How to talk about our first hours in India?

It feels impossible to describe – to be true to – our first hours’ experience of India today, driving south from the Nepal-India border across heavily populated Uttar Pradesh to the city of Varanasi. 

Far easier, it is, to write about the bright white tips of the Annapurna Range to the north, those shy mountains, so far veiled in clouds, giving us a first and final glimpse of their beauty. 

Or to say that we drove across vast fertile alluvial plains that run along the Ganges and its tributaries, their rice paddies about to be harvested, lush market and household vegetable gardens edging the road. 

Or to describe the frenzy of jostling buses, transports, motorbikes, cyclists, three-wheeled moto taxis, pairs of oxen pulling farm wagons and carts, so many people walking on the roadside, small gatherings of people conversing at the road edge, cows, bulls and goats ambling along an imaginary centerline. 

All this, or something remotely approximate, is possible to put into words. 

But there were other dimensions, other qualities in what we have experienced that felt astonishing, so new and so immediate. A kind of physical, especially visual, rawness. Life raw, exposed, public, teeming and seemingly frantic.  (“Especially visual” because so far we have been passing observers, cocooned for much of the day in our van.)  

Along our way … 

A lean white-haired man wearing a worn, dust-coloured lunghi pulled up around his waist, squats at the pavement’s edge, genitals hanging black beneath his hips, shitting and pissing a breath away from the torrent of speeding lorries, cars and motorbikes. 

Another man tends a fat-filled vat of sizzling pakoras and samosas in a tied together shelter of poles at the edge of a shallow ditch filled with muddy wet garbage around which whiskered men sit chatting, their voices sucked out of hearing by a cacophony of honking drivers of every kind of two, three, four and eight wheeled vehicles slithering, like a school of mackerel, around a bull lifting its tail, the impatient drivers pushing ever- so- slowly on into an ever-thickening mass as bull piss pools between their tires. 

Each town’s streets, really a churning rapids of street-walkway-parking lot-market, seem inhabited by a restless frenzied energy that tosses people back and forth in frantic, noisy swirls and eddies as the cows, as if blind and deaf, continue their sleepy meandering .... 

There are quieter courtyards and alleyways here and there beyond this din, but here anywhere close to the street the inside is outside, or there is no inside at all. 

The goods of shallow shops and workshops – rolls of electrical wire, great hanging stems of bananas, lines of shirts, bras and caps – spill onto the streets and into …carts of roasted peanuts; a patch of ground strewn with bicycle parts, men straightening a wheel frame; pyramids of apples and aubergines; six men squatting over a parchese game; a woman in paddy green sari with gold trim haggling over garlics; groups of passing uniformed school children pointing towards our van, chattering, giggling, looking preposterously clean and bright, like the women in saris, against the mucky streets and rain-stained, rust-corroded, worn brown-greyness of so many of the shop fronts.

Especially surprising – against this world of what so often seems like the utterly threadbare and frenzied – is the attention to personal cleanliness and beauty, and to moments of created order. 

Like those gloriously harmonious designs and combination of colour I see on women’s saris, their figures like bright red, orange, green, gold, blue flames rising from the dust and rust. 

Or the mounds of oranges, apples, cucumbers and aubergines, rows and pyramids and half-moons of purple, orange, pink, red, green, so carefully arranged each morning by marketers.  

Or the dignified bearing of so many people we pass or talk briefly with, the men’s neatly timed beards, the women’s graceful subtle hand gestures, the erect long backs and delicate footsteps around the muck and water-filled potholes. 

Astonishing – these signs of grace and beauty.

Pushing our way to Varanasi

Car troubles on the long day’s drive from Lumbini (Nepal) to Varanasi (India). A dying battery or a poor battery connection, then a blown air conditioning fuse. Now we have stopped for a bathroom break and our van won’t start. We get out and push, there’s ignition. Someone remarks on our driver lousy jump-starting techniques. 

Not far alone, we slow to dip through one of the countless potholes on our way. Again the van stalls. Again we jump out to push. Another few kilometres, another pothole, another stall, another push. This time, as the van jerks ahead, our driver jams on the brakes, sending Keith (a travel mate) slamming forehead first into the open door he has been pushing. 

Two towns along, a welt now as big as an Indian puri on Keith’s forehead, we scan the street sides for another battery and cables, and a cold bottle of pop for Keith’s wound.

An hour or so later. We – thirteen people in our tour group – hang out along a fence railing near our van, now parked along a road-cum-market-cum-vehicle part and vegetable stalls. Batteries and cables come and go, as do a long queue of expert but failing solutions to our car problems. A crowd of curious, mostly male, on-lookers has grown steadily, first along the opposite side of the road, then circling around us, inching as close as possible to the young fair-skinned women in our group, the men and boys staring, fascinated, curious. We – pale skinned, Wayne’s lime green bandana and snug in his  yellow t-shirt, ambiguous Alex’s tight dark pink pants and closely-cropped hair, several other fair-haired women in tight sleeveless tops – have become the exotic strangers; they, the townsfolk, the curious watchers. 

I find freshly fried potato samosas and pass them around. A big hit, so Bo (another traveller in our group) and I go off in search of more. Heh, look at the strangers trying our food. Like we are Hollywood movie or satellite sitcom phantoms made flesh.

The Olympian bus ticket collector

Ahead of us, through our van windshield, a youth runs down the road after a moving bus on which, it turns out, he works as a ticket collector. 

Moments before he had jumped off the bus to pay a local road toll. Now he chases and outruns the bus, grabs the lower rung of a rear ladder that reaches to the bus roof, clambers up the ladder, nimbly runs forward along the bouncing, swaying rooftop over and around mounds of bags and bundles, lowers himself down the front side of the bus, perches on a window edge, then swings through the window, ready again to check people’s tickets.

Leeches and rock and roll elephants

Chitwan National Park, southwest of Kathmandu on the road to India. The last days of the monsoons, The skies pour – Here, take this cloudburst, and how about this one! they seem to say with each mucky step we take through the forest. Last days of the monsoon season? Not so fast. Is our karma really that bad? 

Between downpours, we are poled downstream in a dugout canoe. Kingfishers, brilliant blue and orange, perch in branches overhead watching for prey. Flashes of the yellow-backed sunbird. A heavy-headed Great Pied Hornbill just ahead. 

We tramp exhausted along muddy leech-infested trails, one moment slopping in mucky jeep tracks, the next whacking through thick bush and several metre high elephant grass so dense that the only visible wildlife are the out-stretching, twisting leeches latching onto, then sucking blood from our toes, hands, legs, crotches. Oowww! Get the hell off you blood sucker! Where the hell is it? I can feel it but can’t find it. The voices of people tramping through leech-infested muck. A guide shows us how to use the rough surface of a leaf to extricate the little blood-suckers. At a viewing platform, the men and women separate on two levels for a leech-search up and down and inside our pants. Bloodsucker! Chitwan gives new energy, new power to the word.

Another day. Our steady-footed elephants rock and roll us between tree branches high above the elephant grass. The pleasure, way up here, of finally seeing animals other than leeches: spotted and barking deer, a mongoose, red plumed and green tailed junglefowl, a pair of wild peacocks roosting high in a dead tree, another grazing through the grass. Along the river, a one-horned rhino bathes in the muck, and gharial crocodiles lay their slender elongated snouts along the sand, a bulbous protuberance rising from the end of each snout like a pot - ghara refers to local pots.

Between times we rest in our garden hotel and stroll through the quiet village nearby. None of the city's snapping putputput of auto-rickshaws – or their exhaust.

Sensate, talking rags

We had spent the day visiting several much venerated and visually impressive Buddhist and Hindu sites in and around Kathmandu. But the experience that keeps returning to my thoughts again and again several days later is this …. 

We had arrived in Pashupatinath, Nepal’s most important Hindu site – devoted to Pashupati, Lord of All Animals, Protector of Animals, associated with Shiva – its temples and cremation ghats sited along the holy Bagmati River, now green-black with pollution and mountain run-off. We pass Shiva figures red with the tika powder fingerprints of the devout. Someone has placed a sprig of evergreen over Pashupati’s brow. Pilgrims, mourners and tourists are offered garlands of marigolds, incense, conch shells, beads, glass phallic lingams, ancient-looking coins ... gifts for the gods, karmatic amulets and bric-a-brac. 

The sign on a low-rising red brick building, factory-like in outward appearance, names a home for the elderly poor. Opposite, groups of old women, seated and folded in saris, talk together, waiting, we are told, for vacancies in the bricked “home.” 

The old and the poor arrive here towards what they feel is the end of their lives. Family members bring their dead to be cremated. And now tourists by the bus load are brought to view the activities of this holy place and the passing of life through death to life. The sacred here is also a spectacle. I find myself embarrassed and fascinated.

Across the ‘holy’ fetid yellowgreengrey river, smudgy funeral pyres, tended by men in white, smoulder against an ashy blackened world of brick and metal scaffolding. On this side, at the edge of death, holy men counsel grieving parents, partners and children. Fortune tellers sift the detritus of pieces of string, flowers, remnants of clothes, rice kernels and other food stuffs. Fake photo-me sadhus, in their faded orange robes and ash-treated dreadlocks and faces, look the image of wisdom for the tourist photographers and their rupees. Earlier a grey bearded holy man (real or fake, it is impossible to know) berates a woman who has taken his photo but not given rupees to his out-reached hand. An elderly stooped woman, clothed in worn, faded rags that might once have once been red or maroon, reaches out her long weathered palm. 

Then I notice it ... a metre or so from my feet … a small mound of twists and flaps of grey-brown rags, filthy, left here by someone for later use, or simply dropped and forgotten. Then I think I see the slightest movement, then hear the faintest moan, indecipherable but vaguely verbal, an appeal. Then – all this in one long quick moment – one fold in the rags seems to stretch and reach towards my feet. Another moaning appeal – sounds so distantly suggesting words, making me unsure, anxious.  But yes, it is a human, voiced call, indecipherable but I get its meaning – an appeal for money, for help, for recognition. 

The voice makes me look, the rag mound makes me look away. Disturbing, uncanny, this speaking rag heap ... not possible to associate with what I have thought of until now as human being. 

Is it/he/she an amputee, a dwarf, so emaciated, a limbed human now twisted back around itself like those rags? I resist accepting that that so faintly intelligent moan, that plea, can be human, that a human can be reduced so totally, like refuse that might be swept up and thrown into a refuse can this very night. But there she, there he is, undeniable. I feel queasy, look there and look away again, stop, hear that voice, close my eyes, still see that rag heap, walk again but not towards the voice, further on, away, still hearing that appeal. And still hear it now, days later. 

And I sometimes wonder … what was it like, inside that sensate rag heap, to see that well-dressed passerby, another of many, to call out, to see how he slowed down, hesitated, stopped, stared, curiously voiceless, hesitant, then walk on?