India, Part III

So, wow, I’m very far behind in my India Chronicles. Last time I wrote, I believe I had just ended Day 1. Leaping back in…
Other highlights from Mumbai (I’ll be more than happy to write more about any of these, if you ask, but right now am just trying to churn it all out):
- Welcome: Marry or Die, Mafia Style. This would be the title of the Bollywood movie we saw in a theater in Mumbai. Most Americans think that Hollywood is the center of the global movie-making industry; they are wrong – it’s Mumbai. Hundreds of films are churned out of Bollywood every year, most of them raucous romps featuring lots of singing and dancing and some sort of wildly twisting plotline. And the film we saw was no exception – 3 glorious hours of boy-meets-girl, boy-tries-to-win-girl, boy-succeeds-but-soon-discovers-that-girl-is-not-what-she-appeared-to-be-because-her-brother-is-a-mafia-don-with-whom-the-boy’s-uncle/caretaker-becomes-accidentally-but-dangerously-involved. It was something of a mix between My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Rush Hour, Goodfellas, Analyze This, and West Side Story. I’m so not kidding. The film was in Hindi, so we didn’t really understand everything that was going on…but enjoyed what might best be termed an exercise in the outrageous nonetheless.
- The Walking Tour. Since our guidebooks were bulky and heavy, we decided not to take them with us when we set out on a walking tour of the city. This was a mistake. After a successful hour or so, we accidentally took a wrong turn and found ourselves in a small slum. This ended up not being that big a deal since, as Volunteers, we’re pretty used to being surrounded by small children shouting out various random English phrases and wanting us to play with them. We got nervous, though, when we could no longer read anything that was posted and so started following the only English signs, which pointed toward something called “Baranga.” After walking through twisting, cobbled streets and down a large flight of stairs, we found ourselves at a large glistening pool. Not until we made it back to our hotel did we learn that we’d “discovered” one of the holiest (but hardest to find) sites in the city – the place where Rama (one of the incarnations of Vishnu, the Preserver) shot an arrow and water welled up, thus creating the world. Tolkien was right when he wrote that “all who wander are not lost.”
- In a dive bar we went into one afternoon, we noticed an interesting sign: “All castes welcome.”
- The Walking Tour, Take 2. The next day, we decided to bite the bullet and take a taxi to the Haji Ali Mosque (the destination of our first attempt at the walking tour), the major place of worship for Muslims in the city. It is constructed on an island off the city’s coastline; during high tide, the causeway disappears and it looks like a mysterious, floating building. Pretty cool. What makes the site even more interesting (and decidedly Indian), though, is that it is within site of the major Hindu temple in Mumbai. The day that we arrived at the site, there appeared to be some sort of Hindu holiday underway, as literally thousands and thousands of people were lined up along the road, waiting for admittance into the temple. Add to this the people trying to get to the mosque, and you have one hell of a crowd. There were maybe ten or fifteen thousand people milling about the narrow sidewalks in the hot sun. For the first time, I began to get a sense of how big India’s population really is; “a billion people” began to become less of an abstraction. (Here’s some food for thought: we all know about India’s booming economy…but did you know that it has only affected about 200 million people? That’s a lot, certainly…but only a fifth of the country’s total population.)

India, Part II

Our stomachs sated, we set out for Chharrapati Shivaji Terminus, nee-Victoria Station, the busiest train station in Asia. I’ll post photos as soon as I can – the building is impressive, to say the least. Historian Christopher London puts it well: “the Victoria Terminus is to the British Raj, what the Taj Mahal is to the Mughal empire.” It’s kind of strange, actually, to see this great beacon of neo-Gothic architecture in the middle of India…but the great Subcontinent nation seems to absorb everything into its churning, glorious diversity, even the remnants of its former colonizers. Anyway, our less-than-rested brains didn’t pick up on the fact that we couldn’t circumnavigate the station since it had several busy railways thrusting from one side. But we did begin to get a sense of the jostling, crowded, infinitely interesting nature of the city. People everywhere. Think of throngs a la college football games or the last night of FunFest …except that crowds are omnipresent in Mumbai. And the people are doing things that I thought existed only in the pages of National Geographic: women deftly balancing huge bundles on their head as they weave their ways through the masses, men frying samosas and other savories almost too good to be termed ‘street food,’ other men asking if they can clean out your ears, Indian yuppies yapping away on their shiny cell phones (in a way not unlike their American counterparts), and – hardest to take – beggars, scores of them, whole families living on the street with not much else but a blanket between them. I had never seen poverty like this – and I live in a poor country. Poverty so obvious it’s almost not to be believed, like a smack in the face from a stranger. But this isn’t a silent poverty. You are forced – especially as a foreigner – to interact with it on a daily basis. There are different strategies…the friendly approach (favored by children and teenagers) “Hello! What is your name? Give me some money, please!”, the plaintive stare (used mostly by mothers with a child at their shoulder), the aggressive hounding (which can turn into a pick-pocketing), and, hardest for me to take, the telling of one’s personal history, usually accompanied by a “gift” of some sort – a flower, little sugar beads, or the like. Our first evening in Mumbai, I was overtaken by a little girl who thrust a small garland of jasmine in my hands. She soon began to tell me how she couldn’t go to school because her family was too poor, how she was hungry, how the flowers were only a gift. After a couple of minutes, I relented and tried to hand her a couple of rupee coins, a gesture which she refused, saying that she could only accept food, which was to be found just around the corner. She wouldn’t leave me alone, until I finally had to refuse more firmly than I would have liked and rush away. The thing that really broke my heart was that this little guy, at maybe 7 or 8 years of age, had already learned how to dupe people. The “food stand” that she kept trying to drag me to may well have been a set up for a robbery. After that incident, I did (or tried to, at least) the that most tourists – and Indians, for that matter – do: pretended that the beggars didn’t exist, that I had some sort of shield around me that prevented me from hearing, seeing, or feeling anything toward them. And this, this is perhaps the saddest thing of all.

But I’ve gotten ahead of myself here. Back to dinner on the first night. Our lack of sleep, by evening, had begun to catch up with us, so we decided to hit the restaurant next door to our hotel, which just happened to be one of the ex-pat and tourist meccas of Mumbai: The Leopold Café. Unused to Hindi terminology for various dishes, we decided to order the things that we had absolutely no idea what they were, which ended up being a pretty good call. On this night, I began what will likely be a lifelong love affair with Indian food. I plan on writing an entire email/blog entry on the cuisine, but, for now, I’ll suffice to say that Indians make becoming a vegetarian a totally painless proposition. Vegetables and spice and flatbread (naan – oddly enough, this is also the Kyrgyz word for bread…oh the linguistic escapades I’ve uncovered), oh my! Anyway, what we really wanted that night were a few cold beers, and the Leopold Café was more than happy to fulfill this wish. The only hitch was that their “pitchers” were 3-meter-high cylinders that looked a lot more like bongs than beverage receptacles. I should probably mention at this point that we were sitting in the first table, so everyone passing by could see us easily (there being no door, just big open windows and a threshold). Oh, and Gregory David Roberts, the author of the wildly popular (in India, anyway) Shantaram, was sitting at the next table. Needless to say, there was a pretty constant stream of his fans snaking up to his – and by proxy, our – table. We Peace Corps Volunteers, who are usually out of the loop of nearly everything, had no idea who the guy that insisted on keeping his blond braid despite his receding hairline was. Our focus at the time was that our waiter was having trouble reaching our table to bring us our food and drink. We had the last laugh, though, when the very archetype of a Japanese tourist, camera round his neck and floppy fisherman’s hat atop his head, came up to our table and asked not to take a photo with the famous author, but with the table of Americans and their giant beer tower.

Ok, I’ve made it past Day 1 now. More later. I’m starting to realize that my account of my trip to India is going to be considerably longer than I’d anticipated. No matter…things are pretty slow here in snowy Kyrgyzstan. Stay tuned.
Happy (belated) Super/Fat Tuesday!

India, Part I

As promised, here is my account of my two weeks in India, well chapter one of it anyway. I've struggled with how to organize the thing…do it in a logical, chronological, journal-like fashion? In a wacked-out-write-whatever-comes-to-mind way? In a set of themes, a la third grade textbook "History" "Culture" "Traditions" headings? In relation to my senses (for the place truly affected each and every one)?
After spending several days pondering this, I decided just to stop thinking and dive in. The cold – of which I wrote in my last email – has forced most of the schools in Kyrgyzstan to close their doors til February 5. So I've been curled up in my room, drinking hot beverages and reading books. Delicious hibernation. But I'm starting to go a little stir-crazy, so need to produce something of my own. Thus, the following…
As we were driving over the steppe of Kazakhstan to the airport in Almaty, one of my traveling companions mentioned that he wouldn't mind at all if we didn't see a single Russian in the coming weeks. This hope, unfortunately, turned out to be a silly one, as the entire population of Russia seems to have decided to travel southward for an Indian holiday. Forced by awkward flight schedules to spend our first night in India in the Delhi airport, we found sleeping to be next to impossible due to the presence of a boisterous (and intoxicated) group of Russians who not only were speaking their native tongue in levels inappropriate even for a fairly crowded airport…but had brought a book of Russian folk songs with them to pass the time. I felt like I was having some sort of very bad dream as I attempted sleep in the chilly, grey, halogen-lit room, balancing atop two cushion-less chairs, arms stuffed in my sweatshirt, and ears assaulted by the strains of Russian merry-making. Luckily, this gloomy state soon lifted with my plane to Mumbai, where our adventure begins.
The airport is approximately 20 kilometers from the tourist center of Mumbai. Thus, you might imagine that a mid-morning taxi might take you an hour or so. This would be a faulty assumption in this particular place, however. No stranger to aggressive taxi drivers, we groggily found our way into a fairly-enough-priced cab, our noses assaulted by the smells of diesel, flowers, and smog. Joyfully, we shrugged off our sweatshirts and jackets – the weather was miraculously warm. As our taxi driver pulled into the highway – a thoroughfare clogged with motorbikes, shiny new BMWS, old rusty cabs, three-wheeled rickshaws, and buses – one of my traveling partners leaned over and said, "Guys! We're about to enter some of the most dangerous traffic in the world!" Happy to be freed from our Peace Corps Kyrgyzstan chains, though, we all grinned mischievously and leaned back, ready to get our vacation started.
We checked into a cheap, clean hotel and decided to grab some lunch and take a walk round before the exhaustion from 30 sleepless hours set in. As we strolled down the street, all of our gazes were quickly averted. But not to the beautifully be-sari-ed women nor to the piles of fresh fruit nor to the architectural relics of the British imperialists. No, these Americans only had eyes for the Golden Arches. Kyrgyzstan, you see, lacks any sort of Western chain restaurant and, for the most part, all of its attempts at burgers and the like are woefully inadequate. So into McDonalds we strolled. But this was not your ordinary Mickey D's. Not a single beef product on the menu (Hindus, after all, regard our bovine friends as sacred and, thus, do not eat them). They did, to my delight, have Diet Coke and veggie burgers (a staple of mine from my days as a Wahoo) and, for the boys, many varieties of chicken burgers (including something called a Maharaja Mac). Not to mention the soft serve French fries and ketchup (which was in a self-serve pump with little cups). We all had seconds.

Ok, my writing energy has been expended for the time being. And, holy crap, I've only made it to lunchtime on Day 1. Promise more stories later...which will include, among others, our run-in with an eager Japanese tourist, riding in the krunkest rickshaw in Hampi and the bumpiest bus on the planet, and descriptions of food so delicious that it may be painful to write about it (seeing as I'll likely be going back to another potato-based meal right after).

Love, Terri

PS Temperatures are going up and the sun is shining. Woohoo! Oh, and the weather got so bad there for a while that most of the schools in Kstan CLOSED for 10 days! Getting lots of reading and hot-chocolate-drinking in.
PPS Another awkward Kstan moment: Went to the public banya (you rent it out for an hour) the other day...and somehow the wily proprietor circumvented the doorlock, came into the banya, and told my friend and me (in all our naked glory) not to use all the water. Water, I might add, that we were frigging PAYING FOR. Arghhh...but at least I'm clean!