Swimming alone in a sea of India’s billion
By scott.poniewaz | September 27, 2009
The view of the Friday night market from my apartment balcony. West Patel Nagar, New Delhi, India.
The breeze sweeps across my balcony as pigeons raid a deserted fourth floor apartment’s kitchen across the street. The 110-degree heat creates a film of sweat that never seems to evaporate from my skin and the incessant honking ceases only at 11 pm when the stores close their steel gates, the police put up the neighborhood road blocks, and the ice cream and food carts cycle off into the darkness of the Delhi night. Women in saris and salwar kameez make their way through the whirling traffic carrying schoolbooks, while men sit sidesaddle on parked motorbikes smoking bedis in undershirts and jeans. It has been a couple days since I have wandered out of my neighborhood and its been almost a week since I last saw another white person in my West Patel Nagar neighborhood.
I’ve been pent up in my third floor apartment with the windows open, the cooler whirling (a cooler is an inexpensive and less effective version of air conditioning), and my fans buzzing, while I hunker down behind a laptop to complete the work I need to finish. I typically take a mid-day break to head to the nearby Flavours, a local ice cream parlor and Indian-style burger shop with 15 rupee veg burgers (that’s about 30 cents) and a variety of ice cream flavors, the south Indian food place below me, or the chowmein joint that serves up a great bowl of chili garlic noodles.
On hot days, there isn’t a more perfect combination than a spicy thali accompanied by a plate of chilies to help my body’s natural air conditioning kick in. The paneer masala and mixed vegetables get mopped up with chapati while I nibble my way down a green chili. The flies and dust cycle in and out from the streets, while a fan, circa 1956, makes its rotations on the wall above me. I can hear the slapping of chapati coming from the kitchen as the cook tosses dough back and forth between his palms before rolling it out on the table in a disc shape and tossing it in a dry pan to cook. The salt from the sweat rolling off his nose adds an extra hint of sodium. Chapati is a flatbread made simply with water, salt and flour and in India, accompanies almost every meal along with some rice. There are variations such as parantha, which is stuffed and cooked with oils, or naan, which is cooked in a tandoori oven and is more bit crispier and airy, while the prior are dense like a tortilla, but chapati and roti are easy and affordable for any Indian budget.
Most hot days I yearn for that standard Indian thali, which also puts me into nap mood afterwards, so today I opt for a dosa at the shop below me. A Delhi native who studied in Calicut in Kerala, then returned home after his four years there runs it. He met his wife at college, who is from the south, and just recently decided to open the shop. In my broken Hindi, I say to the man, “Mae paneer dosa khana chata hung, aur mae ek Dew pina chata hung.”
“What do you want?” he responds.
“Paneer dosa and a Dew (short for Mountain Dew).”
“Tikka,” which translates to ‘okay,’ he says with a slight tip of the head.
The head bobble, is notorious for stirring up discussion among foreign tourists that are fresh off the boat. It can mean many things, including, yes, no, maybe, and a deal sealer in the way a handshake works in a western negotiation. It confuses foreigners to no end on their first trip here and is the topic of just about any conversation that occurs in the rooftop restaurants of Paharganj, a popular backpacker area in Delhi. The backpackers sip their cups of steaming chai or their not-so-discretely disguised cups of ‘chai’ the restaurants serve that aren’t on the menu.
Paharganj has a collection of restaurant-cum-bar setups, where they aren’t legally able to serve beer due to the difficulty obtaining a liquor license, so instead they serve special chai, which is typically a Kingfisher (of the strong variety, more bang for your rupee), served in a tea pot. As the night continues on, more and more of these pots of chai appear on tables across restaurants and the crowds become slightly more wound up, meaning any honest policeman in the city would either be so oblivious, or like most underpaid policemen, just turns a blind eye and reaps the benefit of a “security bonus” from the restaurant.
As those tables loosen their tongues a bit more, you’ll hear one table of Americans say, “I don’t understand that head bobble thing, I can never tell if they are saying yes or no!”
Their travel partners will respond loudly, “Oh, I know! I just don’t get it!”
Then the table next to them, maybe Europeans, will overhear it and add their commentary,
“You think so too? The first time I tried to get a rickshaw, I couldn’t tell if he would take me for the price I asked.”
Then they’ll all compare their head bobbles with one another, as if to prove they are a more sophisticated traveler through India, and laughter ensues. I’ve stopped trying to speak during these conversations when I find myself surrounded by one in Cochin, Delhi, Varanasi, or any point in between. I wait to see where the natural course of the dialog goes, only to be able to say to myself, “I knew it,” as they finish up trying to figure out how much each is paying for their $2-a-night bedbug infested guesthouse, what a train ticket to their next destination should cost, or whether the trip to Rishikesh is advisable.
A couple of months have passed since I wrote the above paragraphs and I have since traveled back to Madison, WI for a couple months and have just returned back to India for the next two months. The first couple nights I spent in my old Karol Bagh neighborhood, where so many people recognize me as I walk down the street, its amazing that this city is nearly 16 million people. The stationary shop owner waves and gives a smile as I walk to lunch at the “Tina Restaurant” that I’ve written about before as having the dosa’s that dreams are made of (click here for the post “Identifying with India”). When I walk in, the young boy that I can’t tell if he’s 14 or 24 gives a wide, toothy smile, salutes me and says “Hello again, Sir,” they confirm my regular order of a paneer dosa and a coke, then I confirm, like those months I was gone never even existed. I can’t remember how many times I’ve heard him get yelled at or even slapped by the wife of the owner in the back, yet he still comes back out with a smile and a red cheek.
After I finish my lunch, I walk into the small shop on my street that I always recharge my phone at and the owner quickly asks, “Any money to exchange today?” and I shake my head and say, “Just a recharge today.”
“350, full talk time, you want?” he asks.
“Two recharges then, please,” I respond. The phone companies run schemes where you recharge at some amounts where you get the full amount of minutes you pay for, while at other times you get about 10% less than what you pay for, and he always knows whatever the amount, I’ll always take the full talk time, as it will get used.
I hear the infamous Nokia text message beep that the recharge is confirmed on his phone, then seconds later a confirmation arrives to mine, I bid him a good day and walk down the street to the hotel with 700 rupees of talk time on my phone.
My Hindi still is far from fluent, and my white skin is far from blending into the Indian streets, but it is funny how living away from tourists allows for a sense of calm in what is otherwise a world of chaos for foreigners. While occasionally hassled here and there, for the most part, most Indians can now sense that this isn’t my first rodeo.
Just when you believe that, however, a surprise will come your way and catch you completely off guard. Upon entering India on this trip, the Indian immigration official reminded me that:
a) He could no longer read on the front that my passport was from the United States and maybe it was time to get a new one.
b) I needed to get more pages in my passport, as there was barely room for another stamp, despite the fact that I’ve already added extra sets of pages to it.
So Thursday took me to the USA Embassy compound that takes up a few blocks of Shanti Path, where most of the embassies are located. After calling around 11:30 am and being told they close at 1, then are closed Friday and Monday for Indian holidays, I rushed over in a rickshaw, where the driver was oblivious to my urgency of getting there before it closed and didn’t necessarily care that I didn’t need to know about the park he calls “Lovers Park,” where all the couples go to “make kisses.” I also didn’t care to slow down and be passed on the Outer Ring to have him laugh as he quizzed me on my lackluster Hindi skills, or beg me for a job that would take him to America.
I was on a mission, and upon reaching the Embassy, I got through the security channels of the fortressed compound with about 20 minutes to spare and they told me the computer systems were down and would most likely stay down. The woman behind the glass window told me I should get a new passport, to which I agreed, but explained I’m not back to the US for awhile and she pointed out the obvious that you couldn’t read the front anymore, to which I agreed, and she said, “Well, you can leave it until Tuesday and pick it up then, or you can come back then and hope the systems work again.”
Defeated, I slid the tattered passport back into my pocket, left the embassy, then trudged down the road to where I met my same rickshaw driver who had agreed to wait to drive me back. As we’re driving back, the man steering the ship started asking me if I had many friends in India? What I think of Indian ladies? What do I think of India? Am I married? The standard questions really. Then out of his back pocket, a question catches me off guard,
“You like to go sword stabbing?”
“What?” I ask in a very confused manner, already frustrated by what amounted to two wasted hours of the day.
“Yes, you know, by Jaypee Hotel and the Metro stop there, you can go stab women with the sword.”
First off, near the Jaypee Hotel that I think he’s talking about, it’s a good middle class neighborhood area, right next to a new hospital, there’s even a McDonalds with delivery right near there. He is either confusing his English words, or there is a misunderstanding, and at this point, I’m not sure which direction to take this conversation, so I just look out the rickshaw trying to determine what the correct response is, but can just think of the literal meaning of his question. He realizes my thinking is only literal at this moment, and I am confused.
He turns back to me, takes his hands off the handlebars in 40 mile per hour traffic, makes an in and out motion with his left thumb and forefinger in an ‘O’ shape and sticking a finger on his right hand into the hole, “You say you like woman, but you are not married, you can stab the woman for 500 Rupees (US$10) and make you a happy man.”
The wave of clarity suddenly crashes over me and I laugh, then I realize he doesn’t, and he isn’t joking.
“We can both go, it is okay, you can choose beautiful woman from all over the world, same price.”
This is a common offering from the Thailand tuk-tuk drivers, who are more than willing to show you their assortment of pamphlets with a shit-eating grin that advertise more-than-a-bath-house ‘bath houses,’ ping pong shows that don’t involve a ping pong table, or massage parlors that aren’t exactly going to give you a massage. It is one of those brush it off easy in Thailand situations, but I’ve never had it happen in India and the man won’t drop it. He wants to go himself, and wants me to foot the bill for he and I to go and won’t take my repeated no’s for an answer. He can’t understand why at 2 in the afternoon in seemingly 120 degree, exhaust-filled Delhi city heat, the last thing I want to do is go with him to an Indian whorehouse.
Despite his pressures, I managed to finally make him realize that I wasn’t going to go “sword stabbing” with him and all I really wanted to do was get back to the comfort of my air conditioned hotel room and finish my work for the day, so I could hopefully, finally rid my body of a lingering case of jetlag. The conversation stopped after his pleas for a visit to the seedy underground of Delhi, and as we pulled back on to the block 7A of WEA, he turned back and said, “Your name is Scott and I am?”
“Santoosh,” I replied, as we had covered this on our ride to the Embassy what seemed like a lifetime ago.
“Yes, sir, I am Santoosh, and you and I are good friends.”
With a bobble of my head that neither confirmed a yes, nor denied him the answer he was looking for, I handed him the 200 Rupees and walked back into my hotel realizing I will always be somewhere at the crossroads in this unpredictable country no matter how well I begin to think I understand it.
Topics: Uncategorized, General, Thailand, India |
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