...
...
..................
..................
.
.
india - 2 weeks
Okay, so India: got on the plane, stopped off at Frankfurt which was lovely, a sunny day, clean nice bright, looked out the window while the plane was moving and saw the 747 in the mirrored glass of the terminal building, which it must be said, was cool. 9 hour or some exceedingly long time plane journey and then, Delhi! The airport was weird, yellowing marble floors, Indira Gandhi exhibit high up on the wall, armed police about the place, a dodgy looking duty free shop that would have looked more at home in a run down back street, and a sign saying Indians (this way arrow) and Foreigners (other way arrow) How very British, I thought.
So we waited in a line for a while, got to the font, made jokes about not being able to cross a line you had to wait at. Got seen by a customs person, who demanded something of me incoherently, I was pretty shocked, and couldn’t understand him. Mum came along and he said I needed an address in Delhi, which we didn’t have, (Due to the lovely and posh hotel we were going to stay in, we were suddenly not allowed to stay in.) and he took my little disembarkation slip. He’d given mums and dad’s back. (That’s Lily’s and Neil’s to you) but not mine. But we got through okay; we are white people after all.
More marble flooring after that, changed some money, went through customs, ran the gauntlet with about two hundred taxi drivers all wanting to take us somewhere. We had a bus though, (Since we did go with a big cricket team, that also helped us through customs, they love cricket out there.) we got greeted with orange flower garlands, and then got on to this bus, which was interesting for the fact it had carpet on the ceiling, so we got a picture of that and also noticed the thick fog. Drove into town slowly, me watching the road curb, since the smog was so think there wasn’t mush else to watch, the smog was a particularly nasty orange colour, like carrot vomit. Saw all these cars and trucks go past with weird signs on the back like Horn Please, (Which now seems quite dodgy) and keep distance. All hand painted on of course.
Into Delhi we went, it was like a 30 minute journey, we went through loads of back streets and such and saw millions of those tiny vans, minicabs and mopeds parked about the place, only illuminated by moonlight, thinking back it was quite eerie to see those deserted streets, since in the day they are so completely packed. But then we stopped in one of these back streets. I was like, oh no, this is so NOT our hotel, someone is trying to kidnap us. But we went in, had our first glimpse of MTV Asia, and I got a room of my own. Went up, finally managed to open the door, and stared at it shocked. What a dump. Not just a poor quality room kinda dump, a complete disgusting dump, grunge creeping up the walls, stained carpet pillow and sheets, thin rug masquerading as a duvet. Hard as rock bed. A couple of plastic chairs, a fridge that constantly kept turning itself on in the night, dusty wardrobes, and well the bathroom, holes in the wall that were bare plug points, dirty gaps on the tile edges, a grimy shower head and everything. And a white light you could kill wasps with. I barely cleaned my teeth in it. I complained to mum that we were so not staying in this place for 2 weeks. She was angry and said to get unpacked, no way. I snossiled for ages, no fridge noises, possible spider infestation, smelliness of sheets or car noises could have kept me awake. And in the morning? Guess what, Mum says we’re leaving. She, silly woman, had actually unpacked and so had to pack up again. I just put on the same clothes as yesterday, no shower, an iron on my hair to make it look normal, and try not to touch the carpet with bare feet if possible.
I can’t remember what I ate that day. I just remember getting a taxi and being ferried off in search of a new hotel. No actually, we walked along the streets outside for a while, parrying glances at us and generally taking stuff in, and I had breakfast in a wimpy! Yup that was it. I got a spicy burger and it was spicy. The nice wimpy server girl gave us directions, and we realised we weren’t in connought place, but in fact Karol Bagh.
The market is crowded. On either side are tiny shabby shops without anyone in usually. In front of that is a pavement with street vendors and hawkers on it, and they usually spill on to the street. There’s a white chalk line on the street to show where they can go up to. Then there is parked cars and mopeds, waiting rickshaws along with drives and beggars and shoe shiners and then theirs two lanes of traffic and people walking along the road. The horn is used as a signally device to show that a vehicle is there, so it’s used constantly, or so it seems. In the night, the shops are quite bright, but the street vendors have really powerful gas lamps, and such is the state of the pavement that one usually walks on the road, and since it’s a road, me mum and dad usually walked single file, so every time we walked past of these lamps in the night, our shadows would really dramatically arc around, we looked like three kings or three furies walking along the road.
I hasten to add, there are no dustbins, at all. Ever. All the litter is dropped, as is hay and stuff. People hawk a lot in the streets, (As in hawk and spit) People get washed in the streets, eat in the streets, piss and sometimes shit in the street, as do the cows that wander the streets. (‘Why is there a traffic jam?’ ‘There is a cow.’)
We looked around for a while, saw this massive beautiful hotel that mum refused to go in, saying, ‘You don’t walk into these places Meghan.’ God, she’s so gossipy and middle class, yet she doesn’t want to stay in a good hotel, which we could afford. Instead we get into this rickshaw with a conman get taken to a tourist place and get fleeced, but not as bad as we were going to get fleeced at the old hotel. (Called incidentally, the Welcome Plaza Hotel. They all have weird names. There’s an Arpit Palace hotel. [They so didn’t know English] in the bit called Arpit.) I was uncomfortable with the whole situation, going into a tiny office with one guy in it, a desk two chairs, a poster and two switches on the wall. On the desk were two phones, that was it. He gave us a map of Delhi. A hotel, the SunStar Heritage. And a voucher to take to the hotel that would pay for it. I was totally sceptical about this, I mean we give him cash he gives us voucher, the police are corrupt.... But the voucher worked. It dawned on us that Indians never ever steal, they only con, inflate prices and so on. So we did have a hotel then, and a nice one at that. We still had annoying slimy taxi man that wanted to take us places and conned us out of 7 quid. But then, that isn’t much, and well a taxi ride to the other side of the city will only cost you 150 rupees. 2 pound. And Delhi is a very spread out city.
We went to a few shops that day, Got three books about India, went back to the hotel and had a meal there. Boy they gave us so much food. My serving did me and dad. The jalfrezi was lovely, as were the Nan breads. Thin, crunch on the outside but also soft, and they tasted of the oven they were cooked in lovely. (Course, I wouldn’t be thinking that at the end of the holiday...)
And so concludes the first day. 8*) Hmmm, how much more of this is there? She went for 2 weeks...
The second day I had to watch cricket with the parents, which we lost. Badly. In fact we lost all the cricket games, so I won’t mention them again. And I’ll only describe the Roshnara club, cos it was the nicest. I had a book that day too, Khushwant Singh’s ‘Delhi’, which could be described as a Fucking man’s guide to Delhi, past and present, but it’s more a fucking man and his turning into an asexual-old man’s guide to India.
The Roshnara club, like almost everything in India (Apart from the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort) is ugly dirty and decaying on the outside and rather lovely on the inside. (Though still kept badly. See the red fort for more on this) Inside is a cricket ground, surrounded by three big pavilion’s that look like somebody got hold of an Architects handbook and played pick and mix. There’s another tiny pavilion at the end, in front of the pool and beside the two sets of 3 tennis courts, that proclaims that a Maharaja used to own the club. On the other side, are a few manicured trees and a bit of lawn in front of a fence keeping the beggars out. So rich are they that they even have little ornaments and crafts decorating the tree trunks, and a swinging seat. It’s rather pleasant there, not much traffic noise, the sun burning through the mist. (It’s winter over there, which is the tourist season, since in summer it can get to 48 degrees Celsius and then a monsoon comes along and it rains mostly all the time.)
We did the same for 3 days I think, and then we had a shopping day then went off to Agra.
Rickshaws are basically mopeds, but with a big shell attached to the top such that you’re covers, and there’s a back seat. (Sometimes big enough for three, you get fat ones and thin ones.) There’s a plastic window at the back, sometimes this is covered up. There is no door, sometimes there’s a flap you can pull back, but that’s not usually down. Between you and the driver is a metal rod, and maybe a backrest for the driver. The petrol goes in at the front, just beside the steering wheel, and the whole thing is started by pulling a lever really hard. You cruise around in them, giving way to Tata trucks and busses and those old steel ambassador cars, but beeping loudly at cycle rickshaws and cyclists. On the way out of Delhi we saw loads of rickshaws with really elaborate decorating. In the city you might get one with a black leather skin bonnet and clean covered seats, or one with yellow piping on a black bonnet. You might have a guard around the front light, Keep Distance and Stop might be painted on the back as well as the perennial and usually obeyed, Horn Please, and an Indian swastika on the front (Possibly a lucky symbol for success). But these long distance rickshaws we saw coming into Delhi, they’re a different story. Never mind they usually look like a car cram competition has recently gone on, they also have funny silver bars on them, painting all over them, chains hanging from the front, flags coming off, decorated bits on the front, coloured flags and things stuck on, maybe a silver engraved bit on the front. Windscreen wipers maybe. (In fact they’re mad on car accessories, I saw this market, cars parked everywhere with all their orifices open and people fixing and affixing things. And this one van had this cool steering wheel cover that was black rubber and had small spikes coming out of it, a sadomasochistic thing, it was cool. ) Then in Agra, they had these green ones that look like rats, instead of having a bonnet at the back they had another seat facing backwards, and on them written Green Agra, Clean Agra. (They still only have a basic pipe for the exhaust though, no catalytic converter. And it’s a two-stroke diesel engine. Clean I think not.) Happily rickshaws are at just the right height for rising car exhaust. Hmmm, tasty.
The cycle rickshaws are basically cannibalised bicycles with seats stuck on the back. Most of the taxis are these white ambassador cars. They’re similar to our black taxis, big solid steel construction, old style tailoring. But they’re a little shorter than black taxi’s; they’re more a saloon kinda car.
While driving to Connaught place, we went past this massive statue of a man, or so we thought, until we got closer. (The whole thing was covered in this bamboo scaffolding they always use, it was pretty rickety, and leaning to one side.) Then we saw it was actually Hanuman! The monkey God. And they had actually build a full size statue of him and must in fact worship him. (Actually more like nelson’s column size) A quick overview of Hindu gods. There are in fact only three Hindu Gods, Brahma, the Creator, Vishnu, The preserver, and Shiva, the Destroyer. Brahma isn’t worshiped very much, and hence doesn’t have many alter egos or consorts. Vishnu does though; he has a consort, (All the big gods, and male and female sides, see Shiva.) I can’t remember her name though. But he’s been incarnated on earth 9 times. One time as Rama, who had many great adventures and created Hanuman, his monkey helper. One time as Garuda, his great big eagle flying aeroplane. One time as the Buddha, (To bring Buddhism into the Hindu religion) And other times as other people. Oh, yeah, and as Krishna of course, God of Fertility, who goes around shagging as many women as possible generally. That’s all he does usually. One of his wives also started the stupid self-immolation of women when their husbands die thing. Then there’s Shiva, he’s worshiped a lot too, he has this three-pronged trident, (that’s how you know him when you see him.) (Krishna is usually blue) His consort and dark side is Kali, goddess of death. Then there’s Durga, dunnoe what she does, I think she’s spirits and the undead and all that. Yama the god of the underworld comes into the equation somewhere, probably Durga’s husband. Finally, Ganesha, the Elephant headed god of Wisdom and prosperity is one of the most commonly worshiped gods. (Oh I wonder why)
So a lot of stupid bad mad stuff happens in India. In fact a lot of bad mad stuff happened in their past which is probably their problem, combined with the bad mad stuff happening in their religion. So Krishna had this one wife who had to marry some other man, or something was coming between her and Krishna, so she build a big pyre and chucked herself on it, as you do. The woman or someone interpreted this such that when your husband dies it’s the honourable thing to burn yourself. (Since you’re basically a spare wheel in his mother’s house now, with no future chance of marriage.) And that’s what this one 18-year-old girl did in a small village. The Story came out that her husband had died of illness, a short while after they married. So distraught was she that she built a pyre and burned herself, after all the men of the village had been unable to stop her. (Yeah right. Hadn’t tried in other words, if she had wanted to do it in the first place) Which is in doubt, course we won’t know the true story now, but she might have been drugged up and pushed, the people of the village aren’t commenting, their town has become a spiritual place where people come to have miracles performed on them. Then more recently, three girls were ritually sacrificed because they a) were Muslims, and B) went to university. In fact the majority of the women in India, and hence the world, as treated as little more than beasts of burden to do what the men want. In fact they see as their right to beat their wife’s. What’s more the women work 14 hours a day to feed and cloth their men and babies, while the men work for 6, get paid for it, get an education, talk about issues, then spend most of the money on treats for themselves, and when asked what the women do all day, will reply ‘Nothing’. The upper castes ones have to stay inside all day. They’ve not been outside in 10 years. Men are bastards.
Then they’re the dowry and the Mughal invasions. The Mughals, Muslims invaded and introduced Purdue, so women had to kept inside all day. They then became useless which basically led to the rest of their troubles. Then all the upper castes had a dowry, while the lower ones all had the males pay for wives. Well the lower castes wanted to be the upper castes, (The Brahmin, or the warrior caste) so they adopted the dowry, so that the wife became a burden in the mother in laws home. Since the dowry and wedding financially crippled the father of the bride, nobody wanted girls. Girls are a) killed as soon as they come out, not fed, fed less than the boys etc. Which pushes overall infant mortality up since girls are stronger when they come out of the womb. The pop. Of India is well biased in favour of men at the moment.
Mahatma Gandhi obvious helped the untouchable’s cause, by renaming them the children of god. They renamed themselves more in line with their lives, called themselves biget, or in English, scum. Obviously not all untouchables have shit jobs, literally, but the majority do. There was a big furore recently over Indian airlines appointing their first untouchable. Weirdly enough the untouchables are always the midwifes and have more freedom than the upper caste women, being allowed to drink earn and socialise.
So arranged marriages, they don’t believe in love at first sight in India. (MTV is on it’s way to changing that mind.) Love is something you have to work at, strangely enough. After hearing so many testimonies, I feel it’s a somewhat more balanced approach, as long as it starts with long at first sight and doesn’t degenerate to the teachings in small village, summed up, as ‘My husband is a god.’
So after travelling around in Delhi for a while we got used to intense traffic with lots of horn use, no indicator lights, and almost constant rush hour traffic style roads. Got used to the amount of cotton hankies people wanted to sell us, got used to men scratching their balls while talking to you, to hawking and spitting in the road, to idly pissing anywhere they felt like. And sometimes squatting and shitting in the middle of the motorway. And piss they did, and a lot, not even in a corner sometimes, sometimes just along the side of a road, where they had just stopped their car, and pissed with their backs to the road.
So off we go out of Delhi, into the region called Harayana, and to Agra! (Which is in Utter Pradesh, the biggest region of India. The sub region of this we were in is called Rajastan.) So going along the roads, lots of camels coming down the other side, riders on little wagons behind sound asleep, the camel just plodding along. It was a dual carriageway, so why did people find it necessary to come down the road at us? On the fast lane of course. We didn’t get much over 40 miles an hour due to this sort of behaviour. Elephants sometimes on the road, and loads of massively overburdens camel wagons with unbelievable amounts of hay in grey bags that are straining to hold it all in, while flopping over the sides, rises the size of an elephant sitting on the wagon in the air, and is about the width of one and a half trucks. Sometimes people even are sitting on top of them.
Then we go past big funnels coming out of the landscape, basic brick making furnaces. And there are a lot of these buggers. Then we go past a marble market, big slabs of it lined up, as far back as a couple of Ikea outlets. Marble is so cheap here.
Then we pass several villages, (And lots of Bagpiper Whisky which gets cheaper and cheaper the father from Delhi we go, down to £1 a bottle near Jaipur) Most of the shops, if they have shops, are just brick boxes, with hand-painted signs on the sides. There’s a lot of mud huts about. A hell of a lot of Fuel cakes made from cow dung and straw mixed together then left to dry in the sun. They then cook with these. (The women that is. They have to follow the cow and collect the dung, mix it and then let it dry. Then they have to harvest wheat from the field. Make than into dough, after getting water from the river or well, which is probably some distance away. Then they make breakfast, not for themselves of course, they just eat the leftovers, if there is any.) There are sometimes service stations for truckers consisting of a table you can sleep on. And a bar under a propped us sun screen.
The journey took five hours so we ate in a mid-way hotel thing with restaurant. Obviously the driver got a meal out of taking us there. But the food was nice enough and the place was real nice, though they still didn’t manage to keep it very clean.
Then the Taj Mahal. Which was of course amazing. It was weird being here, I kept imagining myself walking into that poster Mrs Chamberlain had on the wall in M6. It’s real big too, and immaculate gardens around it that you don’t see. In a funny ‘Grid of squares’ design that we’d seen at a few other big Mughal constructions. (Cos the Taj Mahal was constructed my the Mughals, Specifically Shan Jahan, for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who gave him 14 kids. [Mumtaz Mahal was just the name he gave her when they got married; Mahal means princess] He didn’t love her that much though; else he wouldn’t have been shagging his way round the royal harem when his son imprisoned him. He didn’t marry again though. But then he wouldn’t need to, with 14+ kids.) There’s also two completely identical building’s on either side. One’s the royal mosque, the other the royal hotel. Looking out over the back of the Taj Mahal is a small turret that Jahan’s daughter built for him, after he died. It marks where the Black Mahal should have stood, that would have housed Shan Jahan’s body, but His son imprisoned him and so he couldn’t. There was also going to be a golden bridge crossing the river between the two Taj’s so that their spirits could have a wee natter. But yeah, amazing blah, turrets slightly tilted so in event of earthquake don’t destroy the Taj and so on, marble beautiful glorious big, etc. It’s also the only clean place in Indian. A person got chucked out for smoking, you’re not allowed to take bag or any shit in with you, you have to take your shoes off to walk on the Taj. Cars can’t come within a couple of miles of it. We got in an Electric bus. Then dodgy guide man took us to dodgy emporium etc, as all dodgy guides do, then we went back to the hotel. Agra wasn’t great for shopping. The fort was quite nice though. Not as good as the red fort from the outside but far cleaner and bigger inside. The red Fort in Delhi is a mess, pure and simple, bare barbwire in piles, mud and crap everywhere, unman cured lawns, dirty water in the grid of squares, rubbish just left, a nasty concrete water tower stuck in the middle of it. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone decided to have a piss around the back of one of the princess’s palaces. It was at the red fort we saw our first audience chamber. They’re great fun.
Oh yeah, better tell you some of the Mughal history. Muslim obviously. Built the Red Fort and Old Delhi. Knocked out by the British who built New Delhi. Not a new thing to do, since Delhi has been rebuilt at least 7 times, and in some accounts up to twenty times. It’s due to the amount of invasions. Iranians, Mughals twice, other people about 7 times.
Shan Jahan, about the middle of the second Mughal Dynasty, had four sons. One of course, was the one who imprisoned him, namely Aurangazeb, or some such. Well he was a bit of a zealot and was also bloody good at fighting so he went about gaining new territory getting rich and generally impressing the people with his devote religiousness. Then old dad took a wee big ill. But he recovered in a day or so. Not quick enough though, as his sons saw this as their time to kill each other and started to converge on Delhi, where poor old dad fell in with one son. While young Zeb, killed one of his brothers, a fool by all accounts and formed an alliance with his other one. He ousted the other brother who fled but was eventually killed imprisoned his pop in Agra fort, then noticing that the brother he was allied with was a drugged up un religious loser, he pensioned him off with enough money to keep him high for the rest of his life. He did the same with his dad basically, and then set about being a good leader. The last Mughal, Bahadur the second, was a twatheed to put it mildly and was imprisoned by the East India Company. And Lieutenant Hodson. Who captured him. Anyway that was the end of them. Some of the Maharaja’s are still alive, or their descendants at least but the Shan line died out.
That’s enough of that, there’s also some weird shit recent history. Funniest of all, a country that treats it’s woman possible the worst in the world, also had the first woman president, anywhere. Indira Gandhi, (no relation to Mahatma Gandhi.) Was a Thatcher like woman, had a grip of iron over the parliament, but altogether was far more interesting. She was the daughter of a famous politician and that’s basically how she got into parliament, she got into the main seat by herself though. She was a Kashmiri Brahmin, the purest and highest caste possible, then she went and married an untouchable, (Or someone really low on the old Caste Scale) which I laughed at. Then she was a bit overzealous in parliament and got chucked out of being prime minister. The next election she got to be prime minister again, then a wee while later made herself pretty much into a dictator by declaring a state of emergency. I read all this in a book called, ‘May you be the mother of a thousand sons’. A common blessing. It also outlined the feminist stages of life, stating that women become more radical feminists, as they grow older. At first, they’re okay, placated by an education at uni that wants to get all the money it can and will take anyone who can pay, then they move into the workplace, and get more radical realising that it’s still biased toward men, then they get to the second stage, when they have a kid and realise who still has to take the burden of childbearing, and the third stage is when women age, and realise that old age is far harder on women than men. Ah what a lot I’ve to look forward to.
Author information goes here. < That's Me! Or Meg if you want my full
name.
Copyright © 1999 by [weirdscience]. Most rights reserved.
Revised: 06 May 2000 21:14:14 +0100
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.