It's a drizzly afternoon in New Delhi. I'm stepping around puddles of water, mud, and human waste as I navigate the streets in the budget-hotel district near Connaught Circle -- nominally in search of a chemist's, but mostly for the chance to take a walk.
The air is cleaner today -- which doesn't mean it's actually clean. This city is grimy beyond description. People seem harder here. Life seems harder here. There are more sneers and fewer smiles -- except from the ever-present touts. (We're here in the off-season for tourists. Rickshaws outnumber potential passengers ten to one, and every hotel has a hawker out front. "Where are you from, madam? Norway? U.K.? Very nice room, single, very cheap!") We get fewer stares in Delhi, too. This city has seen everything.
A rickshaw-wallah motors beside me for a while. Makes me laugh with his patter. "Ride, madam? Very good shopping? We go for helicopter ride?" He's as bone-thin and grizzled as his peers, but his smile seems genuine, and when I laugh he laughs with me. I ask if he'll wait while "my husband" finishes at the 'net cafe, then take us to the train station. He agrees, but is gone by the time we emerge.
I'm learning to negotiate the streets in Indian cities, a little, but it's still challenging. Every tout gets a slight smile and a head-shake 'no'. Children begging get food if we have any, but no money. I'm working hard to not to let the incessant commercial offers tempt me in to putting blinders on. I refuse to stop seeing people.
Two young-teenage boys take turns peeping at me over one another's shoulders. I smile slightly and the taller one approaches. He fumbles a handshake -- left hand, oops, right hand -- and asks "how are you?" I try to ask his name but he blushes and tries to disappear behind his friend. "No English," the friend explains. They look giddy with their own daring: approaching a female farang! A blind beggar approaches, and the boys let themselves be swept away by the crowds, grinning shy goodbyes.
The days are full of moments like these. I'm scrutinized by plump matrons, and happy when I can turn stares into smiles. We're cajoled to buy this, come here, ride there. We step over human bodies everywhere -- a leper in Agra, filthy children sleeping on the train station stairs in Delhi. We see prosperous families, hip youngsters in blue jeans, beautiful women in Saris, striving single men, a small number of other western tourists. Mostly what we see -- everywhere, everywhere, everywhere -- are more people. More people in less space than this Californian could have imagined.
If you need to get through the crowds, sometimes you need to shove. "It's not personal" was the advice I read before we came here. At the train station, rushed and worried about finding the carriage that will take us to Calcutta, I take this advice to heart and start pushing. There's no malice in my pushing, and nobody reacts as though there were. As time gets tighter and we still haven't found our spot, I start thinking of the rules of the highways here -- bigger and faster wins. With my pack on, and with my Western height and American girth, I'm plenty big. I increase my speed, look determined, and make astonishing progress.
The train station is, of course, indescribably crowded. I almost take a header down a flight of stairs when something soft and heavy hits me square in the backs of the knees. A tiny old woman with a massive cloth-wrapped bundle has come up with a clever way around carrying it or hiring a porter. She simply gives her cargo a forceful shove at every landing, and the near-spherical mass tumbles down the next set of stairs.
Shoving, weaving, doubling back in search of our carriage, we see some third-class-non-AC passengers filing into their car in a surprisingly orderly line. A moment later the source of the unexpected order is revealed: a portly man with a wooden stick. He uses it to menace those who might straggle out of place. The stick isn't for show, either. More than once, we see an inattentive or overeager passenger get a vigorous thwack. Steering well clear of The Enforcer, we finally find our (comfy, air-conditioned) carriage and collapse, damp and laughing, into our berths. India reminds us, constantly, of how very fortunate we are.
Later on the train, looking out the window, Walter says something I don't catch, then something I do: "They're the only constant so far. They're everywhere, and they're beautiful."
At the moment he was talking, it turns out, about the cows. Funny thing; they're not what first came into my mind at all.
Posted by Liz at June 29, 2005 06:49 AM