October 16, 2011
India is intrusive. The heat, smell, humidity, people, colors, and spices wrap you in a binding blanket until your entire body is sweating out the country itself. It is full of contradictions, energy, and hard truths. One thing can be true in one place, and the opposite will be true a couple blacks over. In a nut shell, I loved India and couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Also, stay with me here, I’ve been busy so I’m sorry if this post is not exactly inspired…or grammatically correct. I will do my best to please all of you minions back at home.
Day One: I signed up for a Field Directed Practicum, so the moment customs gave us the green light I jumped onto a bus with the rest of my poetry class and we drove through Chennai to a cute little house just off the main road. This bus ride marked my first encounter with Indian men. Our tour guide, a shy 21 year old student did not guide us on our tour at all. He felt his time was better spent talking with me in the back of the bus about the Backstreet Boys and asking questions about American dating. I also experienced the lack of personal space that is normal for everyone. When 1.2 billion people live in a single country, the personal bubble morphs into more of a personal saran wrap.We ended up in the living room of a professor from the University of Chennai and got to chat to Tulsi, a female novelist. We spent all day learning about the history of female writers in India, talking about her books and how her culture has shaped her writing, and eating delicious Indian snacks like plantain chips and chutney. Tulsi has also studied traditional Hindu dance so she gave us a demonstration and taught us all how to dance like elephants or men in love. I already had a head start on dancing like an elephant from the New Years that Vivian gave our family lessons, there is embarrassing video evidence of this somewhere. It was great being able to talk to an author and to have the opportunity of be welcomed into the country in such an intimate setting. We got discuss Hinduism and the idea of Karma as well as marriage in India and how it has changed. Marriages are often still arranged in India, and when they are arranged, a person is expected to marry within their own social class. It is believed that people aren’t as compatible outside one’s own class system because they don’t have the same family values, celebrations, and expectations. Tulsi’s grandparents married for love and, as a result, so did her parents and eventually her too. Once someone marries outside of their own caste, their children are a mixed bread and have no strict identity within the culture. This means that they could not take part in an arranged marriage even if they wanted to. She explained that she had a very happy marriage but she also felt as if she didn’t have any place or culture where she fully belonged. I believe that it is this very feeling of isolation and a dedication to tradition that keeps the caste system in India so visible even though it’s been outlawed since the fifties.
Day Two: My alarm went off at 3am. I resisted the urge to kill everything and rolled out of bed instead. I met up with my crew (the superfine nine…okay I just made that name up, but there were nine of us and we were superfine so it works.) All of us found our groggy way out of the boat and into a cab that took us to the airport. The Chennai airport had a cookie stand, a candy bar, and holes in the ground that were called toilets. I had a nutritious almond joy for my 6am breakfast and thought to myself, “Welcome to India!”
Our two and a half hour flight took us the New Delhi. The plan was to catch a train from there to Shimla, a small mountain village right up against the Himalayas. This is where Semester at Sea’s favorite ‘F’ word came into play: Flexibility! We hadn’t purchased our train tickets ahead of time and there was no place to buy tickets in the actual station unless we wanted to ride third class. The people already waiting for third class covered the floor, sleeping on top of each other with flies swarming around their heads. Eventually, after carefully picking our way through sprawled out limbs, we found a man who said we needed to go to the tourist office to book tickets. We hopped on a rickshaw, which is a bit like a fast moving golf cart, and swerved our way through impossibly small gaps in the traffic to get to the agency. Over the course of twenty minutes, the agent helping us managed to convince all nine of us that we didn’t actually want to go the Shimla. Instead, we wanted to Agra and see the Taj Mahal and then head straight to Jaipur on our own hired minibus. Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur all form an equilateral triangle on the map and he kept on drawing lines around it and repeating “The Golden Triangle.” All of us were hypnotized. One of the most unsettling parts of traveling is never knowing if someone is trying to help you or rip you off. I don’t know if we got a better deal or had a better trip than we would have, but we had a great time so I guess it doesn’t matter much. The drive from Delhi to Agra was about five hours so we caught up on sleep for most of the ride.
When we stopped at a rest stop, a little boy met us at the window with a cobra in a basket. He flicked it in the face until it raised its neck and spread it out to its full size threateningly. He then kept on repeating, “It won’t bite!” and motioning to it. I reached out of the window and he handed it to me. It slithered around in my hands for a bit and then I gave it back to him with a giant squeal. I hope that snake didn’t have fangs. If it did, that’s probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever done, but I get to hold a cobra so yippy!
The hotel we found had character. There were cigarette ashes in the couch, unidentifiable stains on the sheets, and no shower. Instead, we got a faucet in the wall, a bucket, and a drain on the floor. I finished washing and couldn’t decide if I felt cleaner or dirtier than I had in the first place. At least it had TV and Western toilets. The boys took forever to get ready for dinner, so us five girls turned on the television and watched Indian music videos. I am obsessed with the Dezi Boys. The Dezi Boys are two ridiculously ripped guys who pelvic thrust in firefighter, pilot, and construction outfits for the entire song. Apparently India is obsessed with the Dezi Boys also because their music video was playing everywhere we went.
Dinner time! A word on Indian food: it’s delicious. For every meal we ordered different rice dishes, sauces, and nan. They always gave us too much food and it was so good that I ate it anyways. I probably gained a solid five pounds over the four days we were traveling. My favorite dishes were Dal, a type of spicy lentil soup, and Chicken Biryani which is an oily rice dish with chicken and vegetables. Yummmm. The Butter Chicken is also amazing. It’s chicken in a spicy marinara-like sauce with butter and cream. Actually, pretty much everything has butter and cream. The food comas hit soon after and we went to bed early.
Day Three: 4:30am wakeup call! I threw on whatever clothes were closest to me and made a b-line for the restaurant downstairs. About the only thing that can motivate me to wake up after my second pre-dawn morning is a free breakfast. I didn’t get quite what I expected. Eggs were not on the menu. Instead we got spicy lentil soup and really really spicy potato and vegetable patties. It’s a good thing the coffee was strong because my taste buds weren’t ready to get out of bed yet either. Full and awake from the food, we drove to the Taj Mahal and got there in time for the sunrise. To get into the monument there were four separate lines. The first was for Indian men, the second for tourist men, the third for Indian women, and the fourth for tourist women. Guess who’s line took the longest? Mine did! I kept on grumbling to myself “I’m not a second class citizen,” and then I forgot to be angry because I got to watch monkeys run across the gate wall to greet the sun.
We’ve all seen a bazillion pictures of the Taj Mahal but it was beautiful to see in person. If you don’t know much about it, it was built in the 1600s by Emperor Shah Jahon for his wife who died during her 14th childbirth. She died with three requests, “Don’t re-marry, watch over our children, and build something to remember me by.” She’s certainly been remembered so way to go, girl! I think that any woman who has fourteen kids deserves a giant monument…not that that should be a motivation for anyone to have fourteen kids by choice.
We moved from the Taj to Agra Palace. Instead of paying money to walk around inside the palace, we explored the ruins outside the walls. We got to walk into an old, unattended building from the 1500s. Inside were uneven stair cases and rooms that went back into the darkness. We explored a few of these but didn’t walk too far into the dark because bats were hanging on the ceiling and went into flying frenzies every time we entered one of their resting spots. Dr. Phil warned us about rabies so we ran. Dr. Phil is famous on the ship for his terrifying descriptions or parasites, fevers, and worst case scenarios. Apparently one of his lectures gave my poetry professor’s daughter nightmares. When we emerged from the building, we found a boy stripped down to his underwear at the head of the ancient water source. The water was slimy, green, and looked about three feet deep. None of this discouraged the boy from the flip he performed off the fifteen foot drop into it. I don’t think Dr. Phil would recommend jumping in that water either. He then came running up to us and asking for money so we were glad to see he survived and decided it was time to go. We hopped back on the bus and drove another six hours to Jaipur.
The hotel in Jaipur was considerably nicer than the one we had in Agra. We had a shower and clean sheets and everything! We had dinner on the rooftop and got to watch a traditional cobra dance performed by a talented little boy. He made me stand up and try to dance with him…I usually consider myself a decent dancer but this boy’s head couldn’t have been attached to his neck like a normal person’s. Apparently holding a cobra didn’t qualify me to dance like one. I woke up three times in the middle of the night at our hotel. The first time, the water in our shower started running on its own. Apparently the hotel had just turned on the hot water and the faucet had been on already. The other two wakeups were due to power outages that I noticed because our fan would suddenly stop turning and the room would get instantly sticky and unbearable. I can understand how some places get the reputation for being haunted. To add even more character to this hotel, there was a giant mural of a woman dancing with flowers and an overgrown mustache outside our room. Curious, very curious.
Day Four: We got to sleep in until 7:30am! I had enough time to eat breakfast and check the room for ghosts before we made our way to the Amber Palace. Jaipur is a beautiful place. All of the buildings are pink and it is surrounded by small mountains that cover the horizon in every direction. Winding up the mountains was a delicate pink wall full of guard towers and a sense of ancient grandeur. These were the very walls that protected the Amber Palace in the 1500s. We were kindly spared the 13 kilometer hike up to the palace, and who were are rescuers? Elephants of course! These huge elephants had seats strapped to their back that were big enough to be mattresses. Two people sat on each elephant but we could have easily fit another two people with us. I never noticed how big the creatures actually were until I looked down at the rolling ground and decided adamantly not to fall. As we rode up the wall we got to watch all the animals make their way back down in their colorful outfits and face paint. In Hinduism, the god Ganesh is shaped like an elephant and is known as the breaker of barriers. It was pretty clear to me how they came up with this analogy. Each god also has a little vehicle that they travel on. Ganesh’s ride of choice is a mouse; I found this slightly less practical. Gods will be gods I guess.
We got off Jumpu (Our elephant) and found ourselves in the middle of the palace courtyard. It was lively, like everything in India, and swarming with tourists and vendors. Our tour guide walked us through the place where the emperor held court, the palace spa, and the rooms for the emperor’s twelve wives. My favorite room in the palace was the mirror room. Tiny mirrors were incorporated into the designs in the walls and served as heating devices for winter nights. They would catch the light from the lamps and reflect heat into the room. They also served as mood lighting for the emperor when he was entertaining his wives. The servants would set up a mattress surrounded by thick curtains and then wave lamps on the outside of the curtains in order to create the allusion of sparkling stars above them.
We ate lunch at a sketchy roadside restaurant crawling with ants. It was busy with locals though, so we took this as a good sign. The food was delicious as expected, we just made sure to take our Pepto. We spent the rest of the afternoon shopping in the middle of the pink city. I’m getting to be a pro at bargaining, don’t you mess with me shop keepers! Shopping in India is fun because everything is colorful and sparkling and even the poorest women are always dressed gorgeously. The men, for some reason, all wear Western clothes and look shabby and dirty compared to the scarves and saris of the women. A lot of the students went to the Ganges River and came back with heart wrenching stories of beggars with horrible deformities. Apparently beggars will cut off their own fingers or arms so that people feel worse for them and give them more money. There are also children who serve under masters (Slumdog Millionaire style) and are deformed by the older people who capture them and force them to beg. The country has programs and temples that provide food for the very poor, but unfortunately begging is ingrained into the culture because people often get more money than they would otherwise. The street kids can make more money in a day than the average cab driver, but because they have no way to save it without being robbed, they spend it right away on things like videogames and drugs. Jaipur is not as much of a tourist attraction so we were lucky enough to not have to face too much of this. Instead, we all felt like celebrities because everyone kept on sneaking pictures of us on their cellphones. One man pulled Joe (the tallest guy in our group) to a stool and had him pose for a picture while sitting on his lap. Joe was unhappy with us when we started congratulating him on his new boyfriend. I personally thought they looked very cute together.
When we were back at our hotel for the night we went to go investigate a giant party across the street from us. It was so big and elaborate that we figured it was a wedding, but as we snuck a peak, the people standing at the door beckoned us inside. It turned out to be a little girl’s birthday party. Everyone was decked out in their party clothes and full of smiles for us. We got to dance with several of the local kids and they gave us homemade Indian Ice cream. I thought it would be vanilla flavored because it was white but it was actually rich and creamy and sweetened lightly. There was no flavoring at all except that of the cream and sugar it was made from. A group of women in bight saris with dangling bindies pulled me over and asked me to dance for them. I did a couple of hip swings before all of them burst out laughing together. I asked them to dance with me but they all shook their heads no. I’m sure they were all just jealous of my sweet moves. Grandpa once told me that I danced well for a white girl and I’m taking that complement to the grave!
Our timing was smack dab in the middle of festival season which meant lots of decorative floats, animals, and fireworks! The birthday party died down and we got our own after party started by lighting off fireworks in the park across from our hotel. There were about 20 people in the park, adults and kids alike (who knows what people do in parks at 11pm) and everyone gathered around to watch our show. The men loved it every time one of us girls went up to light a fuse. I might have squealed a bit and run away unnecessarily fast but my advice to them still remains “Never make fun of the person in control of the firepower.” Some of the kids around us looked to be five or six and we had to fight to keep them from getting a hold of the rockets. Maybe I’m a straight-laced American but I couldn’t justify giving a five year old something he could blow himself up with. Our hotel manager wanted a piece of the fun too so we saved a couple of the rockets and took them to the hotel roof where he got to light them off with us. Most of our crew went to bed after we came dangerously close to setting a tree on fire, but Joe and I made friends with a crazy English bloke and two German girls and stayed up chatting much later than we should have. The motto of many of us SASers is “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” Dr. Phil’s motto is, “If you don’t sleep, you’ll die a lot sooner.” I try to find the happy middle ground.
Day Five: Our last day was mostly a travel day. It takes a long time to get anywhere in India. The drive back to the airport was about seven hours long and we had the pleasure of witnessing a car accident. The system they have for dealing with an accident involves…oh wait, what system? It probably took three times longer to get around the cars than was necessary because no one was actually in their cars. I felt like I was looking at an instant black party, only everyone was angry and yelling. Our driver kept on getting out of the car, walking around, talking to everyone else who was also walking around, and then getting back in, honking the horn a couple times, and leaving again. We eventually got around the accident by crossing the grass median, swerving through very slow moving oncoming traffic, and crossing back over the median where the road was clear. Just as we were getting away (after sitting in the traffic for an hour and a half) people had started to gather rocks and line them around the road in order to re-direct traffic. Setting up the Third World version of a parking cone was a community effort.
For some reason, lays potato chips were EVERYWHERE. We ate a lot of chips on our drive because we had nothing better to do than sing obnoxiously and eat. Instead of the traditional flavors, we tried Tomato Basil (ketchup flavor), Onion (we couldn’t find Sour Cream and Onion), and Spicy Treat. Spicy Treat was not as much a treat as a vomit inducer. Imagine a potato chip with pepper, mint, licorice, paprika, and about ten other unidentified flavors mixed in. Now imagine eating that chip. Enough said. I would also like to point out that I made everyone sing to moose song with me and they actually enjoyed it. In the airport I ordered nachos. They didn’t sound gourmet but they sounded like they’d be safely gluten free. What I got was Doritos on a plate. I may have grumbled a little.
Overall, we spent 16 hours traveling and got back to the ship tired and cranky. The security was so tight that we had to stop at three different check points and wait in three different lines before we were allowed into the port. I don’t understand how making a checkmark next to my name on a sheet of paper is saving the country from terrorism but I do know I was ready to punch the lady with the little metal detector wand in the face. A couple deep breathing exercises later, I found myself back on the ship and in the shower for a long, long time. I spent most of the last day recovering and sneezing brown boogers. NAMASTE India! The Great Spirit within me acknowledges the Great Spirit within you.
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