I arrived in Delhi, a city unlike any other. The constant mass of people leaves you breathless. So does the constant smell of urine on every stretch of exposed pavement, mildly subdued by burning incense that seeps out of shops, or burning garbage lit in the middle of the dusty, congested roads. The constant protests of a thousand car and auto-rickshaw engines, tired and suffering, rings through the streets, their drivers honking in perpetual frustration. The constant visual stimulation of a thousand colorful saris and turbans makes your eyes water. Or maybe that’s just the exhaust fumes and dust in the air. After a few days you can feel your lungs suffering. Blow your nose and it’ll come out black. Your breath catches in the back of your throat.
Even the people here are overwhelming. Like their brightly colored clothing they are intense, in-your-face types. In contrast to Middle Easterners in their browns and blacks, the man in the bright pink turban wants to answer a question you haven’t even asked yet. And once he engages, another three or four turbaned, swaddled, sandaled men will immediately encroach on the conversation to add their two cents. A destitute mother grabs at your wrist, her dirty baby covered in flies. She asks for ten rupees. Or puts a hand to her open mouth, begging for food. A man on a makeshift wheeled sled with two badly mangled and useless legs wears a pair of old shoes on his hands and uses them to veer in your direction. Parking at your feet, he gazes up at with big sad eyes. He lifts a filthy hand in your direction. What can you do? You see these sights every day. They are powerful and moving. They are scary, but more than anything, they are tragic portraits of the deprivation and need in this country. It is impossible to ignore.
I’m not trying to paint an ugly picture of India. I think I’m still adjusting. All I know is it has spun me for a loop, landed me in a tangle and I’m still trying to untie the knots. Patience, I keep telling myself. And maybe I’ll learn to love this muddling, overwhelming, fascinating country as much as I did the Middle East.
Dad and I have made a whirlwind tour of Rajasthan, in the most unlikely and impractical route possible. But we’ve seen a lot. Together we’ve learned how to negotiate train and bus travel. We’ve discovered that here, you learn things the hard way – by making mistakes, by taking bad advice, by being ripped off, by realizing you didn’t take good advice. But we’ve found that there is beauty in the accidents, and some things just turn out right in the end. I’ll provide our favorite example.
After a lovely Christmas in Udaipur, Dad and I set out for Mt. Abu, a mountainous region to the west. Taking the advice of our hotel manager, who said we’d have no difficulty finding accommodation once we arrived, we set off without reserving a place in advance. Five uncomfortable, smelly, chair-springs-up-your-bottom hours later, at ten thirty, we arrived in the city to find it in complete chaos. The Indian winter holidays were in full swing, it was a Saturday night, and the place was hopping with Gujarati’s (the state to the south) escaping to cooler, greener climes. After asking in about six hotels, we realized there simply wasn’t a place available for the night in the whole city. Tired and hopeless, we made one last stop. There, the concierge gave us a few phone numbers to try, but to no avail. I wondered about park benches and how cold it might be to sleep on one. I considered taking another bus back to our lovely hotel in Udaipur (this thought was quickly banished when I remembered it was the manager of our lovely hotel in Udaipur who’d told us we wouldn’t need a reservation when we arrived here). I considered asking the posh hotel if I could sleep on their couch. Then my phone started ringing.
Sanjay, who worked at a nearby hotel, was returning my call and had found us a hotel. His friend had just opened a new resort six kilometers outside the city. We scurried to find him, and he was incredibly helpful, giving us a pot of masala chai to warm up after our aimless wandering in the cold mountain air, and questioned us on our onward journey, providing train times, bus schedules and sightseeing options. Soon, we were picked up and driven to a beautiful, quiet spot out of town and provided with our very own Rajasthan tent to sleep in for the night.
The best part about our experience at Ratan Villas was that it was a truly Indian one. We were the only Westerners. So naturally, the food was too spicy for us (and not spicy enough for most of the guests). None of the staff spoke any English (except the owners, a wonderful set of brothers, Saddat and Gautam, who were kind beyond imagination). There weren’t any showers, just a bucket and a tap of hot(ish) water. And we were a bit of a spectacle so everyone enthusiastic to catch a glimpse or speak to us.
Furthermore, the hotel was newly opened and still under construction. This meant that the manager and bus boys had yet to be tainted by service industry and were wonderfully keen to provide for their patrons. Saddat and Gautam’s Mum was busy in the kitchen helping cook delicious Indian curries. Gautam eagerly joined us on a magnificent trek in the mountains, and we kept a keen ear and eye out for sloth bears and panthers. By night we were lucky enough to have a performance of a Rajasthani folk group with singing and dancing. Dad and I were carefully selected by the dancer and the poor audience was subjected to our appalling attempt at dancing. I am still embarrassed. But if we put aside the despicable dancing, Dad and I are in agreement that our adventure in Mt Abu was one of the highlights of our trip. So, despite the bad advice, the potential disaster and apparent hopelessness of the situation, we came out wildly successful, happy and Dad got to have his trek.
On another note, perhaps the most interesting part of our stay in Mt Abu was the traffic jam. On the way home from our hike in the woods, we were stopped behind a long row of cars. This isn’t highly unusual, because large tour busses often get stuck trying to pass each other on corners on the narrow, winding road that leads to “the toppest mountain” (my favorite Gautam quote) and several temples. People get out and mill around to see what’s causing the problem, smoke a cigarette and chat while they wait. Backups tend to last until drivers get the nerve to just put the pedal to the metal and go, narrowly avoiding the loss of rear-view mirrors, and lives. But they tend to clear up within fifteen minutes. Not this time. Dad, Gautam, four other young girls and myself (yes, five of us. In the back seat. Squishy.) sat in a tiny Tata car waiting. And waiting. After twenty-five minutes without movement, Dad went out to investigate. “I’ll walk home” he claimed, the ever-enthusiastic exerciser. The rest of us sat vacantly in the car, having had quite enough walking for one day, thank you very much. Gautam got a phone call and abruptly jumped out of his car, grabbing a field hockey bat on the way. Was there some form of Indian street hockey played on mountain roadways, I wondered? It couldn’t be.
I was suddenly rather concerned for my safety and wellbeing. And what about Dad, who had disappeared around a bend in the road. I could hear shouting up ahead. Several army vehicles crept past, somehow maneuvering up the road, carrying grimfaced soldiers with guns glinting in the evening sunlight. We jumped out of the car and followed them up to catch a glimpse of what was going on. Only to find Gautam and Dad walking briskly down towards us, “get back in the car,” Gautam warned, “there’s a fight.” We did as we were told. Another twenty minutes passed, and suddenly the cars started moving again. We inched up the hill, past a group of bruised and battered looking middle age men, stumbling drunkenly in the street. Broken glass on the asphalt and a couple of wounded looking cars. A man leered as we passed with a huge bandage in the middle of his forehead. Next to him, in a wrinkled sari stained with dirt, a woman pleading with a soldier. It was otherworldly. As if it shouldn’t happen here. But I thought about it for a moment. It was just like bunch of drunk, middle age Red Sox fans getting in an aggressive fight with a bunch of drunk, middle age Yankees fans after a game. Except this time there weren’t any caps and jerseys. There were turbans and saris. And they weren’t fighting over baseball. They were fighting about a car accident on the roadway. And there weren’t police on the street corner to break it up, there were army soldiers who came jostling up the hill half an hour later. And apparently that’s all it was. A bunch of drunk Indians who got in a fight in the middle of the only road leading to the “toppest mountain” in Mt Abu. More than an hour and less than a mile later, we were home, hungry and exhausted.
I look back on this little event and it makes me realize how small our world is. It makes me laugh. Yes, I’ve had to adjust to things here in India, but really, we’re all the same. The same things happen, but the context is different. But it wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that India is a country of extremes. And extreme adjustment is necessary.