“What are you thinking of India?”

Many Indian’s ask us “How are you liking India?” The question usually feels prompted by genuine interest, but the manner of asking suggests the questioner really wants to hear India praised. Some put the question differently. “How are you finding India?” “What are you thinking of India?” Now this one, no built-in bias, more room for the mix of our experiences, is easier to begin answering. 

So, after fourteen weeks in the country, what do I think of when I think about India?  

The throngs of people. On the streets, at bus and rail stations, in temples. The invariably long, haphazard, meandering queues. It is as if pretty well everything and every place is undersized, shrunken, relative to the number of people who must move about.

The constant noise. Honking, beeping vehicles. Roaring, sputtering, put-put-putting engines. Loud, often shrill voices. The clamour of temples bells and music. Full-volume videos running through unfathomable concoctions of bloody fists, fairylands and bombast. So few quiet places to be. 

The memorable individuals we have met along our way, people who respond genuinely out of their own character, experiences, memories to each of us as other individuals, not as “tourists,” not as abstractions. The guesthouse hosts (father, mother, daughter) who discussed from their three different perspectives the effort of “finding a good husband” for daughter. Gopi, the  kindly, gentleman “clerk” on the Kerala train who had read Dalrymple’s chapter on theyyem and, with dogged struggling English, so wanted me to read it. The gentleman guide at the Dr Ramnath A Poddar Haveli who, late one day, so generously, so intelligently showed us the painted walls of the grand old house, patiently sketched out the key Hindu gods, then invited us to return the next morning (which we did) because “The house has so many more stories.” The puppeteer who entertained me with the dancing girl and trickster. Narendra Mehta, the painter of miniatures. Zaveri the Jain pilgrim. Our host Gilbert (and his family) at the Alliance Guesthouse, with his open welcome and great walking advice up into the nearby hills and villages. The nameless ones who helped us find a bus station or post office or eating place, to get off a train at the right stop, to better understand where we were, prepared and served us delicious meals.

Traffic frenzy – which we feel whenever we walk, in any vehicle we ride (including those several near-death rides), in the town streets thick with exhaust and churning dust, in engine noise, in the surrounding whirl of movement.

The impossibility of experiencing the pleasures of strolling, at least in urban India. Sidewalks have been rare and are often clogged with stalls, scatterings of repair set-ups, vehicles and garbage. Walking must be done on the street, dodging vehicles from every direction, searching one’s way through more parked vehicles, watching for cow shit and scattered garbage, squeezing through throngs of others also finding their way, walking amidst the stench of urine and rotting waste. So much of one’s attention becomes narrowed to the next step and the beeps at one’s shoulder. Forget conversation. Forget the wider view. Forget any reflective lingering.

Other more critical kinds of turmoil – of ‘new India’. The preposterously concentrated and quick wealth of “new India,” its privatized world of gleaming (conspicuous but blinding) towers and its gated houses, its surrounding sewer-soaked servant shanties, its overwhelming Westernized ethos and culture, its need for ever-expanding ‘security’, its aura of ‘progress’, its promise of ‘success’, its work culture of old coolieism. The many suicides among small land-holding farmers. The continuing, habituated patterns of police/state violence: torture in police stations, the phenomenon of police-orchestrated ‘fake encounters’ (called ‘extrajudicial executions’ under international law).The hopeful-desperate journeys through the Emirates and indenturism. What Ashis Nandy called in 2000 “the growing criminalization of politics in the country” – and today its normalization.

Fondly remembered places and times. Walks in mountain villages above Naggar and in the Sangla-Kinnaur mountain area. Dewali in Delhi with Prem and Santosh and their neighbours. Sitting over cold beer at the Costa Malabari Guesthouse talking about the theyyem rituals; experiencing the intimate processes of applying the dance make-up and costumes.  Moving by boat and train through the green and watery world of the Kerala and Malabar coast, conversations with strangers along the way. The conversational English class with Tibetan refugees in MacLeod Ganj and talking with other refugees there. Rocking back and forth slow-motion atop those camels, then night fall and moonlight and sunrise with chair on the Rajasthan dunes. The many colourful, frenzied, magical, incomprehensible and exhausting temple worlds we witnessed.

What appears to me Indians’ very precise – remarkable to me – sense of space. Vehicle collisions seem so often imminent and yet surprisingly infrequent, especially given the numbers on any road. Passing drivers are able to negotiate the narrowest laneway and cliffside roads with millimetres to spare. Crowded passing pedestrians behave similarly, so often just slipping by each other at the last second. Bumps and knocks feel rare, except in some queues, and are seen as true accidents: met by surprise and politeness. The message? This is unusual. Considering the times my backpack has jostled and bumped others, or made them dodge in crowded spaces, I’ve come to believe that these unnatural protuberances of the body disturb a finely-tuned Indian sense of the space a natural body takes.

Such diversity, such extremes: India’s many “Indias.” Its many landscapes, languages, expressions of spirituality and faith, foods, body colourings and characteristics and expressive habits. The extremes of poverty and wealth. The impossible to fathom spectrum that runs from a world of the high tech, high fashion and industrial-corporate (mimicking selected aspects of 200 years of Western “progress”) through to feudal working and living conditions, pre-modern villages and beliefs, vast urban slums and human uprootedness, and a lively ancient spiritualism. Diversity, yes, but also these extremes. Oil, water, fire.

The fascinating incomprehensible worlds of expressed faith – especially at the many and varied temples and shrines, in the prolific world of Hindu and other gods, goddesses, spirits, venerated humans, creatures, flora, places. The fantastical shapes and colours taken by (or used to represent) the gods, their presences not only on temples but on house roof-tops, pillars, porticos, twisting, glowering, embracing, exhibitionists, guardians, energies. This is a land of the live spiritual imagination like no other I know.

Public filth: waste casually dropped or tossed anywhere, rare garbage bins usually hidden under a heap of waste, streets lined with scattered rotting garbage, increasing amounts of plastic waste, street sides rank with sun-baked urine, walking places littered with smeared cow shit, so many public spaces filled with the stench of filth. The filth kept astonishing us, but no less did so many Indian’s contribution to and seeming shrugs in the face of it. Those towns and states where there is an effort to reduce public filth (thus demonstrating that this is possible), set the scale of the issue in sharper relief in the rest of the country.

The handsomeness of so many of the sari-clad women and white-shirted men – all the more extraordinary against the ground of their often dusty, filthy and shabby surroundings. Just down a laneway strewn with days of garbage stand two straight-back, white-bearded men, white dhotis brilliant in the desert sun, one in saffron pagari (turban), the other in red, a hand on one another’s shoulder, eye-to-eye, smiling, coupled in conversation. Those saris: the women’s eye for such pleasing, often gorgeous, combinations of colour, pattern and design. How the sari itself can swirl along the female form, feet to forehead, the sparkle of tinselly threads or miniature mirrors, the fabric rippling in the slightest breeze, flame-like.

Especially tasty foods such as the stuffed bhel puris of north India; raj kahori, a sweet and spicy concoction in a puri or thin pastry shell; cham chams, sweet wrapped in an edible silver coating; crisp samosas straight out of streetside dhaba cookers; those never quite the same dals; prawns and roasted cashews along the Malabar coast; Jasailmer’s laapsi desert, ingredients too numerous to list; Kerala coffee, from a coffee press, especially after weeks of north India ‘instant”; Kashmiri pulao, a rice pilaf with pomegranate seeds, cashews, peppers, pineapple and papaya pieces …; drinking chai, stretched out on our charpoy on the crest of a Rajasthan sand dune, the sun just now rising on the horizon.

The chronic squeezing out of another 10 or 50 or 100 rupees from travelers, something not peculiar to India, but at least as relentless as anywhere we have been.  The aggravation and stress of this squeezing. The small-time cheating, attempted overcharging, the “friendliness” that sooner or later morphs into some “deal.”

Dysfunctional bathrooms. In 16 weeks we might have had two or three bathrooms where everything worked, more or less. Otherwise: sinks that drained onto floors, toilets without handles, showers without heads, heads without showers, cold from “Hot Water” taps, hot water from “Cold” taps, sinks the size of cereal bowls ….

Those behaviours that strike us, as strangers, as curious and particularly Indian. We ask a man a question in public (Is there an ATM nearby? Is this the bus to …?) and immediately three, five, six, eight more men are at your shoulders and in your face, simultaneously offering advice, opinions, interpretations and misinterpretations, advice on the misinterpretations, disputes over misinterpretations, special deals … until you scream something about none of this being helpful, at which point you realize everyone is giving you a concentrated “Wow, is this guy inconsiderate or what” look, and you wonder – stressed, culpable, your question still unanswered – what to do next.

A land “full of surprises.” We were told this in the first days and it has proved to be so very true, day after day. – “Yes, the bus you need leaves from this stall,” but it doesn’t and you almost miss the last of the day.  – “No, there are no seats on the train you want,” says the man at the India Rail wicket, who then gets up and walks away, perhaps for chai? for lunch? for a pee? for a chat? although another man soon arrives, sits in his place and you begin again, with a look of 67-year-old desperation, with your train reservation question (not yet quite accepting the answer you have), in response to which the new fellow scans his computer screen, stares some more, and longer still, men and women poking through your ribs and kidneys into the wicket itself, and then you hear the voice: “Two seats available. 473 rupees. Do you want them?” – A passing woman says the museum is 10 minutes walk, but it turns out to be 60.  – You spend 15 hopeful minutes studying the six page menu of a restaurant that has, it turns out, only four items “today.” – “Yes, we have hot showers” – until you hear the verbal small print the next day: “Between 5 and 6:30 a.m. on some days.” – Or “Yes, the museum is open. Yes, I am certain. I just telephoned.” – but when you reach the gates, a half hour across the city in another life-threatening auto rickshaw ride, it is Gandhi’s birthday and the museum is closed. In India, have a back-up plan.