Well, let me tell you a bit about India. I was there in the 1980s, but there were things there then that hadn’t changed in hundreds of years, so I doubt they’ve changed much since. One thing you learn there is to be patient, whether it’s waiting two weeks to make a phone call, or dealing with the local bureaucrats who apparently hold powers of life and death over foreigners.
My experience was: if you leave India and return within a month or so, you will immediately be suspected of running drugs or other contraband, and you will need a good friend with powerful connections who can pull strings and or bribe the right people for you so you don’t wind up languishing in some Kafka-esque version of the Twilight Zone, Eastern style. Happily I was rescued by a very kind and helpful couple who ran a local travel agency.
I took Hindi in college, I could even read and write it, but it did me no good, no one speaks textbook Hindi there! There are dozens of different languages and dialects everywhere, but an amazing number of people speak English very well. And, you will find that the local tobacco-wallah, selling cigarettes from a pushcart on a street corner in any major city will have a better grasp of international politics than the average American.
People are very curious to see Westerners, be prepared to be stared at, especially if you’re a woman. I had my daughter with me at the time, she was 4, and she had a life-like little baby doll that was brown-skinned. The locals were fascinated by it, they’d see her dragging it around by one arm and feel the need to come closer to make sure it wasn’t real!
In New Delhi, people are cosmopolitan and sophisticated. Never mind the elephant parked in front of the hotel, or the water buffaloes grazing on the golf course, this is a modern city, it just works a little differently than Westerners are used to. There are lovely buildings, with lovely lawns, but the grass is cut by hand – literally, by men with little knives for the purpose. And the nearest sacred cow will be the beneficiary.
In other areas, it will behoove you to pay attention to certain modes of dress and conduct. For example, Patna, in Bihar, is a good-sized city. But if a woman goes out in public with her hair loose and uncovered, that will raise eyebrows. If a woman goes about in tight jeans, she may be considered fair game by local hoodlums, or even have rocks thrown at her by the more virtuous folk. Men and women do not touch each other in public, nor do they generally sit close together.
Whatever you do, don’t drink the water unboiled. Not even in restaurants, unless it is a 5-star kind of place. Some stores take empty bottles, fill them with local tap water, and sell it as factory bottled water. Do drink tea – I was fortunate enough to be a guest in a household where servants brought what is known as bed-tea, all you have to do is be a lazy sod and wake up and drink it. I became totally addicted to a certain tea-baron’s private reserve of Assam tea – you’ll never taste anything like it anywhere else, not once it’s been sitting in warehouses, travelling in the bowels of ships and so forth to get to our shops stateside.
And speaking of servants, that was a hard thing for me to get used to. Resist the urge to be helpful! They don’t want you messing in their domain of responsibility – it implies that you think they don’t know what they’re doing. So be polite but respect their sphere of influence. But, and I hate to say it, don’t leave things out that you can’t afford to lose, even in a private home.
You can’t imagine the level of poverty there, until you see it. Naked people lying unconscious in the streets, hovels of cardboard and sheet metal, beggars with missing limbs – limbs missing because their parents cut them off, to make better beggars of them. This is the reality.
But there is also incredible beauty. Ancient mosques, palaces, and forts, the air, with its pastel colour taken from the vastness of the place and the smoke of cooking fires, the vivid, undulating ribbons of silk saris hung out to dry from someone’s balcony, the children, with their lovely, kohl-rimmed eyes, the delicate, fine-boned women with exquisite skin and hair.
The beauty comes most unexpectedly sometimes. Once, I was upstairs in the house of a retired colonel of the Indian Army, an ex-ambassador. The house was unlike anything I’d seen before, with wide stairways, an inner courtyard open to the sky, very thick plastered walls, tall windows with wooden shutters but no glass, the ceilings must have been at least 15 feet up. The whole was surrounded by a high wall with a gate, and with good reason (that’s another story). Anyway, one day, I heard the most unearthly voice. Someone was singing outside, in a pure, perfect tone that sent chills up and down my spine, and made my heart constrict, though I didn’t understand the language. I looked out the window, and below was a blind man, who was the singer, and a little boy was acting as his eyes, leading him through the maze of walkways. The funny thing was, no one thought it was particularly special, except for me!
Next installment – beds, baths, lightning and dust storms, Holi, child slavery, and the Hijrahs, India’s answer to cross-dressing!
