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!

Comments

[Karen]

((((Wendy))),

I am relieved to hear you aren't anywhere near Mumbai.

Come home soon.

Peace,
Karen

[Qwendy]

Karen, how nice to hear from you, up at 4am????? Now worrying about me I hope ; ) I'm trying to get home fast, I'm over it here -- hopefully by next weekend, so I'll make the brunch after all -- when is it?
XOOXOXOXX