This past week I spent mostly at my friend's organic farm about an hour and a half outside the city. There the heat is more fun and bearable than in the city - until the power goes off and there are no fans to move the air around and the mosquitoes begin to swarm. I love it there. It has some of the things I desperately miss: a kitchen, friends, fresh air, quiet. The days fly by and melt into each other out on the farm. It also has a lot of the things I will miss when I am back in the States soon: Gujarati, my Indian friends, banana and papaya trees, buffalo and goats, amazing birds, camels and elephants to do the landscaping, so many things. There are a million things about India that fascinate me, that keep my curiosity and imagination peaked all the time.

I've begun to dismantle my room, to give stuff away and plan what is to be sent. Taking things off the wall and emptying bookshelves has suddenly shifted me into moving mode, and in a matter of hours I felt I already had one foot out the door.

I'm a little nervous about going home. There is so much ahead of me: writing a dissertation, facing a changed committee, finding a new apartment, perhaps facing no prospect of work in the coming year in my department. I'm dying to be there, and yet I am scared of forgetting some of what I have seen and learned here, and I am a little nervous about the challenges and unknowns I face once I get home.

Goodbye little sisters

My research assistant and I left Dungarpur together for the last time yesterday. I will return later this year, but she is off to London in a few months for a Master's program in development studies. We had an amazing last day filled with realizations of all the friends we have made on our weeks and weeks of staying there. The guys that own the restaurant we love, the guys at the hotel that were once so grumpy and recently had become so kind, all of the amazing people we have met in villages, the countless cups of chai we were given. And our close friends: P.lal our driver, guide, guard and friend and Madhu our friend, fellow researcher, and slumber party hostess. P.lal told us that he planned to hang a photo of us in his house to remind him of all of these weeks we spent together and all of the fantastic adventures we had. He told us that he wanted to do this because we had become not only his friends but also his little sisters. We promised to work on our Hindi and English, respectively, and to meet again in October.

I could not help but remember how I felt the first time I arrived in Dungarpur, months and months ago, so bewildered and uncertain. I knew next to nothing about the place. Now I recognize the roads, see people I have met in the streets, have grown very fond of the landscape and people, and know an awful lot about seasonal migration and cotton seed production. I am excited to write about everything I have seen and heard. I am also glad that that was not my last trip. I still have lots of questions and a strong urge to spend more time there and understand more about the social, agricultural and economic changes taking place in the area.

I'm off to Rajasthan again tomorrow morning early, until Thursday. I'm hoping to get a lot done (12 interviews?), but I also know that it is supposed to be 109 degrees at least one of the days I''ll be there. Because of the food issue I went to the store today and tried to come up with some ideas for things that I can make without a kitchen of any kind and in a funky hotel room that is bound to be rather hot. I think it should be alright. Breakfast is the main problem, since there are no real restaurants open at 7am when we head out to the villages, and I think I have that settled with cereal, fruit and boxed milk. We'll see. I'm not feeling 100% after the stomach infection, but I'm planning to be really careful and to take it easy. I'm thinking we'll start each morning at 7 and try to be back by 1130am or so. Wish me luck!

Well I survived food poisoning only to move on to a stomach infection several days later. This has given me time to think, draw, stress out, watch movies, write, plan and read. I'm currently reading Winter's Tale. It is impossible to describe how strange it is to read such a book, which is so completely and utterly a love affair with all that is winter, while it is 100 degrees at 11pm. Though it is already an enhanced and magical version of winter, it seems almost like the whole idea of winter is made up to me. I think this sensation is particularly strong because the last book I read was Sacred Games, a fantastic novel about crime, set in Bombay. Though both are about large amazing cities, they seem like different planets. Having this time has been a gift, though. Watching movies and reading novels, lots of them, is something that I haven't been able to do in years. These are things that graduate school has made difficult if not impossible. I am now feeling more and more prepared and excited to get into the next phase, that of writing my book. I won't pretend that my dissertation will be the kind of thing lots of people will pick up to read, but I hope it can later be turned into something that people will. Still, the process is the same. I am allowing myself to plan for it and dream about it, and yet be realistic about the pain and suffering that is sure to be a part of the process. Writing brings out my issues with confidence and it leaves me feeling like an impostor. But I have a lot to write about, and I'm excited about it, so I am hoping that that will get me through some of the hard times.