To Review (chronology is overrated)

“The first thing I noticed about Bombay, on that first day, was the smell of the different air… the next thing I noticed was the heat.”

– From the opening of Shantaram, by Gregory Roberts

“To understand India at all, you must be able to hold on to completely contradictory images, and realize that both represent the true India.”

– From the introduction to Culture Shock! India, by Gitanjali Kolanad

To review: we landed in Delhi, to the smells and the thick air (and the airport parrots). To go even further back: I found some young, vaguely Jewish looking folks at the London Heathrow airport, and we gathered into a small crowd. Name, school, NGO assignment for the year. Memorize, forget, repeat. The words couldn’t come fast enough, and were followed by distinctive pauses, stating ‘I know almost nothing about you.’ Hello stranger, thank god for Cadbury’s chocolates on British Air. I watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the flight (yes, the new animated one – we can discuss this later).

So customs was easy and our luggage arrived and, sweating profusely and gulping bottled water, we climbed into two taxis. We knew to expect cows in the road. We did not know we would see them grazing on the jersey barrier in the middle of ten lanes of traffic moving through a space designed for four. Traffic lines, in India, are more like suggestions – very general, subtle suggestions which may be easily ignored.

We arrived at a sprawling pink hostel in the embassy district of Delhi (not exactly a neighborly area) with more young, vaguely Jewish looking folks (aka white, in our new context) who had arrived the day before. With a few quick introductions by Anna (our in-country AJWS program coordinator), we were released into the teaming, steaming streets. I jumped into my first auto-rickshaw (think a motorcycle with a small open-air European-sized car loaded on the back) with two other girls, Myla and Becca, and headed for Conaught Place. Conaught place, a fairly central and fairly upper-curst area of New Delhi, is made up of a series of concentric circular roads surrounding an underground market topped by a park. The buildings in the area are tall, dirty white, curlicued images of aging colonial architecture. The shopping there can be high-class – United Colors of Benetton sits on the inner circle – but we wandered up and down the spoke streets, and I found a loose sequined cotton blouse for a few dollars. The question of whether or not to wear Indian-style clothing here isn’t just one of tourism, voyeurism, whiteness, etc., but one of comfort and commodity; that “India fab” (not to be confused with FabIndia, a clothing chain) garment has saved me from unbelievably gritty hot weather (but back to such complicated questions of assimilation/appropriation later).

After learning to dodge traffic (again, traffic lights are more suggestions than anything else), and landing safely back at our Pink Palace, the fellows (two still in the air somewhere) were loaded in a bus and shipped out to a suburb to visit Sunita, AJWS’s Volunteer Coordinator for India. She had a feast for us, but the comfort of spending a few hours in someone’s home was almost as filling as the fifteen varieties of sweet and savory. With an early evening and an even earlier morning, we met our last two fellows, plus the NY program director… and twenty of us (17 fellows, 3 staff, along with many boxes AJWS papers) boarded a bus out of Delhi and up into the mountains.

The beginning of the trip was beautiful, but uneventful. It was difficult to tell when we left Delhi, as a mix of suburbs, road-side vendors, and small towns seemed to stretch continuously for hours out of the city. Eventually we emerged into miles of rice and sugar fields, taking the long way around certain towns; Independence Day was imminent, and celebrations were blocking many major roads. But the real excitement came when we reached the bottom of the foothills of the Himalayas, and began a seemingly endless climb up into the clouds. The road we were on was not precisely a one-lane road, but it barely fit two cars passing one another, let alone two buses. All of the curves were blind, and none of the fencing along the edge (short concrete buttresses – if there was anything at all) looked as if it would stop a fall. Our bus’ horn was blaring constantly (except at the cows, who clearly deserve more respect than that) as we tried not to look down the sheer green drop a few inches from the wheels of the vehicle.

It was dark when we arrived at our destination – an education-focused NGO* with its own campus past Mussoorie, past Kempte Falls, and past Kempte Falls Villiage. They had recently expanded their programs to include a gap-year residential college, and we stayed in gender-segregated open dormitories. That night we climbed blindly up their hand-made steps (reconstructed after the recent rains)… but in the morning we were greeted with a stunning view of the surrounding mountain-hills. At our little retreat, we learned crucial skills: how to use squat toilets, how to eat dal and rice using a chapatti that can be torn and handled only with your right hand, how to deal with upset stomachs, and how to focus a camera on distant hilltops. Our days were filled with AJWS sessions on development, Indian history, and NGO politics. We climbed up and down the NGO campus, ventured out to nearby town-outposts, got up at 6:30 am for yoga with the gap-year students, and watched Planet Earth on DVD (the mountain episode was especially educational in our setting).
*(an NGO which Barb Crook worked with in the mid-90’s!)

After a little more than a week of sitting in circles and talking alternated with walking up hills and staring, it was time to pack once again, time to wind back down the slithering roads to Delhi. The plan was: a few days in Delhi, a few more educational sessions and some time to explore. Next, those fellows with placements in the north (Maharastra, Gujarat, Uttar Pardesh) would return to Mussoorie for Hindi classes, while those fellows with placements in Andra Pradesh would head to Hyderabad for Telugu classes. Instead, after a few days of adventures and conversations, after a lovely closing dinner, the Southerners were gathered and told that two bomb blasts had been set off in Hyderabad just a few hours before. Our train tickets had already been canceled, and Sunita would meet us at the hostel the next morning to discuss our options.

(the story, from here, picks up at the "... and then I woke up in a bad reality tv show" post. chronology is overrated.)

P.S. Coming attractions: the adventures in Delhi, Old and New, deserve their own meandering post, to be written some day soon.