The streets of India

Teizeen:

So far, we have probably walked several miles on Indian streets.  We think we're averaging 5-6 miles a day of walking, and since we've been here for over a month, that comes up to more than 150 miles of walking so far.  Most of this (so far) has been amid bustling city streets, with people trying to sell us their goods, child beggars asking for spare change, and spectators staring at us from the sidelines.  We're also slowly becoming expert jay-walkers; you'll be waiting on one side of the road forever if you wait for the traffic to clear.  So, you have to weave through the traffic whenever you want to cross the road.

Most of the cities so far have dirty streets, scattered with litter, the odd roaming cow (and piles of cow poop to match), and skinny stray dogs curled up in odd corners.  I'll be frank: the streets are dirty, with wifts of poop and urine in many places.  There is no centralized wastewater treatment, so there are open sewers lining the streets, funneling liquid waste of all sorts downhill to the nearest river or stream.  Delhi recently had to close some of its water treatment plants (and water supply/delivery to several areas) because of high levels of ammonia in the river.  There are also obvious spots where men urinate on the side of the road.  We've become used to the dirty smelly streets now, watching our step and warning each other about the next pile of cow poop. 

So, when we arrived in Chandigarh (north of Delhi), the streets almost caught us by surprise: they were clean. Not only clean, they were straight, in a grid-like pattern.  We hadn't realized what we'd become used to until it wasn't there anymore.  There were trash cans, and underground sewers.  And now, we have come even further north up to Shimla, where there are state laws prohibiting littering (the fine for littering can be a hefty Rs. 5000 = $ 125 !!  There is also a fine for spitting, and plastic bags are banned).  There are also public bathrooms. 

I don't know about the history of Shimla's litterling laws and how they got implemented, but it seems like the city (and the state it is in) a model for the rest of the country.  However, the town is small, while most of the other cities we've been to are much larger in population, which makes the problem much more difficult to tackle.  Also, Shimla is perched amongst steep hillsides, making open sewers less feasible simply because of topography.  If there were open sewers here, they would be like mini-waterfalls!

Right now, I cannot see how the transformation from dirty streets to clean streets can happen in a country of this size.  It would require drastic behavior change from every individual who walks the streets: no littering, no spitting, no urinating.  When Ryan and I need to trash something while we walk the streets, we have no options.  We end up carrying our waste back to our hotel room's trash can.  But who knows where that end up; I haven't seen big dumpsters anywhere.  Individual efforts may be in vain until the whole system changes at a massive scale.  And when I say massive, I mean massive: some way to change the behavior of over a billion people who walk the streets of India, and one that treats the waste generated by them. 

I'm sure there are genuine efforts to do this in a country of this size, and I may not have the chance to experience the results during this trip.  Nevertheless, the magnitude of the problem remains immense.

Some new photos

We just uploaded some new photos from the last 1-2 weeks, including those of the Taj Mahal.  Check out the links to the left.

Are you Indian?

Teizeen:

Standing in the queue at the entrance to one of the great Rajput Palaces of Jaipur, I am about to pay the entrance fee (which is higher for tourists, and lower for Indian citizens), and I am asked, "Are you Indian?"  Which means, am I an Indian citizen?  Was I, or were my parents, or my grandparents born in India?

To reply "No" would deny my Indian heritage, and the answer would be received with confusion because of my obvious Indian-ness.  After all, I look Indian.  To say "Yes" would be easy, but I would be pretending in order to take advantage of cheaper entrance fees (they don't check you passport, so this is easy to get away with).  In addition, being and looking Indian goes hand-in-hand with speaking Hindi (especially in northern India), and my limited Hindi-speaking abilities would automatically expose my pretend-Indian character if I were to say "Yes, I am Indian."

And so, I often find myself telling the story of my heritage to the people I meet who look at me, assume that I am Indian, but then find out and are surprised that my Hindi does not quite pass the test.  I explain that my ancestors - 5 generations back - moved to East Africa (Kenya), and we have been there ever since, and that this is my first visit to India.  To counter my lack of Hindi skills, I proclaim my fluency in Gujarati.  In this way, they are suddenly impressed and somewhat enlightened by the fact that a local Indian language has survived for 5 generations in the far off continent of Africa. 

If we add my American husband to this mix of Indian-Kenyan-non-Hindi-speaking-Gujarati woman from Kenya, their enlightenment reverts back to confusion.  In order to explain Ryan standing by my side, I have to add an addendum to my heritage story to explain that my family and I now live in America. 

Inter-racial marriages in India are extremely rare and not condoned.  Responses to us walking down the street range from innocent curiosity to disapproving looks (the latter may just be my imagination since I don't really know what they are thinking).  We are often greeted with ominous stares from people who are either not shy about staring, who have never seen such a sight and are genuinely caught by surprise when they see us, or whose parents never told them it is rude to stare. 

However, it is difficult to know, without asking, what people really think of us.  I actually cannot stand being stared at, and because it makes it uncomfortable, I over-inflate what they are probably thinking in their minds (even though they haven't said a word to us):  I think that they probably think that I have diluted my Indian heritage by traipsing around with an American husband, and I am therefore no longer worthy of posing as an Indian and being allowed to pay cheaper entrance fees!

I am slowly getting used to the stares though, and have decided to either respond by (1) glaring right back at them, (2) asking Ryan to glare at them since they are staring at his wife, (3) giving them a big unexpected smile, or (4) keeping my eyes on the ground 24/7 so that I can't even know who is staring at who.  The latter option, however, might inevitably land me in a dangerous spot between rickshaw drivers, scooters, bicycles, cars and buses since pedestrians never have the right of way in India - so if I look down, I'm game to be sandwiched between a number of possible moving vehicles.

Teizeen's Kota family

Ryan:

We spent the last few days in Kota where Teizeen met some of her native Indian relatives.  If you followed our Kenya blog a few summers back, the food part of the experience was much the same as having dinner with Shafiq Uncle’s family: intense family pressure to consume unnatural quantities of super oily food.  Here in Kota, however, the family’s insistence to consume bordered on the annoying and resulted in physical pain to my abdomen and intestines.  It should be noted that my honeymoon with solid stool and stable stomach came to an abrupt end last week in Udaipur (the illness, I suspect, came from the cilantro we used in an otherwise excellent cooking class).  We let the family know ahead of time that I was not well but they did not relent.  As a result, I had a series of loud and embarrassing experiences with eastern style toilets. 

The houses of the family in Kota were, as they were in Kenya, shared communally by multiple generations - elders, the kids of the elders – and the kids of the kids of the elders (the youngest generations were bone skinny, getting progressively rounder with age, until becoming quite fat in their middle ages).  The basic composition of a house: kitchen, toilet room (eastern style), bathing room, and a multifunctional living area that covered dining, tv/entertainment, and sleeping.  

At a basic level, I found myself able to follow some of the Gujarati conversations between Teizeen and her aunts and uncles.  I could not, however, speak enough Gujarati to hold a conversation myself, and very few of the older generation spoke English.  The youngest members of the family had not yet learned English, were just beginning to learn English, or were too shy to exercise what English they had already learned.  For conversation, I therefore found myself leaning heavily on Moiz and Mustafa, two of Teizeen’s college aged male cousins (unmarried as of yet) with good English skills.  Moiz and Mustafa were fantastic hosts, shuttling Teizeen and I all around Kota and showing us the local sites.  Both had many questions for us about work opportunities in the US and Canada since employment prospects in India, even for qualified college graduates, were looking pretty grim.  Moiz’ brother had recently been granted admission to Canada, providing Moiz himself with hope to join them in a few years.  Mustafa, was still looking for opportunities. 

All in all, the family was mega-hospitable, welcoming, and never stopped reminding us that their home was also our home, and that the three days we spent with them were totally insufficient.  However, Teizeen and I are somewhat relieved to be back by ourselves continuing further north on our travels through India – we will be viewing the spectacular Taj Mahal by the end of this week after a brief visit to one of India’s more famous bird sanctuaries.

Our Quest for Juma

Teizeen:

Juma is the Muslim day for congregational prayer accompanied by a sermon, and always occurs on a Friday afternoon - somewhat equivalent to the Sabbath for Jews and going to church for Christians on Sundays.

So, this last Friday, Ryan and I were on our Quest for Juma: we were in Jodhpur in the state of Rajasthan, and we wanted to find a mosque where we could attend the Juma prayers and sermon. 

Step one involved finding a mosque - the crooked narrow streets of Jodhpur were not particularly conducive to us stumbling upon a mosque.  Buildings merge into one another, and houses, shops, and places of worship were therefore not easy to spot.  Roads do not have names, and all sign boards (except those catered to tourists), were in Hindi. 

So, to find a mosque, we needed to find a Muslim who we could ask.  We began combing the streets with our eyes to look for someone wearing a topi on their head (traditional Islamic head wear - they can come in various forms, but worn only by Muslims here), and had our catch in a matter of just a few minutes - a man with friendly eyes, who was sitting nearby in front of his spice shop and also happened to speak really good English. 

Welcoming and eager to share Juma with us, this man named Ramadan, said he was going to Juma in a few minutes and we could join him.  As we waited, we talked about Islam, the importance of education in Islam, and the our role of Muslims in the world today.  Islam, said Ramadan, is a beautiful religion, but there are people who do not know how to practice it.  Then, he started talking about the Rolls Royce: "The Rolls Royce is a beautiful car - if someone drives it and crashes it in an accident, it is not the fault of the car - it is the fault of the person driving it."  And with that simple analogy, he explained how the religion itself is beautiful, but there are people who don't know how to practice it the right way.


As it came closer to the time for Juma, I wanted to know if the mosque had a space for women to pray.  Congregational Muslims prayers involve standing right next to the people to the right and left of you in a line, "shoulder to shoulder, feet to feet", touching your neighbor on either side.  I believe that part of the wisdom behind this is to emphasize equality before God: everyone has to stand touching each other regardless of which mosque you pray  in, making segregation due to race or skin color, or social or economic status that much more difficult. 


Men and women, however, are segregated for the simple fact that your purpose is to pray before God and focus your attention on your prayer. Because of the close physical proximity that is required in congregational prayer, men and women pray in separate lines, or different spaces within the mosque.
The mosque we went to either did not have a space for women, or it was not accessible at the time, but as we walked towards the mosque, I was gently shuttled into the home of a Muslim family living right across the alley from the mosque, whose women were instructed to 'take care' of me during Juma.  The loudspeakers on the mosque reverberated loud enough for us all to hear the sermon and prayer from inside this house. 


Here I was, in a strange family's house, who opened their doors to me based on the simply fact that I was Muslim and so were they - I was automatically welcome.  I was offered a cup of tea, and tried to converse in my limited knowledge of Hindi with the women of the house.  We prayed together - the Muslim prayer is in Arabic, so no matter where in the world you are, and no matter what language one speaks, the prayer is exactly the same.  This universality was what made this house, for the brief 1 hr I was there, feel like home: we all knew what to do for the prayer, and we were doing it exactly the same way, even though we couldn't speak the same language, and knew very little about each other.

After the Juma service was over, they insisted that I join them for lunch.  I told them that my husband, Ryan, would be waiting for me outside in the alley and I should go, but this did not deter them: they extended the lunch invitation to both of us.  So, the afternoon ended with us all sitting on the floor in a circle, dipping our chappati's in tasty mutton curry, and chatting in broken Hindi and English (and some Gujarati), while I tried to appreciate the scene: a white American Muslim man, a Kenyan-Indian Gujarati speaking girl who has never lived or visited India and now lives in America, and am overly hospitable Muslim family in Jodpur, all coming together because of our common religious heritage.

Photos, finally!

We have finally managed to post some photos online.  Look to the left side of the blog, under "PHOTOS!" and click on the links to view some of our photos so far.  We will be adding more links to photo albums when we add more photos (newer albums will appear at the top), so check back for more photos...

Our first trek

"Charles", our trekking guide in Mt. Abu - the post below is about him.

Teizeen:

I was really hoping to post some photos today, but we have been somewhat unlucky with the cyber-cafe's we have used so far: this one doesn't recognize my USB stick, so I can't upload any photos tonight.  So other than my cranky mood resulting from having failed (again) to post photos that I would love to share, today has been a good day.

We are currently in a small hill station in southern Rajasthan called Mt. Abu.  In India, smaller towns and villages perched on hills or in mountainous areas are called 'hill stations'.  In the earlier days, these areas used to be visited by rich Raja's (King's) during hot Indian summers as a cool retreat.  Many of these Raja's built extravagant vacation homes here, some of which have been converted into luxury hotels or guest houses (some more charging more than $200 per night).  We, however, are staying in a relatively budget hotel (just under $9.00 per night), since we have to stretch our budget over 3 months...

This morning, we went on a half-day trek with Charles, who is The Person To Contact for treks into the Mt. Abu Wildlife sanctuary.  Charles turned out do be an excellent and charismatic trekking guide, with animated stories that he would act out with facial expressions and the right European accents (British, Irish, French, German, Australian - he's still working on his American accent).  A native of Mt. Abu, he was named Mahendra by his parents, but given the nickname 'Charles' by a British tourist who thought it would be easier for tourists to pronounce and might help his newly flourishing one-man trekking business (he was also given the name options of Thim or Jimmy).  His father is somewhat disapproving of his new name and his trekking business (What kind of a job is this?  People pay to walk, and pay you to walk with them?!)

Charles practices both Hinduism and Buddhism (more recently leaning towards the latter), and talked freely about his beliefs, his meditations and aspirations to be a pilot.  He is convinced that the name Charles, if he can find the $$ for a lawyer to make it official, will make it easier for him to get a visa to visit a foreign country, which it seemed was his ultimate desire: to travel outside of India, which he has never done.   He would like to live and work in Australia.  When Steven Irwin (the Australian Crocodile Hunter) died, he fasted for two days in his remembrance.

Despite having born, bred and lived in small Mt. Abu all his life, Charles had the best spoken English of anyone we have met so far in India, and, his English had a slight British accent.  Having never learnt English in school, he said he has learnt it through tourists over the last 9 years.  And despite not having stepped foot out outside the Indian sub-continent, he had and immense stash of informed knowledge of the outside world which I think he has absorbed from the tourists he meets.  It was almost as if he had traveled to all the places from which tourists come from.  I imagine him waking at dawn everyday for his morning meditation, and using his meditations to absorb the linguistic attributes of the tourists that he meets, meditating his way through their cultures and origins, and somehow acquiring a relatively accurate depiction of life outside of India.

During our mid-morning tea break, he gave Ryan and I an animated show of his dream of being a pilot: all in a British accent.  Though he has never set foot on a plane, he did a better animation of the take-off scene then I could ever do.  His one-man act included details like the communications he would have with the radio-tower getting ready for a fake Lufthansa airlines take-off, how he would tell passengers to tie their seatbelts, ask the hostess for black coffee (please), being excitedly greeted by expectant US immigration officers upon safe arrival, and traveling to all the parts of the world where he has met people from.

He was literally waiting for his moment to shine - to get out of Mt. Abu (which he admits is beautiful, but is too limited a place to fulfill his desires and aspirations) and travel the world, even if only for a few weeks.

I am putting him on top of my new list of most deserving people to receive a free flight.  And, if he ever gets to fulfill his dream, I would love to spy on him during his travels.