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.
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