India. January 4th. Delhi.
Sep. 30th, 2006 10:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
whathoI wake after eight uninterrupted hours, felling jet lag and three days' sleeplessness fairly impressively, but I don't wake entirely rested because what jolted me out of the jolly old dreamless was a catfight. I rush to the window and catch the tail end of a little black and white mog disappearing into next door's yard. I miss my cats – I've never spent more than three weeks away from them before – but I know I'm really not supposed to fraternise with the local mogs. The whole rabies thing.
I recall that I have a mobile 'phone: my father bought it for me a couple of weeks ago. I dash off a text, keeping one eye on the window. 'Safely in Delhi. Woke up to a catfight. There's a chipmunk outside my window and all's well here.' Then I amble off into the bathroom to have a quick shower (more of a squat under the waist-high tap, which is technically for bucket-filling but is much more likely to spew out hot water than the infinitely more temperamental shower head). I freak out momentarily on discovering that the shampoo in the little sachet is jet black but recover rapidly on discerning that it probably just contains henna.
After breakfast (the meal at which most tourists apparently rebel, and to be honest, I wasn't entirely sure where I was with most of the non-toast items on offer – the squashy red things were unsettling, but the mini dosas were grand), we pile into our rather cushy hired bus and set off on an organised tour of the city. The autorickshaws are a riot and a half, but you get a better view from the bus window and less in the way of noxious fumes in the face. We cruise through the sweeping avenues of New Delhi to begin with, Sid pointing out the prime minister's house then forgetting what every other building is and waving it off airily as something to do with the government. The first stop is India Gate, Delhi's memorial to India's war dead. It puts Marble Arch pretty much in the shade. And, impressively, it has a pelican crossing. We stroll up to it and take a few photos, but are somewhat distracted by the overwhelming number of tat-wielding hawkers. Perfectly accustomed to walking along with my eyes to the ground, I don't attract half as many as Mel, who has to resort to running. I also see snake-charmers with baskets of toothless cobras and men with dressed-up monkeys on chains, wanting people to pose with them and pay to have a photograph taken, and if that doesn't make you want to avoid looking up, I can't imagine what does.
We move on to Raj Ghat, where Gandhi was cremated. It's a small memorial with a long-burning flame set in a pretty and peaceful park. We do little there but stand and note where we are... it's more interesting to watch the awe of Delhi's own residents paying their more meaningful respects. 'Chalo,' says Sid – 'let's go' – and we move along. I quiz Sid about honorifics in Hindi. The 'o' ending to the stem of an imperative verb is sort of sufficiently polite but friendly with it: no ending at all is either intimate or brusk, 'ie' is very polite indeed and 'iega' is downright fawning. Mel spends an age taking pictures of some admittedly very prettily dressed little girls at the park entrance: their daddies patiently hold them aloft at her request.
We stop next at an undeniably over-decorated but nonetheless impressive Hindu temple: the Lakshmi Narayan Mandir. We park a hundred yards or so away from it and are followed part of the way by a tiny, stick-thin man with no legs, swinging himself about on his hands. We drop down into an underpass and he somehow navigates the stairs, keeping pace with the quickest of us. Unseen in the empty subway, breaking every rule we've been told, we slip him some money. I cannot yet grasp how we did anything approaching the wrong thing.
The temple is cool and vast and spacious. We meander fairly aimlessly from shrine to shrine, learning nothing but chatting amiably amongst ourselves and enjoying the temporary respite from the street. 'Let me bless you,' says Sid to C and Pam and myself in front of a shrine to Ganesha, and I put aside the nagging sense that you don't let yourself get blessed for the novelty of it because Pam and C have already said yes, because Sid, a Hindu, doesn't not object to my own lack of faith and because Ganesha is far and away my favourite. Sid dips his thumb and presses it to my forehead. The tikka is cold and damp and I kind of feel like everyone's looking at it, but it does make me feel oddly serene.
The final stop on the tour is the Gurudwara Bangla Sahib, which seems to be on the bustling banks of a massive trench or dry river bed or something. We leave our shoes at reception and tie orange scarves about our heads (I do it so rubbishly that the woman jumps out from behind the desk and reties it for me, huffing impatiently), then we walk barefoot a few hundred yards along the dusty lane to the temple.
The gurudwara is possibly the place of worship at which I feel most welcome. In some, I feel precisely like a tourist who ought not to be coming close to such rituals, and I do steer clear of the prayers, but in the gurudwara kitchen, where the general public is invited to come and eat if it needs so to do, I watch the others rolling out chapattis and I feel quite content. I decline to roll out a chapatti of my own, because some poor soul would have to eat it.
We leave the main building, collecting prasad en route ('In your right hand,' counselled Sid, 'with your left cupped under it so you don't look like you're begging: and chuck it if you don't want to eat it… I don't know if the fellow's washed his hands') and we cross the massive courtyard to stand on the ghats and stare at the carp in the pool. Mel's sister Jane throws her uneaten prasad into the pool. The fish appreciate it, but the man alongside her passes comment. I spot a little tabby cat streaking off into the distance and coo soppily at it till it's out of sight. 'With Mel it's little kids,' says C, 'and with you it's cats'.
Reshoed and de-scarved and en route back to the hotel, we get stuck in a traffic jam. The street that we suddenly have ample time to peruse is astonishing: I was going to refer to it as a slum, but it isn't. It's just an otherwise normal pavement covered in people – resident people – and numerous bonfires, washing lines, dogs and a handful of tents. There are about fifty of them just on the corner at which we've stopped and literally hundreds and hundreds more of them stretching to the next corner, and the next. I'm glad the windows on the coach are essentially one-way, because I'm pressed right up against it. I'm watching a ragged little girl playing with a puppy, trailing a stick for it. She's laughing, and they're awfully close to the fire. The mother, I think, watches from a few feet away, doing nothing but sitting. I want to take a photograph, but I fairly deliberately don't.
That afternoon, aiming for one extreme after the other, we auto our way back to the relentlessly modern Connaught Place. John needs caffeine to go with the nicotine tablets to which he'd been addicted for the past three years, and Connaught allegedly houses a branch of the country's coffee shop chain, Barista's. It's a fairly terrifying sight, Connaught Place: two or three massive circular roads inside one another, connected by bazaar-filled lanes, and with some fairly appallingly thick traffic. It's like a triple-sized Piccadilly Circus trapped inside a much larger Piccadilly Circus, and then the same thing again. We have our first stab at running blindly across a Delhi road with no apparent subways or pedestrian crossings (there are subways, to be fair: we just haven't found them yet). We're very good at the panicking. Dan says you just have to walk very firmly across making sharp little flicking motions with your outstretched hand. It does seem to work for him, but I think it's just his confidence pulling him through. The rest of us settle for bunching together and darting across in brief, suicidal bursts, flailing vaguely and yelping slightly for effect.
Starbucks is one of the few chains that hasn't conquered India, or even set foot in it: Barista's has too strong a hold, which is good, 'cause they're way better. I'm not yet craving good chocolate sufficiently to order despicably delicious concoctions and cakes (that's really, really going to change in a month or so), and I settle for a cup of Earl Grey tea. I love chai, but it does make your pupils dilate. The group breaks up a little and sets off in search of money-changers and internet cafes. Dan, C and I head for the latter. A man congratulates Dan on having managed to acquire two girlfriends. C and I refrain from violence. I read news and send emails and get confused at the US configured keyboards.
After the internet café, a few of us head for a local bazaar. At the end of the busy little market, which is all clothes stalls and gaudy gold trimming and too many people vying for your attention – I pledge, if I ever decide to buy anything for myself, to head straight for the one person who isn't trying to sell to me – a teenaged boy accosts Pam and does the promotional spiel for his shop round the corner. They're from Kashmir and they specialise in fine shawls and scarves and jewels. Pam's looking for scarves. I'm not looking for anything in particular
The boy leads us up a flight of stairs and into a room lined and carpeted and cushioned with plain and patterned cloth of essentially every colour in existence. It's fairly divine. He introduces us to his father, who calls for chai and seats us on a bench. The gentleman explains about the different materials, and for materials read goats, from which the scarves and shawls are made. He teaches us to pluck a thread from a silken scarf and set light to it to check if it instantly crumbles to ash, as real silk does. He passes his finest shawls – pashmina – through a little ring. The finest wool of all is shaatoosh, shorn from the throat of an ibex… but a dead ibex, he says, so they'd never stock shaatoosh. As he talks, he pulls scarves from the shelves and flings them across the floor, one after the other till a hundred or so are fanned out at our feet. We sip chai and contemplate applause. Pam begins to haggle.
The boy is laying stones out on the far side of the room. Dan, who continually addresses the boy and every other resident he meets as 'boss', turns out to be on an epic quest for a piece of lapis lazuli to set in a silver ring. I amble over and sift through the gems myself. The boy explains that the way to tell a genuine lapis lazuli, oddly, is that it doesn't buff up when you polish it. If it does, it's probably glass. He has all manner of stones, and semi-precious stones are one thing I find very hard to resist.
Pam, after a great deal of wrangling and conscience sifting, has bought two shawls: one of them is double-sided, and its name is 'Night and Day'. Dan doesn't find a piece of lapis to suit, but he's added to his education, and I come away with a tiny Kashmiri moonstone.
We're catching the night train to Jodhpur this evening. I pack up my kit and, because I can't really lift my bag without damaging myself, arrange to have the hotel store some of my university library books (I'm still doing my masters dissertation and technically shouldn't really be in India, and also wouldn't be in India is it wasn't for the generosity of the AHRB). We gather at the restaurant on the corner of Sundar Nagar about an hour before we're due at the station and, to prevent the inevitable delays that an abundance of choice tend to cause, order thalis for everyone (for the uninitiated, great big dimpled trays with different dishes in each of the dimples). All I can really say is 'oh my, the deliciousness', and also don't eat the red thing because it flays the inside of your mouth and we don't yet know if the curds are safe. Then we went next door and bought sack-loads of pistachio nuts for the journey.
The bus ride to the station is as uneventful as any bus ride where you can glance out of the window and see, yet again, a goat waiting patiently at a bus stop, till pretty much everyone on the right hand side of the bus yells 'look!' at the same time, so I do. What we are looking at, to my utter delight, is a heavily decorated elephant and a camel, likewise, strolling around a roundabout. 'But look at the height of the camel,' says someone dryly, which rather breaks the mood. The camel, at its withers (if camels have withers) looks to be about the same height as the elephant. There is a nervous silence. The unsettling height of the camel upsets us because, after we're done with Jodhpur, we're driving through the desert to Devikot, where, aside from John and the two Canadian girls, hereafter known as the sensible ones, we embark on a three day camel safari to Jaisalmer. On massive, towering camels about as big as elephants, apparently.
The station is pretty much everything I expected it to be (quite a lot of Delhi is pretty much what I expected it to be after all those years reading, but I must emphasise that this doesn't make it any less extraordinary): namely outrageously noisy and crowded, full of confused travellers and waiting porters and men who apparently don't know how rude it is to stare, and shoe-shine boys (one of whom tries gamely but fruitlessly to polish Dan's white trainers with blacking). There's also a boy selling whips, as in cats o' nine tails, which I really don't understand at all. Whips and padlocks. Padlocks makes sense, but whips? Do we really need whips on the train? Well, not knowing about the necessity of whips aside, I'm stupidly excited about the train ride, mostly because of Kim I suppose. It's just generally a very iconic and vaguely romantic if also slightly smelly thing to be doing.
We're traveling in A/C second-class. It sort of resembles a Harry Potter style corridor train but without the compartments, with three-tier bunks instead of seats and with extra two-tier bunks running lengthways along one side of the aisle. Everything is upholstered in blue plastic.
I secure the pick of the bunks: the upper tier of the two beds that run lengthways, and the only one that's permanently folded down and never in use as a seat. There are no ladders, so once I'm up I'm not inclined to get down again. The others pile into two of the facing compartment sections and begin trading stories and pistachios till nightfall. That'll maybe leave me with a bit of catching up to do, but I'm not unduly concerned. I pull out 'Carry On, Jeeves', plug Leonard Cohen into my ears and unfurl my sheets and blanket. I marvel briefly at the fact that, excited though I am by the sudden feeling of the train's rolling out of the station, I'm going to miss Delhi and that, against all expectations, I'm feeling essentially rather fond of it.
My 'phone will be no use to me once we've left this city. I send my last text for the next three weeks: 'On Indian Railways. Just pulling out of Delhi. I'll be in Jodhpur by morning.'
I recall that I have a mobile 'phone: my father bought it for me a couple of weeks ago. I dash off a text, keeping one eye on the window. 'Safely in Delhi. Woke up to a catfight. There's a chipmunk outside my window and all's well here.' Then I amble off into the bathroom to have a quick shower (more of a squat under the waist-high tap, which is technically for bucket-filling but is much more likely to spew out hot water than the infinitely more temperamental shower head). I freak out momentarily on discovering that the shampoo in the little sachet is jet black but recover rapidly on discerning that it probably just contains henna.
After breakfast (the meal at which most tourists apparently rebel, and to be honest, I wasn't entirely sure where I was with most of the non-toast items on offer – the squashy red things were unsettling, but the mini dosas were grand), we pile into our rather cushy hired bus and set off on an organised tour of the city. The autorickshaws are a riot and a half, but you get a better view from the bus window and less in the way of noxious fumes in the face. We cruise through the sweeping avenues of New Delhi to begin with, Sid pointing out the prime minister's house then forgetting what every other building is and waving it off airily as something to do with the government. The first stop is India Gate, Delhi's memorial to India's war dead. It puts Marble Arch pretty much in the shade. And, impressively, it has a pelican crossing. We stroll up to it and take a few photos, but are somewhat distracted by the overwhelming number of tat-wielding hawkers. Perfectly accustomed to walking along with my eyes to the ground, I don't attract half as many as Mel, who has to resort to running. I also see snake-charmers with baskets of toothless cobras and men with dressed-up monkeys on chains, wanting people to pose with them and pay to have a photograph taken, and if that doesn't make you want to avoid looking up, I can't imagine what does.
We move on to Raj Ghat, where Gandhi was cremated. It's a small memorial with a long-burning flame set in a pretty and peaceful park. We do little there but stand and note where we are... it's more interesting to watch the awe of Delhi's own residents paying their more meaningful respects. 'Chalo,' says Sid – 'let's go' – and we move along. I quiz Sid about honorifics in Hindi. The 'o' ending to the stem of an imperative verb is sort of sufficiently polite but friendly with it: no ending at all is either intimate or brusk, 'ie' is very polite indeed and 'iega' is downright fawning. Mel spends an age taking pictures of some admittedly very prettily dressed little girls at the park entrance: their daddies patiently hold them aloft at her request.
We stop next at an undeniably over-decorated but nonetheless impressive Hindu temple: the Lakshmi Narayan Mandir. We park a hundred yards or so away from it and are followed part of the way by a tiny, stick-thin man with no legs, swinging himself about on his hands. We drop down into an underpass and he somehow navigates the stairs, keeping pace with the quickest of us. Unseen in the empty subway, breaking every rule we've been told, we slip him some money. I cannot yet grasp how we did anything approaching the wrong thing.
The temple is cool and vast and spacious. We meander fairly aimlessly from shrine to shrine, learning nothing but chatting amiably amongst ourselves and enjoying the temporary respite from the street. 'Let me bless you,' says Sid to C and Pam and myself in front of a shrine to Ganesha, and I put aside the nagging sense that you don't let yourself get blessed for the novelty of it because Pam and C have already said yes, because Sid, a Hindu, doesn't not object to my own lack of faith and because Ganesha is far and away my favourite. Sid dips his thumb and presses it to my forehead. The tikka is cold and damp and I kind of feel like everyone's looking at it, but it does make me feel oddly serene.
The final stop on the tour is the Gurudwara Bangla Sahib, which seems to be on the bustling banks of a massive trench or dry river bed or something. We leave our shoes at reception and tie orange scarves about our heads (I do it so rubbishly that the woman jumps out from behind the desk and reties it for me, huffing impatiently), then we walk barefoot a few hundred yards along the dusty lane to the temple.
The gurudwara is possibly the place of worship at which I feel most welcome. In some, I feel precisely like a tourist who ought not to be coming close to such rituals, and I do steer clear of the prayers, but in the gurudwara kitchen, where the general public is invited to come and eat if it needs so to do, I watch the others rolling out chapattis and I feel quite content. I decline to roll out a chapatti of my own, because some poor soul would have to eat it.
We leave the main building, collecting prasad en route ('In your right hand,' counselled Sid, 'with your left cupped under it so you don't look like you're begging: and chuck it if you don't want to eat it… I don't know if the fellow's washed his hands') and we cross the massive courtyard to stand on the ghats and stare at the carp in the pool. Mel's sister Jane throws her uneaten prasad into the pool. The fish appreciate it, but the man alongside her passes comment. I spot a little tabby cat streaking off into the distance and coo soppily at it till it's out of sight. 'With Mel it's little kids,' says C, 'and with you it's cats'.
Reshoed and de-scarved and en route back to the hotel, we get stuck in a traffic jam. The street that we suddenly have ample time to peruse is astonishing: I was going to refer to it as a slum, but it isn't. It's just an otherwise normal pavement covered in people – resident people – and numerous bonfires, washing lines, dogs and a handful of tents. There are about fifty of them just on the corner at which we've stopped and literally hundreds and hundreds more of them stretching to the next corner, and the next. I'm glad the windows on the coach are essentially one-way, because I'm pressed right up against it. I'm watching a ragged little girl playing with a puppy, trailing a stick for it. She's laughing, and they're awfully close to the fire. The mother, I think, watches from a few feet away, doing nothing but sitting. I want to take a photograph, but I fairly deliberately don't.
That afternoon, aiming for one extreme after the other, we auto our way back to the relentlessly modern Connaught Place. John needs caffeine to go with the nicotine tablets to which he'd been addicted for the past three years, and Connaught allegedly houses a branch of the country's coffee shop chain, Barista's. It's a fairly terrifying sight, Connaught Place: two or three massive circular roads inside one another, connected by bazaar-filled lanes, and with some fairly appallingly thick traffic. It's like a triple-sized Piccadilly Circus trapped inside a much larger Piccadilly Circus, and then the same thing again. We have our first stab at running blindly across a Delhi road with no apparent subways or pedestrian crossings (there are subways, to be fair: we just haven't found them yet). We're very good at the panicking. Dan says you just have to walk very firmly across making sharp little flicking motions with your outstretched hand. It does seem to work for him, but I think it's just his confidence pulling him through. The rest of us settle for bunching together and darting across in brief, suicidal bursts, flailing vaguely and yelping slightly for effect.
Starbucks is one of the few chains that hasn't conquered India, or even set foot in it: Barista's has too strong a hold, which is good, 'cause they're way better. I'm not yet craving good chocolate sufficiently to order despicably delicious concoctions and cakes (that's really, really going to change in a month or so), and I settle for a cup of Earl Grey tea. I love chai, but it does make your pupils dilate. The group breaks up a little and sets off in search of money-changers and internet cafes. Dan, C and I head for the latter. A man congratulates Dan on having managed to acquire two girlfriends. C and I refrain from violence. I read news and send emails and get confused at the US configured keyboards.
After the internet café, a few of us head for a local bazaar. At the end of the busy little market, which is all clothes stalls and gaudy gold trimming and too many people vying for your attention – I pledge, if I ever decide to buy anything for myself, to head straight for the one person who isn't trying to sell to me – a teenaged boy accosts Pam and does the promotional spiel for his shop round the corner. They're from Kashmir and they specialise in fine shawls and scarves and jewels. Pam's looking for scarves. I'm not looking for anything in particular
The boy leads us up a flight of stairs and into a room lined and carpeted and cushioned with plain and patterned cloth of essentially every colour in existence. It's fairly divine. He introduces us to his father, who calls for chai and seats us on a bench. The gentleman explains about the different materials, and for materials read goats, from which the scarves and shawls are made. He teaches us to pluck a thread from a silken scarf and set light to it to check if it instantly crumbles to ash, as real silk does. He passes his finest shawls – pashmina – through a little ring. The finest wool of all is shaatoosh, shorn from the throat of an ibex… but a dead ibex, he says, so they'd never stock shaatoosh. As he talks, he pulls scarves from the shelves and flings them across the floor, one after the other till a hundred or so are fanned out at our feet. We sip chai and contemplate applause. Pam begins to haggle.
The boy is laying stones out on the far side of the room. Dan, who continually addresses the boy and every other resident he meets as 'boss', turns out to be on an epic quest for a piece of lapis lazuli to set in a silver ring. I amble over and sift through the gems myself. The boy explains that the way to tell a genuine lapis lazuli, oddly, is that it doesn't buff up when you polish it. If it does, it's probably glass. He has all manner of stones, and semi-precious stones are one thing I find very hard to resist.
Pam, after a great deal of wrangling and conscience sifting, has bought two shawls: one of them is double-sided, and its name is 'Night and Day'. Dan doesn't find a piece of lapis to suit, but he's added to his education, and I come away with a tiny Kashmiri moonstone.
We're catching the night train to Jodhpur this evening. I pack up my kit and, because I can't really lift my bag without damaging myself, arrange to have the hotel store some of my university library books (I'm still doing my masters dissertation and technically shouldn't really be in India, and also wouldn't be in India is it wasn't for the generosity of the AHRB). We gather at the restaurant on the corner of Sundar Nagar about an hour before we're due at the station and, to prevent the inevitable delays that an abundance of choice tend to cause, order thalis for everyone (for the uninitiated, great big dimpled trays with different dishes in each of the dimples). All I can really say is 'oh my, the deliciousness', and also don't eat the red thing because it flays the inside of your mouth and we don't yet know if the curds are safe. Then we went next door and bought sack-loads of pistachio nuts for the journey.
The bus ride to the station is as uneventful as any bus ride where you can glance out of the window and see, yet again, a goat waiting patiently at a bus stop, till pretty much everyone on the right hand side of the bus yells 'look!' at the same time, so I do. What we are looking at, to my utter delight, is a heavily decorated elephant and a camel, likewise, strolling around a roundabout. 'But look at the height of the camel,' says someone dryly, which rather breaks the mood. The camel, at its withers (if camels have withers) looks to be about the same height as the elephant. There is a nervous silence. The unsettling height of the camel upsets us because, after we're done with Jodhpur, we're driving through the desert to Devikot, where, aside from John and the two Canadian girls, hereafter known as the sensible ones, we embark on a three day camel safari to Jaisalmer. On massive, towering camels about as big as elephants, apparently.
The station is pretty much everything I expected it to be (quite a lot of Delhi is pretty much what I expected it to be after all those years reading, but I must emphasise that this doesn't make it any less extraordinary): namely outrageously noisy and crowded, full of confused travellers and waiting porters and men who apparently don't know how rude it is to stare, and shoe-shine boys (one of whom tries gamely but fruitlessly to polish Dan's white trainers with blacking). There's also a boy selling whips, as in cats o' nine tails, which I really don't understand at all. Whips and padlocks. Padlocks makes sense, but whips? Do we really need whips on the train? Well, not knowing about the necessity of whips aside, I'm stupidly excited about the train ride, mostly because of Kim I suppose. It's just generally a very iconic and vaguely romantic if also slightly smelly thing to be doing.
We're traveling in A/C second-class. It sort of resembles a Harry Potter style corridor train but without the compartments, with three-tier bunks instead of seats and with extra two-tier bunks running lengthways along one side of the aisle. Everything is upholstered in blue plastic.
I secure the pick of the bunks: the upper tier of the two beds that run lengthways, and the only one that's permanently folded down and never in use as a seat. There are no ladders, so once I'm up I'm not inclined to get down again. The others pile into two of the facing compartment sections and begin trading stories and pistachios till nightfall. That'll maybe leave me with a bit of catching up to do, but I'm not unduly concerned. I pull out 'Carry On, Jeeves', plug Leonard Cohen into my ears and unfurl my sheets and blanket. I marvel briefly at the fact that, excited though I am by the sudden feeling of the train's rolling out of the station, I'm going to miss Delhi and that, against all expectations, I'm feeling essentially rather fond of it.
My 'phone will be no use to me once we've left this city. I send my last text for the next three weeks: 'On Indian Railways. Just pulling out of Delhi. I'll be in Jodhpur by morning.'
