Queue jumping and other rough pursuits in India

Queue jumping and jostling are as common as long queues in India. Perhaps it is true, as we are told time and again, that the former is a result of the latter. But I still wonder: why all this jostling, manoeuvring, scheming to get ahead of others, especially where there is also so much evidence, even in the same queues, of superhuman patience, perhaps resignation, usually an outward blindness toward the man or woman who sneaks in ahead?

It is one of the Himalayas of unknowns that confront the stranger here. And perhaps I have it all wrong.

Apparently not all Indians tolerate queue jumping, however, as was demonstrated to us a few days ago.

We had jumped off a bus into a row of waiting moto-rickshaws (three wheeled taxis), all eight or so drivers asking us, simultaneously, as is the case here, where we want to go. I speak to one of the quieter ones, arrange a price, and we are about to jump in when the driver is verbally set upon by his mates. Apparently he is jumping from the last in queue to the first, and they are not pleased. We stay out of it, the harangue continues, they agree on another driver, the fellow with the cab at the other end of the row, and off we go.

It was the first time in our experience that Indians have openly objected to queue jumping, then took steps to gain their rightful place in a queue. Something similar occurred a few days ago in another rail station. I watched a man step from nowhere to the head of a queue, but then immediately get singled out and heatedly berated by other men. When he refused to move, the others persisted until a uniformed woman appeared, whereupon increasing numbers of men joined the fracas. The woman eventually pulled the queue-jumper aside and seemed to lecture him at length, then sent him packing to the end of the line.

 

A more typical example of all this took place a day earlier at a branch of the India Post Office. We had joined what appeared to be a queue: two men lined up for the wicket, us behind. It wasn’t long before a kind of scattered ‘queue’ began to form behind and around us. Then the man immediately behind me began to push with such force into my back (perhaps he was being pushed in turn) that I leaned back and shuffled my feet, landing accidently on his toes, whereupon I heard a moan, then a voice in Hindi, perhaps saying something like “Sir, you are bloody well standing on my bloody toes.” I lifted my foot ever so slowly, then turned and told him, rather absurdly and presumptuously in English, that he needn’t push me, we’ll all get to the wicket eventually. His slight smile said he got my meaning.

But moments later – I have just reached the wicket – here he is again, elbowing in along the counter towards the wicket from my left. I lean forward, spread-elbowed along the counter, absurdly, like a Packers’ lineman. The guy has already jumped ahead of two women who are now pressing in on my right. Betty is guarding my rear! Further back is a lengthening slapdash Indian queue spreading like the Indus delta across the room.

When our business is done, I turn my back to Mr Sore Toes and wave the two women to the wicket (their rightful place after all), then hear behind me a disgruntled something in Hindi, perhaps appealing to the other men in the by now pressing multitude – “What!!? Did you see that? Those women first? They just arrived! I was next!  I was standing right here! I’m first! ….” – as we walk away.

Perhaps he said nothing like this. Perhaps no one else cared but us. We also see astonishing patience with long queues: railway station queues, their length, the hours people stand passively especially defy description. 

At the same time, however, we experience so many people in India seeming to need to get ahead at all cost and often at risk to themselves and others.

Take drivers of anything on wheels, for example. They seem to share one rule of the road: an utter disregard for driving lanes. Moto rickshaws can move, eight or so abreast in an ever-shifting staggered mass down a two-lane road. Cars, motorcycles, rickshaws, pedal bikes, and push-cart drivers squeeze a centimetre ahead of the next tire or bumper at each stop or moment of gridlock, which is never a “stop” at all but rather a constant, restless manoeuvring, then a burst ahead, all at once, pell-mell, into the traffic sludge ahead. Every vehicle a few months old is often covered in scrapes and dents. Vehicles regularly clip one another, although astonishingly (considering the 1.3 billion) collisions seem rare … although we have heard a cart, driver and mule thrown into the ditch by our passing bus, a motorcyclist knocked flat and a few upturned hulks of buses and lorries along the roadside. But most everyone just keeps driving on, rushing to the next moment of gridlock.

It makes we wonder whether the same approach applies to the New India of commerce, politics, technology and schooling? All those “special tutoring” and exam-honing shops and “campuses.”  The daily reports of bribes demanded by examiners and potential employers, “public servants” with a contract in their pocket, the mix of thuggish and fantastic schemes to get to the top in business and/or politics. In such a world, the self-regulation of that small group of auto rickshaw drivers seems all the more notable, even admirable.

When we ask Indians about this rush to get ahead, to get to the wicket first, we mostly hear one response – given as a complete explanation: “India has so many people. So many.” “Do you know how many people live in India?” “There’s more than a billion Indians….”

At first the response seemed glib, a kind of shared packet of an answer. But the element of truth in it has started to feel more real with each passing day. India, with its 1.3 billion people, especially in its thronging cities and towns (and except for those who can buy space around them), feels like a place, a space, that has become nightmarishly shrunken. It begins, most immediately for us, with the scarcity of space: to drive, to walk, to travel by bus and train. All that mobbing around bus doors, scrambling for a seat. Then there’s the queue-jostling and scheming. But do many Indians feel something of this same scarcity in the quest for work, for liveable incomes, for places up the social-economic ladder in an India that urges everyone forward and upward?  

Perhaps there is also sense in India that, without something extra – an elbow, the clip of a bumper, a bribe, a cheat sheet, sneakiness, thuggery, brazenness – one can never move ahead in the queue and perhaps never reach the wicket at all … never get those grades or that job or that important signed slip of paper, never get that ticket home, never get ahead under New India standards. Or never get far enough ahead or above to satisfy that singular ego in the multitude.

In our experience, queue jumpers are variously surprised or indignant when challenged. We never know how conscious any of this is. Yet others in the queue seem (with such hesitation, or is that reserve?) to cheer us on with the slightest smiles or nods. More often, though, people appear puzzled or uninterested at our resistance. What’s the fuss about? 

It could well be that what we see as queue jumping – abnormal, impolite, aggravating behaviour – is here not recognized by many people as anything unusual. The man, emerging from well back in the queue, who suddenly sticks his 100 rupee note through the wicket grate and demands a bus ticket as the person at the head of the queue is in the middle of arranging their own, seems never to have been challenged for doing this. For him we are the abnormal ones.

The scramble ahead, the scramble upwards. And the dents and scrapes and bruises? Maybe bad karma. Maybe an accident borne within. Maybe I’ll make my revenge next time. Maybe “just India.” So far not enough people are asking.

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.

"20 rupees"

The bus baggage handler opens the boot of the bus, points and vanishes. 

We are to lift our packs inside, into the usual thick coating of fine dust, into the likelihood of spilled oil or some more mysterious liquid, into a hollow into which will be dropped and crammed various crates, boxes, bags of produce and other goods. 

We heave our bags into the dust, turn, and hear “20 rupees” – from the mouth of the reappearing baggage handler, his hand out. 

Okay, okay – that’s a mere 40 cents, but …. Early on, more naïve, we handed over the 20 or rupees for the privilege of having our bags thrown into that filth pit. Today, deaf, dumb and wiser, we turn our backs and climb into the bus.

The parcel ... and the head bob

Off we go this morning to the main Udaipur post office, two Christmas parcels in hand, bundled in cut down cardboard boxes, wrapped many times over in packing tape, addressed both sides – just as we had done earlier for India Post in Delhi.

Nothing unusual in the walk across town: jumping out of the way of tuk-tuks, motorbikes and cars; trying to ignore anyone saying “What country?” or “Do you rest well?” or “Looking is free”; marvelling again at the surrounding frenzy, colours, signage (“Nice Good Like” over a shop front); working our way from one street corner to the next roundabout with the aid of usually well-meaning and infrequently helpful bystanders. Then there it is: the red and white of India Post.

We are pointed to the parcel wicket (#2, which everyone but us knows), join a short queue, complain (as we have on many days) to men (it’s almost always men) attempting to step in front of us (then facing down their looks of hurt or incomprehension or even, sometimes, anger), and just about reach the counter – when the power goes off.

Semi-darkness. “No service,” the smiling young intelligent-looking man says through the wicket bars, pointing to the weigh scales and computer.

“We understand, but is this where we can mail parcels?” “Parcels need wraps,” we are told. “It’s wrapped,” we push it forward in the dimness, just in case. “Needs white wrapping,” another older man pipes in testily. “White wrapping?” His pointing finger aims at a pile of something in the gloom. “Must be wrapped in white,” says his officious voice. “But we have sent parcels before with India Post just like this one is wrapped.” “Post office policy.” A quizzical look from one clerk, a dismissive frown from Mr Officious.  “Official policy everywhere,” says the latter, certain he is voicing a self-evident truth.

“But ….” Betty stops me and asks where we can find the white wrapping. Three or four men who have been watching and listening intently over our shoulders all point out the PO door. The clerk inside the wicket agrees, pointing outside, gesturing left. Someone else gestures across the street. We hear the word “courier” from several directions. All helpful in its so very Indian way.

Out we go, parcels in hand, into the bright midday sun, first left, then we see the “courier” sign across the street – FAST FIRST COURIER – and now remember passing it 20 minutes ago.

Of course they  - “they”  appears to be a family operation: pop is hanging out, son is running the show, mom … but more about mom in a moment – know immediately what we want, even before we’re halfway across the street.

First we must complete three identical address/declaration forms for each parcel. The parcels themselves are taken behind a counter piled with scraps of worn, once-white cotton near which sits a sewing machine, scissors and a scattering of tailoring tools.

Now mom goes into action, measuring the parcel, rummaging through the cotton scraps, finding what she wants, cutting and trimming, then sewing the pieces into what turns out to be an exactly fitted parcel bag which she hands to son, with a “pretty fast, yes?” smile our way. Then she begins the cycle again for the second bag. How adept she is at this parcel packing business! Really showing us up, and all so congenially too.

Meanwhile son hand stitches closed the end of the first bag with cotton string, drips globs of red wax along the stitching, stamps a seal on the wax (no packing tape needed at FAST FIRST) , writes TO and FROM with a faded blue marker on the once-white cotton and hands the first parcel to us. “You need to copy the addresses.” This will be the fourth addressing of each parcel, the sixth time for each if you count Tom’s address work the evening before. The parcel brings back a childhood memory of taking canned goods and other gifts to church on White Gift Sunday. An eerie look, too, this package, like it might have something to do with the beginning or end of life.

It happens that TO and FROM are the last words the worn blue marker will ever write. I hold up the illegible letters. “Just a minute,” someone says, and son is on his motorbike speeding down the street. We join pop in hanging out, watching mom do her miracle bag-making for the second parcel. Such a warm, good-mother smile.

Another man who also seems to be hanging out at FIRST FAST and is somehow familiar looking, now reminds us that yes we had indeed met him earlier, before we queued and the lights went out and Tom argued in the India PO, and that he had told us then that we must get our packets specially wrapped across the street. He could be saying this in a superior or humiliating way, but he’s not. That’s just what happen to happen, he seems to be saying, and with a smile and gentle head bob.

Now the motorbike and son re-appear with two new felt pens. How could that happen so quickly? The addresses are soon complete. But there’s one more step: son tapes our three address/declaration forms on each once-white cotton wrapped package … they weren’t a waste of time after all! although the odds of these taped labels making it together with parcel across the first room of the Uaipur India PO seem slight indeed. But who are we to speculate on India mail?

Sacrament in hand, we thank mom for her stitching, son for bringing all this together, the stranger for trying to steer us right in the first place, and smile at pop for hanging out, then head back to the India PO where the power is back on, Mr Officious is busy at a distant wicket, and our young intelligent-looking clerk welcomes us back with a smile that seems to be making every effort to ignore the last hour or so, at least in our personal case.

How quickly now – parcels wrapped, wax sealed, addressed and thrice declared – everything is weighed, stamped and set aside … although not quick enough for a helpful man arching over my shoulder to repeat to me in English every sentence the clerk utters in English, and for another to lean into our postcard sitting on top of one parcel, giving it what appears to be a careful read, and (I swear) a third man lifting 100 rupee notes out of my wallet in payment with his very eyes. And all this during the unrelenting press at our backs from those in the surrounding, deepening queue.

“What’s all this crowding and hanging over the shoulder about?” I ask the efficient young clerk.  “You are in a country with more than a billion people,” he says, bobbing his head and smiling pleasantly, intelligently, genuinely, as if the words “more than a billion” explained everything. 

I smile, give a head bob back, thank the man for his help and off we go into the still-bright afternoon sun.

The head bob

Incidentally (meaning quite unrelated to parcels and India Post), I’ve since been wondered why I used the head bob at this moment, and why anyone in south Asia does. It’s so ubiquitous that it can quickly become an acquired habit – just ask either of us. But what does it mean?

Often it feels like some essential empathic conversational gesture: I’m with you, I’m listening, I hear what you are saying. But more specifically? In my experience it seems to have suggested everything from Yes to No, Maybe, Perhaps, Could Be, You Think So? I Never. I understand …. Which perhaps comes back to the idea of an empathetic conversational signal: I hear you, I’m attending to what you are saying.

In my own case, at this moment in the Udaipur India PO, feeling the India full court press and hearing “You are in a country with more than a billion people,” my own head bob might have been saying “I hear you” or “I hear you but that’s no explanation" or “I hear you but I’ve gotta split.” Or perhaps some imp in me, one of those Hindu god incarnations, was just saying “Perhaps.”

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.