Submit To Mother India

“SUBMIT TO MOTHER INDIA,” a veteran traveler advised me before I left New York, and I intended to take her advice to heart. I steeled myself for nothing to go according to plan. I was prepared to get gruesomely ill at some point. I was prepared to let India have its way with me. “You can’t prepare yourself for India,” my well-traveled friend had also said. So I tried to prepare myself not to be prepared. Intellectually I knew what was coming: a full-on visceral assault of chaos and color and excrement; a teeming, pressing madness of too much humanity. But emotionally all I could do was get ready not to be ready for it.

India asked for my submission before I’d even arrived. While my Mumbai-bound Air India flight was still on the tarmac in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, a large Indian woman didn’t sit down next to me so much as on me. I scooted aside in surprise and good-naturedly began to point out this unfortunate violation of my personal space, but she just nodded hello and busied herself with the items in the pouch in front of her. Meanwhile her not-insubstantial ass extended halfway into my seat and gave no sign of moving. My ticket clearly said 23a; her ticket, I have to believe, said just as clearly 23b, but in her mind 23b was a rough approximation, a frontier space with fluid boundaries. Already I was in a kind of cultural awe — not just at her rudeness but at the casualness, the naturalness of it.

After a few weeks in India I would realize what she’d expected of me: to oh-so-pleasantly slam my own ass into hers. She wouldn’t have thought it rude at all. It was just business as usual, and I was just another of the 1 billion souls — and asses — with whom she had to share the subcontinent.

Mumbai, India’s “Maximum City,” has 14 million people and maybe four traffic lights. Cows ambled through intersections as rickshaws, motorbikes, taxis, and double-decker buses vied for position, all laying on their horns at once. The streets smelled like urine baked in the sun; they were dirty, stained red with betel-nut spit, and crammed with people. Destitute mothers and their hollow-eyed children huddled along the edges of the city squares. I passed three men lying on the ground, missing seven limbs among them. They were begging and singing — that crazy, broken, joyous kind of singing that comes only from those who’ve lost everything. The downtown railway station was a melee of bodies. Thousands pressed their way onto cars, some leaping on or being forced off as the trains pulled away. (A handful of deaths occur on the rails each day, I was told.) The city was at once run-down and rabid with life. The public buildings were crumbling, their Victorian bricks streaked with soot, and we’d flown in over slums that seemed never to end. Yet here was a flashy modern theater, there a humming office complex. And always the riotous assault of smells: sweat, garbage, fried pakoras from sidewalk carts, the after-shave of street-side barbers, and the sickly sweet scents of the ubiquitous dessert shops.

My nose was battered. My spirit, too. Rickshaw wallahs and street vendors came at me from all directions. Barefoot children tugged at my pant legs saying, “Rupee? Rupee?” in voices that made me want to melt and scream at the same time. The assault of unwanted attention and human misery was inescapable. If I’d had a room in a guesthouse, I might have crawled back to it and not come out. Fortunately instead of bunking in a guesthouse I was staying with the Indian side of my family. This came as a great surprise to me, as there was no Indian side of my family. I did have an Indian friend, however, and she had a family, and thus, by the transitive property of Indian hospitality, I had an Indian family too. Payal, my friend, had insisted I stay in her ancestral apartment, which at one time had housed fourteen of her relations and was now home to two grandparents and an aunt. It was both a refuge from Indian life and an education in it: Payal’s grandmother taught me to make chapatis. The recycling man arrived with a hand-held scale, weighed the home’s bundle of newspapers, and paid accordingly. Our dirty clothes were picked up by a young boy in the morning and dropped off later that afternoon, clean and perfectly pressed. (On my last day in Mumbai, Payal took me to see what happened in between: the washerpeople at work, fifteen thousand strong, an entire neighborhood of them.)

FROM MUMBAI, Payal and I took an overnight train north to Ahmedabad to visit her cousins Surya and Jaai, a married couple in their thirties. Ahmedabad, like many regions in India, had been torn recently by communal violence. Mobs of Hindus and Muslims had burned each other’s homes and hacked their neighbors to pieces. Gandhi was the father of the country; he was on stamps, billboards, money, even key chains (of which I bought quite a few). He was the Mahatma, or “great-souled one.” But it seems to be the fate of all saints to be ignored in practice as much as they are revered in principle; in this respect India was no different.

Sabarmati Ashram, Gandhi’s headquarters during the long struggle for India’s independence, was in Ahmedabad, and Surya took me there. In the humble, barrackslike buildings Gandhi’s words were framed on yellowing plaques. “Truth is God,” read one, reversing the usual equation “God is Truth” — a nontrivial distinction for a skeptical seeker such as myself. Another said, “I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.” A better tribute to contemporary cultural relativism would be hard to find. For me Gandhi had always hovered above all religions — a hero to humanity in general, a transreligious sage. “I am a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Zoroastrian, a Jew,” read another plaque. I knew from my reading that Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, had cynically replied: “Only a Hindu could say that.” Nice comeback, but from my postreligious perch, still score one point for Hinduism.

At the home of Payal’s cousins, I was beyond well taken care of: Please, eat this fantastic food. No, don’t help clean up; the servant will take care of it. Interested in Hinduism? Please, come do puja with me. Need ticket reservations on a sold-out train? Uncle’s travel agent will take care of it. Need a ride to the train station? One of my employees will pick you up and motorbike you over. Need Internet? Come to my office. Architectural tour of the city? No problem, I’m an architect. Need a haircut? I’ve got just the man.

About the haircut I wasn’t so sure. I’d seen Indian barbers in action and knew the results of their work. It wasn’t that they weren’t competent. Far from it. It was simply that in spite of India’s bewildering diversity — 1,500 languages and 300,000 gods — every man on the subcontinent seemed to have the exact same haircut: close-cropped with lots of room around the ears. It worked pretty well for the 500 million Indian men who had it, but they had wiry black hair that spiked out from the scalp. I had soft, wavy, nonspiking hair.

“Don’t worry. We’ll take care of you,” Surya assured me.

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