Road-stained: further reflections on traveling in India

Waiting for the plane from Chennai to Colombo, Sri Lanka, at the end of our 14 week journey in India. My thoughts full of memories. Conversations, voices, faces.

A father obsessed by his plans to see his daughter married “well,” the daughter wavering between resignation and disinterest. A brother’s murder in 2002 politically-incited attacks in Gujurat of Hindus against Muslim. A young woman’s story of fleeing Chinese-occupied Tibet.

The colours and sounds and touch of place. A sacred tree in a village high over Naggar town. That boisterous meeting of the gods in Kullu. Two women walking along a glacial river’s edge, backs bent under loads of green winter silage larger than their own bodies. A child playfully decorating and undecorating a Ganesh sculpture twice his size.

That new India bus station we landed in – Shimla, I believe: industrial, cavernous, barren, dark, seatless, surely the work of some “notable personality” (the media’s jargon) adept at turning mountains of sand and cement into Porsches and a “prestigious farmhouse property” in Chattapur.

A stone Jain temple floor in Jaisalmer, worn buttery smooth, so pleasingly cool on the bare feet, curvy heavy-hipped nymphs carved in warm golden sandstone dancing in the votive lights.

The relief of quiet walks in mountain forests, in the desert, in bird-filled wetlands.

                                                                                       

Quiet. Relief. Then something like a tsunami wave of another “India” rolls over in, as it has before, like an obsession. That incessantly noisy India, so overwhelmingly congested. The constant dodging of buses, trucks, tuk-tuks, bicycles, cows, cars. Our throats burning with exhaust and dust. Those walks through waste and filth, past warm walls reeking with men’s urine …. 

Worse of all, in retrospect, is how this assault of the surround, a sensory assault, biting at our nerves, had the effect of reducing the circle of our attention onto the next physical step, the body jerking away from yet another threatening honk over one’s shoulder. The sensorium living in a state of emergency.

Still – there were other times on some days when I felt the attractiveness of that same surround: the grand unfamiliar hubbub; the crazed mingling of slow-motion cattle amidst the frenetic jostling of vehicles, pedestrians and shop-keepers; the grandiosities of shop names and their curious self-descriptions in English; the fantastical world of temple iconography and worshippers; people so naturally refined, seeming to move as if oblivious to the surrounding mayhem and filth.

But even these pleasures so often succumbed to weariness, irritability, a yearning for peace and quiet. Only in the villages and country paths and places of quiet like the Gandhi ashram in Ahmedabad could I begin to look, hear, smell more in my own way, have a thought and follow it, arrive at a small shrine at the base of a great tree, then stop, linger, wonder.

My second India traveling companion, V.S. Naipaul’s “India: a Million Mutinies Now,”  describes the stress of getting around, in this case Bangalore in the late 1980s. “We had to walk carefully, picking our way over broken or unmade footpaths. Level or fully made footpaths are not a general Indian need, and the Indian city road is often like a weaving, bumpy, much mended asphalt path between drifts of dust and dirt and the things that get dumped on Indian city roads and then stay there, things like sand, gravel, wet rubbish, dry rubbish; nothing ever looking finished, no kerbstone, no wall, everything in a half-and-half way, half-way to being or ceasing to be. / Deviah would have liked to talk while we walked, but it was hard. We were being kippered all the time by the gritty smoke from cars and scooters …. By the time we reached the minister’s house we had become part of the Bangalore road scene, with dust and fumy grit on the skin and clothes and shoes and hair and glasses … we had become road-stained.”

Is this feeling “road-stained” the experience of the majority of Indians? I often wondered about this, but still have no idea. Many seem to move with a noticeable sense of determined purpose, here to there, not much lingering. And many move with an adeptness that can only astonish the stranger. When asked, some seemed to dismiss or deny the chaos, but questionably because of their glancing references to national pride. Others – those frozen faces, those rare frowns, those hints of a forced-seeming smile on bus passengers as we careen terrifyingly down crowded, narrow highways or alongside cliff edges: what is one to make of those faces? Resignation? Bravado? Karmatic foresight?

And I still wonder how alive, sensing Indians somehow slip through the ear-splitting, seemingly impenetrable densities of public space that so quickly made me so tense. There they are, chatting on cellphones, yelling across the throngs, making purchases and deals, catching up with a passing acquaintance, hoot hooting without end, inching their ways through the relentless pandemonium, apparently not unnerved, not frantic.

Curious and always astonishing to me how they do somehow appear to slip through the frenzy, like they slip ever so closely past one another in crowds and, as drivers, slip a hair breath’s past oncoming vehicles or along the rim of a mountain road.

                                

That capacity to slip through the crowds? Does it have an auditory and olfactory equivalent for Indians? Do they possess an additional capacity to somehow slip through the din, filth and stench? Sometimes I might believe this, but then I have seen Indians cover their faces with scarves, handkerchiefs, rags and saris against the dust and exhaust. I have seen them grimace at the shrieking horns. Surely they must also feel this environmental chaos attacking them, discomforting them. Some Indians living in towns and villages seem to confirm this: “So noisy and crowded in Delhi.” “I’d never live in Ahmedabad; too many people, terrible air.” “Ah old Varanasi! Impossible!”

An Indian acquaintance describes to Naipaul the difficulty of doing the simplest thing in India, the difficulty of arranging the physical details of day-to-day living. There are no rules on the Indian streets, he says. “You feel a bit like being in a jungle, and this can transfer to a large view of things. It can, and does …. A lot of energy goes into these things, those traffic jams, that chaos.”

And what about that apparently widespread northern and urban Indian habit (there are always so many exceptions to a statement like this, possibly millions of exceptions in India!) of talking over the din, so loudly, with such seeming force, assertion, as if one might never be heard otherwise?  Is it an acknowledgement that the usual conversational human voice, the voice one might use in an uncrowded village or town or in the pre-industrialized world, just doesn’t work in most of India?

“This can transfer to a large view of things,” says Naipaul’s correspondent. Caught helpless in sweaty gridlock in some exhaust-filled city, I have also found myself wondering whether the daily experience of this “jungle” is some of the kindling that fuels India’s recurrent episodes of horrific violence, pitting neighbour against neighbour, so quickly moving otherwise ‘ordinary’ people to barbarism?

India leaves me wondering whether the day-to-day life of so many Indians – the effort of basic necessary movement, the effort to gain necessities, of living with filth and frenzy, of living amidst corruption and abuses from bottom to top, of living “road stained” – fund a kind of felt vulnerability and humiliation and resentment, and possibly, too, some desperately driven aspiration to ‘move up’ or ‘move out’. And whether these funds of aggravation and restlessness, borne with such apparent resignation, are like dry kindling, sitting there unremarkable until the next despot appears, sparks flying off his talk of “enemies” and honour and shame … or transmuted into the eager, impatient voices and eyes of the many engineering, software and business students one meets?

(NOTE: On the ‘dry kindling’, see Ward Berenschot’s Riot Politics: India’s Communal Violence and the Everyday Mediation of the State. Also: Pankaj Mishra, “The Gujarat massacre: New India’s blood rite.”)

Are there also qualities in Hinduism that give people a capacity to find some liveable accommodation with the frenzy that is urban India? Maybe. But then I think of the life of so many of the temples we visited where brief moments of quiet reverence collide against the surrounding pandemonium: bells, gongs, shouting, chanting, bouncy cellphone ringtones, loud voices on cellphones, rushing throngs of pilgrims, scurrying merrily between shrines like they are in some fairground.

In contrast to this, our friends Santosh and Prem have created a place of peace around their home shrine. Perhaps many other Indians do as well; many homes and yards we visited include small shrines at which quiet, meditative prayers and rituals can take place.

But many of the domestic or family or home spaces we experienced, spaces often set just off from guesthouse spaces, did not resemble the overall symmetries and spaciousness – respite from the bedlam outside – of the home of our friends Santosh and Prem. Far from it.

Instead, these domestic spaces, to which so many Indians arrive each day, seemed to mimic the crowded chaos they had just left: small rooms packed with furnishings often covered in scatterings of clothes and papers; family photos and mementos the only objects given some settled pride of place; each room a thruway for everyone; a TV on somewhere; the constant cellphone jingles. And all this is not consider the poor 

quarters so many Indians call home.   

Respite from the bedlam, aspirations and longings labouring amidst a maze of obstacles. Does this partly account for the abundance of gurus, priests, shamans, fortune-tellers, astrologers and palm, card, rice and sand grain readers doing a pretty good business across the India?

Indians can answer whether or not the gurus deliver. I came to see them functioning more like the garlands of plastic flowers, flashing  images of gods and goddesses, the stuffed lions and tigers, the crosses and miniature stupas, strings of beads, swaying fringes, bells and smoking incense seen covering bus and lorry dashboards and windscreens – a clutter intended to ward off disaster but in reality increasing its likelihood.

This sacred land

V.S. Naipaul, in his India: a Million Mutinies Now, reminds me that this is the second place I’ve traveled where the land – it’s mountains, rivers, pools, rocks, trees – has for millennia been alive and sacred.  “The land was sacred …. Religious myths touched every part of the land …. Story within story, fable within fable: that was what people saw and felt in their bones. Those were the myths, about gods and the heroes of the epics, that gave antiquity and wonder to the earth people lived on.”

The other similar land I’ve walked, sometimes with aboriginal, first peoples, guides, is Australia. But then, the memory of that returns me to our own First Nations’ experience of the land and its elements, then further afield to a globally-shared “primitive” experience of living inside a meaningful, responsive, providing land – actually where earth, flora, fauna, stars, sun, moon, the elements are all alive, significant, surrounding, embodying, pulsing like a moment of conception or like being afloat inside a great mother. 

Just consider all the flying, floating beings we have seen depicted here in India’s old myth-, legend- and chronicle-based paintings, moving through and between such solid, fantastic skyscapes and landscapes.

During this our brief, glancing encounter with India, we have seen so many signs of a land experienced as so deeply meaningful, life-significant …

… the sacred trees in the villages above Naggar, incense sticks, candles and scraps of red and saffron cloth tucked into their hollows

… a prayer-flag-sprayed rocky outcrop over Dharamsala

…  the Jains’ sacred Mount Shatrunjaya, now covered with a preposterous fairyland concoction of temples, but where the faithful still make offerings of a few rice grains and flowers

… the holy Yamuna, Saraswati, Brahmaputra, Indus, Narmada, Godavari, and Ganges and many other lesser-known rivers, each spiritually alive today, even if now dammed and filthy (the Ganges is among the most polluted major rivers of the world with, I read, fecal coliform levels near Varanasi more than hundred times the official Indian government limits)

… those countless yakshas and yakshis – guardian, protecting beings – associated with lakes and wells and tree roots across India, indeed across so much of southern Asia; yakshas benevolent and fearsome; yakshis voluptuous, wide-hipped, fertile; both members of an extended family of creaturely earth stewards, like the serpent-nagas seen curling up temple pillars along the Himalayas, peering towards the mountains as if daring all comers

… and  Mount Kailash on the India-Tibet border, its profile suggesting the glowing aura around Shiva’s head, a sacred place in the Bon, Buddhist, Hindu and Jain faiths, variously understood as Precious Snow Mountain, Water's Flower, Mountain of Sea Water, Nine Stacked Swastika Mountain, Shiva’s home and a symbol of om, the place where the Jain’s first leader experienced enlightenment, the navel of the universe for Buddhists, a place of eternal bliss, for Bons the abode of the sky goddess Sipaimen.

The garbage bag

In a moto rickshaw on our way out of Ahmedabad to the Adalaj Vav, a famously beautiful step-well which – no one seems to know – will be closed when we arrive. 

Suddenly our driver pulls to the edge of the Nehru Bridge mid-distance over the wide Sabarmati River, reaches to the floor, pulls up a bag of garbage, steps to the bridge edge, tosses it into river, steps back into the rickshaw and drives off. We are speechless. 

Sometimes one or the other of us has questioned people for such acts; we have even berated a few, to the puzzlement, astonishment or quiet cheering of others nearby.

Today, though, we are speechless.

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.