India photos - first weeks

India photos - first weeks

Click on the link above and you will be taken to a series of photos from our first weeks in India.

You can move through them at your own pace by clicking on the Forward > or Back < symbols.

Or you can watch them as a slideshow by clicking the word Slideshow.

Camels, sand dunes, full moon and you

Photographs from an overnight camel trek we took in the desert south of Jaisalmer ... and some memories.

... The bouncy, wavy forward lope of the camels, their heads and upper necks seeming to search side to side, curious, maybe always locating themselves, but also like queens on parade.

Through herds of sheep and goats, up onto the sand dune ridge for the night. Our guides set up our charpoys (rope cots) along the ridge, prepare a tasty thali with the most minimal of brush fires and utensils, then serve it with such bush-elegance.

Sun set, then full moon arcing ever so lazily across the night sky. Betty watches it all night. A slow cool dawn. Dune crests slowly emerge, golden waves along the blue sky. Fresh chai is brought to us in our charpoys!

A dawn walk along the dunes ... wild peacocks, a female with her brood, antelope, song birds.

In these parts you often see paintings of a man and women riding a camel - Dhola and Maru their names are, famous lovers of Rajasthan. (See the story below.)

The camel, we were told yesterday by a painter of miniatures, an impish wise man with deep smile creases radiating from his eyes and along his cheeks, is associated in this area with love and long life. "It's because of the camel's long face that always seems to smile," he said, as much with his mouth as with his dancing fingers and hands."It's always smiling and singing. And when walking, just like a dancing girl. Camel makes you smile. Isn't it true? You watch.” 

The story of Dhola and Maru
 
The story is told in various versions. Here is one.

The king Pingal decided to have his child-daughter Maru married to Dhola, the son of Nal, the king of Narwar and his good friend. So Dhola and Maru got married at childhood. Before they attained adulthood, however, Nal died, and his son Dhola, forgetting his marriage vows with the child Maru, got married again to a woman called Malwani. 

Now Maru kept longing for Dhola. Her father sent many messages to Dhola, but Dhola’s wife Malwani intercepted the messages and had the messengers arrested or killed.

Finally Maru reached Dhola through a troupe of folk singers. Dhola, on learning about his first wifem, started off for her home. Malwani, meanwhile, sent word to Dhola that she had died and he ought to hurry back. Knowing Malwani’s cunning, Dhola carried on. On his way he met Umar Sumar – leader of a band of robbers and a man who wanted Maru for himself – who told Dhola that Maru had married someone else. Dhola refused to believe him, arrived at Maru’s home Poogal to a tumultuous welcome and Dhola and Maru were united at last. However ….

On the way back to Dhola’s home, Narwar, Maru was stung by a desert snake and died. Overwhelmed with grief, Dhola decide to become the first male sati in Rajput history by ascending the funeral pyre of his wife. He was saved by a yogi and yogini who said that they could bring Maru back to life. They played their musical instruments, and just like that, Maru did come back to life. But this remarkable story doesn’t end here ….

Umar Sumar the robber, still infatuated with Maru, invited the couple to spend an evening with himself and his band of thieves. Fortunately the couple were warned just in time of Sumar’s evil intentions, again by a troupe of folk singers. The couple jumped onto their camel and made off home to live happily ever after.

 

Comparing real and look like real pierced earrings

Some bedrooms we have not slept in

Filth India-style: a rant

An editorial in today’s Times of India decries India’s under-achievement in attracting tourists. The points it makes touch on some of our own experience of India so far.

But first a step back. The editorialist claims to know that many Indians think that tourism is unimportant to the New India – i.e. wealth generating India. Not so, not so at all, readers are told. Tourism as such “is a money-spinner” and Indian tourism is already one of the country’ largest spinners of all: India’s third largest foreign exchange earner, amounting to more than two percent of the country’s GDP. 

Nevertheless, the editorialist complains, India is a tourism laggard compared to other countries in Asia. Why? The writer gives several reasons:

The hassle of getting an India tourist visa [not so bad in Ottawa, although I haven’t tried from Vanderhoof?] and the nuisance of the single entry provision.

“Appalling” roads, buses, taxis, trains and airports (Let’s be a little more specific and inclusive here: reckless drivers, rupee-grubbing transport companies of every stripe, filthy departure/arrival stations of every kind, derelict public buses and trains).

Unusable signage, poor city maps, unfriendly information booths, few places to exchange money (all minor stuff I’d say);

The habitual “corruption and cheating … constantly and annoyingly, from the taxi on arrival to the taxi on departure” (Check! Check! Check!);

And, lastly, as the editorial writer puts it – and to get around to our real topic – “for a people obsessed with personal and household cleanliness we have the filthiest public spaces.”

Cleanliness and filth. After seven intense in northern India, I am still taken aback, as apparently is the Indian editorialist, by the stunning contrast between people’s clean, often fastidiously clean, personal appearance and immediate personal surroundings (especially the women, where this is amplified by wonderful attention to often stunning combinations of colours and patterns and sparkle in dress) and what are for us filthy public habits and public surroundings.

Spitting for example: usually but far from always done by men, always preceded by loud and powerful horkings and snortings up of phlegm, and done repeatedly anytime and anywhere … at your passing legs and feet, in the midst of conversations, or out of car, bus, tuk-tuk and train windows into whatever and whoever is downwind. 

Sure vast expanses of India are dusty – the air thick with real earth dust laced with the toxic dust of disintegrating human garbage, animal shit, construction sites and the stirrings of many millions of vehicles. The same might be said of many sad places on earth where people spend their days coughing and blowing and face a later life gasping for oxygen. But I have never been in a land so awash with Anywhere, Anytime, Anyhow spitters.

Then there is the matter of cow shit, unnamed by our delicate editorialist but surely an essential element of his “filthiest public places.” Consider again the tastefully combined colours and patterns of the always flowing, naturally refined sari, then consider that wavy, sparkling band of gold trim along the ankle drooping, ever so slightly, into a brown-green puddly slippery stinking mound of cow shit, those stinking-in-the 30-degree-afternoon-sun variety mounds of cow shit that sit in wait on every street, narrow laneway and market plaza in pretty well every Indian city.

Consider the day’s smearing of these shitty mounds (motorbike and car tires, the hurried errant bare foot, many shiny shoe or flip-flop soles) across paving stones, pavement, at the foot of staircases, in front of open-fronted shops, across railway station platforms. 

Consider each unlit laneway at night and the odds of foot (the woman’s glittering with jewelled toe rings) and shit colliding in the dark.

Consider the dry days between monsoons, the dust of cow shit blowing through windows and rooms, into noses and eyes and lungs. Or consider the wet monsoon days, narrow public passageways running greasy with shit. 

Not all India town and city dwellers are so happy with the freely street-wandering and street-shitting holy cows. We have met a few dissenters, although at least as many rationalizers. Some cities are sending the cows to the farm, others like Udaipur have launched Rescue Centres to give untended cows appropriate food rather than the garbage – including plastics, styrofoam and other toxic materials – that Hindus watch their holy cows eat day after day.

We have been told that these drifts of plastics and other toxic forms of containers and packaging, which so many Indians so nonchalantly drop or toss behind them and which their holy cows now forage in, hoofs stepping across not earth but urban stone and pavement… that this toxic pasture is something only 15 or so years old, perhaps (unlike its glassy malls and bargain-price this and that latest consumable) too new even for New India.

But – to continue taking a more physical closer look at what the editorialist’s “filthiest public places” means – consider the many men pissing in public places (again, as with the spitting, this is predominantly a male activity) … against any wall pretty well anywhere, along city street edges, at shop corners, at every public nook and cranny.

(A statistic: in Rajasthan state where I happen to be writing this, today’s newspaper reports that only 13 percent of the state’s people have access to anything designated as a “toilet.” The government promises to “launch a program of awareness on a community approach to total sanitation.” Yes, pissing and shitting into pits of “awareness” should do the trick.)

Consider the intensifying, sweetly rank stench of urine sun-baked into bricks and pavement, oozing into open sewers, becoming sludgy rivulets of newspaper, water bottles, cloth, plastic chai cups, cow and children’s shit, tuk-tul oil, market-garden waste. This is the world we and so many Indians walk through day after day.

As with holy cows foraging in their poisoned pastures, not everyone likes walking to day-care or work or for morning chai through block after block of reeking urinals. For example some neighbourly folks in one of the most congested parts of Delhi – folks with an ingenuity the knights of New India don’t hear about in B.Comm school – have cemented small ceramic plaques/squares showing Vishnu and Rama and other images of the gods into the local men‘s favourite pee walls along back alleyways, daring the men to piss into the faces of the gods. They say it’s working, and when we walked through these same laneways we agreed. 

Another source of “filthiest public places”? The nonchalant, habituated free-for-all of garbage tossing, today combined with the steep increase in unnecessary forms of packaging, the increasing public use of plastics and other non-biodegradable materials, and the sharply rising number of new consumers.

Consumer plastics alone are burying India in waste – like the increase dependence on (and fashion of) drinking bottled water, or the billions of small plastic chai cups that have recently replaced biodegradable clay cups. You can’t blink before you see someone dropping their plastic chai cup where they stand. (Let’s hope the Turks hang on to their re-used glass tea cups.) Another blink and you’ll see someone tossing garbage out of their shop fronts, onto bus and train floors, handfuls and bagfuls out train windows.  Even if more Indians wanted to use garbage bins, most are either derelict, the bottoms rusted out, or they are buried in heaps of waste.

Road margins and corners are drifts and mounds of waste, street sides and shop fronts are covered in scatterings of paper, plastics, food stuffs, cow shit. The back streets of the poor and low caste trades, out of sight to anyone with influence, contain walled yards filled a storey or two high with plastic bottles. River eddies swirl with plastics, garbage forms a thick fetid scab over lake corners and shorelines.

Sweepers and plastic and paper collectors choke their way between windfall and being overwhelmed: despite their dogged bending and sorting, so many streets are still littered with garbage dumped moments and weeks ago.

Meanwhile, all this waste is slowly, ever so slowly, being pulverized into finer, more mobile pieces and finally into toxic dust which, stirred by ever greater traffic and seasonal winds, blows down the streets, around every corner, through windows and doors, into noses and mouths and back out in spit.

It is unlikely that the wealthy and powerful experience much of this mess first-hand – being driven in comfortable cocoons from front door to glass tower, living as they do in yards and streets swept daily by “the boy” or “the girl” (20 or 70 years old, it doesn’t matter) who live … well, somewhere else. Let the people work and buy and toss, and let me enjoy my profits from this New India, thank-you. 

From a cursory reading of the newspapers, India’s pundits seem especially anxious about the country’s global ranking on every conceivable scale. Is there one for “filthiest public places”? I have no idea. If there was, would India be right up there at the top – like its cricket team or its penchant for corruption? The odds seem very good.

The Trimutri, the Bengalis and us

Tonight - 11 p.m. at the Trimutri Hotel - I believe we are enjoying absolute silence … for the first time in three nights.

The Trimutri itself, in the holiday town of Shimla, hardly exists: little more than a single glassed-in hallway off of which seven rooms are glued to a cliff side.

“Trimutri” – the Hindu triad: Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the creator or destroyer. After 48-hours of the place, we now know which of the cosmic forces can really call this place home.

The past two nights all rooms but ours have been occupied by extended families or friends of Bengali holiday-makers from ‘Calcutta’ (that’s their usage, not the government decreed ‘Kolkata’) who have been enjoying late nights and early, very early, departures.

“Enjoyed” I say, because they really did enjoy one another’s company, and genuinely seemed to assume that everyone else at the Trimuti – meaning Betty and myself –  could only do likewise.

Of course it is impossible for us to describe exactly what they “enjoyed,” only what we, unjoyfully, heard and smelled, which was something like this ….

Evenings filled with six hallway doors randomly and sharply banging closed. People calling one another (loudly, sharply) from end to end of the hallway … then calling again and again with louder and more demanding voices because you don’t always get heard across seven rooms, six blaring TVs and a few dozen other conversations.

Someone clicks through TV channels at high volume, door open; then a second TV featuring some Bollywood number joins the first; then a third featuring a high speed car-gun chase joins in. With a few dozen channels, six remotes and some 40 or so people trying their hand, the possibilities are as varied and as nauseating as a trayful of Indian sweets.

Mid-evening. Cooking pots and dishes are set up on stools in the hallway … and heh, this is a little surprising, the set up is precisely outside our room window! Gas burners are lit, people start milling around,  a regular street-side dhaba … “Where’s the rice!!?” “I need some more salt!!!? Where’s the salt!!!? Bapu!!! Bapu!!! Bring the salt!!!!!”

Chai is served, the gathering builds, lots of friendly-sounding and exceedingly loud chatter. Why so loud? The woman’s three centimetres from your mouth? A man answers his eighty-seventh cell call  … can he really be talking to someone 100 metres beneath Antarctic ice?

Late evening. Sleep calls us. But a room or two along (their room door wide open – I know, I asked them to please shut it) several people are having an argument with what appears to be a deaf grandpa. The veggies, dhal and rice are steaming hot, the aroma thick as taste seeping through our wall and across our bed. There are random raps on our door (the door of a darkened room), followed by calls for those – Gargi! Chitta! Vijay! – apparently missing at the party.

By now all six room doors are open, the food bazaar is in full swing, the Mrs yells something from the actual kitchen at the end of the hall (Its door features a large sign DO NOT USE THIS KITCHEN) across the multi-channel six-room cacophony … and of course she must yell it again, then again, then yells something like “What?” then yells once or twice more.

A few hours later, one by one the TV voices fade, the last door slams (oops, not quite), then quiet … even the quiet of death can’t be denied …

… until perhaps four a.m. when the whole gang (two mornings, two different families/friends, there’s a pattern emerging here) wakes one another with calls and door rapping (sure, bang on our door as well) up and down the hallway. Then the chai burner is again brought out … certainly, go ahead, set it right under our window. (Do darkened hotel room windows have some special magnetism, offer up good karma, for Bengalis?) Four-thirty. The crowd builds. VIJAY! WHERE’S!THE!CURD! Must be getting hard to be heard out there. And me without the Bengali word for “Hush.”

Now impatient and increasingly louder calls to rise and shine. Doors slam bang, the Trimutri shudders. There’s a gathering of suitcases and duffle bags (yes, right beside the chai cups, just under our window, the good karma site), each arrival necessitating another shout between rooms, Seven to Two, Four to One and back to Six and on to Three.  

Finally the last chai is downed, the last plastic cup tossed out a Trimutri hallway window and down the hillside into someone’s rooftop patio or bedroom or the mounting heaps of garbage between houses. Then a last tramping a feet up the stairs.

Oops! a forgotten duffle. Where is it? ROOM SIX! GARGI! GARGI! ROOM … NO! ROOM TWO! TWO! TWO!!! Running, puffing, more running. Then … silence, stillness. Eerie. Unnatural. We hold our breath. Wait. There must be more. But nothing … except silence, blissful silence.

An after-thought …. How not to like someone’s enjoyment? How to oppose infuriating behaviour where nothing infuriating is intended – and hardly conceivable? I’m wondering, guessing here because of the considerable politeness (preceded by surprised, quizzical looks – and from some, the look of “What IS the problem with this man??!!”) each time I asked for a door to be closed or a TV turned down … and of the few moments it took for the ruckus to begin again. Such different understandings of shared and private space, of public space, of “hotels” and “hotel” spaces, and the uses of voice, the understandings of noise and quiet and much else woven into the history of “the public” and “the private.” We have had a glimpse of who we have become … and who we are not.

Busing with that chubby elephant Ganesh

Our driver on today’s Jaipur-Nawalgarh public bus run has just been short-listed in the combined KTA (Kill Them All) driver and On-Its-Final-Kilometre-Very-Decrepit-Bus category – a category which, despite its specialized-sounding name, has many entrants from around the world, including our driver’s stiffest competition, an Indonesian from Sumatra. Actually our driver out-scored the Indonesian entry by .000847 points in an earlier round, a fact which, had we know, would have stopped us from ever getting on this bus in the first place.

This also explains why a few Indonesian bus adventures came to mind immediately we hit the streets of Jaipur. Like how the driver sat slightly sideways in his seat, reaching back awkwardly for the steering wheel (as if either seat or steering wheel was an after-thought) while looking over his shoulder to catch the conversation among several passengers. Or how he enjoyed his horn, a rising four-note number set on LOUD REPEAT for the four hour run. Or the classic Indonesian trolling for passengers, in this case until we are some 60 to 70, mostly standing, instead of a comfortably seated 30, and where any promised timetable (vaporous and biodegradable to be sure) has been chucked out the window along with an assortment of water bottles and snack wrappers.

Today, as we careen through a thread’s width between two on-coming trucks and force one car and three motorcyclists into the sandy margin, I notice a large clock over the driver’s seat. Curiously the main hands have stopped at 7:23. Then I start wondering, obsessing actually … Is that a.m. or p.m.? Morning or evening? The start of the day or the end? Are we at the beginning of something or the end?

Then I notice the third hand, ticking forward 15 seconds, then back 15, forward again, then back, each time between the 7 and 23. So, I think, they too are undecided about the time. Or have they somehow become trapped between an unknown hour and indeterminate minute? And will this have any bearing on that truck piled high with bricks that is fast approaching our windshield?

Back and forth, back and forth that third hand paces … when I see a swaying bus filling our windshield. We swerve sharply, fall into one another, boxes and bags skating along the aisle, the bus leaning into the steely corner of another approaching lorry. Out the side window I think I see a cart driver and mule flash past below. We hear a crunching thud behind us. Betty yells “You idiot! Are you trying to kill us!?!” towards the driver. He glances up into his rear view mirror and smiles. Several passengers look towards Betty and nod in agreement, but sit in silence. The driver’s buddies, piled around the engine housing and windshield, exchange laughs over the driver’s latest death swerve. They’re  excited, full of admiration. This guy’s the real thing! 

The best I could tell, we have left cart, driver and mule overturned in the ditch. I turn back to the clock and its pacing hands. That’s when I spot, sitting in a smoky glass alcove above the windscreen, a Ganesh figure wearing a garland of plastic orange roses. Ganesh, that chubby smiling little elephant – so often found above gateways, shop and house doorways, in front of or above Indian bus drivers – god of learning, the bringer of good fortune, success, prosperity, great clearer of obstacles..

Are you a passenger here, Ganesh, or another of the driver’s admiring buddies? And just what kinds of “obstacles” are you clearing today, right here? This is what I want to ask that fat little cross-legged guy – and get some swift answers too, in case there’s still time to jump bus.

He might be a god of learning, but here and now, on this deathcrate-on-six-wheels, I’d like to know whose learning? The speedswerveovertakeatanyprice joyride kind? Or our more boring “I’d like to see another day” kind? And success, good fortune for whom? Ours, that we get to sleep in Nawalgarh tonight? Or the driver’s, in his damn-all-comers race past everything in sight and on to the top of the KTA pack?

And that clock. Is it morning, Mr Ganesh, or is it night? And whose?

What do you say, you chubby, always smiling, cross-legged, far too contented-looking elephant?