Rainy Season, Blood, and Life in General.

When I was a student on SITA two years ago, I remember sending out a mass email saying "the smell of rain is the same all over the world." Rainy season is starting. Every night, around now, the clouds gather and it gets a little cooler and the air has that unique sensation that you can smell and taste and feel that can only mean the rain is coming. Yesterday, one of the SITA students came up to me and said, "It was so strange. I was out in the country last night with my [host] father and I was walking outside as it was about to rain and it smelled just like home [Arkansas.]"

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I went to Pandikoil today, I brought 3 of the SITA students with me. Pandikoil is the place that I spent most of my semester studying two years ago. It is a village temple a little outside Madurai, and it is unique because on Tuesdays and Fridays (auspicious days,) some women (and once in a while men) get possessed by Pandi, the deity of the temple. Seeing as today is Friday, life at Pandikoil was its usual hectic, loud, chaotic self. Women screaming with possession, little boys running around with sandalwood paste smeared on their heads after offering their hair to Pandi, possessed fortune-tellers telling the future, hundreds of people milling about, having darshan of the ferocious god. And, of course, the fires blazing in the cooking area, cooking the dozens of fresh animal sacrifices. When I was a student, I was in Madurai during the brief period that animal sacrifice had been banned in Tamil Nadu (this state.) It had caused an uproar, sure, as suddenly thousands of villagers who had made promised to various gods could not fulfill those promises. But other than a hushed event in which I witnessed (somewhat to my shock, I must admit) the talons being pulled out of a chicken to offer some animal blood to the god in secrecy, I had never seen an animal sacrifice.

I saw quite a few today. Three goats, beginning to end, a few swift knife strokes to the neck of each was all it took.

Blood is really really red.

Five seconds is all it took to drain all the blood of the goat, til there was nothing left to make its legs twitch or its mouth let out tiny whimpers. Two students didn't want to see it, which was ok, we walked by quickly so they wouldn't have to. But Kathleen lingered. She said she didn't want to see it, but she thought it was important, thought she should. It made sense. So I stayed with her, and we watched. Watched death. Three times over. (And three is an auspicious number.)

And while the image will stay with me, and not in a pleasant sense, there was something uniquely right about the situation, the picture, the story splayed out in front of me. Death was right there, out in the open, not hidden, not hushed, not occuring behind closed metal doors of huge factories. Something very true and painful and heartwrenching and real.

Two years ago I was in Varanasi (Benares) for a couple days. It is one of the holiest places in Hinduism - Shiva's city, on the Holy Ganges. People go there to die. And if not to die, their bodies go there to be cremated. For if one is cremated within the city limits, it is said, the soul will attain instant liberation - moksha - freedom from this endless cycle of death and rebirth - the ultimate goal of Hinduism. The funeral pyres burn on the burning ghats 24 hours a day. Right there. You are walking along the Ganges, and suddenly you arrive at a burning ghat, and there on top of a burning pile of sticks is a human corpse. Death, out in the open, not hidden, not hushed, not seperate from life but in fact part of it. I stayed at that ghat for hours. And something inside me from long ago, perhaps from generations before me - some pain at unwanted death, at hidden bodies, at horrific events - some pain was healed.

The goat sacrifice didn't heal a damn thing. That's not the point. The point is that, like Kathleen, it was something I needed to see - the last cries of a living being, the severed head, the ground painted the richest shade of red.

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We have a remarkable group of students. As I get to know them, as I get to hear their stories, I am constantly in awe of what incredible lives these young people have led, what amazing things they have already done, and more than anything, what unimaginably difficult situations many have had to overcome. One student grew up in the foster care system. One lost her mother four years ago. One has a deceased father and a disabled mother. One grew up in El Salvador and was there during the last years of the Civil War. This student gave a lecture today at a Dutch-founded Center for Social Advocacy in Madurai. Karen, from El Salvador, on an American program, in India, giving a lecture to a bunch of Tamils, Americans, and Dutch. Makes you feel simultaneously really small and really really connected to humans everywhere. Karen did a great job - she talked of hiding in her grandfather's mud hut when she was five and the guerillas came for her grandfather. Of fleeing her family home. Of bombs.

I think of my childhood in Natick, Massachusetts, and I can't even imagine.

I've never been to El Salvador. But I imagine the rain smells the same, there, too. I know it smells the same in Mississippi, in Amherst, high up in the Canadian Rockies, in Alaska, in the Caribbean, in India, in Ghana, and in Natick.

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By now it is raining outside this little internet cafe. I will log off this computer, get on my wet cycle outside, and bike home. I'll go into my third-floor apartment, go into my bed room, open the door to the balcony, and sit. I'll sit in the 3 ft. by 2 ft. area and watch the rain and smoke a cigarillo, picked up in the Frankfurt airport duty free shops. I'll be undetected cause of the darkness. I'll watch life happen on the streets below me. I'll watch the rain silently flooding the mud streets around me, knowing it is no doubt washing away the red color from the holy ground at Pandikoil this very minute. I will know that it - rain - is part of what has sent the southern part of my own country into complete turmoil these last few days. I will know it is something that happens in places I have never been, in situations I have never thought of, to people I have never known, over lives I cannot even begin to imagine.

But I know the smell well.