Two Weeks Now, Some Thoughts

As the plane descended, the city came into focus. My boarding pass read Heathrow to Delhi. Half British, half Indian nationals, the staff was put together for a flight bound to India. Food requests switched, the norm veg and the exception meat. Baseball caps traded, in large part, for turbans. I knew I was on my way to India and I still today know that I am sitting here, the languages around me different, signs foreign, and a map that indicates thousands of miles between me and home are constant in my mind. We touch down, the PA crackles and a polite British accent welcomes us all to Delhi's international airport. All the signs are screaming at me but I know I’ve landed not because our wheels are on the ground or the ground staff is Indian, I know we've landed because as I step onto the extended jet way my glasses fog. It is not raining and the sun in shining, my glasses should not be fogging like they did on rainy days in 7th grade on the public bus home. It is that hot and humid. This is the weather people have told me about, the Delhi heat, sweet air that hangs out at the equator, heat that packing lists have tried to prepare my lightweight pants for and guide books warn me about. I inhale. The air is different, I am in India; now I know.

Each day is filled with moments like this, constant barrages of obvious signs that scream of another country, world, set of religions, movies, languages, foods, customs, but my armor deflects most of the obvious indicators. Kenya arises here, my encounters with the non-American world informing my mind of some of the intricacies that lie beneath the presence of slums, open sewers, the faces of statistics we too often read about. Yet I know this is not Kenya, it is not the Bronx, Scotland, this new land that greets me with unique cologne in each breath is incomprehensibly different from anywhere I’ve been. So, before trying to understand those major differences, over 5,000 years of recorded history, what 1.2 billion people even means, thoughts about development, modernity, governance, I am stuck in this thick air trying to first understand how to engage with the small things. As I exit restaurants I am not taken with the wide streets and impressive infrastructure - such is noted in a book somewhere, to be found out later -- or auto rigshaws, the apparently different thing, or even the auditions of uniformed men with waxed mustaches and wads of chewing tobacco as they bicker for my business. What takes me, what I focus on for its insight, knowledge on pushing me to be better able to adjust, is the resilience of everything we - Westerners - give up on, the cars my family has gotten rid of, dumped refrigerators, wires, engines, phones, radios... here, things don’t break, repairmen are everywhere and nothing is ever on its last leg, always salvageable. This is telling.

Two weeks in, these are the things I notice, trying to get my mind around what I can, see what is different and what is the same. Underground passages, train stations, still house people who are without homes, men sleep on the bare sidewalk, cozied up in a blanket for the night, wholly without shelter. I’ve seen homelessness before, bashed over the head by its ubiquity on the streets of Kenya, especially amongst orphans. I know people are homeless all over the world, and this is a sad reality that will continue to exist. But never before have I been so bothered by the presence of an infant, a new way of encountering homelessness and the often times concomitant begging. At stop lights, choked in smog, noses running and clothes dirty babies are used as a competitive advantage in a game that often links looking the most desperate to monetary success. Young women's hips often set the stage, babies slung on hips, pawns in a negotiation for money, a prop to pull a heartstring, a surety for soliciting funds. Surely many of these families need the money they get from begging, but in the justice of my mind, babies, innocent, ought not play a part in this -- better left home with grandma or sister. Presumptuous perhaps. In the end, as the woman holds her child on one hip and taps me with her free hand, wrinkled with her burdens, her clothing saturated with dirt, face pleading, I give her money, aware that I may have been worked, but really just feeling empty inside, truly and wholly sad.

We roll off into a cacophony of horns - in India, they say, you can drive without brakes but not without horn -- passing bollywood billboards, the fully extended leg of a cyclist as his pedal comes full circle, a glistening sweaty back of a day laborer, kiosks, malls, mansions, hotels, embassies, baboons, motorbikes, roundabouts, sandals, shapely shadows of leaves I’ve never seen, policemen, buses gurgling black diesel emissions, intoxicating colors of women's saris. As we ride I try to get away from any and all preparation that I've had, to avoid the tendency to exotisize the foreign, fetishism the different. My challenges lie in each person I pass, yearning to understand each one as they fit into this complicated Indian fabric each as human beings, seeing laborers not as laborers, but as husbands and fathers, politicians not at officials but people, women not as victims of gender bias but IT professionals, all fallible, all implicated through their interactions, histories, and converging futures in a larger scheme that I too am now a part of.