India: In The Eyes Of A Stranger

In 1992, Stephen Ausherman traveled through India as an intern for Surya, a magazine based in New Delhi.

“India: In the Eyes of a Stranger” is excerpted from the pieces he wrote for that journal, some of which have also appeared in Spectator.

— Ed.

 

I arrived in Delhi at 3:00 A.M. and found a driver, sent by my friend A.J., waiting for me at the Indira Gandhi Airport. He spoke no English, so I had no idea where he was taking me. All I knew was that A.J. had arranged to get me a room somewhere in the city.

We drove for more than an hour through slums, past people sleeping on the sidewalks. Then the streets narrowed to a maze of lanes, and the buildings began to look shabbier as morning dawned. Just as I’d begun to fear that this neighborhood was where I’d be staying, the car stopped. I was shown into a yellow, dusty cell with scarlet curtains, unfinished furniture, and walls blank but for a few lizards and a poster of a blue-eyed, blond little girl who appeared to be praying. No TV, air conditioning, window screens, locks, or toilet paper.

I wouldn’t be staying here very long. I was planning to accompany a crew of men who regularly drove around Uttar Pradesh and showed wide-screen music videos in the villages. As the days passed, however, there were the typical Indian delays, waiting for paint to dry and so on — the kind of stalling that makes Westerners marvel at Indian patience. Meanwhile, as word got around that I was planning to travel in U.P. by truck, people grew concerned. They said I wouldn’t last three days out there, that I’d be killed by the heat or disease. I asked them how the crew managed to survive. The answer was always the same: “They’re Indian.”

Once we were on the road, I began to understand. The first roadside restaurant we stopped at seemed pleasant at first, with a thatched roof and a mosaic of bright tiles on the countertop. But the food looked like a mix of mustard and syrup, and it attracted a lot of flies. On one bench the flies were as thick as fur and gave the illusion of one long, shivering, headless quadruped. Feral dogs and a water buffalo roamed about, scavenging for scraps. Rats darted across the dirt floor of the open-air kitchen. The waiter, crippled by polio, served us water from a can that previously had held engine coolant. He didn’t understand why I refused to drink it. I worried that he’d think I was treating him like an untouchable.

My discomfort wasn’t limited to food either. I couldn’t bring myself to bathe at a roadside water pump because the idea of crowding under it with several other men didn’t strike me as particularly cleansing. I declined to bathe in the Ganges for the same reason. The river may be holy, but it smelled like hell, and I saw something fleshy and swollen floating down it, like the belly of a pig or the bloated back of a drowned woman.

The irony of refusing to bathe in order to stay clean ceased to amuse the crew after two days. I was more than dirty. I was becoming one with the relentless grime of India — the smog, dust, and dirt that hangs in the air all day and all night. The five of us were crammed for days in a cab built to seat three. The temperature was more than a hundred degrees, incense burned constantly, and exhaust and diesel fumes blew in through the windows.

I was disturbed by the dirtiness of the countryside: garbage in the fields, animals defecating in the middle of the road, pools of stagnant water and clogged open sewers, burning trash. Earth, wind, fire, and water — the elements were entirely polluted. I wanted the monsoons to come and wash it all away.

 

When we got to Lucknow, we were fortunate enough to have a place to stay, though it was still like camping. We were in an unfurnished house with no water in an otherwise affluent suburb. The neighboring houses were boxy and freshly painted in bright Caribbean colors like pink, aqua, lemon, and lavender. Many had two cars in the carport.

It was early enough to sightsee, but the crew wanted to sleep, which is what they did all day, soundly, on straw mats. I envied how easily Indians can sleep. I’ve seen them sleeping on bicycles with their feet propped up on the handlebars, on the backs of water buffaloes, on pineapple carts, on the roofs of moving buses and trains. They sleep en masse along the roadside, as if they’d just dropped dead in their tracks.

When the crew woke up, one of them took me sightseeing. We caught a bicycle-rickshaw to the Residency, where three thousand British and Indian loyalists took refuge when the 1857 Mutiny began. Two-thirds were killed by the end of the three-month siege, and all that remains now is a park full of bombed-out buildings, some gardens, and various memorials proclaiming the bravery of those who died. My guide, Raj, said it was the only place in Lucknow worth seeing. I asked him what made this place better than the others: was he saddened by the massacre of the loyalists, or was he moved by the attackers’ determined fight for independence? He said, “It is a good place to make a date. In fact, I brought my girlfriend here on our first date.” He sighed wistfully, staring vacantly at the graves of two thousand men, women, and children.

 

As we drove deeper into U.P., the roads got worse. Earlier in the trip I had been concerned about the number of dead animals in the road, and the vultures that were killed while picking over them. The vultures were flattened on the pavement, but their wings, which never stuck, flapped in the breeze, as if they were still trying to fly away.

Now the number of motor accidents began to overwhelm me. Many involved buses, private cars, and tractors. We came across a solitary tractor flipped over in the middle of the road. Nothing else was near it. I still can’t figure out how someone overturned a tractor on perfectly flat pavement.

Most accidents involved Tata trucks — bright orange trucks that are decorated like temples and driven at breakneck speed. Many wrecked because they had been overloaded, and when their contents spilled across the road, other vehicles crashed too. The cabs of the trucks were almost always torn open, the axles split, and the windows shattered. A crew member, Bijenda, who spoke a little English, told me that the drivers were always killed because of the position of the steering wheel. He relied on gestures to explain how the wheel crushed the chest cavity without actually breaking the skin.

 

Through the towns of U.P., our truck passed virtually unnoticed, even though it was painted like a circus wagon. In fact, the most prominent word on the truck was CIRCUS, painted in red and blue letters on a yellow background, surrounded by a couple of clown faces for good measure. It was an advertisement for Circus Biscuits, and I was always embarrassed to be seen emerging from the truck.

In the smaller villages, however, I was often the center of attention. Some people laughed at me; others glared. Children threw things at me, usually onions, but sometimes small pieces of brick. Crowds would form around me, and the questions were always the same: “Where are you from? Why are you here? How much did your watch cost?”

In one village, I was sitting on the front steps of a school, writing in my journal, surrounded by the usual entourage of children, when I heard someone behind me say, “This is not a village.”

I turned to see a serious-looking boy who had been reading over my shoulder. He said, “This is a part of Ronahi. It is a town, not a village.”

I said, “Do the people who live here also work here and purchase their goods here?”

He answered, without hesitation, “Mostly, yes.”

“Then it is, for all practical purposes, a village.”

“You could say so,” he replied. “But I prefer not to call it one.”

I was amazed. After days of strained dialogue about the most basic things, I suddenly found myself engaged in a conversation about the economic definition and negative connotation of the word village — and with a child.

His English name was Jackie, and he invited me to his house for a cold drink. Along the way he explained that his father had died ten years earlier, when he was five, and that since then he had been living with his brother, a ticket collector for the railway, in Calcutta. He attended school there, and that was where he had learned English. He was in Ronahi for the summer to visit his mother.

His mother’s house was the only one in the area that had been painted, in the same Caribbean colors I had seen in Lucknow. It was a low, boxlike structure, with the greater part of the front wall open to the outside, revealing a color TV, a refrigerator, and a bed that took up most of the room. Jackie’s mother was sitting on the bed with her back to the TV.

I put my hands together, nodded, and said, “Namaste.” She reluctantly put her hands together but didn’t reply.

Jackie grimaced and said, “That is not the proper greeting.” I had inadvertently given the Hindu, rather than the Muslim, greeting. “Do this —” he saluted me, “and say, ‘Salamwalekum.’ ” I did as he said, and his mother smiled broadly, perhaps amused by my foreign pronunciation. I wrote the word in large black letters on the back cover of my journal.

We sat on a bench outside. Jackie noticed a member of the crew, the driver, watching us from a distance. Jackie said, “Your friend is worried about you.”

“Should he be worried?” I asked.

He laughed. “Nobody will harm you here. He just thinks he must be extra careful with you because you are a foreigner.” He invited the driver over for a cold drink.

Darkness was just beginning to settle in. The driver suggested that we return to the truck because it was time to show the video. Jackie followed us back but didn’t stay long. He said it was time for his bath and left. He returned halfway through the show, his hair wet. We watched the show quietly for a few minutes. Most of it was a series of Hindi music videos.

Jackie said, “We don’t like Michael Jackson here.” I was glad to hear it. A few years ago, I taught English in a teachers’ college in a small town in China, where not one of my students had even heard of Michael Jackson. This fact still excites me.

Then Jackie said, “I like Rambo.” I was crushed. It got worse: he also liked Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal.

All the while we were talking, an old man stood nearby, quietly watching us. Suddenly, he began to speak in Hindi, and he pointed to my book bag. I asked Jackie what the man was saying. Reluctantly he said, “The old man is a bad man. He is using slang. Bad slang. Calling you names.”

“What did he call me?”

“He is saying that you Americans walk around with bags full of money. He thinks your bag is full of money.”

“But why?”

Jackie’s voice trembled. “People here are stupid. They all want to go to the cities and make lots of money. They don’t care about this place. It was once a good place, but everybody has gone to the cities. Now there is nothing. The people here are greedy. They are thieves. They fight for money. My uncle is like that. He lives next door to us. He is a jealous man, so God has punished him. That’s why he lives in such a poor house.”

The show was almost over, and the driver was signaling for me to get inside the truck. Jackie said, “Promise you will write to me.” I told him to write his address in my journal. Just as I was closing the door of the truck he yelled, “Wait! You are forgetting something!”

I checked my bag but didn’t notice anything missing. He seemed slightly irritated and said, “What did I teach you?”

I peeked at the back of my journal. Then I turned to him, saluted, and said, “Salamwalekum.”

 

In one town I saw a cow trying to board a train. How it got into the station and past the ticket gate, I don’t know. But there it was on the platform, negotiating the step into a car, and no one in the station was giving it a second glance. I couldn’t help but wonder: where did the cow want to go?

In Faizabad, a man named C.K. joined the crew. He spoke English, so I often asked him questions when I saw something strange. He grew tired of my questions very quickly. Our first day together we saw a man lying on the ground under a blanket. Another man was standing over him, yelling and chanting. A crowd surrounded them. The man who was yelling reached into the crowd and touched a child. The child fainted. The man picked him up, and the child vomited blood. The man under the blanket started kicking his legs as if he was trying to ride a bicycle. I turned to C.K. and asked, “What is it?” He replied, “It is nothing.”

He gave the same answer every time — when I asked about a woman carrying an enormous basket on her head, a man who draped snakes on children, bearded men in saffron robes with painted foreheads and golden buckets, women who were walking in circles around a tree. “It is nothing,” he always said. A typical conversation between us went as follows:

Me: C.K., see that man over there? The one standing in the field?

C.K.: (blandly) It is nothing.

Me: But he’s completely naked.

C.K.: (irately) It is nothing.

Finally, after asking about a man with a caged bird and Tarot cards, I countered, “No. It is something. It’s something I’ve never seen before. Now tell me what it is.”

He was more irritated than I, and he snapped, “Fine. I will tell you. This man is a disgrace to India. He is a lazy fool who does not want to work, so he sits out here all day with his stupid bird. If you want to waste your money, the bird will hop out of the cage and pick up a card. Then the man will tell you about your future, if you are stupid enough to believe it.”

Soon after that exchange, I decided it was time to abandon the crew. A friend of mine lived in Mahson, or rather his parents did. Amit, whom I had met at the University of North Carolina, had told me that if I ever happened to be near Mahson, I should drop by.

The Faizabad buses didn’t go to Mahson, only to nearby Basti. I bought a ticket but was delayed twenty-four hours due to a general strike. The next morning I boarded the bus, and soon afterward the driver boarded, but he only moved the bus a few yards, out of the shade into the sun. Another man boarded. He stood at the front of the bus, facing the passengers, and gave a twenty-minute sales pitch for some sort of miracle drug. After he got off, a second man boarded to begin another presentation. I don’t know what he was selling, but he used the word America more than once, each time pointing at me, as if I had endorsed his product.

An hour later the bus finally got rolling. But every ten minutes, someone in the back of the bus would shout and pound on the roof. The driver would then stop the bus so that all the passengers could get off and pee or buy ice cream. As the journey wore on, the stops were less frequent but longer. It was sweltering. We didn’t arrive in Basti until late afternoon. It had taken four hours to cover about forty miles. I spent another hour on a rickshaw to Mahson.

It was worth the trouble. Amit’s parents lived in a palace. There was a front entrance wide enough for elephants. Above it gleamed the double-fish design of the royal family of Oudh. Red, blue, and gold onion domes capped each corner of the house, and there was a center courtyard so large you could have played full-court basketball in it. Throughout the house, the walls were covered with old photographic portraits and animal skins — leopards and tigers with fierce expressions, crocodiles with gaping smiles.

The library was packed with Western books. There I collapsed in an oversized chair and introduced myself to Amit’s father, Mr. Pal, a retired engineer. The discomfort I felt from grime and sweat was nearly matched by my gnawing hunger and burning thirst. Mr. Pal, by contrast, looked cool, relaxed, and, above all, well fed. He was tall and nearly bald, with wide, gray sideburns connected to a thick mustache. Despite his commanding appearance and voice, he made me feel welcome. He ordered the servants to bring me trays of food and told me I could shower after I ate. Then he invited me to see the estate in the morning.

It was so large that a tour had to be done in shifts. Mrs. Pal guided me through the interior of the palace. She showed me many rooms, some of which I don’t think she had seen before. One room was filled with appliances she had brought back from the States: hair curlers, a microwave oven, a Kenmore stove. Another room was an armory stocked with rifles but no bullets. “They are too expensive here,” she said. Next to the armory was a vault. “It was once full of money,” she sighed. “Now it is completely empty.”

I began to notice how much the place was deteriorating. In spots the plaster was worn away, exposing the brick underneath. Most of the walls still wore their original coat of paint, which was faded and peeling. The color of the walls that had been repainted didn’t match.

Afterward, Mr. Pal guided me on a tour of his stables, his post office, one of his schools, his fishing ponds (teeming), his pool (empty), his grove of hardwood trees, and his orchards of jackfruit, mango, and lime. Along the way he explained how the estate was built: for generations the family had been tax collectors. Amit had already told me, only he had called his ancestors extortionists. I hinted at this to Mr. Pal.

He didn’t seem surprised. “I’m afraid my son is a bit of a romantic and a bit of a Communist,” he said. He explained how it is the duty of any responsible government to collect taxes by any means necessary.

I added, “Amit also said that you’re putting back into the community what your grandfather took from it. I guess he meant the schools you’ve built and the jobs you provide.”

Mr. Pal replied indifferently, “Like I said, my son is a romantic. I don’t do these things for charity.”

That afternoon a servant showed me the estate’s vast stretches of sugarcane fields that bordered the village of Mahson. “These belong to Amit,” the servant said.

We spent an hour walking through the village, stopping to watch two children slaughter a goat, and visiting a small clinic. Inexplicably, the clinician showed me the villagers’ health records, but they were in Hindi, so I couldn’t read them. He spoke excitedly, and the servant was able to translate only this: “When people here are bitten by snakes, they don’t die from venom. They are superstitious people, so they die of fright.”

 

Later I learned that there were more palaces nearby, and all belonged to the Pals’ relatives. I visited one owned by a member of the legislative assembly of U.P. It was slightly more grand than the Pals’, but the tour, conducted by the legislator’s wife, was limited to the interior. She refused to go outside because, she said, “The political people are out there.” She meant a group of men who were waiting to speak with her husband on matters concerning their employment and his policies. They looked like they had been waiting out there all day. She assured me that they would be given meals and a place to sleep if necessary. This kind of hospitality was expected from legislators, she said.

Later, Mr. Pal explained that when rich people live among the poor, the rich must continuously give to the community. Otherwise, the poor will revolt. He said anyone who has paid any attention to history knows this. It wasn’t a concept of noblesse oblige or charity. It was strictly a matter of self-preservation.

 

The next day I talked with Mr. Pal while we were seated comfortably in the library. Right away he asked, “How do you find India?” Before giving me a chance to respond, he said, “You must hate it. The heat, the blackouts, the poverty. And it’s so dirty.”

I’d heard this refrain several times since coming to India, yet I hadn’t figured out how, as a guest in this country, I was expected to reply. Yes, the standard of living in India is lower than that of the States. But I often wonder how long Americans will be able to continue consuming the huge amounts of energy and resources needed to maintain our standard of living. Our water supplies are becoming tainted, the air quality is worsening, the cities are turning into slums. By the time India attains America’s current standard of living, America will be where India was fifteen years ago. In short, the world is a dog chasing its tail.

I’d shared this theory with an Indian friend of mine in the States and asked him how he thought Americans would cope if forced to live at Indian standards. He said, “The same way Indians are coping with their situation now.” I thought he was referring to the elasticity of Indian patience, but then he added, “They will riot every day.”

I did not say any of this to Mr. Pal. Instead, I said only, “I’m finding India just fine.”