Walking with Salaam Balaak

A guided morning walk through the back lanes near the Old Delhi Train Station. The walk is hosted by the Salaam Baalak (salute/honour children) Trust, www.salaambaalaktrust.com, an organization supporting street children, especially children for whom the train station has become home. 

Two ex-homeless children lead our walk: Tabrez and Ajay, both now in their late teens. Tabrez separated from his parents at six, has had a childhood of pick pocketing and glue sniffing, and is now starting university. The Trust began by using theatre in the stations to attract children, to build trust, and to introduce alternatives to the homeless street life. We are told that glue sniffling and drug use is common, as is physical abuse. The heads of many of the boys we meet (the Trust also works with girls), shaven to kill lice, reveal extensive scarring, and infections around their eyes. Some have been beaten by family members, some by older boys, many by the police – many by all three. The Trust provides medical and emotional support, accommodation and some basic literacy training, and eventually tries to place children in family homes. 

At one of the Trust’s centres, participants in our walking group play hand games with individual boys. Some quickly become animated and smile, others remaining withdrawn, faces blank, eyes open but never connecting with us. 

I make a rough sketch of Rahu, maybe six years old, then asked him to do one of me, which he does – somewhat mechanically or mistrustfully or obediently, perhaps guardedly calculating this attention from a stranger. He draws a circle first, then a curly head of hair, a nose, a smiling mouth, then a long rectangular body with stick toes and fingers. I point to my ears, which he obligingly adds, then eyes, again added. None of this is done with visible enthusiasm until I hold up our sketches between us and smile into his eyes. Then he too smiles, but so momentarily that I might have missed it. A glimmer of pleasure or another expectation he calculates must be met? 

It feels good to be with these children, to hear their life stories, to see their brightly painted pictures on the wall, to feel signs of the beginning of trust … all the more so after stealing ourselves against the appeals of other begging children who have approached us on the street and in the Delhi station itself.

Anti-sightseeing with grandpa and grandson

Was it a misunderstanding, a scam, bad karma – but then whose? We’ll never know. A lousy day, that we do know. And further evidence of Vivek’s (an earlier guide) caution that “India is full of surprises.”

We had arranged with an auto-rickshaw driver (actually grandpa and his several year old grandson) to drive us to several museums and monuments spread across Delhi. We started by heading to the National Museum which our hotel tour agent has assured us is open today (‘I just called’). Turns out it is closed, as is every national museum and gallery, because it is Gandhi’s birthday – not, seemingly, a widely-known fact among hotel tour operators or auto-rickshaw drivers.

Disappointed, we ask to be driven to the quiet Lodi Gardens. Off we go, the four-five year old grandson steering through Delhi traffic while receiving grandfatherly auto-rickshaw driver lessons on the meaning of this street marker and that, that driver’s cunning and this driver’s bad habits, makes of cars, attractive girls glancing back from car windows. They’re having a great day together.

The gates of the Lodi Gardens (Yeh!! They’re open). Betty and I head off for a walk, a peaceful respite. 

Then the day really unravels. We tell grandpa that we want to visit two other sites in the city, neither of them far away. But we head south … and farther south (this is when we should have yelled STOP!) towards (we soon find out) the famous Qutb Minar where grandpa has been insisting we must go but where we have shown no interest in going, at least for now. Thirteen and counting kilometres through New Delhi city streets, then, our auto-rickshaw put-putting amidst Audis and buses, onto an eight-lane thoroughfare, us desperate to tell grandpa to pull off but there’s no room really, so on we continue until we are suddenly swallowed in a traffic jam we can’t see beyond. 

Seems everyone in Delhi has had a hankering to visit the Qutb Minar this very day. Sure, it’s one of Islam’s premier monuments in India, the ruins of a sandstone tower inscribed with Koranic text, although the remaining tower, according to historian John Keays, hints strongly of a factory chimney and brick kiln. No doubt worthy of a visit, too especially on some quiet sunset evening, several couples strolling the nearby parks, the scent of fragapani in the air … but not here and now in this throng, these horns, these clouds of dust and exhaust. 

We pull into a safe corner, try to explain the “misunderstanding,” get puzzled looks from grandpa, recruit a passing English-speaking Indian woman to help clarify things, which she does, then apologizes for not being able to extricate us from the mess. What to do? Go on to other sites? Cut our losses, say so long to grandpa and hop the Metro home? We decide to get back to the refuge of our hotel, grandpa at the steering handles, grandson in Betty’s arms soon asleep, an unplanned sightseeing journey of the streets of Delhi, a few hundred rupees out of pocket.

It is only now, a week later and far north of Delhi in quiet hill country, that I can remember another side of that day: having our first fleeting glances of the sprawling, many-sided Delhi itself …. How grandpa drove us out of the mazy congested Main Bazaar and Old Delhi’s back streets, south beyond Connaught Place and farther south and west from India Gate into the astonishingly (because so unexpected) wide-avenue, treed expanses of New Delhi – a golf course, a race track, and grand houses hardly visible behind high walls, iron gates and armed guards – then north and east past sackcloth and scrap metal human encampments under overpasses, between drainage ditches, on once vacant patches of refuse and weeds.

Along the way sellers take advantage of traffic stops and gridlock, moving from window to window, offering towels, magazines, a toy ball that pops out of a cone, 3-D images of gods and goddesses. A ragged family works the traffic lights, this time from the sidewalk, a man snap-beating a drum to catch our ear then eyes, a four or five year old girl going through a spiritless if agile routine of back-flips, headstands and tricks with a metal ring up and down her pencil-thin torso, a smaller brother in imitation. (The performers – we have seen others at railway stations – make me think of Daumier sketches of Paris street performers, faces fixed with a determined, desperate iron will, the mechanical movements of the children.) Then the same two emaciated children, hair straggly stiff, are at our auto-rickshaw, at our elbows, along with mother and babe, voices like whimpers and moans, the tap tap on the arm until we are rescued by the changing traffic light. I steel myself, trying to feel no natural feeling, making sure I don’t connect. We drive away. I feel rescued, relieved, but gut sick too.

The day, the city Delhi, is like India itself … many cities in one. 

Those open, wide clean avenues. Those fortress estates. Tree-lined suburban residential streets. The ruins of earlier times now mostly swallowed in newer mansions, glass towers, teeming markets, high-speed thruways and their overpasses, themselves scrap waste home to refugees from the countryside and villages; thruways that vanish into narrow canyon streets and lanes only navigable to the most local of ‘locals’, into vast rabbit warren markets, into a swirling sludge of cars, motorbikes, trishaws, auto-rickshaws, vans through which people seem to slip like fish in what feels to us like a terribly shrunken, teeming world.  

Quiet Orchha, royal beauty, royal feuds

Old Orchha – “hidden place” – is really two places. The remains of a medieval town, its palaces, temples and havelis rising skyward through the country dust along the River Betwa. Then a small, modern, friendly-feeling Indian market and temple town, a quiet refuge after the congestion of Varanasi. 

We take a late afternoon walk through the town, along the Betwa towards the dusty magnified sun setting golden and pink behind the old palace spires. Men bathe among the river’s great boulders, couples stroll a walking bridge, the atmosphere is serene. 

Later we visit the central temple for the daily 8 p.m. appearance of Lord Vishnu, tucked behind a curtain as a crowd of some 500 devotees assemble. Many have brought sweets, other food stuffs and flowers to give to the deity. His priests will re-distribute these as blessings to others later. Vishnu might be clay, plastic and colourful cloth, but unveiled he suddenly animates the crowd. Excited calls of awe and praise, appeals for blessings reverberate between the temple walls. Everyone is on their feet, on tip-toes, necks strained. In the milling about that follows later, there’s great pleasure, even bliss in people’s faces, and an atmosphere of amity and fellowship, happy fellowship. Vishnu lives.

Another day we walk through Raj Mahal (royal palace) and neighbouring Rai Praveen Mahal, built for a favorite concubine in the mid-1670s. Delightful murals of Vishnu in various incarnations, made earthly amidst scenes from once opulent court life: the raj and his retinue on elephants, acrobats and jugglers, courting lovers. We are led through the half-dark up a steep, hardly passable winding staircase to the upper floors of the Chatturbuj Mandir – high over the memory of this medieval royal village whose spires and walls rise everywhere the eye turns, the sky alive with circling vultures, chattering blue-tailed parakeets, swooping swifts, the expectation of a hunting party appearing on the far horizon, a thousand elephants, fluttering red and golden banners, trumpets sounding. 

Several days later, now in Agra, we walk around the renown Taj Mahal. At first it feels difficult to experience first-hand a building like this, so at sea in the visiting crowds and where so many images of the place already fill my thoughts. And yet the immediate beauty of the place, especially in its details, does take over. Flowers, butterflies: their delicacy rendered in carved marble. More flowers in patterned in-laid hand-painted tiles, reminding me so much of the painted tiles of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. A tall man in white dhoti and red turban, walking erect and tall along a great wall of patterned ivory marble. Women strolling in many-coloured saris – fuchsia, bronze, tea green – like rippling flames set at the foot of this palace of love and grief.

Later we walk the plazas and ramparts of the Red Fort where I am reminded of the extent to which no effort was spared to keep the Mughal rulers in comfort.

Consider the wells filled daily with fresh water, then sprinkled with jasmine blossoms, while women sit nearby fanning the perfumes and water’s coolness towards the shady courtyards and meeting chambers. Or the fort’s fish tanks where the emperor and his courtiers could practice their angling skills. Or the silks and brocades and jewellery. Or the arches from which auspicious peacocks, formed from inlaid lapis lazuli and jasper, watch over passersby. 

All this self-indulgent beauty – those many mirrors for instance, grand and miniature, reflecting and winking back – deep inside a fortress society, a society based on a few elite families and their feuds, marauding, slavery, deceit, fratricide and patricide. Beauty demanded of the women, but hidden in purdah and the zenana, behind walls and screens, mostly brought out to dance and be of sexual service. 

Beauty amidst a world that forever generates and even needs enemies. Thus the thick high fortress walls, a moat with crocodiles, another ring of lions, ramparts sloping towards heavy gates which we now walk but down which burning oil was once poured and great boulders were rolled towards hapless intruders. Not hard to see the blood stains on the gloriously patterned carpets, the chipped inlaid tiles, the havoc of narcissism dancing with absolute power.

First India train rides

We are lucky to first experience Indian Railways’ stations and trains with the help of our  guide Vivek. 

We, a tour group of us, follow him through the Varanasi station, like daycare children on a towline … into the cross-currents of the scurrying throngs, watching, as advised, for signs that match platform to train to numbered train coach, shrieking questions on the fly, now stepping over and around begging children, the poor and frail, weary families trying to nap on station floors and platforms, past shouting chai vendors and snack hawkers, the lame and infirm hoping to cash in on the traveller’s desperate attempt to vanquish his fear of death-by-India-Rail with charity, into a new river of passengers and the gatherings who have come to bid them goodbye, fussing aunties, a father with wallet in hand. We yell more questions. Who are the men in red? How can we tell where our train coach will be on the line? Will there be eatable food? Will we actually be prepared to do this on our own?  

Our first overnight ride, sitting astraddle a tumble of bags and packs, is a share of three-tier single bunk beds, each not quite six feet long (passersby keep getting hooked on my toes all night) along with a sheet and a dusty blanket. We remind one another that this “reserved sleeper” is pure comfort compared to the human cattle cars down the way. 

Another train ride, this time in the very early morning from Jhansi to Agra. We climb into a sleeper car that has come from Mumbai and the far south. Many people are still curled asleep, others are half-awake sitting in scatterings of the nights blankets, bags, food and clothes. We have been cautioned to be patient, let people wake, organize themselves. Good advice. We sit across from two woman and a restless child, and two men who turn out to be part of the new world of global citizens, one an engineer, the other a medical researcher who seemed to have spent most of his life studying/researching outside India and who says he understands German better than he does the Indian women next to us. 

A third train ride, now from Agra to Delhi late afternoon and evening, spacious seating, even clean feeling. We are getting accustomed to spotting the station signboards, navigating the track overpasses, watching for red-shirted rail staff if we need directions, remembering Vivek’s rail cautions. Arrival platforms change right to the last minute.  Keep your eye on the men in red shirts and keep asking. Make sure your ticket matches the car number. Always, always remember that train stops can be surprisingly short, the press to get into cars quick and intense, so make sure you’re ready, make sure to push your way on, but without being ‘pushy’ – or get left behind. Once settled on board today, we wave off India Rail’s ‘very spicy’ (Vivek cautions) “Meals on Wheels” dinner and pull out our pizza and apples. 

Footnote: Indian Railway carries some 30 million passengers each day, using about 7,500 trains and employing some 1.4 million people. Each year there are dozens of derailments, and reportedly some 15,000 deaths and many more injuries. 

Footnote on train toilets and deaths: Research shows that human excrement and urine, discharged directly from passenger car toilets onto India’s tracks, are corroding the tracks and hindering the safe maintenance of rail cars. Dr Anil Kakodkar, head of a committee looking into Indian train safety, says that the toilet discharge “is one of the life limiting factors .... Because of the pH content of the toilet discharge, there is widespread corrosion of the rails. These toilets need to be discontinued. We also found that maintenance workers often refuse to service the undercarriage of the trains because discharge from toilets makes the undercarriage extremely dirty.”

Varanasi the washout

Not for us the guidebook promised experience of the great Hindu city of Varanasi stretching itself along the banks of the Ganges. Varanasi, Kashi to the devout – the Luminous, City of Light – founded by Shiva, one of the oldest living cities in the world, a centre of spiritual life since before the sixth century BC, built at one of the holiest of all Ganges tirthas, crossing places, where the divine is in earth, water and fire, where the devout come daily to the many stepped ghats for their ablutions in the holy Ganges, where the dead are brought on their continuing passage through deathlifedeath, where the elderly come to await death and the promise of enlightenment. 

Not for us this Varanasi. 

Instead days of heavy rains, at times torrential. The holy Ganges, surging down the Himalayas and across the plains, is up a dangerous 30 feet, lapping at the upper steps and edges of temples, flowing across doorsteps, the rushing currents sweeping garbage, bodies and Himalayan silt towards Kolkata, the streets one morning knee and waist deep in muck, reports of 24 lives lost, rickshaws and tuktuks abandoned in unseen potholes, the holy ghats grey, dripping and forlorn, the fires smoldering ash. Indra, King of the Gods, Lord of Heaven, God of War, Storms and Rainfall is having his way with Varanasi.

Yesterday we attempted to walk on higher land through mazy laneways, their crannies still so full of activity. Men stitch sequins and tiny beads on saris, the chuffing of a small flour mill, a bicycle repair operation scattered along the lane stones, the part skeleton of one ancient bike upsidedown, the parts of others set out nearby. Cows and bulls wander these same narrow lanes (and the congested main Varanasi streets), their wet brown droppings and pools of piss everywhere. Men pee against walls and into gullies, urchins run in play through damp slippery alleys. 
 

Immediately the waters subside, the streets are immediately crammed with vegetable sellers catching up from the flood, their wheeled carts piled with cucumbers, garlics, peppers, chillies, tomatoes, oranges, apples. Men pull rickshaws free of the muck. Cows again mosey around the street corners, grazing amongst vegetable waste and plastic chai cups.