It is December 2008 and we are on the second of our big trips. We have finished making friends with elephants in lowland Nepal and fly from Kathmandu back to Delhi. We have spent only twenty-four hours in India so far. Now the fun begins.
Delhi is a city of great contrasts. We visited the Lodi Gardens, a public park with a formal layout of exotic (to us) trees and lawns dotted with handsome stone mausoleums dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was a quiet place in which a few amiable stray dogs, green parakeets, and middle class locals hung out. Some people engaged in a peculiarly Indian form of mock exercise: an ostentatiously brisk walk punctuated with spells of heavy breathing and arm waving. No-one attempted anything as vigorous as jogging. But there was yoga, as Flic observed: one man made me jump when he leaned over, stuck out his tongue and roared, other people sit in the lotus position and meditate, or lie with their legs in the air.
In another part of town we passed by a camel market. I say passed because a young guy came up to us with a mildly threatening manner as if encouraging us not to hang around. The market was situated in an open space among the rubble of demolished buildings and surrounded by other derelict and ruinous buildings. There was rubbish everywhere; there were pushcarts and cycle rickshaws and lots of young men coming and going; and there were the camels, decorated with coloured sashes and tinsel and strange seemingly hieroglyphic patterns drawn or painted on their sides.
Flic saw: people sleeping on the pavements, and pushcarts full of oranges, papaya, bread, boxes, cows walking alone in the traffic, ox carts being driven. Masses of clothes hung in the middle of the road and in trees drying. We walked down Chadni Chouk, a busy street, people selling food, fruit and veg stalls, jewellery, clothes, women with babies begging, bicycle rickshaw drivers ask us over and over again if we want a ride.
On our second day we visited a large mosque where we were allowed, if we paid a small fee and took our shoes off, to climb a minaret and look down through the smog-filled air to the dirty streets. Then: we walked from the mosque to the old railway station down more narrower crowded streets stepping over piles of rubbish and pools of black water past sparkling jewellery shops. We made it to the station crossing a great road. We tried to use a pedestrian crossing bridge but when we went up we could see the other half had fallen away so we came down again.
In the station I queued to buy railway tickets for the next day. We loved Delhi for a whole morning but now, a day later, we were ready to move on. I was constantly jostled by the man behind me and was ready to turn and confront him. But I looked across to the next queue and saw that everybody stood not just close but actually physically touching. Physically touching! I can sense my Western distaste for close contact with strangers coming through. But this was India and if you weren’t pressed up against the person in front somebody would push in.
On the way back to our hotel I saw a large billboard advert with the words Keep Delhi Young – Exercise Daily. On the street below there were two skinny men pushing a very heavy barrow of bricks up a slope. They may not have been able to read but they were on the job.
Before we leave Delhi here’s Flic’s description of what turned out to be typical Indian street food: On the corner of the road is what I first thought was a bakers but it’s more like a fryers, there’s a huge vat of bubbling boiling oil and a man stirring it and everybody’s buying fried battered pakoras samosas poori. Opposite is a fruit shop with custard apples and pomegranates and coconuts, pineapples and all kinds of luscious fruit. I ate a persimmon and a custard apple.
The next morning we went to the station to get our train to Jaipur, in Rajasthan. We were very early as we were advised to be. A helpful man looked at our tickets and said that there was a problem. He took us across the road to a travel agent. Now I had read about scams at railway stations and so I was sceptical but we went along with it more out of interest than anything if I remember correctly. In the office a man shook his head at the letter W on one of our tickets. He said it was for waiting and only valid if someone else cancelled. He made a show of looking at the computer and then made a phone call. He said the train was full but he would sell us tickets for the one at five in the afternoon. I had lost interest by now and we went back to the station and got on our train. I had the ticket with W on it and very much enjoyed the view from the window seat.
In India they have the caste system and a much stratified society and it’s no surprise that the railways have ten classes of railway travel, if you include the various sleeper classes. We travelled AC chair car, with AC standing for air conditioning. It didn’t cost much and we were surprised to be given a free English language newspaper and a cup of tea soon after we set off and then, also in the price, a substantial breakfast at eight o’clock. The windows were dirty but it was fine to open the carriage door and stand in the doorway watching the world go past. Flic saw: semi-desert with big sand dunes and thorny looking trees. Wells with people collecting water in bright saris, people ploughing the land with mattocks, some camels pulling carts, flat roofs with men in white clothes.
We arrived in Jaipur and found ourselves choosing to travel in a tuk tuk driven by a very handsome young man dressed in white robes and hat. He introduced himself as Imran and strode off across the car park with his head held high while we struggled behind with our rucksacks. When we told him we were from Wales he laughed and said, in his strong Indian accent, very funny people Wales people, they talk very funny. He took us to our unpleasant hotel and we arranged to see him later for a tour of the city.
Jaipur, the pink city, is painted a foul orange colour, is unbelievably dirty and busy, and looks like it has been hit by an earthquake – it hasn’t, it’s just in an advanced and ongoing state of decrepitude. Imran took us through the old city and on to a promenade by a shallow lake complete with seemingly floating palaces. We walked for a bit and Flic, when I was looking the other way, was on the receiving end of quite a few male stares.
The city turned out to be foul and fascinating and in our few days there we saw palaces and forts and colourful birds and glimpses of ordinary life too. The most amazing of the historical buildings was the Jantar Mantar Observatory. It consists of a number of weird abstract architectural forms that were once used to chart the movements of the sun, moon, stars and planets for astrological purposes. There is, for instance, a huge sundial with a pointer about twenty-five feet high. It’s built of stone, as are most of the bizarre structures there, and has a staircase running up to the top.
Stepping out from the observatory into the street again we were met by half a dozen forceful vendors of guide books. The charming expression in yer face gives a fair idea of how these guys operate and how stressful it is to deal with them again and again. Tourist touts, rickshaw drivers, shoeshine boys and beggars young and old and a whole lot of vendors of things you don’t want are in yer face in large numbers in some parts of north India. It’s really stressful.
How do you deal with them? In the worst places you keep moving and don’t look at them – in fact in the very worst places don’t engage with anybody, just move on. My theory is that these guys are forceful and rude because they are desperate. I don’t know their circumstances but I imagine they have families to feed at home and are struggling to make any money at all. So here’s another strategy – be firm, by all means, but be sympathetic. If you are aware of how tough these men’s lives are it makes them more bearable and it comes over in your body language I think. They are less confrontational.
Being on the street in some parts of Rajasthan is hard work. As Flic said: it feels sometimes as if I’ve been dropped into a parallel universe or other world or a game where I don’t understand the rules. I keep making mistakes and almost being hit by motor bikes, bicycles, being butted by cows with painted horns, treading in cow dung. Flic never quite got the idea that cows in India require a certain amount of respect and will take a swipe at you with their horns if you pass by too close.
But being on the street is what it’s all about. For instance: we saw an amazing wedding procession. A tuk tuk with a generator providing power for tall lanterns held on peoples shoulders, a band playing and dancers followed by two horses wearing silver and gold drapery, children dressed up on their backs and fireworks exploding regularly.
I remember seeing an elephant or two dressed up for ceremonial reasons – perhaps that was for a wedding too. As well as the occasional elephant or horse there were many other animals playing a part in daily life in Jaipur. In one part of town there were herds of small black pigs rooting around in the piles of rubbish. We found out later that they weren’t feral but owned by people, members of the sweeper caste. There were cows, of course, wandering everywhere, making their way through the heaviest traffic. Some people kept goats. There were camels for riding or for towing carts and donkeys as beasts of burden. There were monkeys on the rooftops and swinging from electricity cables. And there were rats coming out of the sewers onto the street in broad daylight.
Before we left Jaipur we spent a few hours pottering about by the lake and saw lots of wonderful birdlife. Our little bird book gives the names. There were lily-trotters, stilt legs, red-vented bulbuls, mynah birds, golden-backed woodpeckers, feral peacocks and, best of all, the hoopoes that have the habit of raising their crests when they landed. And they were easy to see, much tamer than birds in Europe.
My son, Peter, is in India as I write this (as noted earlier). He emailed me recently asking about staying in hotels. I found myself emailing back, under the heading Travel, India, a Short Guide, the following message:
There are 3 types of hotels in India: the cheap ones that Indians stay in (glitzy, modern, lots of tinted glass and cockroaches – at 3 am some guy starts shouting for his mother-in-law, she’s a heavy sleeper but one of the grand children wakes up and starts shouting back, the grandchild’s mum starts telling it off and that sets off next door’s dog, that wakes the couple next door and she says “it’s all your fault, I should never have married you” to her husband several times over until he wakes up, at which point you realise that the sound like that of a barking seal was him snoring, it’s now stopped and at last you can go to sleep – or can you?); the cheap ones that Europeans stay in (not glitzy, quieter, much much quieter); and expensive ones for both Indians and Europeans. Some towns that don’t get foreign visitors only have the expensive and the seal barking ones. Indians are, of course, wonderful people but they don’t have the be-quiet-you’ll-wake-up-the-neighbours thing in their culture. Good luck.
What I should also have said is that he should take the hotel with the best rooftop view in town. When we arrived in Pushkar this is exactly what we did, though not on purpose. The bus was met by a number of men with pushcarts ready to help people with their luggage and find them somewhere to stay. Here the atmosphere seemed relaxed and amiable, quite different from the aggressive hustling of Jaipur. And so it was easy to allow ourselves to be led to Hotel Everest with its wonderful rooftop.
You’ve no doubt got the idea now that life on the street is hard work for a visitor to north India. There is so much to see and so much to bump into and sometimes a lot of hassle. But up on the roof you can relax. You are still in India but it’s down there, at arm’s length instead of in yer face. And there is the view.
From the roof of Hotel Everest we could see much of the town and some of the surrounding countryside. One of the disappointing things about north India as we experienced it is the quality of the light. We had spent twenty-eight days walking in the Himalayas where, in late autumn, the sky is an amazing deep blue, the air is very clear and everything is sharply defined. Here, in India, it was always hazy, with moisture or pollution in the air. But in the early mornings the low sunlight gave, for a while, a dreamy beauty to the landscape.
Pushkar was surrounded by yellow-grey hills of rock and sand with sparse semi-desert vegetation. On one side of the town was a high ridge and on the other sides were small conical hills, at least two of them topped by small temples. The town itself had no high buildings, just the usual Indian brick and concrete flat-roofed houses with some more ornate larger buildings that might have been temples. The houses were painted, as Flic described it: a cool harebell blue. The temples were white apart from one which was day-glow orange.
There was the usual rooftop human activity, people hanging out washing or preparing food, and there were also lots of boys flying kites, practicing in advance of a festival. The kites were very light, made of paper and with a single string. They could be flown in the tiniest breeze but it took a great deal of skill to get one airborne. This we know because Flic bought one from the hotel owner’s son. They are inclined to self-destruct in the branches of trees and on buildings and are very cheap, disposable, and bought ten at a time.
The other occupants of the rooftops were the monkeys, both the red macaques and the big grey langurs. The langurs were very handsome with black faces, hands and feet, silvery grey fur and tails longer than their bodies. They were not easily intimidated by humans and every rooftop had one or two sticks kept handy to beat them off. They were not frightened of children and if there were monkeys on the roof children kept away. We had to keep the door to the roof closed or they would come into the building. I spent a lot of time watching them.
We walked up two of the little hills on the edge of Pushkar and had two quite different experiences. On the first one a group of local boys harassed us asking over and over again for money and refusing to go away. It was a very unpleasant experience and they failed to arouse any sympathy from us because they were aggressively rude and didn’t look particularly poor. The other hill had a temple on the top and we walked up in the company of friendly pilgrims with whom we shared the heat, the exercise and a sense of camaraderie.
From Pushkar we had a day out travelling by bus to nearby Adjmer. The people there were mostly unpleasant. Flic describes it well:
we walked through the park and a boy dived towards Richard’s feet and started brushing his shoes. Everyone seemed interested in us. We left the park to go to the ruins, ending up in small streets, gutters full of foul water, horrible bristly pigs and dogs and rats, people begging, one small alley led to another until there was one that we just couldn’t face going down, so smelly and dirty. Everyone we passed seemed to want something from us or be laughing at us. Our way back to the bus station was better: we walked back down an interesting street full of shops. Bowls of rose petals and marigolds and gold embroidered cloths were being sold, shoe shops selling glittery pointed toed sandals, jewellery shops, butchers with live hens under the counter and plucked ones above, tea shops, cafés with giant woks of boiling oil and floating pakoras, jalebi shining in honey, more giant woks with gas flames below boiling gallons of milk reducing it to sweet gunge to mix with coconut and blackened pots on bricks of fried foods, puri, gulabjumun.
Before we left Pushkar we rented bikes for the day and cycled out into the countryside. There was scrubby semi-desert but there were green areas too. We passed by large fields of marigolds and rose bushes, grown just for their flowers and petals, used for decorative and religious purposes. Small trucks went by carrying people dressed up in turbans, pointed shoes, sarees, as if off to a fancy dress party. Went past some groups of school children who were horrible. Asking for pens, trying to grab our bikes and slap us, one boy got hold of my bike rack, Richard shouted at him and he let go. It felt like a racist attack.
And now it’s coming back to me – how we loved India and hated it too. I think our first experiences were tough. We weren’t always happy and sometimes we were counting the days, looking forward to our flights to Kerala, in the south, where people were said to be friendlier. Before we went south we experienced two more Rajasthan cities, Bundhi and Udaipur, where we spent Christmas and New Year respectively. But India is tiring and we need to take a break. After a while we’ll forget the hassles and miss the noise and colour. Then we’ll be drawn back. Really, it can happen.