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New Delhi trains
Entry 32 of 50 | show all | print this entry |
I am sitting on the train in New Delhi, waiting to be taken to Agra. It's dirty but not too cramped, which is nice. It's no spacious Metra, or even the El, but Katie and I both have leg room as we face each other on a bench seat alongside the window. My leg is stretched out on the stretched out on the teal seat until Katie reaches for her back pack again underneath the seat, so I tuck my skirt around me and prop my knees against the bars with the red chipped paint that guard the windows. I passed my camera through to one of the SAS guides, and he took a picture of us all from the outside, where men are selling chains to lock up our bags, women, girls and men are carrying huge bags of grain on their heads or carting them on wheelbarrows made of old wood and dried animal skins. Cheers erupt as the train finally starts moving on the tracks overgrown with grass. We arrived at the train station fifteen minutes before our train was to leave, but it was delayed. For two hours, Katie, Lauren, James and I sat on newspapers on the ground playing cards. This provided me with a lot of time to get used to being stared at. I've never felt more noticeable. In Brazil, there are white Brazilians. South Africa, obviously, and Mauritius too have many white locals. India does as well I'm sure, but not too many because when we walk around India, our white skins stick out amongst all the brown skins. I have yet to see a white person who isn't a SAS student. And at this moment, a man who cannot walk because polio left him with nothing but the bones in his legs is scooting up the aisle, tapping my leg to ask for money. And he isn't the only one asking for money. Mothers for their children, a young boy, six or seven, with a deep cough sweeps the floor with straw, older boys with coconuts and tomatoes to sell, a man with pouches of skin hanging from the right side of his face and boils on his arms. The image of him I will never be able to forget as long as I live. I don't mean to be disrespectful to him because I know he is very sick, but he looked like Davie Jones from Pirates 2. The entire right side of his face was nothing but at least half a dozen tentacle-looking growths that hung from his head like hair. Lauren and James missed out on a lot of these people because they had climbed up onto the sleeper seats above us, but Katie and I were dumbstruck for a few minutes after him. I know what they mean when they say India is not only the poorest country but the one that will challenge us the most emotionally and psychologically. In the past ten minutes I've had to physically shut my jaw to keep from gaping, swallow down my gag reflex, and turn my face down to my journal to keep from giving every last rupee I have in my money belt to the desperate eyes of the coughing boy. I haven't until this point wondered if I can handle this. This country, this trip. I was nervous to come on SAS but only because of the logistics of all the traveling, but this is a psychological question; can I handle it? I know I can, and if I can't I have to. But at the same time, these train rides are what help me to learn. This is my equivalent to Jorge in San Juan, Maria in Brazil, Neo in South Africa. You don't have to speak to these Indians I encountered on the train to learn their stories. And young girls stare because they've never seen anyone who looks like me. Confusion in the eyes of a child is universal. I love it. Not the confused eyes obviously but how much it opens my own. I've heard people say that they don't need to necessarily see these things because they read about it, they know what's going on in the world. But me, I want to see it. I want to see the world rather than read about it. I am not of the mentality that I need to see it to believe it, but seeing it for myself gives me such a greater understanding and evokes so much more compassion than reading about it or even viewing pictures ever could. Maybe that's just me, but I think it's hard to form a true opinion when you've only got other people's accounts to go off of, because what you see isn't necessarily what I'll see, and I know I'll respond differently than you. Which makes it seem odd that I'm writing it all down so that others can read about my perspective. I respect other perspectives. It's another way of learning about the world, reading the accounts of others because you also learn about them from the way they see things. But I've always preferred hands-on learning. I hated watching skating, even though I was a figure skater for nine years. I know it's not always possible to be able to experience it all for yourself, but my thought process is if you want to and you can, do. Because how do I really now what to think until I can experience it for myself? There is so much out there that we don't know, and the thing we think we know are accounts given by media so who knows if you can really trust that either. If there's one thing that I've learned from India it's that I don't know, really know anything. I know things, but I don't know a lot that I can trust I know. I think I'm losing my mind a little bit. I'm watching a girl in a sequined red sari step over another man with polio who is able to move only a few inches every few minutes. She steps over him like he's a crack in the floor he sits on. He's an untouchable. But she doesn't even see him. For him to be an untouchable she has to know that he's there so that she can avoid touching him. But he goes unnoticed by her, reducing him to even less than an untouchable. How can people live like this? How can we all live in a world where we barely see each other? We all have our own lives, and I'm coming to terms with the limitations that imposes, but we all live on the same planet. We all have life, we all take breaths from the same air. So why do we not care, or even notice? Maybe it's naïve, but it's also sad. And it's so easy for me back in the States to want to do something, but to get caught up in my own life so I don't do the thing I could do. Laziness, basically. I could rearrange things, I could make time and put in the effort, but I don't. A friend told me about the bowing nun, I think that was her name, and how she said something along the lines of if you can't do something you just can't, but if you can and you don't it's laziness. I'm a lazy one. Being here, I want to get moving, but I don't know what will happen when I fall back into the rhythms of my life back home. So let's hope that this is my call to arms. I feel like it is, and I hope I don't disappoint myself when I get home. But for now, I'm here, being shocked and thrown by it all. We're about an hour into our train ride and we're getting into rural India where I expect to see cows roaming free. Back in the city, cows walk in the busy streets, were tied up at the train station to trees, and ate trash from the gutters. In rural India they eat wheat and grass.. Children have stopped populating the creeks and ravines alongside the train. Fewer shantytowns stretch as far as I can see. The ground is no longer covered in Skittle garbage and excrement and remnants of buildings but instead fields, women packing cow pies, and straw or cow pie homes. At least for a few miles, then the shacks with rocks holding down the sheet metal roofs and the deprived cows appear once again. I am so confused because it sometimes seems that while the front cars of the train stare see shantytowns the back cars still see the rural looking areas. The scenery changes with little warning here, back and forth from one way of life to another. The village people seem to live simply but well, enough. I could be very wrong. No one has enough, but in the farmlands the people have fully structured homes, a complete roof over their heads and no unintentional holes in the walls. They have clean land to work. When technology and bricks come into the picture, so does filth and nakedness and stench, a stench so potent it burns the back of the throat. It's all so overwhelming and I don't know what sense to pay attention to: the smell, the blur of sights of India, the feel of the pounds of dirt on my skin and in my sinuses or the sharp pains of my hair whipping in my eyes because I look at the world outside through horizontal bars and not windows, or the sounds of the train rolling along the tracks or the wail of the train coming from the opposite direction. I am truly overwhelmed.
I woke up at 3:30am to be on the bus that would take us to the airport at 4:15. I'd only napped, having tried to stay up to write in my journal so I wouldn't have to play catch-up and try to mange all the schoolwork during the three-day stretch from India to Malaysia, but I was just too tired. So at 12:45 I'd gone back to my room to sleep but did so fitfully. But I've been pumped on adrenaline all day long, being so excited to travel around India and go see the Taj. The adrenaline helped me to wake up easier, which was nice. I didn't sleep on the hour-long trek to the airport. Instead, I watched Chennai awaken. Or perhaps what I watched was the transition from night into morning rather than its awakening. At 4:30am, the main streets and highways were dead but the side streets and were very much alive with street vendors and bon fires and loud music. The vendors had either opened early or stayed open all night to serve the partiers and/or early risers. The areas underneath the cement train tracks, groups of people surrounded the fires that illuminated the blankets on the ground where others slept and the garbage piles and cement mounds they call home. It reminded me of the areas in big cities you wouldn't want to be caught dead in, but strangely enough I felt safer going through these areas in Chennai as an alien than I do as a citizen in the US. At home you can pretty much guess the kinds of people who live in the ghettos and the projects but here, they're just poor. They haven't all made poor choices or decided to join gangs or sell crack. They aren't sketchy like that. They're victims of circumstance more so than anything. And for that reason they don't seem to rely on crime or violence as much as Americans tend to. So, I feel safer here. Uncomfortable but not threatened. Perhaps I'd realize I could feel the same way in the US but the difference is I'm too nervous to try to break down the stigmas. In the case of the US, they're true a lot of the times. I spent the rest of the ride thinking and I came to a realization. I spend so much of my time trying to figure out my place in the world that I sometimes forget to be in it. I focus so much on where I should go next that I forget to take in what's right in front of me and live the life I have today. I can't help where my thoughts go, but I need to be sure I'm not missing out because my eyes blur when I stare off in thought or write instead of look. It's a fine line sometimes, between being there and taking it into my head with reverting inward and missing it, but I don't want to miss a thing. After we arrived at the airport we waited for our tickets outside before going through security inside. I was hoping that the airport would be more of an experience, like it was in Brazil, but there was nothing notably different in the process except for the lack of bookstores or convenience stores. That and one of the major Indian beers owns an airline. But we went through security, with women getting patted down in a private curtained area, before proceeding to get our bags that were waiting for us on the other side of the conveyor belt. This worried me, because we're not supposed to leave our bags for security reasons but women's bags are left unattended for the few minutes it takes to stand in the line and be searched. But I was also worried that security would take my camera and battery pack because batteries aren't allowed on the planes here. I'd put the pack in a plastic baggie marked with my name and contents due to the restrictions on our luggage, which worked because I made it through with all my belongings. We waited for about twenty minutes before boarding the plane, and I read a magazine provided by the airline until I fell asleep. I have to say that sometimes Global Studies annoys me and bores me, but I educates me. I was able to read half the magazine (I was too tired to finish it) and know about or at least was familiar with the issues discussed in every article. The Grameen bank, the feminization of poverty, those things I'd become familiar with in Global, which made reading a magazine on an Indian airline pretty exciting for me. Maybe not as exciting as picking up the newspaper in the seat back pocket that had an article about us SAS kids in it, but you make choices. I chose the magazine, though I wouldn't have if I had known about our article in the Indian newspaper. Apparently (a woman just leaned over Lauren to spit...Lauren was sleeping but the spitting woke her up; such a strange place) the paper printed an article about the student ship being back in town. Not many ships come into port in Chennai, and certainly not many with 700 college kids, so we made the newspaper and the television news, so I heard (and I'm so sad that no one else saw the cow walking through the train station we're pulling into right now. Because they're sacred to Hindus they get the right of passage). I woke up five minutes before landing to catch my first glimpse of Chennai, at what looked like clusters of buildings spread out in a desert, connected by freeways and interspersed with groupings of shacks, like the townships in South Africa. From the ground it looked much the same, but different than Chennai. It's much more developed so there's a little less extreme poverty and a little more urbanized areas. I saw all this on the drive to a hotel we were stopping at for lunch. The driving is even worse in Delhi than in Chennai, and the best way to deal with it is just try not to look. But you can't help feeling the sudden slamming on the breaks or the quick swerves out of the way, and it was just so entertaining. I think the roads were technically meant for two to three lanes but they managed to hold five and sometimes six rows of vehicles, be it rikshaws, the ever-popular motorcycles, and the auto rikshaws. Rikshaws dart around wherever they please, and drivers wear iPods in their ears to drown out the sound of the honking, but unfortunately they're usually the cause of even more honking because they can't hear and thus don't know what's going on. It was chaos but at the same time I loved it because I love speed and crazy driving (in controlled atmospheres like on ATVs or the Mini Grand Prix of course) so I had a ball watching it all. We arrived at the hotel, which was my first big "I'm in Asia" feeling because of the modern architecture, the very precise lines and minimal furnishings and décor. Simple, clean, Asian. We feasted on chicken curries, rice, naan, and soup (mostly rice and naan for me because of the garlic issue) while listening to instrumental versions of movie soundtracks- Mission Impossible, Love is All Around, and others, all performed 1920s style. We took a restroom stop inside one of the hotel rooms, not in a public restroom. I've never gone in a hotel room to the use restroom in a hotel before, and it was a little bit strange. We stood in line in the hallway and filed into the bedroom to sit on the bed or the chair while we waited for the bathroom to open up. And people are so much more open than they are in the US. They sit in their rooms with the doors open. It was like being in a college dorm hall and not a nice hotel. People in the US never sit with their doors open. So that was kind of cool. We then boarded our busses and took the quick five-minute drive to the station. Our driver dropped us off and we shuffled out to the platform, where we spent the next two hours before the train ride.
We were due to arrive in Agra at 6:30 after the delay. As soon as the train got into the area, the scenery changed. Not drastically, but the rural area was long past us by now. Apartment style buildings began to line the tracks, and more people started to appear as well. The train stopped at a commercial area with masses of people and lots of street vendors, standing in front of shops. The people of Agra, like Chennai, must know when we're coming because I was stared down by each person I made eye contact with. Heads turned 180 degrees to keep my gaze as I passed in the train and the eye contact of others who sat at the windows as well. Some men would even run after us. Men, not boys, ran alongside our window more than once. We carried on past more homes, more dirty gutters and creeks, and happened upon an open field, part grass, part dirt. What grass we could see under the multitude of colors from the trash was feed for the cows, the cows that were alive anyway. On these fields we passed a couple of carcasses being fed on by dogs. Only the ribs on both remained, ad as I stared at the sight, unable to take my eyes off of it, the train moved me into the line of sight of a man cutting open a dog from the tail forward. At this point the guide told us that the next stop was ours and I wanted to throw up. I started to understand how my Dad felt, wondering why I wanted to come to these places. I even started to wonder if I could handle a whole month in Tanzania. We pulled into our platform and locals cheered and jeered at us through the window. I'm not sure if the middle finger means the same thing in Indian culture, but I saw it a couple of times. We were greeted at the platform by more people trying to sell us their goods, the norm here. We walked through the station to find our busses, and we were greeted by other travelers, Agra natives just hanging around, more suffers of polio- this one walking on his hands in a crabwalk position, and a man with elephantitis of the feet. My only thought was that my Mom would never see the Taj. She couldn't handle what you have to see to get there. I took a deep breath, took my seat on the bus, and stared at the back of the seat in front of me the rest of the way to the hotel. We checked in and ate dinner before bed. I feel better, sadly enough, because I'm going to bed in a gorgeous marble-floored hotel with a big, comfy mattress. It takes a lot, to witness so much. I love it in a strange way, seeing this side of the world, this side of life, but it's comforting here, at the Hotel Mansingh, and I am so grateful for that. And tomorrow...the Taj! But those people, I can't get them out of my mind. Some smiled, those asking for money, like the disabled, were the most friendly and engaging. I can't blame them, for with their disabilities and deformities and inability to get any sort of medical attention, I would do all I could to get money too. And I doubt these people can hold jobs. The man with polio can't walk, can't stand. He can't afford a wheelchair. He can't even afford shoes. The man with elephantitis I think has a better shot at keeping a job, and for all I know maybe he has one. But how is it that I can witness in the span of four hours people suffering with three different diseases, none of which I've seen in person before? This country, it needs help. They are making improvements I hear but those people, they are in serious need. No one deserves to live like that, if their living situations can be improved. No one. So now, I am sitting in my room watching Indian MTV. I walked through a mirror-lined hallway with green marble floors and pots of flowers on the table opposite the elevator. To go to sleep here, in a room with two beds, two love seats, a couch and a desk, after what I've seen today, really freaks me out. I'm confused because I feel bad, but relieved at the same time. This is my life, and I have to live my life, but that's not enough for me. I need to do something with my life to do something about this, so hopefully I'll figure out something.
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