The Wallflowers Of Delhi: Faulty Memory India, Part One
In which our narrator tries to come to terms with a first real trip in the most populous country on earth.
She will not break eye contact, not ever. The hotel—I have no idea what it was called; I’m not sure I even knew then—is on a road closed to traffic, but a road still somehow muddy and rutted. There’s a huge window at the front of the hotel, and from outside it’s easy to see the reception desk and this long boardroom table that’s been set up in the lobby, where I’m sitting for an orientation session of sorts. I was the first to arrive, and chose to face outward, with a view of the street. Within a few minutes of my sitting down, she walked by, her baby hanging off an exposed breast, and she turned casually as she passed to look into the hotel and saw me. She met my gaze. She still hasn’t broken it. It’s been hours.
Around me at the table are 10 or 15 tourists, mostly from the United States and Canada, and our guide Vikram is giving a long overview of the upcoming trip. I’m in Delhi. I’m 25 or something. I’ve just finished a year of teaching English in Ulsan, South Korea, and I’m spending a little bit of the money I earned on a three-week group tour of India’s Golden Triangle. I’m trying so hard to listen, to keep my eye on Vikram, but my glance keeps flitting to the street, to this woman who won’t stop staring at me.
After a couple of hours, she changes her tactic slightly, adds flourish. With her free hand she begins to express herself. She clenches her fingers together and holds them to her mouth in the universal gesture of hunger. She beckons, curling her arm in the universal gesture of come outside and give me some money. She holds up her sleeping baby, her crying baby, her nursing baby, the universal gesture for “I have a baby.” She stares, and she seems to not need to blink. Every time I look, she’s watching. Soon, I can’t stop looking. I’m transfixed, curious, helpless.
The orientation session comes to a close eventually and I’ve learned very little. I know I’m in India, and have been told about the things that we’ll do. We’ll see the smog-tarnished Taj Mahal and wander the ashy streets of Varanasi, try to see a tiger in the wild and visit the Kama Sutra temples. We’ll go to some pink city. Or maybe blue. We’ll see fortresses and temples and take long uncomfortable trains and we’ll see Diwali fireworks and get sick and get better. Something like that.
At the end of the session, Vikram starts collecting cash, a fee payable on arrival, and while I hand over a stack of rupees I glance outside and the woman’s eyes are wide and wild. She’s seen.
Vikram announces that we’re heading for dinner somewhere close by. Watch your wallets, he says. Keep your hands in your pockets. Don’t give anyone money. I want to tell him about the woman, ask what to do. Instead, I keep a cluster of rupees balled up in one hand, obeying only two-thirds of the guidelines. The group stands up, people stretch, awkward jokes are told, and we head toward the front door of the hotel.
She’s on me in a flash. That free hand is on me, poking and tapping. She doesn’t really speak, I don’t think. She murmurs. She prods me, my pocket, my chest, her fingers stabbing me to say I know you have more than me. And she’s right, so I take the balled-up hand out of my pocket and unfold it and her fingers peck at my palm and the money is gone and Vikram is suddenly there, shouting at her and shooing her away and I’m pleading halfheartedly that it’s fine, but I’m so confused and then she’s gone, hurrying down the muddy street toward the main road.
Vikram turns to me and sighs. “Sorry,” he says. For Delhi, I guess. For India? For poverty? He doesn’t elaborate.
“That’s okay,” I say. “She needed it.” I don’t say “more than I did.”
“That’s not the point,” he says, smiling but with an obscure melancholy, a faraway look.
“What’s the point?” I’m new to this and don’t know what questions to ask.
He hesitates. It’s our first night, after all. I can see whole worlds flash across his eyes. He slaps me on the back, then squeezes my shoulder. “Let’s go eat!” he says. Someone in the group cheers. No one has really noticed the interaction with the woman.
“Let’s eat,” I agree, and the tension disappears for a moment.
When we reach the main road, I see the woman and her child. She isn’t looking at me, but is holding the baby over the curb, where it empties its bowels into the open gutter. Vikram doesn’t notice. No one seems to. And so, we go to dinner.
A week or two later, I’m slapped in the face with a giant beetle. By now, I’m a different person, seeped in India, and things simply don’t surprise me the same way. The beetle, fist-sized and solid-shelled, startles me. Sure. It is not gentle. It flaps into me like a baseball moving in slow motion but with all the same hardness. It hurts a little bit. But it doesn’t really shock me in any way. I’m simply a man who has been hit in the face with a giant beetle.
Other things have changed too. I left Delhi via Agra and Jaipur and have been awed and wowed and delayed and harassed. I’ve learned to feel the rhythm of each day, to be insistent when required and patient when faced with no alternative. I’ve eaten glorious food and sipped a million cups of chai. I’ve been warned about bandits. I’ve slept in a 16th Century palace and a dodgy motel with stains on every surface. I’m getting used to the place.
The beetle comes to me in a small town whose name I’ve forgotten that sits at the edge of a dense jungle home to wild tigers: the reason we’re here. It’s little more than a strip of restaurants and some basic hotels and outfitting shops, all camo gear and hats with strings on them and binoculars and sunscreen. A service town for jungle tourism, for the tigers.
It’s dusk. Around town, these super-powered streetlights come on, fluorescent and horrible, that kind of cheap municipal fix to a problem that didn’t exist. They look like something around a major league ball diamond and totally out of place in this rural setting. The streetlights disorient the jungle wildlife, especially the bugs. Thousands of insects swarm around the lights, forming clouds so thick that the lights look like they’re fading and the street below is covered in weird jumpy shadows. One by one, restaurants on the main strip turn on their gas-powered generators for the evening dinner rush. Their sputtering drowns out the howling of monkeys and the shrieking of birds off in the jungle. In turn, shutters are raised on the row of restaurants and tourists emerge from their hotels.
Our group is led to one of these jungle-front restaurants and sits around a long table, chattering happily. The restaurants fills with our low, excited chat. It was a long drive to get here, but tomorrow we might see tigers. We’re all buzzing. Bowls of beautiful-smelling soup are brought out with piles of roti, and we dig in eagerly.
Outside, the streetlights, those false moons, are now totally covered by crawling insects and only the feeblest of light sneaks through. The restaurants have become the only source of light, and any insect not crawling on the streetlights—of which there are surely millions—start to be drawn here. The small, speedy ones arrive first, flapping or buzzing around the long fluorescent tubes hung from the ceiling. A few land on the walls and are ignored. A few land on the table and are casually brushed away onto the floor.
Then the slower flyers arrive. Like the big, fat, hard beetles.
Maybe it was trying to land on me; maybe it didn’t know I was there. I don’t take it personally. It hits me in the face and then—confused; more confused than me, surely—it falls, splashing into my bowl in a ridiculous way because it’s so big that it takes up most of the bowl. If flops around, upside down and struggling. “There’s something in your soup,” someone wisecracks, which was a funny enough joke a few days ago. It still brings little laughs and a little smile from me. There is something in my soup, to be fair. I use my spoon to fish it out and put it right-side-up on the table, where it sits stunned for a while. I push my bowl away and continue chatting. After a while the beetle is dried out enough to first walk and then fly away, back into the streetlight night. More soup is brought out but no one thinks to change my spoon.
As a group, we have—bad jokes aside—stopped paying attention to the bugs, to the heat, to the traffic jams, to the trains not arriving at the platform, to the constant humming of the lights and the rattling of the struggling air conditioners. There is a requirement to give in here, to give up a little. Some things are easy, many are not. Time carries on, you adapt quickly. This is just another minor inconvenience, another bowl of soup to be taken off the table.
I’ve never written about this trip to India before, for good and bad reasons. Good reason: like other trips from this era, the photos are long gone. (This is a shame, because India is so beautiful and colourful and friendly and is therefore a highly photogenic place, and also because I’ll depend on stock images for things like the tiger we did indeed see and the still mornings on the Ganges and the breadlines at the Sikh temple and the touching moment in a little town square when Vikram taught a stranger how to tie a turban and a thousand other lovely missing scenes.) Good reason: there is no single story of India, no unifying narrative that is often the goal of a travel story, and it has taken me a long time to see this is not necessary. Bad reason: fear. Fear of oversimplifying, of broadly generalizing, of condensing too much, of stereotyping—these are true in all acts of memory. But any writing that starts with fears and failures in mind can drift too easily into them, so I have parked those fears, if not dismissed them entirely, and will simply attempt to remember the feelings and sounds and smells of this startling trip taken so long ago to have now obtained the golden hue it deserves.
This was my first hard trip, my first culture shock, my first bout of extreme heat stroke and/or extreme food poisoning. My first true adventure. The first time I experienced, to paraphrase Matthew Arnold badly, a place that was so opposite anything I knew. This Faulty Memory series will aim to chronicle my shift from a new, wound up, and nervous traveller to young man happy when hit in the face with a giant bug.
Back to Delhi, then, to the start. It’s the second day of the trip and it’s early in the morning and it’s very quiet inside the grand mosque. The stones of its vast courtyard have been polished to shining by centuries of softly padding bare feet and are warm and comforting. Even at this early hour, the day has an irrepressible heat. Men lounge in the shady borders of the courtyard, fanning themselves with newspapers, bored and happy-looking. The tour group idles close together, a symptom of early India travel, that fear of breaking from the pack. We’re still adapting.
The walk to the mosque had been a bit harrowing. As with the previous day, leaving the hotel meant running a gauntlet where people would approach, fingers pinched in front of their mouths to show want, need, the other hand grabbing at your arm or shoulder. “Don’t make eye contact. Don’t give money. Don’t pay attention.” This was Vikram, still gently scolding me from my failed first attempt to ignore a plea for money. I found this very difficult, as did the others in the group. There was something about the physical touch that made ignoring impossible. The desperation, the panic, the hope: these too were hard to ignore. But the touch was so urgent, immediate.
Arriving anywhere after that gauntlet always required a bit of a reset. I stood quietly, feeling the warmth of the stones, growing calm and slowly starting to take in my surroundings. I’d never been to a mosque before, I don’t think. I don’t know when I would have. At this point, I had only been to Japan, Korea, and China. It just hadn’t come up.
But what a mosque to start at, the Jama Masjid. Built in that Mughal style of intricate dark stonework and playful, bulbous domes, the Jama Masjid is a pretty great representation of some of India’s 17th century architectural mastery. It’s in the same style and of the same era as Delhi’s Red Fort and, of course, of the Taj Mahal, that old number. But unlike the Taj—which during my visit was the worst kind of museum, dull and grey and too officious and orderly—the Jama Masjid is a functioning place, a part of daily life in Delhi. It was at the time home to India’s largest Friday prayer, with around 25,000 people attending.
On this quiet morning, between prayer times, it was impossible to imagine that many people squeezed into the square—yet their presence was plainly visible in the gentle grooves worn into the stone courtyard, in the unevenness of the ground, in the way the lower parts of the surrounding walls were shinier from so many centuries of bodies rubbing up against them. Above the human-smoothed courtyard, the minarets rose out of the front corners of the mosque, skinny and tall and possible to climb if you are a 17th-Century mullah or a child, but not if you’re a 21st Century Canadian. No one on the tour even tried.
We hung around the edges of the place for a while, cooling off or gathering courage or both. We were too raw, too flustered, to enjoy or understand anything. That would change within hours, but we didn’t know yet. I think we went inside the mosque and poked around a bit. We should have, if we didn’t. All I can remember was the warm stones and the safety of the fringes.
This was the first stop on a planned Trilogy of Religions Tour that day. We began at the mosque, then drifted a few streets over—dodging fingertips, a little more confident navigating the streets—to the enormous Gurdwara Bangla Sahib, a Sikh temple. Vikram had done a respectable job of explaining the tenets of Islam in our 45-minute tour of the wall of the grand mosque, but here he was in his community, his element. He was greeted by everyone, silver bracelets jangling with every handshake and hug. Our tour through the temple took hours, for this and many other good reasons.
In addition to being a place of worship, the temple was a community center and a library and a restaurant. Our tour began in the kitchen, where I lingered happily for a long while. Every day, the kitchen prepares free meals for about 10,000 people, an effort that requires dozens of volunteers. Vikram didn’t ask anyone from the group to volunteer, but the sheer joy emanating from the kitchen ensured that most of us did. I chose to work at the chapati station, sitting cross-legged with five or six others, slapping flatbreads into shape and then dusting them in mounds of flour and passing them to someone to put onto the conveyor belt of an industrial oven, where the bread would be quickly toasted to puffy perfection. Others volunteered at the curry stations, where people stood on stepladders and stirred six-foot pots with a wooden contraption that looked like a pizza board but might have, in fact, been an enormous spoon.
When all the cooking was done, the group went to the temple’s dining room, a vast space with long lines of people holding shiny tin trays. Everyone found space on the floor and was given a steaming pile of rice and a ladleful of curry and one of the chapatis I had slapped around earlier. There was a constant ruckus of clinking trays and a thousand conversations and deep booming laugher and everyone in our group was scattered and dispersed for the first time to sit amongst the friendly locals and be swallowed whole.
We stayed in the dining room for a long time after the daily eaters had emptied out, everyone in the group eventually finding Vikram by his pink turban and joining him on the floor in the center of the room. Chai was served, smiles were plastered to faces.
This was a remarkable place, we were beginning to realize. This temple, with its kitchen that runs around-the-clock to feed those in need. This city, with its pluralism and its desperation and its generosity. This country, with its billion people improbably trying to exist all at the same time.
One of the leaders of the temple came to sit with us and chat, via Vikram, about the sheer volume of work required to feed so many people every day. He spoke about the tenets of Sikhism, about the bracelet reminding devotees to act with honour each time they reached out their hands, about the bears and turbans required of men, and about the swords. The swords! Vikram, who had an eye on an acting career and a penchant for an exaggerated story and a dramatic outburst, revelled in explaining the reason that Sikhs carry swords. He was also a poor interpreter. The temple leader said a few words—two sentences at most—and Vikram translated them more-or-less as follows:
“Okay, so it goes like this. We respect everyone, as Sikhs, but many people don’t respect us. Not in India only, but all over the world. And we have our kara [the silver bracelet] to remind us not to do evil, but why do we have our swords?” (He wasn’t wearing a sword.) “We think of our swords as our last resort. That’s the best way to think of it. Do you know the expression ‘Turn the other cheek’? Well, we think like this too. If you slap my cheek, I’ll turn the other cheek. And then you can slap my other cheek, and I’ve got two cheeks so that’s fine. But what happens next? Well, I’m out of cheeks,” he said. He paused for the perfect amount of time, the high-drama amount. He pointed at the sword of the temple leader, then continued. “I’m out of cheeks, but I do have this fucking sword!”
He burst out laughing, and the rest of us followed. No one thought to ask a follow-up question, and I’ve never bothered to fact check this story. Do Sikhs indeed carry a sword as a reminder that violence awaits those who push the limits of tolerance? It would be a shame to learn otherwise, so I’ve let that knowledge take hold in my brain for nearly 20 years, where I hope it remains forever unshaken by new facts or alternative information.
When the tea was finished, the temple leader walked with me to the door of the temple, his hand resting always on my elbow. He pointed to paintings and decorations along the way and describing them to me in another language. I smiled along, nodded, laughed when he laughed, and generally ingratiated myself to him. Near the door, there was a wooden box with the silver karas that every Sikh man wore. I picked a few up and looked at them, ran my fingers over them. The man locked eyes with me, then held up a kara. “For you,” he said in English. I politely shook my head no thanks and laughed and waved the gift away. He wouldn’t be swayed, and grabbed my right hand (the do-only-good hand) firmly and started to slide the bracelet over my fingers. “That’s okay, thank you!” I said, and his grip tightened slightly. The bracelet was stuck on my pesky thumb, which he was now folding in beneath my index finger. He smiled at me and with a final push the bracelet was on my wrist. He was shaking my hand, giggling slightly. It was hard to be angry about this.
We stayed too long in the Sikh temple to make it to the final stop on the Trilogy of Religions Tour TM, a Hindu temple in the same neighbourhood. There would be other Hindu temples, Vikram promised, and instead lead us to a nearby bar for shots of Old Monk rum, an anti-food poisoning strategy he swore to. Any food made with bare hands and no running water required one to two shots of Old Monk to kill any bacteria. We performed this ablution daily.
And so, between temples and food and shots of Old Monk, a few days passed pleasantly in Delhi, a city that gets under your skin. I grew as accustomed to the constant overload of sounds and smells as it seemed possible after a few short days, and began to wander out alone, away from the group, to take photos that are now lost. I shed the fear of being a foreigner here, but never the guilt of having more. As often happens with travel in overwhelming places, just as I was starting to get used to the place, I had to leave.
***
This Faulty Memory series will be published throughout the summer and will rely on stock images because the narrator/photographer has lost all of the photos he took on this trip. New, original photography coming soon.
That was great. Loved every bit of it, especially the story about the swords.