simon and Melanie joined us later the same day, and we spent nearly a week eating, drinking, being very merry, and reminiscing about our shared school experience as well as catching up on the past ten years and a whole lot of getting to know each other more intimately than we ever could have in a teacher-student relationship.

It is a truly wonderful experience to get to know someone again, from an entirely new perspective.  As adults now, Simon and I could understand and appreciate so many stories that they never would have told us 12 years ago when they were our teachers.  True, many of these we never heard because its just not appropriate to tell some things to your young students!  The wild party stories were incredible and hilarious, but what I appreciated most was Arshia’s insights on subjects like the still-present scars of Partition and the imperial national identity of India, her mother’s experience of subtle conflict within a westernized Muslim family, the unprecedented shifts of globalization which have thrown India into cultural turmoil and effects on the worsening condition of women, and the threat of Hindutva taken to the extreme to become a kind of neo-fascism.

Ok, hold it.  Those are big issues… I have many thoughts on these subjects, but I still want to save them for later.  Because in this part I want to focus on reunion.  Just put them away for now, they will be coming back around in due time.

I suppose I should introduce Arshia and Sanjay properly.  Here they are, surveying the future of the Indian national identity:

So far, I suppose I have made them seem very serious.  And they are – Arshia is a brilliant Ramayana scholar and a very accomplished author and teacher.  Recently she has been writing some really sweet children’s books as well.  Her husband is equally brilliant, though he tends to lie low (no wikipedia page for Sanjay Iyer), he recently starred in a Kanada movie that looks pretty exciting!

Very serious stuff.  But that serious stuff only popped up once in a while during our 4am parleys, studded in amongst joking and gushing about how much we love each other.  Pretty sappy stuff.  Lovely, though – I cannot think of any better way to be welcomed back to India.

We also helped them unpack boxes and shift furniture around, as they had just moved into this new place about a week before.  And we had nightly feasts and many strong whiskey drinks, of course.  Somewhere in there we watched a mediocre play that included dialogue jumping between 4 different languages (annoying), Simon and I speed-painted a large but simple abstract mural to brighten up their balcony (awesome), and we also took a little day trip to an absurd “Science and Technology Museum” which had been built some time in the 70s and then apparently just left to collect dust.  A museum of a museum now, at least half of the interactive activities were no longer working.  I guess this one was still working, whatever it was.  There was also a rooftop restaurant with a missing apostrophe, “Anus Cafe.”

It was a wonderful pre-union, and Nikki and I made excited plans to return in September, which led to some of the best moments of our entire trip.  Stay tuned… Bangalore will be coming back around too.

On our last day another friend, Flavia, joined us and we jumped on an overnight train back to Pune to connect with all the other reunion-goers.  Nikki and Melanie got their first heavy dose of creepy men staring, and they were not amused – it is harder on the train because you cannot walk away.  However, a handful of really sweet young guys came and sat with us when they realized the ladies were being pestered.  We taught them how to play backgammon.

We spent loads of time riding on trains during our journeys, so I will return to this subject in more detail later.  For now, lets just say we had a good journey, all in all (it sure beat the sleeper bus!), and we arrived in Pune with just a few hours of free time before we had to catch the bus to campus.

I suppose I should take a moment to describe my school, the United World College – Mahindra, which we all definitely call by its old name Mahindra United World College of India, aka MUWCI (rhymes with pukey).  Since most of the folks reading this know all too well what it is about, I will try not to get tangled up in boring details.  I just want to say this much:

Two years at MUWCI – immersed in the contradictions and confusions and sensory overwhelm of India, while also protected and aloof from it (literally up on a hill high above surrounding fields and villages) and constantly processing these experiences in relation to the multiplicity of perspectives held by students and teachers from about 50 different countries and a very wide range of socio-economic classes (I left my tiny rural Wisconsin town on a full scholarship) – were incredibly transformational for me.  When I was there the school was new, we were the 5th graduating class.  It was a bit of an experiment, as I imagine every new UWC was.  But our experiment was wild.  MUWCI had a reputation amongst other UWCs.  Numerous people have told me it was known as the “sex, drugs, and rock n roll” UWC, and that actually jibes pretty well with my recollection of it.  I remember 200 teenagers, recruited with the intention of including the most diverse mix of weirdos and misfits possible, with virtually zero adult supervision, and all the obvious consequences of such an environment.

Sounds fun, right?  Yeah, it was amazing, we had a blast.  For many students, academics took a backseat to socializing and impromptu self-education.  We challenged each other constantly, in an inescapable cigarette smoke haze of loving but heated argument.  We filled our days with self-organized community service activities and intellectually over- ambitious art pieces, orchestrated elaborate theatrical productions, and we never seemed to sleep much.  But there was a dark side to it as well… MUWCI was not a safe place when I was a student.  It sometimes felt like a survival-of-the-fittest environment, in clear contrast to the “one-world” ideals we were supposed to be building.  During each of my years there was an attempted suicide, a few students left because they just couldn’t hack it, and others were expelled for smoking too much ganja and failing all their classes (in those days you had to be smoking weed hourly and stop going to class entirely to get that kind of reaction).  Teachers sleeping with students seemed to be a fairly regular occurrence.  And just to speak for myself, I learned too well all the wrong ways to build a romantic relationship.

So it was also a very trying experience.  Sometimes I think of that early MUWCI as a kind of crucible that crushed us in a tumbler of cultural relativity and dumped us in a fire of post-modern existential doubt to be re-cast into something vaguely shaped but hopefully hard.  Kind of like anti-boot-camp, where the intention is to mold creative and tenacious peace-makers rather than obedient and sacrificing war-makers.  But no, that is not even right, because in our anti-boot-camp there was no drill sergeant – we tortured and tested each other simply by insisting we persist in this mad expedition into the limits of adolescent intellectual capacity.

For an alienated anti-social individual (ie, me), the experience was potentially catastrophic.  But we supported each other, at least we tried as best as we could, and holding fast til the end was all we knew to do.  I am still learning valuable lessons from these trials, even now, and I feel a deep bond of love and loyalty to all those who shared them.  For me, it was a great and powerful experience – I have no interest in nice cozy comfort, and I feel like MUWCI prepared me to tackle anything, or at least to attempt to tackle anything and then keep a straight face even when I am neck deep in unforeseen consequences.

I cannot even describe what it was like to show up at the Pune Coffee House and see all those familiar faces… fellow weirdo anti-warriors who had been separated the last 10 years, who had travelled from all over the world to come together once again just for a weekend, who like me had never felt quite at home anywhere after MUWCI.  There were too many hugs, one after another as we all bounced around like happy bumper cars.  By the time the bus finally came, I grabbed a seat next to Nikki and did not talk to anyone for the hour and a half it took to get to campus.  That whole scene was just a little too overwhelming.

For some stupid reason I neglected to take photos of the campus… Too bad.  To give a sense of it, the surrounding area looks mostly like this (taken from train between Mumbai and Pune):

I will tell more about campus later.  And now that I have reached this point, I feel like there is not that much to say about the reunion itself, actually.  It was an over-the-top 3-day party, yes… but what is the point of writing about that?  I certainly cannot do it justice with words.  But I have included just a couple of photos.  We did not take very many (too busy getting shmammered).

The photo above is of a few of the very best people I have ever met.  Enough said.

This one to the right ought to be included in the promotional materials for the college, obviously.  Now that is some good-looking photogenic multi-cultural harmony, if I do say so myself.

I will say this – unsurprisingly, everyone looked older.  Some people I did not even recognize at first!  And folks have been engaged in a wide variety of interesting and innovative endeavours in their far-flung home places or all over some crazy international travels… But when we got together, everyone was instantly time-warped to 17 again.  Funny how easy it is – in spite of the many years and experiences that separated us, somehow we instantly reverted back to the former selves we all remembered.  And we wanted to party just like we used to.  Except now we can handle our drink and smoke a lot better, but we also get worse hangovers.  It was a disaster.

I also got to share Beehive graphics, which was very exciting for me – I think we sent posters back to at least 25 different countries besides India!

The reunion proper is mostly just a giddy blur, but it did not stop there.  For Nikki and I, who had started reuniting almost 2 weeks earlier, it would stretch out for more than 2 weeks after as well.

NEXT POST: reunion redux