Adventure Divas (14 page)

I am so
not
there.

Another ten minutes pass, and I begin to wonder if this is all one of those malaria pill–induced psychotic moments Peg mentioned.

And then, it happens. Eight feet to my right, at about two o’clock on the cosmic clock, a five-foot-long black and green snake with orange stripes slithers into a patch of sun that managed to defy the thick jungle canopy and beam onto the forest floor.

The snake stops.

I stop.

The world stops.

The snake does not recoil to strike, nor does it coil to sunbathe. The snake simply lifts its head three inches off the ground and stares. At me.

Oddly, instead of heightened panic, I feel utter calm. No itching. No fear. A strange union.

It sticks its tongue out at me.

I stick my tongue out at it.

Everything has disappeared—the jungle cacophony, the weeping leech sores, television. This staring contest lasts a full two minutes. Biruté Galdikas says looking into the eyes of an adult orangutan is like looking at a hundred million years of history. Calming and frightening at the same time. I avert my eyes, in submission. The snake slithers away and I am left to interpret its message.

A half hour later Berti finds me sitting on a log. I don’t tell Berti or anybody about the snake. The visit was like a strange gift from Boo Radley, hidden in the trunk of a tree. Nobody’s business, really. Especially not the cable-viewing public’s. There was no kill today, but somehow I think I got the nutgrab.

“Tell us what it was like,” Georgie asks, sticking the hulking DigiBeta camera in my face. “I already did, to camera, in there,” I say, pointing into the arboreal abyss, and handing her the Canon. “Let’s be done for the day,” I say.

On the way back I think about Berti’s feet and the snake’s eyes, and the twirling sago and the disappearing magic. All the secrets that are being felled.

3.

HOLY COW

diva,
from Italian
diva,
goddess, lady-love, “fine lady”: Latin
diva,
goddess, female divinity, fem. of
divus,
divine, god, deity.
deva,
from Sanskrit
deva,
a god, a bright or shining one.

—OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY

M
ount Rainier, its jagged edges buffed by a thick blanket of snow, was looming presidential and sparkling as it took up what seemed half of the clear, blue horizon on the day Mary Jane called from PBS: The Cuba show had aired to good ratings and great reviews, and the top brass was greenlighting an entire
Adventure Divas
series.

We bought martinis for our soon-to-be-paid interns. “To the empire!”
Clink, clink.
For a pink, potential-filled moment, it looked as if our dream might actually come true. The energy wafting around felt like that pregnant pause when “The Star Spangled Banner” ends, just before the hockey crowd goes wild. A slice of unbridled possibility. Of course, in our private moments, Jeannie and I felt like the characters at the end of
The Candidate,
when the idealistic darkhorse candidate, Bill McKay (Robert Redford), who never thought he would get elected, does just that. McKay looks at his equally shocked campaign manager and simply says, “What do we do now?”

Teamwork,
Jeannie and I agreed, rolling from the heels to the balls of our feet in preparation for what was to come. We had to deliver eight programs, on four countries, in six months, and we were determined not to become formulaic. After all the months of idling, we suddenly slammed the rig into overdrive. Unfortunately, we had no chassis to speak of.

We needed headquarters, pronto, so I confidently plunked down a check for $2,312 to our new lefty landlord, Knoll Lowney. If you stood on a chair and pointed your tippy-toes southeast, you could make out the top of Rainier from the window of our storefront office. Our neighbor to the west was called Outlaw, a barber whose chair had been the seat of neighborhood information and ten-dollar haircuts for thirty years. To the east was Philadelphia Fevre, a cheesesteak joint, a rare bastion of meat and grease, for which we were grateful in vegan-leaning Seattle. Upstairs, there was a firm of environmental lawyers who also owned the building (threatened salmon were frequent clients). Our office’s last retail incarnation was as a pager store, but more recently, and more importantly in terms of juju, the space was the crash pad for the leaders of the protesters who stymied the World Trade Organization talks, and got the attention of the world, in 2001. The protesters slept like litters of puppies on the floor of this office when they were not dodging tear gas or putting
HISTORY WILL NEVER FORGIVE YOU
stickers on the walls. I figured the anti-globalization smudge would be good for our small business that hoped to promote a different brand of World Organization.

We began to staff up and, in order to enhance our modest PBS-lined coffers, Jeannie and I took our pitch to the outdoor retail industry for additional underwriting, and to venture capitalists for cash investment.

Meanwhile, an excellent core group of colleagues came together. Jill Hodges on editorial and Kate Thompson on design began expanding www.adventuredivas.com, managing our growing online community and preparing for pbs.org deliverables. Michael Gross, who was the lead editor on the Cuba show, and so critical to its success, climbed on board full-time. Heather Reilly, Rena Bussinger, and Susannah Guttowsky hammered away on research and preproduction for our next shoots. This represents only a few of the many individuals who contributed to the enterprise.

Two weeks after we moved into the office, we were laboriously rearranging our heavy, gray metal desks bought for five dollars apiece at Boeing surplus. I noticed Jeannie staring ominously at the calendar; her face stiffened. “We need to settle on producers
now,
” she said—her way of telling me to
quit interviewing and start making decisions.

After the Cuba shoot,
Jeannie and I had decided that a divide-and-conquer approach would be best for business (not to mention family Christmases for the next thirty years). She would manage the office stateside, and I would take the shows on the road.

The Cuba show received significant attention and excited freelance producers out of the woodwork. Among them was seasoned feature-film producer Julie Costanzo, whose career was forged in the Coppola crucible in the Bay Area. The day she arrived she had to leap, in her two-inch heels and pure silk chemise, over a stream of raw sewage to reach the door of the new Diva world headquarters. Her long dark hair and smashingly sophisticated Italian good looks immediately lent our office new credibility.

Experienced, smart, and willing to work for a modest sum, Julie seemed perfect. But I was worried about her high fashion sense, a forte that would surely wilt under 110-degree heat. Plus, could she work effectively with a stomach full of amoebas?

“What is your next destination?” asked Julie.

“India,” I replied, scanning her reaction for any sign of quiver. “Look, Julie, I have some concerns. I don’t know if you’ve done shoots exactly like this. We’re talking difficult conditions . . . high ideals, but low budget . . . and . . . and . . .”

“I know what you think,” she said, assertively uncrossing her Manolos. “Don’t worry, I can go days without sleeping, have a constitution of iron, and a stash of Cipro that could keep a crew of twenty working for a month.”

And, she hadn’t flinched at the sewage-line break.

Hired.

We wanted to go to India because our research had identified Indian women who were making massive change, activism on the scale of the huge challenges the country faced. And the “nominate a diva” section of our website was regularly turning up people from the subcontinent.

But I had other reasons, too. Spirituality was a floater in the corner of my vision and perhaps it was time to coax the little irritant away from the periphery and into the center.
Diva
means “deity,” says the OED, and according to the
Lonely Planet
guidebook, India is chock-full of them. “Some estimates put the total number of deities at 330 million,” the guidebook says of the Hindu pantheon. Certainly a country with a three-to-one human-to-deity ratio must have an inside line on the big question: how to find the divine in the everyday.

“Delhi has ten million people,”
says our taxi driver, Rajbir, as a way to explain our lurching progress down New Delhi’s Pusa Road on our first day of a three-week stay in India. I’d learned from Cuba about the shortcomings of too brief a shoot.

“Yeah, but,” I say to Rajbir, noting the unusual traffic jam we found ourselves in, “it’s the ox carts, buses, rickshaws, scooters, and—”

Rajbir suddenly slams on the brakes:
eeeeeerrreescrrrrrrrrruchhh!!!

I plunge forward and my head snaps to a stop, eye to eye with a statue of the goddess Kali on the dashboard altar. A displaced shaft of incense smoke juts sideways in slow motion, and the garland of orange carnations slung over the goddess swings like a slow, heavy pendulum.

“—the cows that make it tricky,” I finish, picking my chin off the back of the front seat.

A large white cow with a heaving udder and a fuchsia smudge across its neck languidly saunters across the road in front of us. Julie bends over to collect the rolls of 16mm film that have tumbled onto the floor. “How’s it going with Phoolan Devi?” I ask her about India’s well-known bandit-turned-member-of-Parliament. Julie has been in India for a week scouting, and Devi is one of the people she’s been trying to connect with.

“Raghu has been calling every day but no luck yet,” says Julie, “and just so you know, Raghu is a great fixer.”

“And the fishing,” I ask expectantly. “Found a place yet?”

“Not yet,” she responds, not looking up.

“Mostly Hindu, some Muslim,
all mayhem,” is the sophisticated theological analysis I am able to eke out for a first standup later in the day before my foot is run over by a young man in a Ted Nugent T-shirt pulling a wooden cart full of greens. We are filming at a memorial to Mohandas Gandhi as part of a brief rundown on Indian history.

“I can see we are going to have some logistical challenges,” says San Francisco–based DigiBeta cameraman John Chater to Julie, nodding toward the thirty-five boys and men who have crowded around the camera and are looking straight down the lens. Good-natured, strong, and tall enough to shoot over the crowds, John will be a huge asset on this shoot, as will his quiet, mustached soundman, Doug Dunderdale. Sound technicians, not surprisingly, are almost always quiet.

“See you back at the hotel,” says Cheryl, as she sinks, undaunted, into a mass of pedestrians with her small Beaulieu camera. Cheryl’s freewheeling footage added a unique element to the Cuba show, and I’m glad she was available to join us in India. Ideally, we intend to keep crew consistent from one show to the next, but prior commitments and the contingencies of production have meant that, this time, Cheryl and I are the only returning crew members.

Of all of India’s iconic leaders, it is Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi, with his combination of spiritual practice and political action, who most intrigues me. A leader during the country’s long struggle for independence from British rule, Gandhi began his civil disobedience as a young lawyer in South Africa by burning the identity cards that were required of nonwhites. After returning to India, he was a participant in the Indian National Congress and later used civil disobedience, fasting, and marches as political tools in his work. Known throughout the world for his dedication to nonviolence (
ahimsa
) and truth (
satya
), Gandhi was nominated five times in an eleven-year period for the Nobel Peace Prize, but never received it. As with many of India’s leaders, a cult of personality surrounds Gandhi, almost deifying him.

India’s reputation as a place of truth and nonviolence, popularly embodied in Mahatma (“great soul”) Gandhi, stands in contrast to another rap: a place of widespread corruption. Today’s headline in the
Times of India
blares out:
TOP GUNS TO SLUG IT OUT IN BATTLE ROYAL
and goes on to say that money, muscle power, and the mafia play an unhealthy role in elections.

Politicians with criminal backgrounds are not uncommon in India. Phoolan Devi, the Bandit Queen who we’re trying to track down, is a case in point. On the one hand it seems shocking that a renowned bandit can be elected to office, but on the other, if white-collar crime were prosecuted as aggressively as drug-related crimes in the United States, our country would have its share of convicts-cum-politicians.

To explore how widespread corruption thrives in this birthplace of truth, nonviolence, and pacifism, we have arranged to meet one of Delhi’s top cops, Kiran Bedi, at a police training center an hour outside of the city. She said in a speech, “I do firmly believe that police in any country can be the greatest protector of human rights and the rule of law—as it could as well be the greatest violator of both.”

Bedi became India’s first lady beat cop when she joined the service in 1972, and she has since climbed the ranks despite her habit of stepping on toes of the higher-ups. She is a former tennis champ, the author of several books, the founder of many social service organizations; she has a slew of degrees; and she won the Asian version of the Nobel Peace Prize—the Ramon Magsaysay Award—in 1994. Her résumé sounded right-on when I first heard about her. But it was almost
too
good, and I was a little suspicious. Was she just a Brahmin with a foolproof infrastructure of support? (In American-speak: a Kennedy?)

“Plus,” I had said to Julie back in Seattle when I expressed my initial reservations about Bedi, “she’s a celebrity, and we’re trying to avoid that.” The show’s mission is to seek out “unsung” folks whose work is driven by personal passion, not “achievement” status. I was concerned that Bedi was more of a high-profile celeb.

“Trust me,” assured Julie, who had read much more than me, “this woman
is
a diva. She’s constantly going at it with the establishment. That’s why she got banished to prison duty. Nobody thought she could succeed, but she did.” She handed me Bedi’s 1999 book,
It’s Always Possible: Transforming One of the Largest Prisons in the World.

Bedi was sent to run the infamous Tijar Jail, a maximum-security prison and the largest in South Asia. It was an infamously brutal place where 12,000 prisoners were crammed in a space with a stated capacity of 4,000. By all accounts, rather than flinching, or dodging the posting, she ran straight at the challenge. Her most striking innovation was to introduce Vipassana, a meditation program that includes a ten-day silent retreat, as a part of prisoner reform. She also instituted a “petition box” where prisoners could post anonymous complaints, make requests, and expose corruption and abuse; invited nonprofit organizations into the prison to provide child care, medicine, literacy, and advocacy; and instituted gardening programs. In short, she started treating prisoners like human beings.