Better Than Fiction 2 (8 page)

The chemistry teacher and I leaned back on the green couch mountain and nostalgically remembered our drive from the airport the first day we had arrived. That had seemed like such a hopeful time. All those vast fields. Were we missing out on the real Kazakhstan at this Potemkin village school? How could we get back to that region near the airport? There had to be another Kazakhstan that we weren’t seeing.

‘I want to go someplace where there are just bushes and no people pointing at me, at the color of my skin,’ the chemistry teacher said. ‘I came to this country because I wanted to feel what it was like to be surrounded with so much vast space. For one day I just want to walk in that space, to only encounter a bush.’

When I would ask our fellow Kazakh teachers if we might be able to go to a village someday, they would look at me scornfully. ‘Why do you want to go to a
village
?’ they would say. ‘They are not civilized there. They are only wild. We teach at a
presidential
school. We don’t do such things.’

The chemistry teacher and I considered getting into a taxi and just telling the taxi driver to take us out into the steppe, but we were warned against this because the taxis weren’t reliable when the weather was still -30°F. But that first weekend in March, when the temperature rose a little, one of the younger teachers, Gulnar, finally gave in and arranged to take us to a village. ‘Just don’t judge us,’ she pleaded.

So on Sunday morning, Gulnar, the chemistry teacher, and I drove out into the steppe. There was nothing but white snow and white sky so that you couldn’t see the demarcation of the horizon. ‘Maybe we could just live out here, get a car, and
commute,’ the chemistry teacher suggested.

The door on the passenger’s side suddenly flew open and the taxi driver pulled over to shut it. But when he started driving, it flew open again.

‘Oh, I am shame, shame, shame,’ Gulnar said, her head in her hands.

‘No, this is why I came,’ the chemistry teacher said, clenching his teeth with exertion as he held the door closed. ‘I just want to hold the door closed.
Finally
, we are having a Kazakh adventure.’

The village was called Podstepnoy, which means ‘the place below the steppe.’ Gulnar had told the principal of Podstepnoy’s school that we would be visiting. This principal had arranged, on a Sunday, for all her students to come to school and to greet us with bowls of homemade sour cream. Then she introduced us to the school’s pets, a parakeet, a fish, and a frog, and then to the huge cucumbers and the herbs they were growing in the greenhouse. This school had a playground, not a target range. She brought us into their small auditorium and a young male teacher dressed in a maroon velvet jacket got on stage and sang us a Kazakh love song. As we were leaving, the students wanted us to write little prayers for them in their school notebooks. Then the school bus took us for a tour around the village. The bus driver took us to the cinema, where the locals showed homemade experimental films on a screen made of pieces of paper pasted to the wall. No Hollywood here. Here was a deeper sophistication.

The bus wound around the village and the driver pointed out the Friendship House and the Peace House and then dropped us off at the principal’s house for a meal of fresh horsemeat. She had set the table with crystal and even invited our taxi driver in for the meal too. She introduced us to her son, a guitar player from a local alternative Kazakh rock band. He told me his name was
Nurlan. ‘It means a real man,’ he said. ‘The actual meaning is Camel Hero.’

Camel Hero asked me why I had come to Kazakhstan and I said I liked to write about cultures. He admitted he had never met a person like that before. I said that I had found a soulful life in Kyrgyzstan and had wanted to write about the soul of Kazakhstan but I didn’t know where it was.

‘Really? I never imagined the West cared about souls,’ he said, pondering. ‘I never realized that maybe we are all the same.’

I turned to the principal and begged her, ‘Can I just come and teach at
your
school? I’ll volunteer.’ She was shocked. ‘But you teach at the
presidential
school,’ she said.

‘But the people in that school are so fake,’ I said. ‘Everyone just wants to watch that Hollywood movie
Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter.
’

‘But that movie was made by Timur Bekmambetov, born in Kazakhstan,’ Camel Hero said. ‘He is who arranged that vampire movie. Maybe he revenged for
Borat
?’

Finally I was finding some humor in this place! We started joking. I asked him what he read. He said his favorite book was by Nurlan Abayev. I asked who that was. He said, ‘Me!’ Ha ha. Joke joke. Everyone at the table laughed. I said my favorite book was,
Beyond the Green Couch Mountain
. He said he had never read it. ‘But you wrote it!’ I said. Ha ha. Joke joke.

‘Oh my god! You are one of us! You understand Kazakh humor!’ Gulnar said. And I think I finally did.

Camel Hero asked if I had a husband and I said no.

‘You should
joke
with him,’ Gulnar nudged me.

So I said, ‘I don’t have a husband but I have a wife.’

‘No! Not
that
kind of joke!’ Gulnar said, scandalized.

‘Okay, here is a joke,’ I said. ‘It’s kind of dumb, though.’

‘Tell me!’ Camel Hero said.

‘Once there was a fish and it hit a wall,’ I began.

‘A fish hit a wall!’ he cried. ‘Hahaha!’

‘Wait! That’s not the end of the joke,’ I said. ‘The fish said damn.’

‘Hahaha.’ He was still laughing. ‘I understand the first part of the joke. I just don’t understand the end of it.’

Camel Hero invited us to the new Kazakh cowboy bar where his band was going to be playing next weekend. It was called FOK Country Inn. Everyone there wore cowboy hats, he said, and they made TexMex food.

The chemistry teacher sighed and said, ‘Why does everything have to be a joke here? Why do they have to call it FOK Country Inn?’

The principal then led us into a pillow-strewn room and told us to take a nap. The taxi driver placed a pillow on his knee, patted it, and motioned to the chemistry teacher, my rather proper English companion, to lay his head on it.

I’d finally found my Kazakhstan, for that one day in the village.

The next day at school, however, the teachers were shocked. How dare I go to the village! How dare I see how uncivilized their country was. Was I going to tell people in America about the Kazakh village, how they are all ruffians, hooligans, how they are just like the people at the ice skating rink who knock each other over and don’t stand in line?

‘But I love those kids at the ice skating rink,’ I said.

That Friday, Women’s Day, I prepared myself for the shooting competition. If I was really going to have to shoot an AK-47, so be it. But it turned out that they used only little cap guns
in the gym and nobody really participated because everyone was so busy preparing for the main activity: the student dance performance.

As I sat there in the auditorium listening to the orchestra tuning up, the conductor showing off his Italian-speaking skills as he introduced the musicians, and the Kazakh violin players dressed up in their slightly shoddy light blue satin dresses that looked like they had been hand-sewn from curtains, I realized slowly that there was a bigger mind amidst all this. I mean, all the petty-mindedness was there, the power struggles, which you would expect would rise out of a presidential elite school vying for attention in the middle of absolutely nowhere. And yes, of course, some students were snoring, and some were talking on their phones. And there were still the suspicious neighbors: ‘Why have you come here? What is here for you? You must be KGB/CIA.’ And of course the chemistry teacher was still squirreling away his time in his lab, his lab without chemicals, googling ‘Kazakh mentality,’ trying to understand it here and becoming a little paranoid in the process. All that was here. But something bigger and more benevolent than all that was also here, some force that had invited us to experience their land. They didn’t even want anything. They didn’t actually even want reform. The teachers didn’t want us to teach them anything. They wanted to teach
us
. They wanted to believe that we had come here to increase our knowledge of ‘Stan’ country mentality.

Our mistake was that we kept thinking we were supposed to
do
something. We kept thinking we were supposed to teach them how to be like us, how to be organized, how to plan ahead, how to make things work like we liked them to work, but the main ones suffering for it were us. All they really wanted was for us to come, observe them, and be happy. Wasn’t the principal always
ordering us to smile more? As I watched them dance, doing their flash mob, I realized they really just wanted us to look at them and say they were okay. They wanted validation that they were sophisticated too. And maybe there was something benevolent in us too. We came because we wanted to help. We would all go back to being petty and self-righteous, to feeling over-worked and under-effective, but there was something bigger. ‘Come, valiant strangers!’ they seemed to be saying. ‘Come dance with us in our giant Kazakh flash mob.’

E
ach morning that winter I woke to a routine: at five am, I slapped at the cheap digital alarm clock on the bedside table of my room at the Hotel Raysons, threw on a once-white t-shirt, and spent the predawn hour silently sipping a sugary cup of chai with my boss in the rear of a Range Rover as we shuddered through the tandoor smoke and motorbike exhaust of Kolhapur, India. Just before dawn – in hilltop parks, municipal gardens, and cricket pitches – we found them: Indians dressed in uniform, arranged in tight army formations. Someone happening upon one of these gatherings could have mistaken it for some sort of militia, but on closer inspection the uniforms displayed the faces of jolly Buddhas, clipart of bawling crowds, the words ‘Ho!’ and ‘Ha!’ hovering over crazed cartoon expressions like Pentecostal emanations.

‘We are the healthiest persons in this world! We are the
happiest persons in this world! We are laughter club members!’ these groups’ leaders addressed their ranks. ‘Free Laughter! One, two, three! Start!’ And then the gatherings erupted, initiating the forty-five minutes of their daily hysterics. My job was to plant myself as deeply as possible among the manic throng, aim the Canon XL2 video camera hitched over my shoulder, and try to maintain the professional demeanor of a documentarian as chubby, bearded men in jumpsuits reached out to tickle me.

‘Hold the camera steady! Please!’ my boss yelled at me, and for good reason. At twenty-two, I was a nervous kid, with shaky hands and distractible attention, but I had somehow lucked into this first real gig in my supposed career as a cameraman. Back in New York, serving an endless unpaid servitude as an intern for a production company, I had met Neil, a fashion photographer who had stumbled upon India’s laughter club movement and persuaded a few friends to fund the production of his first documentary film. I still can’t say why, other than my bargain-basement rate, Neil might have hired me, but the source of his fascination with the laughers of India seemed clear enough. An exacting, impatient artist with a good taste for the absurd, Neil was seduced by the devotion of the many thousands who congregated each day to an idea equally joyful and outlandish. By 2005, when we arrived, India’s public parks were daily jammed with the dozens or even hundreds who congregated to laugh away the stresses of their modernizing nation.

There were no jokes told at laughter club. Instead, they relied on a number of ‘laughter exercises,’ such as ‘Bird Laughter,’ ‘Free Laughter,’ and ‘Tickle Laughter.’ ‘Laugh for no reason’ and ‘fake it ‘til you make it’ were the two pillars of the laughter club credo, and after a month of filming, I had seen how quickly forced laughter, among fifty adults in an Indian park at dawn
or sunset, could become authentic. Dreamt up by Dr Madan Kataria, a physician from Mumbai, the laughter clubs called their activity
‘hasya yoga’
– laughter yoga – and its members often rhapsodized about laughter’s myriad health benefits.

‘For God’s sake! How hard is it to hold the thing straight?’ Neil berated me, as I chased the laughers through the Kolhapuri dawn. Though I had spent my off-hours pacing the hallways of the Hotel Raysons practising a steady grip on the XL2, whenever I was confronted by the exuberance of actual laughter clubs, I still could not figure out where to point it, and so the camera veered wildly in my hands. Screening the smeary footage in our hotel rooms, Neil blinked furiously behind extravagant clouds of cigarette smoke. ‘How can I use any of this?’ he asked. It was my first job, in my first career, and I saw that my desperation to prove myself was precisely what doomed me.

The purported subject of our documentary might have been ‘The World of Laughter,’ but after a few weeks in Kolhapur, it had subtly shifted, at least for me. As it turned out, laughter, narratively speaking, was like a tulip or a sunset: nice to look at for a minute or two, but my interest quickly ran dull. ‘
Behind
the World of Laughter’ was my new angle, and I set out to unveil the ordinary human aspiration, pettiness, rivalry, and self-deception that shaped the jolly dream.

The laughter clubs of India might ‘laugh for no reason,’ but the club culture we found in Kolhapur (‘the laughter capital of the world,’ its denizens proudly boasted) had come to use group laughter for purposes other than health. Kolhapur’s clubs, populated mostly by the growing middle class, had become like de facto Rotary Clubs; I’d seen how the long walks to and from
the parks offered an occasion for the city’s upwardly mobile citizens to gather and chat about business. There was even a low-burning but perceptible rivalry between club leaders. After a day spent documenting a movement united under the motto ‘world peace through laughter,’ I was developing my own, less peaceable mottos. ‘Stories are all about conflict,’ I liked to say, and I did my best to capture whatever conflicts among the laughers that I could.

And conflict, I felt, was thickening in the humid Kolhapuri air. Our producers had spent a sizeable portion of the production money to help finance the first ‘World Laughter Competition,’ where the best laughers of each club would square off for the title of ‘World’s Best Laughing Human Being.’ We invited rival laughter leaders for lengthy meetings to write the rules and plan the events for the big night. Upping the stakes, we paid the travel expenses for that laughter messiah, Dr Madan Kataria, to personally officiate the competition, where participants would be judged on the contagiousness of laugh, authenticity of laugh, and creative interpretation of each of the common laughter exercises. The grand competition’s specifics were a good flashpoint for argument: occasionally, through the viewfinder of my XL2, I happily watched tiffs erupt. Just as often, however, the meetings would break forth into impromptu laughter sessions or dance parties. I liked to fancy myself a professional documentarian, but I was just learning my first lesson on the complexity of the relationship between storyteller and subject: their worst behavior was my very good news. But for the most part, the laughers of Kolhapur were behaving very nicely.

I might have spent my days in the epicenter of the world laughter club movement, but back in my hotel room, I brooded. Suffering the common gastrointestinal introduction of a first-timer
to India, I sat in the bathroom worrying about our film. My own camera work might have been woeful and amateur, but each of my lousy videotapes seemed to me just a small example of the lack of focus that marred the entire production. Finding little conflict, no central drama, how could Neil possibly cut the ninety-minute feature film we imagined? And what would happen if this, my one absurdly lucky break, were to fail? Dreading my return to ungainful employment in New York, I felt how much I needed our film to succeed.

And yet, the camera continued to swing wildly in my hands, as Neil and I left behind our main characters to travel the red-brown Maharashtrian countryside, in search of better dramas. What we found were just more uncomplicated, triumphant stories: in one small town, we met a group of women in matching pink saris, whose laughter club provided many of its members their first occasion to leave their homes unchaperoned by men. We met a near-blind great-grandmother – doubled over with scoliosis in the packed asbestos shed in which she lived – who became a woman transformed when she laughed, standing upright and shaking the thin walls with her exuberant bellows. Building up to the night of the World Laughter Competition, I filmed stories of recovery through laughter – private triumphs over cancer, depression, substance abuse, loneliness, poverty, and repression. Despite my efforts, I seemed to be shooting a promotional video for the laughter club movement.

But my last best hope lay in the night of the competition. The event turned into something of a sensation, thousands cramming into the outdoor theater we had rented. The lead competitors arrived in grand fashion: that stooped nonagenarian came to meet her competition atop an elephant, preceded by dozens of laughers banging drums and waving tambourines.
And yet, despite a couple of instances of backroom drama, the competition itself was a frustratingly euphoric affair. None of Kolhapur’s rival clubs was victorious: in the end, the leader of that small town women’s club won the day, and everyone seemed pretty pleased with the result. Fireworks burst in the Indian night; the city of Kolhapur rocked with the thunder of five thousand voices laughing. I flew back to New York City, to a string of gigs filming bar and bat mitzvahs, until my career as a brooding guy videotaping other’s joyful activities at last sputtered to its end. Neil and I fell out of touch.

And so it was a great surprise when, three years later, Neil sent an email to inform me that a short film he had cut from our footage would play as part of a new film festival called Pangea Day, a massive event sponsored by the TED organization, to be live-streamed to satellite gatherings all over the world. On the night of May 10, 2008, I sat in front of my computer, waiting for my first glimpse at our stunted laughter epic, which I still hoped Neil would someday complete. But – as far as I know – the culmination of our months spent chasing the laughers of India remains just that four-minute clip that I watched with all of Pangea that evening.

Absent all the behind-the-scenes drama I had tried so hard to capture, this film was a four-minute montage of men and women laughing into the pretty Maharastrian countryside as Dr Kataria, in voiceover, expounded upon his dream ‘to bring the whole world like a family’ through laughter. It was, in fact, precisely the promotional video for the laughter club movement I had worried we were making.

When the 240-second running time of our film came to its end, the live-stream cut to a shot of a stage at Sony Pictures Studios in Los Angeles, where the actress Goldie Hawn
introduced Dr Madan Kataria. After describing his mission to ‘connect the whole world’ by establishing ‘one million laughter clubs,’ Dr Kataria spread his arms, drew his breath, and led the viewership of Pangea Day in one great, international laugh. And then, if only for thirty seconds or so, Dr Kataria’s crazy dream came true: the live stream cut to masses in London, Rwanda, and Mumbai, united in laughter. Alone in my crummy Brooklyn apartment, the room lit only by the glow of my laptop, I was laughing too.