[boston - paris - london - mumbai - jodhpur - jaipur - udaipur - delhi - chicago - boston]
Two weeks in India is nowhere near enough time experience this crazy, massive country. Week One you spend recoiling from and delighting in the incredible otherness and chaos of the place; Week Two you spend annoyed and indignant at the incredible otherness and chaos of the place… Two months might be enough to begin peeling back the layers. Or two years. But in two weeks we just got a snapshot, slightly blurry and off-center.
But really our trip was just about traveling somewhere. Anywhere. Plopping ourselves in an alternate reality outside of the west, beyond the familiar and routine, to see something of the world and to find out who or what we would become when we weren’t at home.
In my marriage vows I recalled an early episode that led to the recognition that Dennis might be someone I could travel with. And if travel is an analogy for how I live my life, I said, then perhaps in Dennis I could find a home.
This was just a gut sense I had, stemming from a summer afternoon early in our relationship, wandering aimlessly around a Waltham graveyard, eating Lizzie’s ice cream and making up stories about Frank the Crow (really he did seem to be the spirit anima watching over the grave of this dead guy, Frank) – though we hadn’t really traveled much together until heading off to India for our honeymoon.
But the analogy is significant, because of my rambling, alternatingly uptight and aimless travel style, a rhythm that’s both languid and trying, much like the way I wind myself through life. A rhythm that would drive most normal people nuts. I travel with purpose but without direction. I loathe anything touristy – mostly in denial that I am in fact a tourist – preferring to seek out the essence of a place and its people. As it turns out, Dennis is pretty much the same. We travel well together.
In India we found a dizzying assault to the senses, a world turned upside down, inside-out, placed in a kaleidoscope and spun in circles; a world of contradictions, counter to everything we take for granted in America.
So much so, that I am at a loss to put it all together. I have a handful of experiences and associations, but I’m missing the glue to make sense of them all.
In no particular order, this is what we found in India:
Smell. The first sensory experience of India is the smell – a pervasive methane sort of smell. It’s not a particularly offensive smell – just kind of odd – making you think of a gas oven that’s been left on and forgotten about. And then, as you enter the city center, the smell becomes a little more distinct, and you become aware of the sewers running down the sidewalks. A not-so-nice smell, but mixed with incense and spice.
Chaos. Hurtling down a Mumbai highway in a tiny pre-paid taxi, horn bleating nonstop, we pass burned-out slums and shanties, billboards in English and Hindi, weave between cars, motorcycles, auto-rickshaws, camels, cows and goats. Yes, the cows do in fact lope languidly down the highway, seemingly oblivious to the traffic around them.
Despite the constant overflow of traffic, which at all times included livestock and stray animals, pedestrians, beggar children and motorized vehicles, there never seemed to be any traffic jams. This may have had to do with the fact that there were no traffic lights, stop signs or designated traffic lanes. Traffic flow was mayhem, and yet it always seemed somehow to work.
Auto-rickshaws. The auto-rickshaw is an interesting contraption that appears to be built on the chassis of a riding lawnmower. It has the turning radius of a bicycle, which is critical considering the narrowness of the streets in Rajasthan’s old cities, and presumably is designed equipped with brakes, though we were not able to observe their usage. Hurtling at breakneck speed through the winding streets of Jodhpur, dodging people, cows, goats, dogs, bikes and other motorized vehicles, I was reminded of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disney World. Odd an association though it was – given it’s been over twenty years since I’ve even been to Disney World – I couldn’t get it out of my head. Every auto-rickshaw we took was the same – speeding down the streets as fast as the 5hpw lawnmower engine could go, spewing black diesel smoke in our wake, a cow would suddenly step into our immediate path; just as it seemed inevitable that we would plow straight into the obstacle, the rickshaw would swerve to the side with it’s impossible turning radius and we’d continue on our way.
Sound. In the mornings we would awaken early to the lovely, haunting sound of the Muslim call to prayer. A sacred soliloquy over loud-speaker, sung to the city. Evocative, beautiful, oppressive. Day 1, in Jodhpur, I awoke to find Dennis on the terrace, standing in the darkness, in his underwear, holding a microphone to the pre-dawn sky. Everything else is silent, as the city gently rises to pray.
By afternoon the city centers are chaotic and bustling, filled with the sound of frantic beeping auto-rickshaw horns and the put-put-puttering roar of tiny diesel engines as they wind their way through the crowded, narrow streets. And if you’re a tourist, no matter where you go, you can never escape the calls of street vendors, rickshaw-drivers and touts – hello, hello! excuuuse me… yes, hello. yes, yes? for you, my friend, 200 rupees. very good deal. best quality! spices, tea? best in India! nowhere you find better price. I give you Indian price. you buy textiles? best bargain, best bargain! only 5 feet down the street…I show you, come with me…best price!
In Udaipur our hotel room opened onto the lake, filling the room with soft breezes and the constant, rhythmic sound of the washer-women beating their laundry against the ghats. Thwap-thwap-thwap. All day. Soft and rhythmic like a beating heart. In the later afternoon, the thwap-thwap-thwaping mingled with the shouts and laughter of children plunging into the lake for an afternoon bath. When the beeping, shouting, haggling bustle of the city became too much, we retreated to our room and dozed to the tranquil sounds of the lake.
Rooftop Cafés. Our favorite part of Jodhpur was the rooftop café atop our little haveli, where we were served hot masala milk tea and watched as the Blue City slowly, quietly awoke to the new day. Caught in the amber glow of the rising sun, we noticed a gentle, peaceful side to the city, which contrasted to the hectic, chaotic pace it would adopt as the day wore on.
In the evenings the rooftop cafés and gardens were lit up with candles. The little flames danced in the breeze and threw shadows evocatively across the table, creating an impossibly romantic atmosphere for enjoying your Kingfisher and thali.
Lassies. Lassiwala in Jaipur is so famous for it’s lassis (served in terra cotta cups that look like miniature planters) that there are now about four other lassi stalls crammed in right next to it, all with the name Lassiwala painted across the front. Some claim to be the original Lassiwala, others to be the national Lassiwala, but the way to pick the “real” Lassiwala from the crowd is to note the “since 1944” on the sign. And of course, if you’re smart, you notice that one of the many Lassiwalas has a constant crowd of Indians standing in front of it drinking lassis out of terra cotta cups, while the other stalls are all strangely empty.
However, my favorite lassi by far was the creamy, thick makhania saffron lassi unique to Jodhpur that we were served at the grimy but extremely popular Shri Mishrilal Hotel. This is what we ate for lunch each day while in Jodhpur, thrilled by the notion of getting lunch for two for the equivalent of 50 cents.
Haggling. You have to haggle in India. If you do not, the Indians will have no respect for you. Of course, as a westerner, you can never win at this game. But you are expected to try. The thing is, no matter what you pay, you are paying too much – you can tell by the way the merchant smirks at you as he takes your money. But you are still paying a fraction of what you’d pay in the west. And so you start out being generous, making only half-hearted attempts to haggle, knowing that you don’t really mind paying a few dollars too much, until you can no longer stand being laughed at and taken advantage of, and then you find yourself haggling heatedly over 50 rupees because you’ll be damned if you’re going to let another merchant laugh at you for being a foolish tourist. And then when he finally gives in, because you’ve learned that making for the door is a sure way to get your price, and you walk away with your box of tea, or pashmina shawl or miniature painting, you realize you just fought over a dollar. And you realize that that dollar is absolutely nothing to you – who will pay three times that for a cup of coffee at Starbucks – but it’s no insignificant sum to this Indian merchant who, though he smirks smugly at your western naïveté, will be lucky to make three sales today.
There is also a commission system in effect. Which means that if a rickshaw-driver recommends a shop or restaurant to you, you will almost certainly be charged double and he will return later for his share of the commission. This means that every time you set foot in a rickshaw or taxi, the driver will try to persuade you to visit some factory – jewelry, textiles, furniture – where you will be a captive audience as they put on the hard sell. We finally began taking bicycle rickshaws because, as painful as it was watching these frail men – some quite old, and one a skinny child that couldn’t have been more than 12 – physically labor to transport you a mile or two down the road, at least the bicycle rickshaw-drivers would not try to encourage us to visit a factory 5 kilometers outside of the city.
So desperate are the shopkeepers to make a sale, that if you show the slightest sign of interest while browsing a shop or even just looking in the window while walking past, the merchant will draw you inside, beseech you to take a seat, have a cup of tea, and then proceed to unfurl his entire inventory onto the floor in front of you. This is a manipulative tactic intended to make you feel compelled to buy something, even if you really didn’t want a pair of traditional Indian shoes or yet another tapestry. But once you become hardened to the tactic and begin to leave these eager shopkeepers without making a purchase, you notice the crushed expressions on the shopkeepers faces as you exit.
And in these moments you feel the keen contradiction and dissonance that is India twist in your soul. Witnessing the raw desperation of these working poor is anguish, and yet the haughty smugness with which they regard you once they have your money makes you feel dirty and used.
In Jodhpur we got an initial taste – new to the game, we fell for the ruses again and again, each story contradicted by the next vendor we spoke to, until we left the city with some beautiful textiles and our dignity in tatters, feeling like utter dupes. In Jaipur we tried to make ourselves impervious to the tactics but found ourselves so overwhelmed by the soup of desperation and pushy aggression that each evening we’d return to our hotel room feeling a peculiar, uncomfortable mix of angry, sullied and heartbroken. Your compassion is wrung out and turned into hostility and then wrung out some more into a resentful sort of pity. Jaipur is not for the faint of heart.
Poverty. Poverty is probably the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of India. We had braced ourselves for this, and so were not overly surprised by it. More unexpected was our observation, walking through the old city of Jodhpur, of a gentle, almost tranquil quality, resignation perhaps, that the very poor seemed to imbibe. We thought maybe this stems from the caste system (outlawed in 1949 with the adoption of India’s constitution, but still in effect in smaller towns and villages), by which individuals born into the lower castes are denied any hope of bettering their lot in life. If your father was a cobbler, you will be a cobbler, and your sons will be cobblers; if your father was a sweeper, you will be a sweeper. Though the negative effects of such a system are obvious to the western way of thinking, perhaps the flip side of the coin is an unexpected tranquility that comes from the absence of social climbing. When we stop striving for more, we have no choice but to appreciate what we have.
Monkeys. The highlight of Jaipur was the monkey temple. Having momentarily escaped the haggling and hassling and general chaos of the city below, as our disgruntled autorickshaw-driver sat waiting to take us back into the merchant fray, we purchased bags of peanuts and climbed to the temple at the top of the hill, feeding monkeys and goats along the way. The goats jumped up on us, hooves leaning eagerly against our chests like puppies begging for food; the monkeys were initially a little suspicious, but then greed overcame suspicion and finally they were eating out of our hands.
Camels. Our original itinerary had included a journey into the Thar desert near Jaisalmer where we planned to spend a couple days on a camel safari. But we were dissuaded from continuing on to Jaisalmer – told that the Thar was extremely hot (over 40 C) and Jaisalmer very touristy (apparently after the Indian government began testing nuclear weapons in the Thar desert, most of the locals fled, leaving behind only the tourism industry). So instead we took our camel safari in the Osiyan desert a couple hours outside of Jodhpur.
Perched atop Mr. Raj and Mr. Singh, with a third rambunctious, misbehaving, disgruntled young camel in tow (who our guides referred to simply as “The Newcomer”) we plodded through the sand and brush of the desert. To be honest, once you’ve seen a mile of sand and brush you may as well have seen the entire desert, and we were a bit perplexed by the knowledge that some tour operators offer four-day camel safaris (a day and a half was plenty for us). But the day and a half that we spent plodding through the desert was probably among the most authentic of the experiences we had during our two-week journey. We passed sheep and goat herders – thin old men in giant turbans and children in brightly colored kurtas, their dark hair bleached orangish-blond under the sun. We passed tiny villages of mud-thatched huts. We heard the cries of peacocks. When we stopped for supplies at tiny stalls seemingly in the middle of nowhere (the equivalent of the village convenience store), the school children would gather around with curiosity, staring at us as though we were wild animals at the zoo.
We stopped for lunch at a watering hole with a cluster of trees. As Dennis and I dozed under the shade of the trees, one of our guides led the camels off to drink while the other two prepared a lunch of chapatti and dhal beneath the shadow of the camel cart. After lunch we were offered masala tea and biddis (Indian cigarettes), which we smoked out of politeness and then ended up trading our Coleman lighter, which fascinated our guide, for the rest of the pack. Den wandered off to explore the dunes and made friends with a young shepherd boy, who taught him the word for frog (mandik) and whom he left with the precious gift of a plastic ink pen.
We camped out in the desert, sleeping on blankets laid out on the sand beneath a big sky of stars. We awoke to the sound of peacocks (Dennis, again, holding his microphone to the sky) and the rosy pink sun rising over the sand and brush and dunes. Milk tea for breakfast was made by calling over a shepherd girl, handing her a metal cup, which she filled by chasing down the nearest goat. Fresh masala milk tea is sweet and rich, a meal in of itself. My preference though was for the mint tea, which was made by adding mint leaves to the masala chai – sweet and strong and cooling. Tea was accompanied by potato paratha, which our guide taught Dennis and I to make. And then the camels returned and we were on our way again. And this was about the time I began to get sick – the inevitable “Delhi belly” – which made for a much less pleasant return trip through the desert, and doesn’t bear detailing.
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A couple weeks back home in Boston now, nestled in 1369 on a rainy Saturday afternoon, we’re still trying to digest it all. Did we enjoy India? Would we go back? Did we learn anything at all about Indian culture? Or even just a peek into the human experience outside of the Rich West? Not sure.
But the travel bug is definitely back in force. Next stop North Africa?
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p.s. to see our travel photos, visit Den’s Tabblo pages:
Jodhpur “The Blue City”, India (October 1st-4th)
Thar Desert “Camel Safari”, Osian, India (October 4th-5th)
Jaipur “The Pink City”, India (October 6th-8th)
Udaipur “The White City”, India (October 8th-12th)
