Or maybe that's still "Getting back on our feet..." I don't know.
Yes-yes, ya'll! We're back in Canada and rocking the scene in Langley. We have been here for a few weeks or whatever, and have managed thus far to find a place to live (3rd Ave. in Kits) and to secure one job interview. No job, just the interview. But we have a house? We move there soon. Ok, so I don't know how we're gonna pay rent, but we'll manage. We always do. I also don't know how often we're gonna bother writing on here. I personally am in a sort of writing slump right now. Probably that's only because nothing is happening right now. Perhaps once our lives get rolling again we'll have things to talk about. For now though, blah.
Kyle.
an errand.
Going to the store….It’s a routine I do nearly every day, walking to the store when we realize we are out of bread or milk. But it’s funny how the ordinary things of life never make it to the journal…so here it goes.
I head out the front gate, purse over shoulder, and turn left. Ahead there are kids playing games in the street, barefoot kicking up dust with their ball. I turn right, ahead is the neighbourhood temple. I can hear the bells clang in the evening, carried by the warm breeze, the ringing echoing down the streets as worshippers clang them to alert the gods of their devotion. It is a large compound, with trees and several buildings. And, I suspect, from the laundry hanging on the roof that several families live there (and some cows too, from what I have heard in passing). I walk along the high walls of the temple compound until it forms a right angle with a wall cutting across my path. It looks like a dead end, but it’s not. There is a narrow gap, only wide enough for one person to walk down this alley. High walls on either side, and the way is strewn with rubble and trash.
I follow this until it turns a sharp right and I find myself in the alleys that run like threads between the buildings. These too are very narrow; you are rubbing shoulders with whoever passes by. And this dim twisting labyrinth remains cool throughout the day, as the sun travels across the sky, failing to stretch its burning Indian rays between the piled concreted, steel and bricks above. These alleys do have flies however; great buzzing clouds of them, resting on piles of rotting garbage and waste until some unsuspecting pedestrian disturbs the feast, and the cloud rises to a buzzing mass around the face. I have learned to walk with my mouth closed.
Doors leading to homes and courtyards stand wide open, and the line between private and public is blurred in this cool world, away from traffic and sunlight. Old men resting on mats, watching some old Bollywood movie on TV. Women washing clothes, naked children running between rooms and doors. Conversations echoing through rooms, the flashing colours of sari’s and the jingle of anklets as hips sway. I remember my feelings when first walking through these lanes. How uncomfortable I was, how self-aware, how I kept my eyes down and walked quickly. I think the intimacy of those alleys was a bit overwhelming, all those lives spilling out of doorways and window frames. I felt like a trespasser in someone’s home, walking in uninvited. As Bollywood tunes echoed off walls and women laughed and sang, I felt like an outsider.
But much has changed these past six months. These twisted alleys are now familiar, the smells of garbage and cooking, the dhobi-wallah heating coals for his iron, the noises streaming over balconies and down walls from floors above – I know them. I know my way, where to turn, where to duck and step over. And in a small, special way, I feel proud.
I emerge from this world into the sunlight and heat once again. I look up and a man smiles and waves, he works at Sandeep’s tea stall, where I had some chai this morning. He knows me. I smile, and tilt my head to the side as a response back to him and carry on. The lanes widen, and I dodge a scooter negotiating its way back into the labyrinth. I am now on Masighar, a street lined with shops, my destination.
“Hello!” I hear a yell and look up, there lounging on the seat of his rickshaw is our friend the rickshaw-wallah. Well, he has become our friend since Kyle saved him from receiving a beating several weeks back (that is another story). Now, whenever he sees us, we are greeted with a blinding smile and a wave. I smile and wave back, he too, knows me. And he also knows that Kyle is my husband, not my brother, after enquiring last week while taking me to a friend’s house where my brother was. “Nahin! Meera pati hai!” I cleared it up.
I head into a shop, pick up some dudh (milk), dahi (plain Indian curd) and chinni (sugar). Well, more like I tell the shop keeper what I want, who in turn tells the boy, who fetches said items, returns them to the shopkeeper, who gives them to me. But, they are out of bread. That is fine; I head down the street to Baxi General Store. They always have mountains of bread. I look down at the bag of groceries in my hand. How can I go in there and face the dukandars (shopkeepers) of Baxi, who also know me, when it is clear I have already bought the rest of my groceries somewhere else? Well, I do have a legitimate reason, I prefer Nestle dahi over Brittania, and Baxi only carries Brittania dahi. I practice my line in my head, in case they ask me about my loyalties to Baxi General Store. “Kyonki mujko Nestle dahi passant, ne Brittania” (Because I like Nestle dahi, not Brittania). I enter the shop, and sadly, no one seems to notice or care about my patronage to the other general store, nor my particular dahi preferences. Ah well, bread in hand, I head home.
I feel like bananas, and as I walk down the street I keep my eye out for a pul-wallah. A fruit seller who pushes a wooden cart piled high with kailae (bananas), amm (mangoes), suntarae (oranges), seib (apples) or whatever else it might happen to be that day. I practice more Hindi in my head, in an ongoing conversation with myself…
“Pul-wallah, ap kahan hain? Mujko kailae chiyea!” (Fruit guy, where are you? I want bananas!)
“Ap meera sarak par hain?” (Are you on my street?)
“Pul-wallah, ap kahan thae, ap ye dukhan mein hain?” (Fruit guy, where were you? Are you in that store?) That one rhymed. A little grammatically inconsistent perhaps, but I am proud nonetheless. I round the corner, now home again after my Hindi wanderings and wonderings. I wonder if this is the kind of thing I will remember going home, the every-day, the errands, the mundane. I wonder if I should write it down…
I head out the front gate, purse over shoulder, and turn left. Ahead there are kids playing games in the street, barefoot kicking up dust with their ball. I turn right, ahead is the neighbourhood temple. I can hear the bells clang in the evening, carried by the warm breeze, the ringing echoing down the streets as worshippers clang them to alert the gods of their devotion. It is a large compound, with trees and several buildings. And, I suspect, from the laundry hanging on the roof that several families live there (and some cows too, from what I have heard in passing). I walk along the high walls of the temple compound until it forms a right angle with a wall cutting across my path. It looks like a dead end, but it’s not. There is a narrow gap, only wide enough for one person to walk down this alley. High walls on either side, and the way is strewn with rubble and trash.
I follow this until it turns a sharp right and I find myself in the alleys that run like threads between the buildings. These too are very narrow; you are rubbing shoulders with whoever passes by. And this dim twisting labyrinth remains cool throughout the day, as the sun travels across the sky, failing to stretch its burning Indian rays between the piled concreted, steel and bricks above. These alleys do have flies however; great buzzing clouds of them, resting on piles of rotting garbage and waste until some unsuspecting pedestrian disturbs the feast, and the cloud rises to a buzzing mass around the face. I have learned to walk with my mouth closed.
Doors leading to homes and courtyards stand wide open, and the line between private and public is blurred in this cool world, away from traffic and sunlight. Old men resting on mats, watching some old Bollywood movie on TV. Women washing clothes, naked children running between rooms and doors. Conversations echoing through rooms, the flashing colours of sari’s and the jingle of anklets as hips sway. I remember my feelings when first walking through these lanes. How uncomfortable I was, how self-aware, how I kept my eyes down and walked quickly. I think the intimacy of those alleys was a bit overwhelming, all those lives spilling out of doorways and window frames. I felt like a trespasser in someone’s home, walking in uninvited. As Bollywood tunes echoed off walls and women laughed and sang, I felt like an outsider.
But much has changed these past six months. These twisted alleys are now familiar, the smells of garbage and cooking, the dhobi-wallah heating coals for his iron, the noises streaming over balconies and down walls from floors above – I know them. I know my way, where to turn, where to duck and step over. And in a small, special way, I feel proud.
I emerge from this world into the sunlight and heat once again. I look up and a man smiles and waves, he works at Sandeep’s tea stall, where I had some chai this morning. He knows me. I smile, and tilt my head to the side as a response back to him and carry on. The lanes widen, and I dodge a scooter negotiating its way back into the labyrinth. I am now on Masighar, a street lined with shops, my destination.
“Hello!” I hear a yell and look up, there lounging on the seat of his rickshaw is our friend the rickshaw-wallah. Well, he has become our friend since Kyle saved him from receiving a beating several weeks back (that is another story). Now, whenever he sees us, we are greeted with a blinding smile and a wave. I smile and wave back, he too, knows me. And he also knows that Kyle is my husband, not my brother, after enquiring last week while taking me to a friend’s house where my brother was. “Nahin! Meera pati hai!” I cleared it up.
I head into a shop, pick up some dudh (milk), dahi (plain Indian curd) and chinni (sugar). Well, more like I tell the shop keeper what I want, who in turn tells the boy, who fetches said items, returns them to the shopkeeper, who gives them to me. But, they are out of bread. That is fine; I head down the street to Baxi General Store. They always have mountains of bread. I look down at the bag of groceries in my hand. How can I go in there and face the dukandars (shopkeepers) of Baxi, who also know me, when it is clear I have already bought the rest of my groceries somewhere else? Well, I do have a legitimate reason, I prefer Nestle dahi over Brittania, and Baxi only carries Brittania dahi. I practice my line in my head, in case they ask me about my loyalties to Baxi General Store. “Kyonki mujko Nestle dahi passant, ne Brittania” (Because I like Nestle dahi, not Brittania). I enter the shop, and sadly, no one seems to notice or care about my patronage to the other general store, nor my particular dahi preferences. Ah well, bread in hand, I head home.
I feel like bananas, and as I walk down the street I keep my eye out for a pul-wallah. A fruit seller who pushes a wooden cart piled high with kailae (bananas), amm (mangoes), suntarae (oranges), seib (apples) or whatever else it might happen to be that day. I practice more Hindi in my head, in an ongoing conversation with myself…
“Pul-wallah, ap kahan hain? Mujko kailae chiyea!” (Fruit guy, where are you? I want bananas!)
“Ap meera sarak par hain?” (Are you on my street?)
“Pul-wallah, ap kahan thae, ap ye dukhan mein hain?” (Fruit guy, where were you? Are you in that store?) That one rhymed. A little grammatically inconsistent perhaps, but I am proud nonetheless. I round the corner, now home again after my Hindi wanderings and wonderings. I wonder if this is the kind of thing I will remember going home, the every-day, the errands, the mundane. I wonder if I should write it down…
Geo-Journal #4
It’s been almost a month since my last Geo-Journal. I am sorry for that. And now I’m too sick to go out and do a new journal, (especially in the 40 degree heat), so I have decided to do a Geo-Journal special edition. Enjoy.
Geo-Journal #4 – Special Edition: Population Density
I’ll start with this. I love Google Earth. I mean, how great is it that you can look and see exactly what the layout is of the places you have been and the places you want to go. I have used Google Earth a lot since coming to Delhi, and it has proved itself invaluable. From scouting out new fun places to go explore, to planning routes for my walks in and around the city, or just trying to find the best route to one place or another so the Auto-walla doesn’t take us the long way (thereby jacking up the price on the meter). Then one day after spending months pouring over every nook and cranny of Delhi and New Delhi on Google Earth, I decided to look at Abbotsford. I don’t remember what made me do it, I just did and I was given quite a shock. Now we all know that Abbotsford is a much, much smaller city than Delhi. We also know, or at least can assume that the population density of New Delhi is somewhat higher than that of Abbotsford. But I could not believe what my eyes were seeing. Abbotsford looked totally empty. It almost felt to me like someone was playing a joke on me, and that the real Abbotsford had been hidden beneath a photoshop-ed landscape that somewhat resembled Abbotsford, but had had every second house removed. This got me to thinking about population density, and I realized two things.
Firstly, I realized that I am probably going to be mildly auto-agoraphobic upon my arrival to big, empty Abbotsford. By now I am quite used to literally squeezing through tight alleyways, dodging motorbikes and rickshaws, and bumping into peoples’ shoulders as I pass them. The second realization is that I will probably never be able to explain just how tight this city is packed to someone who has never been here. I can hear it already, “Packed? You mean like parts of Vancouver?” or, “Packed? You mean like Robson Street on Sunday?” No. I can’t explain it.
But then it hit me. The initiator of this entire train of thought could be the very resource that could make it maybe a little bit clearer for those who may never come here. So, I opened the Google-Earth browser, and flew on over to New Delhi. I took a snap, and I flew on over to Abbotsford, where I took another. Then I compared to two, and I was amazed. And now I will show them to you.
I’ll explain my methodology here for a minute. I first isolated a typical area of each cities residential areas. Both cities were captured at exactly 1000 m eye altitude using the print-screen function on the laptop, and the copied into Photoshop, where they were cropped to the exact same size. So, to the best of my knowledge, this is a fair comparison between the two cities. It should also be noted that while the Abbotsford image shows single family homes, the Delhi image shows two or three story tall housing complexes, thereby increasing the density even further. There is a good chance that there are more people living within the confines of this picture than there are in all of Abbotsford. I know this will still not do justice to what it is like to live in such a crowded place, but perhaps it makes me feel a bit better about my attempt to explain so.
Geo-Journal #4 – Special Edition: Population Density
I’ll start with this. I love Google Earth. I mean, how great is it that you can look and see exactly what the layout is of the places you have been and the places you want to go. I have used Google Earth a lot since coming to Delhi, and it has proved itself invaluable. From scouting out new fun places to go explore, to planning routes for my walks in and around the city, or just trying to find the best route to one place or another so the Auto-walla doesn’t take us the long way (thereby jacking up the price on the meter). Then one day after spending months pouring over every nook and cranny of Delhi and New Delhi on Google Earth, I decided to look at Abbotsford. I don’t remember what made me do it, I just did and I was given quite a shock. Now we all know that Abbotsford is a much, much smaller city than Delhi. We also know, or at least can assume that the population density of New Delhi is somewhat higher than that of Abbotsford. But I could not believe what my eyes were seeing. Abbotsford looked totally empty. It almost felt to me like someone was playing a joke on me, and that the real Abbotsford had been hidden beneath a photoshop-ed landscape that somewhat resembled Abbotsford, but had had every second house removed. This got me to thinking about population density, and I realized two things.
Firstly, I realized that I am probably going to be mildly auto-agoraphobic upon my arrival to big, empty Abbotsford. By now I am quite used to literally squeezing through tight alleyways, dodging motorbikes and rickshaws, and bumping into peoples’ shoulders as I pass them. The second realization is that I will probably never be able to explain just how tight this city is packed to someone who has never been here. I can hear it already, “Packed? You mean like parts of Vancouver?” or, “Packed? You mean like Robson Street on Sunday?” No. I can’t explain it.
But then it hit me. The initiator of this entire train of thought could be the very resource that could make it maybe a little bit clearer for those who may never come here. So, I opened the Google-Earth browser, and flew on over to New Delhi. I took a snap, and I flew on over to Abbotsford, where I took another. Then I compared to two, and I was amazed. And now I will show them to you.
I’ll explain my methodology here for a minute. I first isolated a typical area of each cities residential areas. Both cities were captured at exactly 1000 m eye altitude using the print-screen function on the laptop, and the copied into Photoshop, where they were cropped to the exact same size. So, to the best of my knowledge, this is a fair comparison between the two cities. It should also be noted that while the Abbotsford image shows single family homes, the Delhi image shows two or three story tall housing complexes, thereby increasing the density even further. There is a good chance that there are more people living within the confines of this picture than there are in all of Abbotsford. I know this will still not do justice to what it is like to live in such a crowded place, but perhaps it makes me feel a bit better about my attempt to explain so.
Easter in Hindustan
It is 7:39am on Good Friday morning.
For the last half hour I have been listening to the same song being sung over and over again, echoing throughout the neighborhood. It will end and there will be chanting and talking, either from a man or a woman, and then the same song again. I know very very little about the Easter celebrations of the Indian Church, but I know they're loud. As I walked around the neighborhood this morning just after 7am, it seemed like everything was just as normal. People were walking around the tiny parks, performing their morning rites at their shrines, washing their cars, or standing around talking. The only difference is the giant blazing loudspeakers freshly installed on every third telephone pole. From these the story of the death of Jesus is being told, and worship, possibly from the church two streets over, or possibly from the cemetery (I have learned that many churches worship Good Friday by re-enacting Christ's death in a cemetery).
Anyways, my point is this... I am Canadian.
I am part of a church in Canada, and while we try to reach our communities with the Gospel message, I think we would indeed stop short of tying giant loudspeakers to telephone poles and filling the whole neighborhood with the sound of our worship. That being said, as I walked around this morning, my first feeling was that I wondered how the 'others' felt. How do the Hindu's walking around the park feel? How about the Muslim on his way to work? What do they think about all the noise and the message being forced onto their streets and invariably into their houses? I thought to myself as I walked that perhaps they would be a little resentful. I mean, it is 7:00am, and these speakers are turned right up to 11. This is an invasion of personal space.
But then I remembered when we first got here to India, how every morning at 4:30am we would wake up to the Muslim call to prayer s it blanketed the city, and then again at 7:00am if we were still in bed. Then we would often hear a somewhat discordant, "Haaa-re Hare Jai Krishna..." being projected from speakers at the local Hindu temple. We don't really hear these things any more. I am used to hearing the call to prayer 5 times a day, so much so that now I don't hear it. The same can be said for the men running up an down our street yelling and selling. The same again for the hammering as they have been slowly (over months) tearing down the house beside us. All day long, 8am to 9pm, or sometimes later, hammering! And now I just don't hear it.
Anyways, in Canada I'm pretty sure we'd have a heap of angry people throwing eggs at our churches if we filled their neighborhood with loudspeakers and cranked up the sermon, and so being a Canadian I reacted with uncertainty, or perhaps almost embarrassment at the uncouth methodology employed in sharing the gospel message here in India. But thankfully I was reminded that in this cultural context, their methodology is sound (pun not necessarily intended). It's normal to fill the streets with the sounds of your worship. People do it all the time, for worship or elections or weddings or selling fruit. Loudspeakers are A-Okay!!!
For the last half hour I have been listening to the same song being sung over and over again, echoing throughout the neighborhood. It will end and there will be chanting and talking, either from a man or a woman, and then the same song again. I know very very little about the Easter celebrations of the Indian Church, but I know they're loud. As I walked around the neighborhood this morning just after 7am, it seemed like everything was just as normal. People were walking around the tiny parks, performing their morning rites at their shrines, washing their cars, or standing around talking. The only difference is the giant blazing loudspeakers freshly installed on every third telephone pole. From these the story of the death of Jesus is being told, and worship, possibly from the church two streets over, or possibly from the cemetery (I have learned that many churches worship Good Friday by re-enacting Christ's death in a cemetery).
Anyways, my point is this... I am Canadian.
I am part of a church in Canada, and while we try to reach our communities with the Gospel message, I think we would indeed stop short of tying giant loudspeakers to telephone poles and filling the whole neighborhood with the sound of our worship. That being said, as I walked around this morning, my first feeling was that I wondered how the 'others' felt. How do the Hindu's walking around the park feel? How about the Muslim on his way to work? What do they think about all the noise and the message being forced onto their streets and invariably into their houses? I thought to myself as I walked that perhaps they would be a little resentful. I mean, it is 7:00am, and these speakers are turned right up to 11. This is an invasion of personal space.
But then I remembered when we first got here to India, how every morning at 4:30am we would wake up to the Muslim call to prayer s it blanketed the city, and then again at 7:00am if we were still in bed. Then we would often hear a somewhat discordant, "Haaa-re Hare Jai Krishna..." being projected from speakers at the local Hindu temple. We don't really hear these things any more. I am used to hearing the call to prayer 5 times a day, so much so that now I don't hear it. The same can be said for the men running up an down our street yelling and selling. The same again for the hammering as they have been slowly (over months) tearing down the house beside us. All day long, 8am to 9pm, or sometimes later, hammering! And now I just don't hear it.
Anyways, in Canada I'm pretty sure we'd have a heap of angry people throwing eggs at our churches if we filled their neighborhood with loudspeakers and cranked up the sermon, and so being a Canadian I reacted with uncertainty, or perhaps almost embarrassment at the uncouth methodology employed in sharing the gospel message here in India. But thankfully I was reminded that in this cultural context, their methodology is sound (pun not necessarily intended). It's normal to fill the streets with the sounds of your worship. People do it all the time, for worship or elections or weddings or selling fruit. Loudspeakers are A-Okay!!!
A Poem (but not the one I'm reading at the thing...)
The school kids at dawn, up and ready to learn,
The careful footsteps through the thin littered pass,
The smell of the smoke as the fallen leaves burn,
The long rickshaw rides to our Hindi class.
The silence of nights on Sukhdev Vihar Streets,
The gates that will close at eleven o'clock,
The footprints we make with our dirty feet,
The size of the crowds found in Chandi Chowk.
The chai-walla's selling their magical drink,
The beggars at traffic lights asking for alms,
The way that the old men just sit there and think,
Like old Mughal tombs now surrounded with palms.
The Delhi I know has much more than one face,
From rickshaws which putter along oh-so-slow,
To the markets which move with incredible pace,
There's a lot more to Delhi than I'll ever know.
The careful footsteps through the thin littered pass,
The smell of the smoke as the fallen leaves burn,
The long rickshaw rides to our Hindi class.
The silence of nights on Sukhdev Vihar Streets,
The gates that will close at eleven o'clock,
The footprints we make with our dirty feet,
The size of the crowds found in Chandi Chowk.
The chai-walla's selling their magical drink,
The beggars at traffic lights asking for alms,
The way that the old men just sit there and think,
Like old Mughal tombs now surrounded with palms.
The Delhi I know has much more than one face,
From rickshaws which putter along oh-so-slow,
To the markets which move with incredible pace,
There's a lot more to Delhi than I'll ever know.
Geo-Journal #3 – Lajpat Nagar Bazaar (28°34’09.90”N 77°14’30.35”E)
I am sitting in a miniature park in one of South Delhi’s busier bazaar’s, Lajpat Nagar Central Market. This market is famous for its amazingly cheap merchandise, such as clothes or shoes. But, it is also one of at least a few markets where you can find legitimate goods from companies like ‘Pier 1 Imports’ or ‘Crate & Barrel’ for literally up to 1/20th the price (or perhaps less!). These two companies (and many others like them) manufacture goods in India, and whether the dukandars (shopkeepers) at Lajpat sell the reject goods or whether they have some sort of deal with the manufacturers, I cannot say. I can say, however, that the stuff is dang cheap, and it is in fact the real deal. It’s neat too, ‘cause often the price tag will still be on the items, so you can do the math and figure out exactly how amazing the deal you are getting actually is. For example, these placemats are listed online at $9.95 USD. We bought 4 of them for 200 rupees, or roughly $1.20 CAD each. If you think that is a good deal, you should see the legitimate Zara skirt that Andrea bought. She paid Rs. 250 (about $6.25 CAD). The price-tag on the skirt was for €70, or about $120 CAD. Anyways, enough bragging about how posh our lives are (please read Geo-Journal #1 to see how posh our lives aren’t…), it’s time to peel back the layers on the over-ripe onion that is Lajpat Nagar Market.
The park in which I currently sit is more of a garden than a park. It is a mere 15x35m in size, yet still contains the token Indian walking path around it rectangular perimeter. You do the math. That’s a 100 m circuit. If anyone walks here, it’s a sure bet that either they’re counting laps by the hundreds, or they’ve been eating too much ghee, and not enough subzi. Also, remember in GJ#2, I mentioned that most parks had only one way in or out? Well, this park has neither. I got in by following some Indian men as they climbed up onto a bench and stepped over the short fence on the top of the wall. Being a Canadian, I couldn’t help but look both ways before doing it but no one seemed to care, not even the man with the whistle.
There is a small water issue in this park. Directly in front of me a small spring is gently bubbling away, slowly creating a significant puddle in the middle of the park. It may look like the brick that has been placed on top of the fount is a failed attempt to plug a broken underground pipe, and that this whole thing is a mistake. However, this brick is actually a highly preferential method of water distribution control. We have seen several variations on this theme, such as sticks jammed into the end of a leaking pipe, or elastic bands holding old socks around a pipe with a hole. These are meant to regulate the flow more than to stop it, and they are often quite effective too; letting just a small stream of water out instead of a raging torrent (until Kyle tries to wash the sand off his sandals and accidentally knocks said stick out of the pipe… thankfully that was in Kerala and the man with the whistle wasn’t there to see me do it). The puddle in this park appears to have reached equilibrium, as it seems to be evaporating just as fast as it is filling up (thanks in no small part to the tireless efforts of the brick). So, as I am still a small distance from the edge of the water, I should be alright.
The puddle is in fact less a puddle and more a method of watering the grass. This flooding technique has many advantages for the gardener with too much garden and too little help. He simply turns on the tap and walks away. Later he will swim back and turn it off. Now, as easy as this system seems to be, it is not flawless. In almost every park we go to at least one tap (perhaps with a hose attached, or perhaps not) will be turned on, and the grass in one particular area will be completely submerged, while the rest will be slowly browning with the sun. Another unfortunate side effect of this too-efficient use of time is seen in fields that have recently been seeded. Our beloved Elephant Park (a small park in New Friends Colony) has recently undergone such a reseeding, and quite unfortunately, the majority of the seeds did not survive the flood. Those that weren’t swept away by the micro-tsunami were drowned, and within 6 hours of the first watering, the park grounds were back to dustbowl status.
The Lajpat Nagar park here sits in the center of a small courtyard in the pedestrian only market (pedestrian only means bicycles and motorbikes OK in this country), but it is surrounded on all four sides by shops, with cracks in the corners just big enough for two people to pass through to the next courtyard, rubbing shoulders as they do. The open air shops, though some no bigger than a Canadian ATM room (we won’t talk about Indian ATM’s), each have between 5 and 25 people in them, all chattering and gesturing and bartering and trying on and so on. Above each shop is its sign, and above its sign is another, bigger sign, and perhaps above that is another yet larger one, until there’s a 25 foot-tall lady in a brightly-coloured sari looking down on me from 50 feet in the air, as if to say, “Buy my sari or I’ll squish you like the ant that you resemble!!!” The shops all have really great names too, like ‘Ladies Suits – Mix & Match’, or ‘Damsel Zone’, or ‘Dried Fruits Guru Nanak Store’, or ‘Ditoo Chappal Palace’ (chappals are sandals). However, my personal favourite in this particular courtyard is Lilliput. Lilliput is a childrens clothing chain with stores in nearly all the big Delhi markets. The reason I like it so much is its signage. In the marketing for this strictly Indian company, there’s a distinct lack of the Indian demographic. Above the store two 1.5 story tall blond boys are rocking out pretty hard. Inside the store Swiss looking children mingle with African Americans and perhaps a Korean or two. No Indian’s. It’s not just Lilliput either. In our local Community Centre there is a new-ish sports bar named Superstars. The signs show a group of white people holding drinks and having a quite enjoyable time. I could guess into the cultural significance of this type of signage, but I’d probably be way off (I’m an outsider, remember? I probably always will be), so I’ll just leave my petty observations as petty observations, and no more.
The walkways and courtyards of this bustling bazaar are packed not only with shoppers, but also with peddlers. Hundreds of men troll through the crowds, tooting little horns or calling out the names of their products. While they are found all over this great city, the mobile merchants in Lajpat Nagar are a special breed. A seedy bunch, they seem. And they always seem to be peddling the same few types of wares in this particular market. If you want to buy socks, find a mobile merchant in Lajpat. Tin foil? Lajpat. Pants falling down at work? Buy a new leather belt from the belt man. Nose running? Wait in a courtyard here in Lajpat and we promise a handkerchief man will be with you in a minute. Customer service A-Okay. My favourite out of them all is the sunglasses men. I don’t know what it is about this particular product, but they treat you as though they are peddling some sort of illicit item. Perhaps they are. Perhaps the sunglasses are stolen, I don’t know. Regardless, they tend to walk up to you very covertly and from their waist open a glasses case for a split second to reveal a pair of Oankley or Ray-Bun glasses, as though were in some kind of 1940’s sleuth movie. “Psssst… you wanna buy some glasses?” they ask while slightly opening the front of their oversize trench coat. Then with a quick look in either direction they sink back into the shadows…
The Equilibrium has shifted. The puddle is slowly approaching. It is time to seek higher ground.
Despite its hectic surroundings, the ambiance in this park is rather tranquil. Sitting in this park is sort of like being in the eye of a shopping cyclone. It is the calm in the storm. Between the gentle trickle of the broken-but-not-really-broken pipe to the soothing murmur of thousands of shoppers trying to strike a deal, the air is alight with peaceful tones. Every minute or two a passenger jet will soar slowly overhead on its final approach to the airport. It adds to the oddly relaxing rhythm and aura of this place. It is no wonder then that the park is slowly filling up with men. Some are eating, some are sleeping, some are washing the dust off their feet, some are conversing. Maybe they work here, or perhaps their wives are shopping somewhere in the area. Either way, this park is a great place to sit and soak in the vibrant air of the Lajpat Nagar Central Market. I think perhaps I will come back some time.
The Documentary
We decided to make a documentary about an outing to the market. Here it is.
Part 1: The Roof
Part 2: The Newspaper
Part 3: The Toothbrush
Part 4: The Plan
Part 5: The Stairs
Part 6: The Auto-Rickshaw
Part 7: The Meter
Part 8: The Mathura
Part 9: The India Gate
Part 10: The Payment
The Rajasthan Adventure
We went to Rajasthan and rode camels. Here's the proof.
In any other country, this would be a severe liability issue. At least Kyle had his Indiana Jones hat on...
In any other country, this would be a severe liability issue. At least Kyle had his Indiana Jones hat on...
No Bags Allowed!!!
The Commonwealth Games. If you are anything like me… these words do not mean alot. What comes to my highly unsports-oriented mind is a colonial Olympic knock-off, or something along those lines. But then again, that is coming from the girl who has never participated in any semi-organized sport in her life (aside from the occasional game of dodge ball, which I hated. I have many memories of those red rubber balls being whipped at impossible speeds towards my 40 pound frame by other 3rd graders).
However, if you live in Delhi, the “Commonwealth Games” means a great deal. As far as I can tell, it means: the impossible extension of a under used metro line (there is currently metro construction clogging up every main road in the city), and an impossible number of state-of-the-art sporting stadiums only one quarter, or even one third complete in a city where no one gives a rip about sports unless it is cricket. Billions of rupees are being poured into hosting the 2010 Commonwealth Games, and from what I can tell, if you asked the average Delhi citizen what they thought of it – well, most just shake their heads.
So when we caught wind of the baton (think: Olympic Torch knock-off) unveiling being held at India gate tonight, (apparently it gets sent to the Queen of England in Buckingham Palace!) we thought it might be a good chance to see what this Commonwealth thing was really all about. Actually that is a lie, I heard that there were going to be some acrobatic feats happening which rivalled cirque-du-soleil, involving both cranes and flying angels. I was immediately intrigued, and having nothing better to do on a Sunday night, we decided to check it out.
So we got ready. We threw together a picnic blanket, some books and dinner – put it into our backpack and headed out. We caught an auto to India gate where we were dropped into a crowd of several million people; we joined the masses as everyone wandered around wondering where the angels were. After several enquiries with the traffic police, we discovered the entrance to the evening’s performance was on the other side of the roundabout, or 1 km away. So we began walking. The entire park was crawling with the Delhi Police (“with you, for you, always”) and their rifles dating back to the British rule. Many also had important looking bamboo canes. They were spaced every 20 feet, and as we walked along Kyle and I speculated as to whether or not they would shoot us if we tried to make a run towards the center of the park. After some discussion, we decided that they would probably just tackle us because we are foreigners. And after some further discussion, we also decided that if Kyle were to dress a little more, ahem, ‘ethnically’ the chances for a shooting would certainly increase.
Eventually, after several false alarms, we reached the appropriate gate for the ‘common folk’ (ie. non-pass holders) to enter. There were around 70 people milling about in front of the all-to-common metal detectors (we have become surprisingly used to being frisked, searched and ‘detected’ upon entering any mall, movie theatre, train station, and various other public domains). We joined the ranks, and inquired as to when the gates would be open for the masses. 7pm one man told us. Kyle asked a nearby police officer when the gates would be opened. 6:30 he said. It was only 5:30, so we got ready for a bit of a wait. Immediately, the crowd surged forward, and we found that all of those waiting, including ourselves, had suddenly shrunk into a space roughly measuring 10 square meters. In the midst of elbows, dupattas, children and armpits we realized that the gates were in fact, opening now.
Amid the shoving and watching my ‘personal space’ disappear at an alarming rate, I realized that the crowd wasn’t being allowed to filter through the 2 metal detectors, something was holding everybody up. There were a lot of hand gestures and frustrated shouts directed at one extremely cross looking police officer. I asked a lady who was 2 inches from my face what was going on. She rolled her eyes… “no mobiles allowed”. Now to understand this frustration, you need to understand that in the city of Delhi, everyone owns a mobile phone. From the rick-shaw wallahs (and us) with the bottom of the barrel plastic model to the upper class with their i-phones, they have become a staple part of human existence in Delhi, along with food, water and shelter. So no mobile phone essentially meant no one can come in. There had been no warning of this absurd rule in any advertisements for the event, and naturally, the crowd was getting a little peeved. But the officer stood his ground amidst various yells, expressive arm waving and mobiles being shaken in his face. It became clear he wasn’t going to budge. Wondering what we were going to do, we noticed some people breaking off the edge of our crowd and crossing the street to where 2 more metal detectors were set up, they were letting people in on that side.
Quickly we elbowed our way out of our crowd, and joined the growing crowd on the other side of the street; it seemed that these officers hadn’t got the “no mobiles allowed” memo - fine by us. We made our way through the metal detectors, and a police officer searched our back pack. No problem there, so we paused to look around and figure out where we were heading in this giant park. There was the driveway heading into the center of the park, which was blocked off, everyone was being filtered to either the left or right through holes in the hedge to go around to the center of the park. We were standing on the one side where our mobile-friendly police had let us through, the crowd pushing through the hedge was quite large here (as most abandoned the other security check) so we crossed back to the other side of the street behind the no-mobile security check and began to cross through the hedge. Immediately a man was blocking our path – it was the same very cross police officer –“NO BAGS ALLOWED!” he roared. We protested, telling him we just got in with the backpack, and it had just been searched by his colleagues 10 feet away across the street. But again, as with the phones, he wouldn’t budge. Fine. Apparently it didn’t matter if there weren’t going to be any spectators on that side of the park, at least there wouldn’t be any mobiles or backpacks either. We crossed back the street, elbowed our way through the dozens of people, through the narrow gap in the hedge and were spewed out the gap onto the lawn.
At last! Through the ridiculous security, we briskly walked ahead in search of the flying angels. We rounded a corner, and alas, we saw two long lines of people, one of men, the other of women. More security! We hurried into our respective lines, and with a shrug of the shoulders we waited. Police patrolled up and down the line inspecting the spectators. A couple of officers stopped at Kyle –“NO BAGS ALLOWED!” Kyle protested, we had already had our bag searched, and the gentlemen were welcome to search it again if they wanted, all it contained was 2 novels, a picnic blanket and some sandwiches. We had travelled half way across the city to get here, were we supposed to just go home? Was there a bag check? Nope. Didn’t matter, because: “NO BAGS ALLOWED”. And the police moved on down the line. I was getting increasingly frustrated with the security, the bureaucracy and huge ordeal simple events end up becoming.
I marched over to Kyle in the men’s line. Should we just forget it and go home? Two dejected looking German tourists walked by, lonely planet and backpack in hand. “Ya, they are holding a Commonwealth Games event – you can’t get in” (Well, the games aren’t for another year, but close enough). That did it for me, we were getting in there. There is no way I was going to miss out on those flying angel’s man. “Just give me the bag.” I said to Kyle, refusing to give up. I carried the back pack over to the women’s line and resumed waiting. Soon 2 female police officers walked by and pointed at the backpack “NO BAGS ALLOWED”. I nodded appreciatively, and held my spot in line. There were 2 young ladies in front of me who didn’t speak any English, they smiled sympathetically and seemed to agree (from my limited understanding of Hindi) that “NO BAGS ALLOWED” was a silly rule. The men’s line was moving along much faster and I could see Kyle making his way through the metal detectors (again) and being patted down (again) and searched. He was safely in, we were halfway there. Eventually, I got up to the detectors, seeing Kyle watching from the other side.
But what’s this? My detector wasn’t working. A group of officers were discussing this in a group, staring mystified up at the red and green blinking lights. After some time, they unplugged it dragged it across the grass and dragged another one over and plugged it in. An officer walked back and forth through the new detector, and it continued to beep and bleep and blink. The other officers continued to discuss this turn of events and one started smacking the ancient machine while looking hopefully at the blinking lights. No use. This detector was then unplugged, dragged, and the former was reinstated. All the while I was standing at the front of the line with my backpack, trying as hard as possible to look like the kind of person who didn’t carry bombs into large social gatherings. It must have worked, because once waved through by the group of officers, who ignored the backpack I proceeded to the women’s search station behind a black curtain, where I was patted, prodded and my back pack was thoroughly searched. The bored looking police officer waved me through and motioned to the next woman in line. I hurried out to meet Kyle, figuring that she didn’t get the memo either, that there was absolutely, without exception or excuse “NO BAGS ALLOWED”.
Geo-Journal #2 – Sitting Under a Tree (28°33’38.85”N 77°16’09.70”E)
I found a place to sit that I have walked by a million times but have never actually noticed. I guess that’s what happens when you slow down and look. I’ve lived in Abbotsford my whole life but there’s probably places there too that I have never noticed. It’s just the way things are I guess. But anyway, I’m living in Delhi right now, and this is about a place in Delhi.
I am situated on the sidewalk, sitting on a bench under a big tree and leaning against a short wall, behind which is a park. All the parks here are walled in, and almost all of them have only one way in or one way out. I had originally intended to sit in the park and write this, but there was nowhere to sit in the shade, and it’s getting hot in Delhi these days. So, I walked back out the one entrance and onto the sidewalk, looking for a place to sit as I did so. Then I saw the bench here, so I took a seat.
A row of parked cars separates me from the road, and beyond them a small fence separates one half of the road from the other. On the other side of the road are the entranceways to the mighty Crowne Plaza Hotel, and the local Community Centre. Down the road to my left is Mathura Rd., the main highway in our area, and down the road to my right is the way I will eventually walk home.
To my immediate left on the sidewalk, a man has set up a small barber shop. These outdoor salons can be seen all over the city, and while I haven’t taken the time yet, I may one day choose to get my hair cut by one of these street-scissors. However, I may choose not to as well. The thought of an old man who speaks no English running a huge straight-edge razor under my chin makes me a little nervous. I’ll probably continue getting haircuts from Andrea. However, it seems like these outdoor barbers have an interesting thing going on. Here, two beat up old chairs sit facing the brick wall of the park, and two rectangle mirrors lean against the fence on the ledge of the wall, reflecting the faces of his patrons while the barber (in his bright blue shirt) silently snips away. The fixings, his various gels and creams and scissors and combs and so on all sit on a piece of newspaper that he has draped over the top of the wall, waiting to be used. He looks at me suspiciously, and I will find out later that I am sitting on his bench. His current customer becomes satisfied with a job well done, and dropping some few rupees into the barber’s hand, he walks away.
Oh great! I didn’t bother to check this bench and wall very well, did I? I am now crawling with bugs, from head to toe. As I stand and brush myself off, the barber cracks a smile and tells me they won’t bite. The chai-walla to my right chuckles as well and goes off in Hindi, and all I can pick up is the word “later,” and I shudder to think what that means.
The chai-walla is an institution here in Delhi. I am convinced that they are both the cities strength, and its Achilles heel. Take away the chai-walla, and the economy would crumble. The chai-walla is the trader of tea, the connoisseur of caffeine, the sultan of sip-able spice, the dealer of daily information and the most abundantly present presence on the streets of Delhi (or on the buses, trains, and in the parks). Wherever you are, you are no more than a hundred steps from a chai-walla. A horde of men will invariably be crowded around them, paying 3 or sometimes 5 rupees to drink fresh Indian chai out of a small handless glass cup, their fingers wrapped gingerly around the rim of the glass, desperately trying to escape the heat. They sip carefully at first, their pinky finger curled slightly in order to tip the glass from its base, the only other location on the glass that is cool enough to touch. Then as soon as the chai is manageable they chug the rest and hop back on their motorcycle, carrying on along their way. The whole scene takes not more than five minutes to play out.
The chai-walla beside me has no table or booth. He squats with his back to the wall, and looks up to his customers every so often in the midst of his flurry of activity. This man does good business. All he has is a small gas burner sitting on the dusty sidewalk, and various containers of spices and tea scattered around him. A small wash basin is found just behind him to the right, and here he half-heartedly rinses out the glasses before re-filling them and passing them on to the next patron. He sells to long-ji wearing rickshaw-wallas and suit-wearing business men indiscriminately, but he won’t sell to me. I don’t like Indian chai. I am an anomaly, I know, but I just can’t handle it. I can drink it if I have to, like when I’m invited in to someone’s house and they bust out the chai from the kitchen. But if there’s a way to get out of it, I will.
Beside the chai-walla there is a paan-walla. I hate paan. Paan is the betel-nut chew that India is famous for. However, cast off all notions of old men wrapping the gooey red nut in a banana leaf (or whatever they use). This is a multi-billion rupee industry. Paan is now produced in rolls of tear-away tea-bag sized plastic rip-open packages, and the typical paan-walla has hundreds of these rolls of chew dangling down from a small pole, ready to be ripped off and sold. Not only does it come in ready-to-chew packages, it also now comes in a plethora of flavours. Often they contain tobacco or other narcotics (legal or not), but they even have paan for kids, or breath-freshener paan.
All over the city at all times of the day, men can be seen tearing open the little packages and emptying them into their month. Now, I’m a live and let live kind of guy, but that’s only for things that don’t affect me. If these men kept their paan to themselves, I wouldn’t mind so much. However, they spit. They spit like camels, all over this city. We will be sitting in the back of an auto-rickshaw, and the auto-walla will lean out the side of the vehicle and unleash the most disgusting steam of chunky red paan from out his mouth, and a sharp “splick” will sound as the stream comes into contact with the cement, leaving a thick pile of red goo splattered where it hits. These red slicks are everywhere in this city. Sidewalks, streets, alleys, park paths, etc. Every time we walk we watch our step, just as much for the disgusting puddles of paan as for the stray-dog feces. Paan should be outlawed. I could probably go on and on about how disgusting this habit is, but you’d probably never get it. I’ll just leave it at this: I’d rather spend all day around smokers than one minute around a paan chewer.
Across from the paan-walla is the areas most significant landmark. Crowne Plaza Hotel. This behemoth towers above the local development, and can often be seen from many miles away (depending of course, on the state of the cities dense smog). Rich business travelers and foreign dignitaries frequent this 5-star dormitory, as it promises proximity to important places and peaceful sleeps for all its guests. Surrounding the complex is a 12-15 foot high wall, and there are only 2 gates. One that goes in, and one that goes out. Within these walls lies a miniature America, Indian style. It is a peaceful place to eat a way-too-expensive pastry or have an air-conditioned respite from the mad-house that is the Delhi outside its walls. As an added bonus, our local travel agent has his office in the basement of the hotel, giving me an excuse to visit little-America every once in a while.
Getting in to little-America, however, can sometimes be almost as difficult as it is to get into Big-America. Besides the run of the mill security gate and the routine security checks on every vehicle that enters the premesis, there stands a battalion of security guards, some hired security, some police, and quite often some military officers. After the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai, a sand-bag bunker was erected in front of the main gate, and it has been there ever since. There are often 5-6 soldiers armed with semi-automatic assault rifles sitting behind its walls, chattering away about this or that, perhaps waiting for a chance to spring into action at a moments notice. As I walk by these men they eye me from top to bottom (I look Israeli, remember?). But with no probable cause, they let me pass, and I walk up to the front door of the hotel. Here I am frisked and my bag is checked. Then a quick swipe with a metal detector gives me the final clearance and I am in. This may sound extreme, and perhaps it was for me when I first got here, but by now it is a normal occurrence. To get into any mall or government park or market, one needs to pass at the very least through a stand-alone metal-detecting arch, and often this is coupled with a frisking and a bag check. I am quite used to this. They even sometimes get me to show them my phone so they can be sure that it is not a trigger for a bomb, as this technology is what has recently been used in several attacks across India. These security checks may seem out of place in a thriving metropolis like Delhi, but they are a constant reminder of the September bombings across this city, and the November attacks in Mumbai.
Beside Crowne Plaza sits the New Friends Colony Community Centre. This is the hub of entertainment and fast-food or fine-dining for the surrounding district. On its maze-like yard one can find restaurants like Subway, McDonalds, Pizza Hut and Dominoes, as well as numerous high class dining or Indian fast food chains such as Nirula’s and Fast Trax. It also houses the two largest coffee chains in India (there is no Starbucks in India), Café Coffee Day, and Barista Café. The Community Centre (or CC as it is called), is the place to be in the evenings, and it is crawling with groups of guys and groups of girls, (and every once in a while a group of guys AND girls), all looking for a place to hang out or eat. There are also general stores, stationary stores, photo-labs, and a plethora of small hole-in-the-wall style Indian diners, each with its own varying level of sketchiness. Some we will actually eat at. Some we will eat at, but only from their vegetarian menu, and some we refuse to enter. Throughout the course of our week we will likely eat at CC at least 5 times, sometimes more, depending on how our budget is doing. If it is not feeling very well, we’ll probably just walk over to the market street which is much closer to our home, and we’ll buy ourselves a bag full of samosa’s for 20 rupees.
Well, that about covers that. Besides, a local security guard has come over and has sat down right beside me. He is staring at my page as I write this, so I guess I will probably engage him in conversation for a while and then get on my feet and carry on down the road. There’s plenty more to see in this great city, so until next time, thanks for reading.
Kyle.
I am situated on the sidewalk, sitting on a bench under a big tree and leaning against a short wall, behind which is a park. All the parks here are walled in, and almost all of them have only one way in or one way out. I had originally intended to sit in the park and write this, but there was nowhere to sit in the shade, and it’s getting hot in Delhi these days. So, I walked back out the one entrance and onto the sidewalk, looking for a place to sit as I did so. Then I saw the bench here, so I took a seat.
A row of parked cars separates me from the road, and beyond them a small fence separates one half of the road from the other. On the other side of the road are the entranceways to the mighty Crowne Plaza Hotel, and the local Community Centre. Down the road to my left is Mathura Rd., the main highway in our area, and down the road to my right is the way I will eventually walk home.
To my immediate left on the sidewalk, a man has set up a small barber shop. These outdoor salons can be seen all over the city, and while I haven’t taken the time yet, I may one day choose to get my hair cut by one of these street-scissors. However, I may choose not to as well. The thought of an old man who speaks no English running a huge straight-edge razor under my chin makes me a little nervous. I’ll probably continue getting haircuts from Andrea. However, it seems like these outdoor barbers have an interesting thing going on. Here, two beat up old chairs sit facing the brick wall of the park, and two rectangle mirrors lean against the fence on the ledge of the wall, reflecting the faces of his patrons while the barber (in his bright blue shirt) silently snips away. The fixings, his various gels and creams and scissors and combs and so on all sit on a piece of newspaper that he has draped over the top of the wall, waiting to be used. He looks at me suspiciously, and I will find out later that I am sitting on his bench. His current customer becomes satisfied with a job well done, and dropping some few rupees into the barber’s hand, he walks away.
Oh great! I didn’t bother to check this bench and wall very well, did I? I am now crawling with bugs, from head to toe. As I stand and brush myself off, the barber cracks a smile and tells me they won’t bite. The chai-walla to my right chuckles as well and goes off in Hindi, and all I can pick up is the word “later,” and I shudder to think what that means.
The chai-walla is an institution here in Delhi. I am convinced that they are both the cities strength, and its Achilles heel. Take away the chai-walla, and the economy would crumble. The chai-walla is the trader of tea, the connoisseur of caffeine, the sultan of sip-able spice, the dealer of daily information and the most abundantly present presence on the streets of Delhi (or on the buses, trains, and in the parks). Wherever you are, you are no more than a hundred steps from a chai-walla. A horde of men will invariably be crowded around them, paying 3 or sometimes 5 rupees to drink fresh Indian chai out of a small handless glass cup, their fingers wrapped gingerly around the rim of the glass, desperately trying to escape the heat. They sip carefully at first, their pinky finger curled slightly in order to tip the glass from its base, the only other location on the glass that is cool enough to touch. Then as soon as the chai is manageable they chug the rest and hop back on their motorcycle, carrying on along their way. The whole scene takes not more than five minutes to play out.
The chai-walla beside me has no table or booth. He squats with his back to the wall, and looks up to his customers every so often in the midst of his flurry of activity. This man does good business. All he has is a small gas burner sitting on the dusty sidewalk, and various containers of spices and tea scattered around him. A small wash basin is found just behind him to the right, and here he half-heartedly rinses out the glasses before re-filling them and passing them on to the next patron. He sells to long-ji wearing rickshaw-wallas and suit-wearing business men indiscriminately, but he won’t sell to me. I don’t like Indian chai. I am an anomaly, I know, but I just can’t handle it. I can drink it if I have to, like when I’m invited in to someone’s house and they bust out the chai from the kitchen. But if there’s a way to get out of it, I will.
Beside the chai-walla there is a paan-walla. I hate paan. Paan is the betel-nut chew that India is famous for. However, cast off all notions of old men wrapping the gooey red nut in a banana leaf (or whatever they use). This is a multi-billion rupee industry. Paan is now produced in rolls of tear-away tea-bag sized plastic rip-open packages, and the typical paan-walla has hundreds of these rolls of chew dangling down from a small pole, ready to be ripped off and sold. Not only does it come in ready-to-chew packages, it also now comes in a plethora of flavours. Often they contain tobacco or other narcotics (legal or not), but they even have paan for kids, or breath-freshener paan.
All over the city at all times of the day, men can be seen tearing open the little packages and emptying them into their month. Now, I’m a live and let live kind of guy, but that’s only for things that don’t affect me. If these men kept their paan to themselves, I wouldn’t mind so much. However, they spit. They spit like camels, all over this city. We will be sitting in the back of an auto-rickshaw, and the auto-walla will lean out the side of the vehicle and unleash the most disgusting steam of chunky red paan from out his mouth, and a sharp “splick” will sound as the stream comes into contact with the cement, leaving a thick pile of red goo splattered where it hits. These red slicks are everywhere in this city. Sidewalks, streets, alleys, park paths, etc. Every time we walk we watch our step, just as much for the disgusting puddles of paan as for the stray-dog feces. Paan should be outlawed. I could probably go on and on about how disgusting this habit is, but you’d probably never get it. I’ll just leave it at this: I’d rather spend all day around smokers than one minute around a paan chewer.
Across from the paan-walla is the areas most significant landmark. Crowne Plaza Hotel. This behemoth towers above the local development, and can often be seen from many miles away (depending of course, on the state of the cities dense smog). Rich business travelers and foreign dignitaries frequent this 5-star dormitory, as it promises proximity to important places and peaceful sleeps for all its guests. Surrounding the complex is a 12-15 foot high wall, and there are only 2 gates. One that goes in, and one that goes out. Within these walls lies a miniature America, Indian style. It is a peaceful place to eat a way-too-expensive pastry or have an air-conditioned respite from the mad-house that is the Delhi outside its walls. As an added bonus, our local travel agent has his office in the basement of the hotel, giving me an excuse to visit little-America every once in a while.
Getting in to little-America, however, can sometimes be almost as difficult as it is to get into Big-America. Besides the run of the mill security gate and the routine security checks on every vehicle that enters the premesis, there stands a battalion of security guards, some hired security, some police, and quite often some military officers. After the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai, a sand-bag bunker was erected in front of the main gate, and it has been there ever since. There are often 5-6 soldiers armed with semi-automatic assault rifles sitting behind its walls, chattering away about this or that, perhaps waiting for a chance to spring into action at a moments notice. As I walk by these men they eye me from top to bottom (I look Israeli, remember?). But with no probable cause, they let me pass, and I walk up to the front door of the hotel. Here I am frisked and my bag is checked. Then a quick swipe with a metal detector gives me the final clearance and I am in. This may sound extreme, and perhaps it was for me when I first got here, but by now it is a normal occurrence. To get into any mall or government park or market, one needs to pass at the very least through a stand-alone metal-detecting arch, and often this is coupled with a frisking and a bag check. I am quite used to this. They even sometimes get me to show them my phone so they can be sure that it is not a trigger for a bomb, as this technology is what has recently been used in several attacks across India. These security checks may seem out of place in a thriving metropolis like Delhi, but they are a constant reminder of the September bombings across this city, and the November attacks in Mumbai.
Beside Crowne Plaza sits the New Friends Colony Community Centre. This is the hub of entertainment and fast-food or fine-dining for the surrounding district. On its maze-like yard one can find restaurants like Subway, McDonalds, Pizza Hut and Dominoes, as well as numerous high class dining or Indian fast food chains such as Nirula’s and Fast Trax. It also houses the two largest coffee chains in India (there is no Starbucks in India), Café Coffee Day, and Barista Café. The Community Centre (or CC as it is called), is the place to be in the evenings, and it is crawling with groups of guys and groups of girls, (and every once in a while a group of guys AND girls), all looking for a place to hang out or eat. There are also general stores, stationary stores, photo-labs, and a plethora of small hole-in-the-wall style Indian diners, each with its own varying level of sketchiness. Some we will actually eat at. Some we will eat at, but only from their vegetarian menu, and some we refuse to enter. Throughout the course of our week we will likely eat at CC at least 5 times, sometimes more, depending on how our budget is doing. If it is not feeling very well, we’ll probably just walk over to the market street which is much closer to our home, and we’ll buy ourselves a bag full of samosa’s for 20 rupees.
Well, that about covers that. Besides, a local security guard has come over and has sat down right beside me. He is staring at my page as I write this, so I guess I will probably engage him in conversation for a while and then get on my feet and carry on down the road. There’s plenty more to see in this great city, so until next time, thanks for reading.
Kyle.
Geo-Journal #1
I often write of the things I see that stand out. The bizarre or the intriguing. Sometimes the scary things, and often the funny things. But what really makes life in Delhi interesting, what gives it vitality and colour more than elephants running red lights or monkeys stealing roti from travelers at the train station, is the plain old everyday life. I could write a hundred stories of the most amazing things I have seen in Delhi, but you would not understand Delhi like I have come to understand it. You would not see it with my eyes or smell it with my nose (though for the latter you should be grateful).
I have been wondering how I could best capture this “everyday life” for my own memory and for sharing with others. Last night on a long train ride from Jaipur to Delhi, as I tried to overcome my nausea while Andrea sat giggling beside me with her nose in a book; last night the answer finally hit me. The book is by a gora (a white man) and has only very recently been published. In it the author details a number of journeys he has taken by foot around the great city of Delhi. Each chapter starts with a hand-drawn map, and this is followed by an amazingly insightful and often humorous narrative of the things he encountered along the way. The reason this book captures the essence of the city is that it was written in the city. In order to write about this city, the way I see it, I need to actually be in the city, seeing it. It was this realization that led me to dream up Geo-Journaling, and this is the first instalment.
Hopefully each week I will be able to find time to sit somewhere in the city and journal about the things that I see and experience. I will write about my experiences around the topic, perhaps from other times or places, but all having to do with what I see right then and there. If I can, I will include the history of things and the cultural motivations or implications of activities around me, (though I in no way claim to actually know what is happening at a deeper level; I am after all, a Canadian, through and through).
Finally, as for the “Geo” part of my journaling, I will give the longitude and latitude for each of my stops so that those of you who, like me, are Google-Earth addicts can look up the locations and get an idea of the geography of my experiences. As stated above, I am hoping to journal about once a week, perhaps more if I can find time, but this whole idea may just flop and come to naught. Or perhaps I’ll start my own geo-journaling website and take over Facebook or something. Who knows? Anyways, please enjoy the following.
Sincerely,
Kyle Hendy
Geo-Journal #1 – My Front Yard (28°33’27.24”N 77°16’34.56”E)
I decided that it would be most fitting to start this journal of the ‘everyday’ the same place that I start everyday. My home in Delhi.
Andrea and I live in a place called Sukhdev Vihar. It is a small middle-class neighbourhood in New Delhi, India. It is a clean neighbourhood by Delhi standards, and the gates close at about 11:00pm, so it’s a quiet one as well. Our house is white, cold, and about as broke down as my car was when I decided to park it for good. I don’t mean to say that we live in a trash heap. I could never say that (or do that). There are people quite literally right down the road, who quite literally do live in a trash heap. There is no space between the rich and the poor in this city. They could be neighbours (albeit neighbours that do not interact and have quite possibly never acknowledged or even seen each other). No, our house is not a literal dump, it’s just that we are wealthy Canadians, and so it just feels like it sometimes. However, we caught the rat in a trap, and the cockroach population is for the most part under control, so our house is liveable and in all honesty, it has become our home.
Our house is also very large. It is probably about 3 times as large as our basement suite in Abbotsford, and our lack of furniture combined with the echo-ey cement walls and floors and ceilings makes it feel even bigger than that. In our neighbourhood, however, our house is comparatively small. Many of the houses have multiple levels (ours is only one), and while some of them have different residents in each level, quite a few have three stories or more to themselves. Only the dhobi-walla has a worse house than us.
The dhobi-walla, or laundry man, lives in the most run down house on the street (28°33’26.40”N 77°16’36.30”E). I’m not sure if he rents it or is just squatting, but he sleeps there so I say he lives there. It is basically a big empty box with a few rooms and more than a few broken windows. His only furniture is a wicker bed and a few clotheslines (if those can be called furniture). He sets up shop every day at the end of the road under a wooden roof made out of scrap lumber (28°33’25.40”N 77°16’36.30”E), and he spends all day folding clothes or ironing them with a big old iron in which he places hot coals to produce the heat. He washes clothes for people from the neighbourhood, and it seems like he’s always busy. He sometimes sings while he works, and his own clothes never seem to be quite as clean as the ones he works on. His neighbour drives a Mercedes, and the house across the street has four stories of luxurious marble floors and brass light fixtures. I say hello to him when I walk by. He smiles and says hello back, and carries on pushing the iron around his table.
Our next door neighbour is currently renovating his home. I have short conversations with his servant (yes, everyone in these neighbourhoods has servants), and through his very limited English and my very limited Hindi I have ascertained that the house owner has moved into his summer house until Diwalli (a fall festival), and in the mean time the inside of the house is being gutted. Like, literally gutted. They are redesigning the layout of the house, and that means tearing down all the brick walls and building new ones. If we were in Canada, this may not affect us, but in India it does. All the houses on this street are built right up against each other, so that the brick wall of one house rests right against the brick wall of the next house. The hammering starts at about 8am every morning, and carries on until 9pm, and sometimes later than that. Therefore, our big empty cement house daily becomes a giant resonance chamber with every swing of the hammer next door. Today I was in the back yard, and the vibrations from the pounding were causing pieces of plaster to fall off the wall into our yard.
Another interesting aspect to this method of construction is the sheer amount of man hours put into the building of a house. Labour is so cheap here, that it doesn’t make sense to buy machines to do things, when you can get humans to do them for cheaper. For example, every morning before the rest of Delhi is quite awake, the streets fill up with men and women wearing turbans and shawls and holding straw brooms, and by 8:00am the streets are entirely swept. Even in the coffee shops or restaurants we go to, there are a plethora of bored-looking servers standing around the counters watching you eat or drink, looking at their watches, or if they’re lucky, the boss isn’t there and they can visit with each other. In the context of my neighbour’s construction, this fact means that there are about a hundred guys in the house at a given time, some knocking things down, and others building them up. It also means that when the huge truck stacked with a load of new bricks for the house showed up, it was unloaded by hand, one brick at a time. It was then neatly re-stacked in front of our house (don’t ask me why they didn’t stack it in front of their own house), brick by brick, layer by layer until the entire truckload of bricks was sitting on our yard. The stack is about 5 feet tall, 6 feet wide, and about 12 feet long. You want to hear the best part? The truck showed up at about 12:30am, so for the next 3 hours there was a rhythmic deep ceramic thudding and the sound of mens’ voices echoing through our house. I managed to sleep through some of it, but not until after I went and peeked through the windows to see what the heck was going on.
Our front yard is separated from the street by a large wall and a metal gate. While the gate does nothing to keep the endless march of dust from entering our premises (or even our house for that matter), it does provide a simple cultural symbol of private space. This can be good, in the case of Hindu holy-men dragging reluctant calves along behind them seeking alms for Krishna, or bad, in the case of ordering pizza. We have no buzzer outside the wall on the street (as most houses do), and it is a known fact that to open someone’s gate and walk right up to someone’s front door is an absolute no-no in this part of town. So, we can ignore the man in orange and his bovine god, but we have to stand by the front door and wait when we’re craving a deluxe Hawaiian.
Running the full length of our front wall is a 1.5 foot wide planter. Everything planted in it has long since passed on, but it makes a nice bed for the neighbourhood cats, and it doubles as a quick and easy source of grass and twigs for the pair of finches that have decided to build a nest in the crack between the bricks up in the corner by our front door.
“Yeh-Mackinay!!!” My concentration is broken along with the quiet of the neighbourhood by a loud call from down the street. “Yeh-Mackinay!!!” it comes again. A man walks by holding some metal wire and a 14 foot long bamboo pole. “Yeh-Mackinay!!!” He repeats his call every 10-20 meters, and does so for the entire morning. He walks around our neighbourhood and often passes our house 2-3 times a day, his call echoing through our cavernous domicile. He is soon joined by another “Subziiiiii!!!”, and another, “Gumlay-o-laaaaay.” Before long there is a symphony of calls moving up and down our street as each man, whether he is selling flower pots, brooms, vegetables, or even coming by to pick up our garbage, tries to get our attention by uttering the most creative or guttural call they can possibly muster. They are like those courting birds on BBC’s Planet Earth. Our two personal favourites are the “Yeh-Mackinay” bamboo guy (don’t ask me what he actually sells or does), and a man on a bike who yells with the most intriguing mono-tone robot voice you will ever hear. We don’t quite know what he is saying, but he sounds like a storm-trooper droid yelling “Eat paaaaaaaaaaaaaie… made-by-me… made-by-me.” Even though he doesn’t actually sell pie, we always crack a smile when we hear his froglike, throaty, mono-tone call.
The most common are the subzi-walla’s. They are the vegetable salesmen, and they pass by with three-wheeled bicycle-carts filled to the brim with fresh vegetables. We love listening to them call and we trying to distinguish the different names of the vegetables they sell. “Subziiiiiii! Alu or gobe or tamatar or adrak or nimbuuuuuuUUU!!!!…” It is always interesting. These mobile supermarkets are a great asset when you are midway through making a cup of tea and you realize that you just ran out of ginger. Run out to the front yard, open the gate, and within a minute a subzi-walla will be by with your much anticipated veggies. A couple of rupees will stock up your fridge and you’ll be ready to cook.
We have an Indian friend who swears that by purchasing from the mobile subzi-walla’s we are getting ripped off. We do try to save money where we can, so the thought of buying vegetables for even cheaper than cheap was for a day fairly appealing to us. However, that day ended with us heading across the highway and across the tracks and through the slum past the garbage dump to the subzi-bazaar; the mecca of cheap vegetables (28°33’33.50”N 77°15’48.90”E). This is where the mobile markets stock up each morning before heading out to the multitude of twisted alleyways and subdivisions surrounding the market. Our friend convinced us that this would be the best place to buy veggies, because they were cheaper. Now, there is no possible way I could ever describe the subzi-bazaar to you and do it justice, so I will just kinda throw a few brief sentences of description in here and then when that is over I will say, “No, you still don’t get it.” We pass through the gates and enter the mess. Five foot high piles of every kind of vegetable imaginable (and perhaps a few that are unimaginable) line the yard (you can see the green piles on Google Earth), and a narrow pathway is left between them. People yell and people push. Cows and goats scramble over the piles trying to escape angry vendors with bamboo batons while simultaneously scooping up as many mouthfuls of leafy lunch as they can, and distributing their distinctive deposits along behind them as they do so. Watch your step! Dead rats lay still warm along the edges, swept there to make room for the ever changing piles of vegetables, and along the pathway those rodents who neglected to notice the abundantly laden delivery trucks as they approached have become two-dimensional warnings to their friends. Then there are the flies. Well, I won’t even tell you about them, suffice to say that they hang in the air like a fog, obstructing vision past more than a hundred feet.
In the midst of all this we stop to ask a potato-walla how much for a kilogram of potatoes. His answer astounds us. Five rupees. That’s ten cents back home. The only catch is, you have to buy a minimum of 5 kg in order to make a sale. The next man says the same. As does the next. As it turns out, there is no one in this market who is willing to part with less than a cart-load of veggies as a time, so we said goodbye to the veggie-zoo, and walked back across the tracks and across the highway and into our own little neighbourhood. It’s better this way, we decide. We’re not spending much on them anyways, and we certainly don’t need 5 kg of onions. We can just buy our veggies and we don’t have to think about where they have been. We can just wash them and eat them, and pretend that they came straight out of the garden and onto our plate. Mmmmmm. Good eats.
Well, this is my neighbourhood, as seen from my front yard. I don’t really know how to conclude this entry. I feel like I need to set a precedent by writing a great witty conclusion so that I will carry on the practice as I continue to write these entries. However, as I stated above, there is a chance that this whole idea will flop anyways, so I’ll just leave my entry at this, and go out for the afternoon. Thanks for reading. Goodbye.
I have been wondering how I could best capture this “everyday life” for my own memory and for sharing with others. Last night on a long train ride from Jaipur to Delhi, as I tried to overcome my nausea while Andrea sat giggling beside me with her nose in a book; last night the answer finally hit me. The book is by a gora (a white man) and has only very recently been published. In it the author details a number of journeys he has taken by foot around the great city of Delhi. Each chapter starts with a hand-drawn map, and this is followed by an amazingly insightful and often humorous narrative of the things he encountered along the way. The reason this book captures the essence of the city is that it was written in the city. In order to write about this city, the way I see it, I need to actually be in the city, seeing it. It was this realization that led me to dream up Geo-Journaling, and this is the first instalment.
Hopefully each week I will be able to find time to sit somewhere in the city and journal about the things that I see and experience. I will write about my experiences around the topic, perhaps from other times or places, but all having to do with what I see right then and there. If I can, I will include the history of things and the cultural motivations or implications of activities around me, (though I in no way claim to actually know what is happening at a deeper level; I am after all, a Canadian, through and through).
Finally, as for the “Geo” part of my journaling, I will give the longitude and latitude for each of my stops so that those of you who, like me, are Google-Earth addicts can look up the locations and get an idea of the geography of my experiences. As stated above, I am hoping to journal about once a week, perhaps more if I can find time, but this whole idea may just flop and come to naught. Or perhaps I’ll start my own geo-journaling website and take over Facebook or something. Who knows? Anyways, please enjoy the following.
Sincerely,
Kyle Hendy
Geo-Journal #1 – My Front Yard (28°33’27.24”N 77°16’34.56”E)
I decided that it would be most fitting to start this journal of the ‘everyday’ the same place that I start everyday. My home in Delhi.Andrea and I live in a place called Sukhdev Vihar. It is a small middle-class neighbourhood in New Delhi, India. It is a clean neighbourhood by Delhi standards, and the gates close at about 11:00pm, so it’s a quiet one as well. Our house is white, cold, and about as broke down as my car was when I decided to park it for good. I don’t mean to say that we live in a trash heap. I could never say that (or do that). There are people quite literally right down the road, who quite literally do live in a trash heap. There is no space between the rich and the poor in this city. They could be neighbours (albeit neighbours that do not interact and have quite possibly never acknowledged or even seen each other). No, our house is not a literal dump, it’s just that we are wealthy Canadians, and so it just feels like it sometimes. However, we caught the rat in a trap, and the cockroach population is for the most part under control, so our house is liveable and in all honesty, it has become our home.
Our house is also very large. It is probably about 3 times as large as our basement suite in Abbotsford, and our lack of furniture combined with the echo-ey cement walls and floors and ceilings makes it feel even bigger than that. In our neighbourhood, however, our house is comparatively small. Many of the houses have multiple levels (ours is only one), and while some of them have different residents in each level, quite a few have three stories or more to themselves. Only the dhobi-walla has a worse house than us.
The dhobi-walla, or laundry man, lives in the most run down house on the street (28°33’26.40”N 77°16’36.30”E). I’m not sure if he rents it or is just squatting, but he sleeps there so I say he lives there. It is basically a big empty box with a few rooms and more than a few broken windows. His only furniture is a wicker bed and a few clotheslines (if those can be called furniture). He sets up shop every day at the end of the road under a wooden roof made out of scrap lumber (28°33’25.40”N 77°16’36.30”E), and he spends all day folding clothes or ironing them with a big old iron in which he places hot coals to produce the heat. He washes clothes for people from the neighbourhood, and it seems like he’s always busy. He sometimes sings while he works, and his own clothes never seem to be quite as clean as the ones he works on. His neighbour drives a Mercedes, and the house across the street has four stories of luxurious marble floors and brass light fixtures. I say hello to him when I walk by. He smiles and says hello back, and carries on pushing the iron around his table.
Our next door neighbour is currently renovating his home. I have short conversations with his servant (yes, everyone in these neighbourhoods has servants), and through his very limited English and my very limited Hindi I have ascertained that the house owner has moved into his summer house until Diwalli (a fall festival), and in the mean time the inside of the house is being gutted. Like, literally gutted. They are redesigning the layout of the house, and that means tearing down all the brick walls and building new ones. If we were in Canada, this may not affect us, but in India it does. All the houses on this street are built right up against each other, so that the brick wall of one house rests right against the brick wall of the next house. The hammering starts at about 8am every morning, and carries on until 9pm, and sometimes later than that. Therefore, our big empty cement house daily becomes a giant resonance chamber with every swing of the hammer next door. Today I was in the back yard, and the vibrations from the pounding were causing pieces of plaster to fall off the wall into our yard.
Another interesting aspect to this method of construction is the sheer amount of man hours put into the building of a house. Labour is so cheap here, that it doesn’t make sense to buy machines to do things, when you can get humans to do them for cheaper. For example, every morning before the rest of Delhi is quite awake, the streets fill up with men and women wearing turbans and shawls and holding straw brooms, and by 8:00am the streets are entirely swept. Even in the coffee shops or restaurants we go to, there are a plethora of bored-looking servers standing around the counters watching you eat or drink, looking at their watches, or if they’re lucky, the boss isn’t there and they can visit with each other. In the context of my neighbour’s construction, this fact means that there are about a hundred guys in the house at a given time, some knocking things down, and others building them up. It also means that when the huge truck stacked with a load of new bricks for the house showed up, it was unloaded by hand, one brick at a time. It was then neatly re-stacked in front of our house (don’t ask me why they didn’t stack it in front of their own house), brick by brick, layer by layer until the entire truckload of bricks was sitting on our yard. The stack is about 5 feet tall, 6 feet wide, and about 12 feet long. You want to hear the best part? The truck showed up at about 12:30am, so for the next 3 hours there was a rhythmic deep ceramic thudding and the sound of mens’ voices echoing through our house. I managed to sleep through some of it, but not until after I went and peeked through the windows to see what the heck was going on.
Our front yard is separated from the street by a large wall and a metal gate. While the gate does nothing to keep the endless march of dust from entering our premises (or even our house for that matter), it does provide a simple cultural symbol of private space. This can be good, in the case of Hindu holy-men dragging reluctant calves along behind them seeking alms for Krishna, or bad, in the case of ordering pizza. We have no buzzer outside the wall on the street (as most houses do), and it is a known fact that to open someone’s gate and walk right up to someone’s front door is an absolute no-no in this part of town. So, we can ignore the man in orange and his bovine god, but we have to stand by the front door and wait when we’re craving a deluxe Hawaiian.
Running the full length of our front wall is a 1.5 foot wide planter. Everything planted in it has long since passed on, but it makes a nice bed for the neighbourhood cats, and it doubles as a quick and easy source of grass and twigs for the pair of finches that have decided to build a nest in the crack between the bricks up in the corner by our front door.
“Yeh-Mackinay!!!” My concentration is broken along with the quiet of the neighbourhood by a loud call from down the street. “Yeh-Mackinay!!!” it comes again. A man walks by holding some metal wire and a 14 foot long bamboo pole. “Yeh-Mackinay!!!” He repeats his call every 10-20 meters, and does so for the entire morning. He walks around our neighbourhood and often passes our house 2-3 times a day, his call echoing through our cavernous domicile. He is soon joined by another “Subziiiiii!!!”, and another, “Gumlay-o-laaaaay.” Before long there is a symphony of calls moving up and down our street as each man, whether he is selling flower pots, brooms, vegetables, or even coming by to pick up our garbage, tries to get our attention by uttering the most creative or guttural call they can possibly muster. They are like those courting birds on BBC’s Planet Earth. Our two personal favourites are the “Yeh-Mackinay” bamboo guy (don’t ask me what he actually sells or does), and a man on a bike who yells with the most intriguing mono-tone robot voice you will ever hear. We don’t quite know what he is saying, but he sounds like a storm-trooper droid yelling “Eat paaaaaaaaaaaaaie… made-by-me… made-by-me.” Even though he doesn’t actually sell pie, we always crack a smile when we hear his froglike, throaty, mono-tone call.
The most common are the subzi-walla’s. They are the vegetable salesmen, and they pass by with three-wheeled bicycle-carts filled to the brim with fresh vegetables. We love listening to them call and we trying to distinguish the different names of the vegetables they sell. “Subziiiiiii! Alu or gobe or tamatar or adrak or nimbuuuuuuUUU!!!!…” It is always interesting. These mobile supermarkets are a great asset when you are midway through making a cup of tea and you realize that you just ran out of ginger. Run out to the front yard, open the gate, and within a minute a subzi-walla will be by with your much anticipated veggies. A couple of rupees will stock up your fridge and you’ll be ready to cook.
We have an Indian friend who swears that by purchasing from the mobile subzi-walla’s we are getting ripped off. We do try to save money where we can, so the thought of buying vegetables for even cheaper than cheap was for a day fairly appealing to us. However, that day ended with us heading across the highway and across the tracks and through the slum past the garbage dump to the subzi-bazaar; the mecca of cheap vegetables (28°33’33.50”N 77°15’48.90”E). This is where the mobile markets stock up each morning before heading out to the multitude of twisted alleyways and subdivisions surrounding the market. Our friend convinced us that this would be the best place to buy veggies, because they were cheaper. Now, there is no possible way I could ever describe the subzi-bazaar to you and do it justice, so I will just kinda throw a few brief sentences of description in here and then when that is over I will say, “No, you still don’t get it.” We pass through the gates and enter the mess. Five foot high piles of every kind of vegetable imaginable (and perhaps a few that are unimaginable) line the yard (you can see the green piles on Google Earth), and a narrow pathway is left between them. People yell and people push. Cows and goats scramble over the piles trying to escape angry vendors with bamboo batons while simultaneously scooping up as many mouthfuls of leafy lunch as they can, and distributing their distinctive deposits along behind them as they do so. Watch your step! Dead rats lay still warm along the edges, swept there to make room for the ever changing piles of vegetables, and along the pathway those rodents who neglected to notice the abundantly laden delivery trucks as they approached have become two-dimensional warnings to their friends. Then there are the flies. Well, I won’t even tell you about them, suffice to say that they hang in the air like a fog, obstructing vision past more than a hundred feet.
In the midst of all this we stop to ask a potato-walla how much for a kilogram of potatoes. His answer astounds us. Five rupees. That’s ten cents back home. The only catch is, you have to buy a minimum of 5 kg in order to make a sale. The next man says the same. As does the next. As it turns out, there is no one in this market who is willing to part with less than a cart-load of veggies as a time, so we said goodbye to the veggie-zoo, and walked back across the tracks and across the highway and into our own little neighbourhood. It’s better this way, we decide. We’re not spending much on them anyways, and we certainly don’t need 5 kg of onions. We can just buy our veggies and we don’t have to think about where they have been. We can just wash them and eat them, and pretend that they came straight out of the garden and onto our plate. Mmmmmm. Good eats.
Well, this is my neighbourhood, as seen from my front yard. I don’t really know how to conclude this entry. I feel like I need to set a precedent by writing a great witty conclusion so that I will carry on the practice as I continue to write these entries. However, as I stated above, there is a chance that this whole idea will flop anyways, so I’ll just leave my entry at this, and go out for the afternoon. Thanks for reading. Goodbye.
A Glimmer of Light in a City of Darkness (or, How God Gave Me a Gentle Reminder)
This city is tough. This city will eat you alive if you are not up to the challenge of living here. This city breaks backs and it breaks hearts. It breaks legs and arms so it can earn a bit more on the street corner, and if you can’t make the rent, it might end up breaking your thumbs. This city chews people up and spits them out like a mouth full of betel nut. This city is rich, and this city is poor, and this city keeps the two separated by a big brick wall trimmed with razor wire. This city is a siren, luring poor rural folk with no work and spoiled crops into her grasp. This city greets them at the rail station with a grin and a handshake, and with that same grin still plastered on her face she forces them into debt peonage. This city runs on the back of the Dalit while giving credit to the Brahman. This city says modern and acts medieval. Here people sort through garbage to find something to eat. In this city it is steal or starve, stand up or fall, and sometimes kill or be killed. In this city the poor polish the cars of the rich and the rich withhold payment. In this city people push others down so that they can get ahead, and people steal others’ jobs so they can pay the rent, and people work a week so they can buy a single loaf of bread. This city is tough, and its people are tougher, and there’s no getting by without a fight.
Every day I see people up at the crack of dawn and working all day without a break. Maybe this day they can earn enough to buy chapatti for their family. Every day I see children on the street corner begging for money, only to give that money to their parents. Fifty rupees a day or go without food, and probably get a beating. Some have missing limbs or terrible scars. Every day I see people ride to work on a bicycle that they spent a year working for, only to polish their boss’ Mercedes and drive him around town. Every day I see people pushing huge loads on their three-wheeled bicycles up the long steep ramps of an overpass. Meanwhile the more fortunate pass by and don’t seem to notice the man struggling to push his bike another foot. Every day I look on and I feel sad. But just then, what is this? A man on a motorbike slows and approaches the rear of the load on the bicycle. A foot comes out and rests on the back of the load, and with a call to the weary labourer the motor revs and the bicycle is pushed up the hill by the man on the motorbike. The look on the man’s face says that he is not just doing this for a few more karma points. No, he shows some genuine concern for the life of another human. Could it be that not everyone is just out for their own gain? Could it be that instead of pushing others down to get ahead, some may actually push others up? In a city as dark as Delhi, it is refreshing to catch a glimpse of light from time to time.
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