August 28: Festival!

Today’s events were over-the-top fantastic. The Indian fellows organized a “mele” – a traditional village carnival -- on an adjunct campus several miles outside of the city. We got out of the buses and were welcomed by a) fireworks b) a 20-foot diameter pattern of flower petals c) necklaces made of jasmine and c) a band. The band began to play and then walk backwards. We were told that at a festival the band always led you to the next event -- so we followed it up the hill to a stretch of field where it was announced that it was time to play games.

Games are always good . . . but in this case, even better. For one thing, they’d created five or six stations for various games all of which already had kids playing on them. They had invited kids from all the neighboring schools to come out on the field and demonstrate, so we could learn the games and then jump in. This is sheer genius and I’m doing it at every party I ever have from now on. But better yet, the games were, well, awesome is the only word. I am humbled when I think that I thought, say, tether ball was a good way to pass recess. There was a game called Coco which is not unlike Duck Duck Goose, in the way that chess is not unlike checkers – I mean it was Duck Duck Goose that required agility and strategy. The fact that this was being played by girls in pigtails and perfect blue-gray sari school uniforms didn’t hurt the picture either. There was another game that was sort of team tag, but you have to hold your breath while you try and tag someone. But the best game, the most intricate of all . . . involved a tennis ball and a tower of flat rocks about a foot and a half high. The game starts out serenely enough, kind of reminding me of cricket. One team stands behind the rocks, while each of the members of the other team have three tries to fling the ball at the tower and try to knock it over. The team in the outfield calmly throws the ball back if they miss. But if the ball makes contact, then the game – I swear this is true – turns into a frantic game of dodge ball. The team that threw the ball rushes forward to try and stack the rocks back up, all while the other team flings the tennis ball at them. If they hit a team member before the tower gets restacked, then they win. It is possibly the best game I have ever seen in my entire life.

After about 45 minutes of games, the band struck up again. I think I may be doing a disservice when I say “band.” We’re talking about seven people dressed in bright yellow robes, three on brass horns, four on drums, playing as loudly as they can while jumping along, inciting all the rest of us to fall into line behind them doing rhythmic dances like rats behind the pied piper. One of the Chilean professors said it nearly moved her to tears. The other Chileans were too busy shaking their hips to worry about crying. The band took us to another field littered with various blankets and activities at each. There were more dancers and musicians, there was a puppet show, there were girls grinding grain, women who wove flowers into your hair, people who strung bangles onto your wrist, a woman giving out henna tattoos (guess where I got mine?), a potter working on a manual wheel that he would keep spinning by periodically giving it a couple good shoves with a long pole like he was a punter on the Thames, men who hacked apart coconuts to eat with machetes, and two fortune tellers. The fortune teller said I would have more than one home abroad but “only” two children and that pretty much nothing was ever going to go wrong in my life. He also said I was supposed to have been born male and that I was very brave. (I neglected to tell him I was so brave that I was carrying a stuffed hippo in my backpack.)

One of the best things about the entire carnival was how many extra people were there. All those working the fair brought their friends and families, there was staff from the college, and there were of course the school children running everywhere – one bold one from each group stepping forward occasionally to ask a name or where one of us was from. There were as many, if not more, non-Meltonites there as members of our own group, and it made the experience all the better, both in its being more realistic, and in watching how much others were enjoying it. One of the musical groups began playing during the carnival and a group of Indian and Chilean fellows began to dance. There is something of a stereotype within the Melton Foundation that it is the Chileans who are the best dancers – so it’s great to realize they’re not the only ones who can really do it up. The Indians were leading the way -- just a handful of the rest of us jumping in – and then members of some of the other dance troupes joined up and a group of uniformed schoolgirls finally dared each other to join too.

We had some snacks at this point, and I thought the afternoon was winding down when the band struck up and led us to a courtyard where we watched 45 minutes of a dance troupe. Then the band led us outside, playing music as the sound of fireworks exploded above -- and again I assumed it was time to leave. But we were called forward to sit on the grass in the dark. Someone lit a match, and suddenly colored sparklers lit up to spell “Symp 2004.” There is, it turns out, a whole genre of fireworks that I didn’t know about. Seven or eight wire contraptions were set up in front of us, all covered with fireworks nailed to them. Once a fuse was lit, the crackers would begin to emit flame that would suddenly send all the moving pieces swirling around furiously – a drunken globe, a spinning wheel, and the best: a cobra some twenty feet tall just writhing back and forth. Each whirligig lighting was spaced out by either a display of ground-based firecrackers, spraying sparks like a water fountain into the air, or an intense display of air fireworks. Since these were lit just for our group, we all sat directly underneath the umbrellas of color.

“I’ve never been this close to fireworks,” I said.

And Adrian, an alum from Dillard, responded: “Yeah, that’s because we have laws about it in the U.S.”

It was at this point that a five-inch ball of flame landed at my feet. It went out quickly enough, but I realized my eyes had had a close call, since it was still attached to the three-foot long dowel the firecracker had originally been stuck to. This was not enough to keep me from staring up into space, however. The fireworks lasted for a solid half an hour – one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. The rain of ash chunks falling into my hair was just part of the price.