Pierre & Wendy On the Road

Content Warning!

I must say at this point that I hoped I'd love India, and that this trip would be a fabulous adventure, but I have found out that I am a naïve Westerner, and I have been caught off guard by most of my feelings about it. I'm rather embarrassed that I can't just love it, and I know it's terribly politically incorrect to seem hard on places that don't have all of the Stuff we have at home, but that seems rather Colonial to me. I would never have come into a country where I loved the people and the life in all of it's original splendor, and tried to make it my own by making them Better while exploiting their resources for profit. 

At this point in my life I know that I treat people well, and I try to be direct and open and loyal and thoughtful in my daily life, but I'm cynical too, and this journal of my trip is a reflection of all of those things.  I am sorry that my experience is confined mostly to Delhi, and I've heard about many other parts of this huge country to visit, particularly far South and far North, that sound great.  But this is a working trip, and it is limited by my need to be here, and these notes are a reflect that limitation.  When Political Correctness was embraced by people like George Bush, it was a signal to me to try to avoid it whenever possible, without flagrantly hurting people's feelings, for I have no desire to do that, but a bracing dialogue is nice!

The bizarre nature of a blog being in a "public" space is that a bunch of strangers will hate it, but many of those who know the source will be intrigued at least.  I know I can't stand all of the blogs about what stranger's kids do from day to day, but their friends and family love it.  I wish we had an equivalent to Namaste, I feel silly using it here, but I'd like to.

Wendy Goes to India Part Three - Jodhpur

I would be lying if I didn't say here that for the first time I sure can see the appeal of being an insulated American traveling in style in the Third World.  But I think it comes with a kind of attention I simply I don't really like.  I mean I wouldn't mind the attentiveness of the handsome turbanned Mercedes van driver, it's so romantic, but I imagine that I don't like being placed that way in relation to the local people.  I say that I imagine it, because at this point, I think maybe I no longer care!  Of course just being Anglo has an effect, but I have had my principles after all ; )  I have always really wanted to be Inside the places I visit, not just Outside, which is why I don't like being a Tourist and don't like hanging out at Tourist attractions.  But maybe I want to be an Outsider here!  I fear I am turning into The Accidental Tourist.

The more I am here, the more I long for the relative simplicity, cleanliness (NYC is a hospital compared to it here), orderliness and complicity of life at Home. I have no sense of "we're all in this together" here, although natives may have it with eachother, but they play things quite close to the vest.  It didn’t occur to me that it really is Asia here, people are a bit inscrutable, and generally more communicative than other Asiatic groups.  But no one touches eachother in public here, except for children and oddly, boys and men (up to late 30's I'd say), who routinely hold hands and have their arms around eachother, as a male bonding thing, so they say in my India Culture Guidebook, as homosexuality is completely taboo, but this way they can hide in plain sight!  Click the highlighted bit for a hilarious blog by an Indian guy on this subject. 

Feeling totally up to my eyeballs in Delhi, I decided to escape for a "vacation" for a few days and chose to go to Rajastan, based solely on the fact that I had visited the Indian Trade Fair, which is a World's Fair kind of thing, mostly for regions in India, extolling the virtues, accomplishments and charms of each state.  I loved The Stuff from Rajastan, so I thought I could just go there.  I had thought of Northern India (which is everyone's most restful and sparkling choice as it turns out), but I got side tracked and forgot all about Shimla.  So I flew to Jodhpur.  The Guidebook said that it is oft overlooked in itself and simply used as a stopover to Euro Fave Jaisalmer, and that with it's Anglo past it is also neglected, and I thought I could use a bit of Anglo influence, I sure love London!

I decided to treat myself and fly there for around the price of flying to SF from LA, and also stay in a nice place, this was my Vacation after all.  The provincial airport was just as I had imagined, let's say a more arid and less Streamline Deco version of the Long Beach Airport (did I mention that Rajastan is a desert?  I forgot that too when I decided to go there!).  The streets were at first empty and rathe bleak near the airport, but got just as choked and congested as I am used to as we got into town, with even worse air since the Tuk Tuks still use diesel instead of natral gas like in Delhi.  The ride culminated in the bumpiest imaginable route through the teeming closed market instead of around it! 

I checked into a nice room in my quiet courtyard hotel that almost didn't even seem like a real business, just a place where people stay, the laissez faire attitude of the people who worked there (except for the young man who hoisted my huge suitcase onto his shoulder and walked up 4 flights!) was so pervasive.  Oddly, there are two, really three, hotels with part of the same name, two are owned by brothers in the same courtyard building, but one is fancy and one is not.  I thought I had booked into the fancy one, but I hadn't and it turns out to have been a good thing.  The fancy people were the snobbish version of laissez faire, which is much more annoying than being merely casual.  

My mint green room with cool stone floors (all stone in India comes from Rajastan) faced The Fort, not a street in sight, and I lay down for a little nap before I went out, after the heat of the day, around 5.  I hung a Louie out of the hotel, away from the impossibly busy market and tourist area, and FINALLY it happened, I experienced the charms of otherworldliness!  Wandering down a nameless street (they are all nameless, I mean they have names but there's no way of knowing what they are) I entered a world that hasn't ever changed.  Pierre and I like eating Indian, Thai, Korean and other ethnic foods that seem the way they always have been, like we are eating food at its origins.  That's how it was in the back streets of Jodhpur, and I hear it is just so in many smaller towns all over India (1,000,000 is a Small Town here).  

It's very dense, with people in little connected stalls down both sides of the street (just like you see in movies that take place in places like Jakarta, even the ones parodied by Indiana Jones), puntuated by houses, doing what they do, like soldering jewelry in the waning daylight sparked by the light of the torch, or selling candies or vegetables, and a zillion other things I don't even recognize, each stall specializing in something, selling only to locals, or making dinner or washing their kid's hair in a bowl with the door open.  I was the only stranger here, and lots of kids acknowledged me by saying hello, sometimes they put out their hand, as if to shake yours, but they don't really want to, just the gesture.  Shaking hands is a totally Anglo thing, Indians only do it because they know it's our regular practice, and to "do business" it's necessary.  All you get is the limpest of hands grasped inside yours, totally inert and vague.  Sometimes the kids run after you in groups, calling hello hello, something you see in those black and white Italian movies too, kids running after people who look so different, and it's sort of cute, but it can be sort of menacing too. 

I walked and walked and walked, knowing I was almost lost, but not too far afield.  For part of the way a girl led me on her bike until we got to her area, and I encountered one beggar, really the neighborhood simpleton asking for something, it's so hard to have small change here unless you are really living within their economy, where one rupee is actually worth something (there are about 50 rupees to a dollar).  I bought a couple of pairs of shoes from a couple who was making them right there, having to take off MY shoes and be barefoot in their messy shop (that's what I got the tetanus shot for), and hanging out with them for a while.  They spoke about ten words of english related to their metier to facilitate the deal, which culminated in my minor bargaining by writing amounts in pen on the palm of his hand.  I just can't bargain to save my life!  It's not fun for me, it's kind of like having an argument with a stranger, which I really hate.  With a friend it's different ; )

I was so happy today to be able to experience  the timelessness of being in the back streets,  it could have been a hundred years ago (ignoring the motorbikes and tuk tuks = auto rickshaws) and I was largely ignored, or simply acknowledged, no one wanted anything from me, I wasn't made to feel welcome or unwelcome, I was just taking a walk in a strange place.  And strange it is -- camels sleeping behind broken gates, or chewing or pissing in the street, oodles of roaming cows, sleeping ownerless dogs, and tethered goats, ancient edifices, all different, from crude adobe affairs to intricately latticed ones, all dilapidated. Some are painted the special blue of the city, giving way to greens and occasional pinks, both exteriors and interiors, as you can look straight into people's houses. Life is very public here, I doubt there is any of the sense we have of "privacy," so many things take place in public, even haircuts!  I learned from the Isreali guy that the blue buildings are Hindus and the green doors Muslims, there tons of temples, but the most noticeable souds are from the Muslim ones.  I love hearing the Hindu chanting, which is similar to the Buddhist's, but I couldn't find my way into any of the temples, they're kind of walled off.

I was so happy wandering and wandering, it got dark and I was exhilerated by feeling safe, after 10 days of not being able to wander in my Delhi neighborhood at dusk.  As a result I got into a little bit of a sticky situation, walking down a very dark street with a big wall on one side and closing shops on the other, and a camel and some cows lurking there in the dark, of course they aren't dangerous, just large objects in the way, and a large gang of kids started following me, grabbing and yelling, and I didn't like how it felt.  None of the adults around were intervening, as often they do when their young ones are harassing you, and I really hated it.  Then the street emptied out onto another one, and I realized I wasn't at all where I thought I was.  Luckily there was a landmark clocktower in the main market near my hotel, so I asked some friendly auto drivers, who didn't try to pester me into riding with them, and got redirected, way way far away, back down the same dark street, this time with no children in sight.  Is this becoming a boring story?  Sorry!  Anyway, it was fun and tiring and I felt I was really on an adventure for the first time since I'd left home, and that traveling was, indeed, worth it. 

Wendy Goes to India Part Two - Delhi

Everyone was impressed that I was off on this adventure to make shoes in India for a month, on my own, with only my Business Agents as connections to the entire continent.  I kept saying that I "knew I was insane," so I guess everyone thought that I had some idea of what I was in for, but I really didn't.  And I knew I didn't, I just knew that I could handle it at this moment in my life, and anyway, I'd been pursuing a way to make my shoes in India for ages, and now that I'd uncovered the opportunity, I felt I had no choice, especially with Pierre's active support. 

A couple of times in the weeks preceeding the trip, I sort of welcomed the possibility of NOT doing it, if the first samples I'd been emailed were absolutely awful or if there was an international incident, or if it turned out that it was going to be astronomically expensive for some unforseen reason, but no such luck!  Hotels in Delhi, as it turns out, are NOT inexpensive, they are at about the level of hotels in a provincial US city, like St Louis, not at all on the scale of the rupee, in which everything else is wildly inexpensive, like a subway ticket is something like 9 rupees, which would be under 20 cents.  Yes, you can stay near the railway station for $20 a night, but I've never been good at staying at those kinds of places.

I had already made a series of mental adjustments about what I was going to be able to produce here.  I could tell that my original idea about producing ornate embroidered jeweled gold-threaded shoes in India, utilizing what was, in my mind, the indigenous aesthetic of the place.  I was going to make a kind of indo-european shoe instead of the traditional indian shoes one sees everywhere, or the brittle pointy ladylike ones and gaudy sandals we see as exports, made in synthetics, for Hindus, that Indian women wear with their dressy clothes, jeans, or saris.  I was going to utilize the ancient techniques I thought that were still being used in inferior materials but in superior materials for my shoes, converted to my designs.  As they say in French, ce n'est pas evident.   

Whoops!  The aesthetic I was imagining existed in the last century, and while the general penchant for embellishment and color is, and always will be, a huge part of the culture here (no one wears black!!!) its contemporary expression is in plastic and polyester, they don't even use silk thread for embroidery, it's called "silky" thread, and there's lots of "silky" stuff because silk is "too expensive" for the mass market here.  I haven't told them that I pay upwards of $70 a yard for Indian machine-embroidered silk in the U.S.  What does it cost here?  Must get to that fabric store that was closed last time.  It makes me think of when I asked a Turkish woman to bring back a great pair of shoes from the market in her hometown for me, and she apologized when she told me that all of the footwear in the market was made in India or China, and nothing special anymore, so sad!

I met today with William Bissell, owner of the fab Fabindia company, with 15 stores across Delhi, employing 15,000 village craftspeople to make their lovely clothing and home furnishings.  By our standards they are wonderfully affordable chic-traditional and contemporary twists on the classic indian cotton and silk clathing presented in retail settings with an international tone.  He told me that he had started out working with shoemakers many years ago, and that they made traditional all-over embroidered shoes with jewels set in them, but it was at least 20 years ago, it's over now, he apologized.

I spent my whole early life feeling, and actually being, "different," and I find that I don't really enjoy being "different" while travelling, especially in this situation when it marks me as an Anglo to sell stuff to.  One of the reasons that I am so happy in France is because it is the only place I have ever been where I don't stand out, I look just like them!  I wish I were there now.  Or I wish someone were here with me, I use Pierre for motivation while traveling, he'd get me out to the local Mosque or fair or whatever, where I don't want to go alone, too much attention to fend off! 

People say that what they love about India is "the people," but in Delhi I generally find people to be rather surly, impatient and mercenary (with everyone, not just foreigners), and daily interactions are quite a struggle outside the hotel, if you are lucky to have nice staff in humble places, as I have been.  Outside the big city, in smaller towns (even 1,000,000 is a small town!), people are totally different, and it's quite a relief.

I'm completely open to meeting interesting tourists, but most of them don't seem anything like moi, they are mostly regular people out to see the world, or well heeled travelers out to consume the world, or earthy adventurers.  If the truth be told, and I could choose one of these types to be, it would be the latter, but I fear I'm Type 2, but not as insulated since I'm really not that well-heeled, so I'm ultra sensitized, really too high strung for the Third World!  So far, I have met some lovely people, an Isreali Old India Hand building a house in Jaisalmer, which he offered to me anytime, a French guy spending 6 months on walkabout for photos of craft-speople in India, and a couple of Quebequoise women on a spiritual quest.  One of them had sold everything at 50 to enact her lifelong dream of traveling around the world, but I noticed that she was only going to Asia, that was "the world" to her.  So far she had loved everything, except spicy food.  She was surprised when I told her to be careful in Thailand, she had no idea the food would be spicy there!  But she was on the trip she'd dreamt of all her life and it was working out for her, why quibble? 

Wendy Goes to India Part One - Delhi

My first third-world country just might be my last!  It probably doesn't get any more like it than my "budget" hotel neighborhood here, though I'll bet that each 3rd World location has it's very own third wordliness, with its flood of humanity, pollution and squalor, hideous lighting, whirring fans, uniformed "officials," bizarre rules, and a poor populace trying to make a buck off rich white people at every opportunity.   I miss Paris!  

When I was preparing for my trip, I had the weather for Delhi on the desktop of my computer and at night the atmosphere was simply called "Smoke," like for somewhere else it might say Cloudy or Rainy or Clear.  I figured it was an odd translation, but now that I am here, it is the only way to describe what's in the air, a mixture of a very rough kind of smog mixed with the mist that is coming in for "Winter."  It's a bit shocking, to be able to see the smog right in front of you all the time, and nothing like a blue sky ever. 

How to describe it here?  My first night, coming in a taxi from the airport at 3am, hurtling through the smoky dark on highways with trucks mostly, transporting stuff to and from the City, sometimes people or animals, with stretches of absolute nothingness, leaving me to wonder if we were indeed on our way to the city or if I might be abducted -- which I could sense wasn't the case, I just couldn't help it popping into my head!  Arriving in "my" section of the city, Karol Bagh, from the back, as it turns out, the least scenic route and the one guaranteed to get my driver quite lost, as our directions were from the main access route (as well as in English, which he didn't speak).  Had we entered from the great Hanuman sculpture -- a huge painted representation of the orange elephant/man deity, I might have been less dismayed about the area, but all it looked like was a sprawling 3 story crumbling shanty town with wandering dogs and cows, big pools of I don't know what, wires everywhere, and places that not only looked closed at 3am, but maybe closed forever, with no one in the streets but some hovering auto rickshaw drivers who had no idea which streets were within 6 blocks of their posts.

I passed a miserable first night, or early morning, having gotten in at 4:30 or so, with a terrible smell of camphor whose source I traced to the bathroom with mothballs in all of the drains to kill what is in the water, eww. Outside barking dogs and intermittent fireworks punctuated every five minutes it seemed, until they gave way to the early morning traffic and endless honking horns.

What a strange experience I've signed onto, coming to India this way.  I always said that I'd rather come to such a foreign place with a project to do instead of being a tourist, because I do hate going to places other tourists go to, and that hasn't changed.  I went to Agra for the shoe factories, so I had to go to the Taj Mahal, which I hated, I know, EVERYBODY loves it.  Oh well.  Agra itself has all of the charm of Newark, and is an absolute cesspool for Industry, which enrobes the Taj in a blanket of brown mist that makes parts of it rather photogenic, but also makes it impossible to see it or capture it in it's proper "light," EVER.  Google it for a proper picture. Here's a short clip of the street activity in Agra.

Oddly, I didn't feel (or LET myself feel?) at all stressed out here for the first week, which leads me to believe that "stress" is more conditioned than situational, so maybe I can lick it when I get home.  Perhaps the familiar feeling of my stomach doing its anxiety thing happens when I anticipate certain experiences, and I can learn to undo that.  I guess that if experiences are simply thrust upon me, I just react in the moment, without imagining anything in particular, so nothing is triggered?  I mean I certainly feel insecure here, sometimes sad or lonely, even slightly endangered, and my stomach stress thing has only kicked in once, when I couldn't sleep all night and had to go to the train station at 5am, which was a complete zoo.  

Well, now that I think of it I didn't sleep well for my first 10 days in Delhi, sleeping in an unimaginably active neighborhood of car parts dealers mostly, and on the busiest side street at that.  The street that the religious procession passed on my second morning at 6 am, complete with a brass band, and also home to the drummers for one of the political parties up for election this week, paying poor people to vote their candidate as it turns out.  Did I mention that I couldn't go out on the street at night on my own because the streets were full of men, and only men, hanging out with, you guessed it, men.  And not a woman in sight, farbeit for me to be The One! 

I did take a fantastic Tuk-Tuk (three wheeled auto rickshaw that goes "tuk-tuk") ride with the Sidney Greenstreet character who ran my hotel, in what seemed like the middle of the night, to go get my plane ticket to Jodhpur, passing the most amazing market, a wedding, and every manner of life taking place on the street.  It was like a real live India amusement park ride, and one of my most fun moments, and there haven't been that many, I must admit.  Doing my work here IS fun, but it is the least part of my time, the rest I'm supposed to be a Tourist having "fun," and I don't like being a Tourist, which I conveniently forgot to get myself here I suppose!