Dispatches from India 1: First Impressions

(Usha Alexander's periodic musings on her life in India. She moved there in mid-2013.)

        Jamun sold in Old Delhi

So here I am living in Gurgaon for the last four months. We arrived in the hottest days of the year and to summer’s sweet deluge of fruits—mangos, lychees, jamun, watermelon—which we enjoyed daily. Within three days of arrival, we found a furnished rental with adequate water and power backup, and we lucked upon the services of an excellent cook and a cleaning woman, both recent migrants from West Bengal. We soon identified some take-out places, a barber, dairy outlet, and other services in the small bazaar two streets over. And we found a gleaming mall with a modern gym, theater, grocery stores, bookstores, and electronics, just a 15-minute walk from our door, across lots filled with cows, stray dogs, mansions, and shanties.

       Our local bazaar

In our earliest weeks, we spent a lot of time reconnecting with old friends and family in the area. We had to relearn how to get around Gurgaon, which has reconfigured itself in the grand makeover this so-called Millennium City has undergone during the seven years since our previous stay here. Most of these changes have been very useful, from our perspective: the completion of the Delhi Metro line serving Gurgaon; the impending completion of Gurgaon’s own Rapid Metro; improved roads (apart from those still under reconstruction); and the easy availability of familiar international products, like fresh basil and avocados in the grocery store, and hummus and falafel takeaway. So in many respects, our landing has been soft and picking up new rhythms of life has been easy.

       Our street

The most difficult part was the fair amount of officialdom and red tape to untangle, which Namit took on single-handedly. I was useless in these tasks, being both unable to drive and unsure with my Hindi, let alone entirely ignorant about how these things work in India. So armed with his parents’ insider advice, Namit made his way around to the various agencies and businesses to set things up, including health insurance, phone and internet service, cooking gas permit, electrical billing, ID cards, police verification, tax filing, bank accounts, and other essential mundanities. None of these things are to be had as straightforwardly as in the States: one must produce official documents, various proofs of identity and residency, forms in triplicate procured from one office and stamped by the clerks in another, multiple properly framed and sized headshots, and the names of dead ancestors. All this for a cylinder of propane for the kitchen.

Veggies at our farmer's market

The adjustment might have been more difficult, though. Happily, we have no children, which means, among other things, we aren’t agonizing about their health with each sip of water and every mosquito bite, nor are we selecting schools and private tutors to ensure the right college admissions, as we see other middle-class parents doing. This alone collapses our risks and costs immeasurably and increases our freedom. Just as much, we are fortunate to not have to seek conventional employment—provided we live modestly—which means we avoid the grind of daily commutes, workaday insults, and the weariness of mounting the career ladder. The upwardly mobile, family-oriented lifestyle emerging in India seems even more of a rat-race than it is in the US, and a good part of our secret to gladness in being here is that we are not pursuing it.

Instead, we have come with the hope of taking advantage of what India perhaps uniquely offers: regular encounters with the self and the other, across almost every dimension of experience. India at its best is both confrontational and abundantly flowing with experiences. It challenges and feeds the heart and the intellect at once. It is an excellent place to learn to pay attention, if one can afford it. But more about this as it comes; here I am about first impressions.

   Wild peacock in a New Delhi park

We were prepared for the heat, but it was much hotter than our previous two summers in Delhi. During our first month here, temperatures daily exceeded 105º F, up to 115º F. So we relished the monsoons when they came, increasing in frequency and itensity through July and August. Breezes would rise, the clouds mercifully block the glaring sun, and the rain arrive with riveting thunder. Afterward, the air would be clear and charged and brilliant. Often, too, the roads would flood, causing traffic to tangle and slosh over new potholes and old mud.

I’m sure I’ve never seen a city with more birds. Mynahs and parrots, sparrows and crows. Pigeons, of course, and many other species I can’t name. They sing constantly and enliven the streets with their color and movement. They also leave their crap on every surface.

Our neighborhood from above

Their plentiful presence here might have something to do with the amount of greenery that gushes up exuberantly throughout the city, even in the dry season. Not only compared to other metros in India, but compared to any of the overlarge cities in the world, I’d wager greater Delhi is among the prettiest for its verdure. And in our little enclave, most neighbors are devoted to their trees or their balconies and lots crowded with potted plants, haphazard and lush. But plants grow even where one wishes they wouldn’t, from the cracks in a rooftop or the side of a building. 

Then of course, there are the monkeys, amusing and adorable (from a safe distance). They move through every few weeks in large bands, ranging about the rooftops in the mornings and evenings in search of food or adventure, it’s not clear what. As they pass, they wreak havoc as a matter of course, flinging pots or clothes or whatever catches their momentary interest, tearing open trash bags, uncovering rooftop water tanks. For the most part, people have learned not to leave things on the rooftops and batten down their water tank lids, but one can’t always be careful. And sometimes the monkeys come down even to individual balconies and compound walls.

         Monkeys on our street

All the plants, the birds, the monkeys, the loitering cows, stray dogs, wild boars, and feral cats, preserve a whiff of wilderness, a remembrance of disorderly nature within this fully urbanized zone. This is something completely absent in the ordered cities of the West. Here is a daily exchange with chaos, as its tentacles seek to pull apart all that you have built, to muck up all that you have neatly tended. Here is a constant conciliation with uncivilizable agents. Traffic cannot flow smoothly not only because people drive disastrously, but because one must make way for the animals, who take no heed of safe crossings or the difference between the middle of the road and the side of it, when divining the perfect spot for a nap. For the most part, these animals are not sweet and compliant pets, but executors of their own agendas, having no regard for ours. Yet there is no cultural idea that this nature will be finally conquered, rather that space must be left for it, that this negotiation will always continue. And while nature can be exasperating and even dangerous, it’s also completely enchanting; it not only enlivens the urban environment but purposefully contradicts it, like Shiva wagging his finger at young Murugan, full of his own power.

Cows on our walk to the mall

But there seems another side to this urban disorderliness, which is the trash and rubble that invariably clot Indian pavements and open spaces. Though no one dares to say it, I suspect India is the filthiest country in the world in terms of on-the-ground waste, and this is among the first things a foreign visitor will notice. While there has been some improvement in this regard over the past two decades—and this despite a whopping increase (nearly 25%) in the population—there is no discernible change to the essential dynamics of the way it happens, the way it does or does not figure into urban sensibilities.

Yet just when one shakes their head with hopelessness about the matter, a clean space appears! Many gardens and parks are reasonably free of waste. In the Metro, no one drops anything, nor even spits. It’s as though, being in a clean space, people behave with care, but once on the grimy streets, everyone returns to their most careless selves. Perhaps it is another face of this uniquely Indian negotiation with chaos that allows Indians to tolerate disorder and disruption from the human horde (including themselves) the same way they tolerate it from natural agents. If that is so, it is a sad thing, for to change one might require the other to change also.

In any case, for now I am trying not to look down at the trash, but to look up at the flowering trees and soaring raptors, at the green flash of parrots against the red sandstone and the simians leaping about the skyline.

Parrot on a ruin by the Qutub Minar

(Read Dispatches from India 2: On Hiring Domestic Help in India.)

Comments

[Sumant Rawat]

Great description of the daily contradictions and messiness that is life in Delhi. I hope you write a piece on the Humayun tomb, Sunder Nursery Nizamuddin area that is being redone into a large park.I look forward to reading more posts on the charming frustration that is Delhi.

[Namit]

JM Coetzee made similar observations about animals in public spaces in India. They appear in the following letter he wrote to Paul Auster, which appears in a recently published collection of their letters to each other, Here and Now. This was Coetzee's first visit to India.

Dear Paul,

I’ve been wanting to write to you about India, but then thought I ought to let enough time pass for my thoughts to settle and perhaps grow more mature, more interesting. Now I find that they aren’t growing at all, merely settling, so there is no reason for procrastinating any longer.

I was invited to the Jaipur literary festival, which I thought I would use as an entrée to a tour, if not of India then at least of Rajasthan. If Rajasthan worked, I thought, I might at some future date explore another part of the country, perhaps Kerala, with a little more confidence.

About the Jaipur festival I had mixed feelings. I had heard it was large and noisy, which didn’t recommend it to me. On the other hand, there would surely be sympathetic souls there, Indian and foreign, and I would have time to consult with them about good and bad, advisable and inadvisable, ways of seeing the country.

I don’t think I distinguished myself at the festival. I was determined not to subject myself to the rounds of public questioning that have become a standard feature of festivals nowadays. Interrogation is not a medium I do well in. I am too brief in my responses, where brevity (clippedness) is all too easily misread as a sign of irritation or anger. So I announced that I was simply going to read a piece of fiction. This was what I did. The fiction wasn’t amusing (it was about life and death and the soul), so it was probably a bad choice for that kind of occasion. The audience response: respectful but puzzled.

Anyway, after five days the festival was over and I had gathered no particular wisdom from sporadic conversations about how to approach India. Worse, I had picked up a low fever which left me feeling lethargic most of the time.

So Dorothy and I set off on a one-week, fixed-price tour of Rajasthan in a car with a driver named Rakesh. Rakesh drove us from Jaipur to Pushkar to Jodhpur to Udaipur to Bundi and back to Jaipur, and when the tour was over put us on a plane out of the country.

I suppose I could at this point list the sights along the way that made an impression on me. But I suspect you will want more from a letter than that. So I will limit myself to two observations on what I saw, and then perhaps reflect on the question of why I am such a poor reporter, not only on India but on all of life.

My first observation was that this was the first country I had visited where human beings and animals seem to have worked out a decent modus vivendi. The range of animal species I actually observed was limited— cows, pigs, dogs, monkeys— but I have no reason to think that only these animals are accepted into the human sphere. I saw no sign of cruel treatment, no sign even of impatience, though the cows wander in among the very busy traffic and hold people up.

It is commonplace that cows are worshipped in India. But worship seems to me the wrong word. Relations between people and animals are much more mundane than that: a simple tolerance and acceptance of an animal’s way of being, even when it intrudes among men.

Behind this observation lies my experience in Africa, where animals are also omnipresent but where an unthinking cruelty toward them is common, an attitude of contempt toward them as a lower form of life.

My other observation concerns poverty, and again the contrast with Africa was at the back of my mind. “The poor” in India do indeed seem to be living perilously close to subsistence level, to be scraping a bare existence from day to day. But the more I saw of this bare existence, the more I was impressed by the reservoir of practical skills people were drawing on, as well as by their sheer industriousness. Whether one was looking at men chipping building blocks out of quarried sandstone or at vendors preparing food at the roadside, these were dextrous people with what I can only call intelligent hands who, in another kind of economic setup, could be prosperous artisans. In other words, there seemed to me to be vast human resources that are only very partially tapped at present.

And now we come to the observer himself, the man who emerges from a two-week immersion in a foreign culture (and a foreign civilization) with nothing to show for it save a handful of trite and rather abstract observations. Why am I incapable of travel writing in all its splendor— of the vivid evocation of strange sights and sounds? I know you will say, “But surely you are in good company. Where are the vivid evocations of strange sights and sounds in Kafka? Where are they in Beckett?” But is it good enough to rely on that kind of consolation? Isn’t it plain old inadequacy that one is exhibiting— an inadequate response to the beauty and generosity of the world? What is praiseworthy in trying to turn a native poverty into a virtue?

Questions, questions.

Yours ever,
John

[Kanchhedia Chamaar]

If Mr. Coetzee wanted to observe an attitude of contempt toward a lower form of life, all he had to do was to hear the Anglophone elite talk about those who, on account of a congenital moral flaw, cannot speak English.