Hyeri and I lay on the sand dunes in the Thar Desert in Jaisalmer, on an overnight camel safari, wrapped up in blankets. We looked up at the Milky Way above us. What I loved was how I would be looking at the constellation app on my phone, trying to identify the stars, and then I would put it away, and look up. As I looked, I could see more and more stars becoming visible to me as my eyes adjusted to the light. There were thousands. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands. And knowing, when the Hubble telescope focused on one empty corner of space for several days in an unprecedented long exposure shot in the 90’s, it found thousands of galaxies, containing millions of stars.
There is a magnitude to India, that is hard to grasp. India is bigger than me. India is a subcontinent with 1.1 billion people. India is bigger than everyone. Then you look up at the stars; and you think of the size of the planets, and size of our sun, and the unfathomable distances and unfathomable masses that exist in our galaxy and in our universe. And all I could do, is lie there, and see a fraction of a fraction of a fraction that my small and human eyes could perceive.
There is a universe inside my head, billions of neurons and impulses, and thoughts and complexity. Then there are more inside every one of us.
There is a universe above us. Infinite and Expanding.
I am small. I am infinite. I am trying to be ok with both of these things.
I stayed up for a long time, sitting on those dunes, lamenting my lack of knowledge of the constellations, but admiring the way everything looked around me. Living in cities, you forget just how incredible the night sky is each night, as soon as you get away from the light pollution. We were in the Thar Desert, something like 40 km from the Indian Pakistan border, and I could still hear the wind turbines in the distance, and some kind of party or wedding happening elsewhere. Life still continued. Life always continued. But genuinely, for that night, time felt different. The stars were innumerable.
day after arriving in Jaisalmer, I went on an overnight camel safari. It was me, a lovely Korean girl called Hyeri (WHO I MISS DEARLY), plus three British girls who complained a lot, stuck to themselves, and got excessively high that night. With us were two men to help with the camels, and the owner of the hostel (one of the weirdest people I have ever met, and with a habit of wandering habits. I didn’t particularly like him).
We ate food and drank tea by a campfire, and ran and dived off the sand dunes. But definitely the highlight for me was the stars… and the camels. Camels are wonderful and weird creatures, and very uncomfortable to ride for the uninitiated. Barely 3-4 hours of riding spread over 2 days made me feel like I had been punched in my thighs, either side of my groin. I’m not a horse-rider, so I don’t know how it compares, but it definitely is a lot more lumpy of a ride. But you gotta love those awkward creatures. And this desert evening when when I first properly started learning Hindi. So I know wonderful phrases, such as ‘Aap oont hain’ - ‘You are a camel’. The enjoyment of the evening was hampered by getting hit on again by a male member of our group, and this following on so soon after it happened in Jaipur, really didn’t help my view of men in general. But it didn’t ruin the evening, and the stars were still beautiful, and still bright.
I stayed for one day after returning from the camel safari, and I explored the city with Hyeri, particularly the massive live-in-fort, which was something out of a story. The streets were narrow, but auto rickshaws and moped still zipped around.
Finally. Dogs. The most important of topics, always.
There were several dogs in the desert who we befriended and fed, and the dogs in Jaisalmer were lovely too, if the skinniest I have seen across India.
About 2 hours before I had to get on a bus, Hyeri and I encountered a 3 week old puppy limping across a busy square. It had had an accident and had scraped its front paw badly that the bones were showing. We debated what to do, whether to take it with us, if we could remove it from its mother and siblings,until we found a local charity who sent a guy out on a moped to find us. He had hydrogen peroxide, and iodine, and cleaned and bandaged the poor things’ foot up, and assured us within 2 weeks it would be walking again fine.
Job completed, I hurried back to the hostel, packaged in 10 minutes, and then left to get on the 12 hour overnight bus to Udaipur. Moving on once again, leaving those stars behind.
all my love
- Lily (Jaisalmer always had some of the best endorsements for products ever)
My time in India <3 (follow me on Instagram here too)
And now we have Agra. It is almost infamous within the tourist circuit for being loud, difficult, and frustrating, and the hawkers and scams there are thick on the ground. As mentioned in the previous entry, I had real difficulties initially in Agra. I could not deal with the stares and vividly feeling different. I stuck to the hostel whilst having a quiet and low-level panic attack for the entire day. There were good people stay at the hostel, and a couple of them let me cry and did not flinch, and that was so deeply appreciated.
One of the mornings I woke up at 5:30am to see the Taj at sunrise, and there was a massive thunderstorm outside to greet me. I sat there, wrapped up in my massive shawl-blanket from Dharamshala, and buzzed from the storm, because, dear lord I love Storms. Things improved in Agra after that. Of course, it is because I had some time to think and panic and could speak to people there, and call friends, and work out what I was doing next; but I like to think the storm had something to do with it, because genuinely, I love those things far too much. They remind me of Nigeria.
After the storm, I went back to bed, and that afternoon, with two German tourists, and Shubham, an Indian guy from Mumbai, and we all went to the Taj together. The Taj Mahal is easily one of the most well-known monuments within India, and likely contributes to Agra being the 4th most visited city in India, and the 66th most visited city in the world. It is a massive complex built around the central tomb, and a perfect example of Mughal Architecture.
I enjoyed visiting the Taj, and I am glad I saw it, for it truly is absolutely incredible. However I am not sure how much of that comes from the tens of people who said ‘Oh you simple HAVE to go to Agra’. A trip to India is considered not-complete without seeing the Taj. I am glad I saw it. I don’t have a great need to return to Agra.
As for the rest of my time, I stayed 3 nights in Agra, and did relatively very little. I stayed in the hostel, I read, and I played with the 2 month old puppy Francesca, who hung around the hostel. There isn’t much to say or write. This is a comparatively short entry (also as I am desperately trying to catch up with this blog, as I am over 2000km away from Agra as I write this).
I was recovering from ‘hitting the wall’, and through much conversation with several friends in India, I booked my buses and trains to go to Dehru Dun and stay with Atreyi, instead of continuing through Uttar Pradesh. I needed a home, and familiarity, not constant moving and constantly different faces in hostels.
I had spent the Monday in Delhi, mostly within the Starbucks on Connaught Place. For reference, I hate Starbucks. I hate what they stand for, I hate how they try to be ‘standardized hipster chic’, I hate how they avoid their taxes, and mistreat their staff. However. If you want a safe haven in a foreign country, head to Starbucks. The drinks are basically the same price in India, as they are in the UK (i.e. horrendously expensive for India), but it is safe, and familiar, and you know how it works, and you can sit with your laptop and excessively large bag in a corner, and you can be. I was in an anxious mood, and stupidly ordered coffee, which of course made me worse. And then I was desperately trying to book buses to go to Agra, and my card kept being rejected by every website I tried, and I got worse and worse and worse.
One of Amrita’s long time friends, Atreyi was in Delhi at the time, and decided to pop in and say hi, and she met a near-shaking anxious mess who couldn’t get anything to work and was hesitant about travelling to Agra to begin with. This was the second time we had ever met, but I am not good at keeping face at the best of time, so of course I ended up anxiety-crying in a Starbucks in India. Tick that off the bucket list.
Agra is in the state of Uttar Pradesh, and Uttar Pradsh is known to be one of the most stressful and dangerous states of India, and travel within it is one of the most frustrating. It is also where two of the most visited cities in India are; Agra, home to the Taj Mahal, and Agra Fort; and Varanasi, the holiest city within Hinduism, where people are cremated on the ghats by the river Ganges. And I was going to spend my next week and a half there. It is not a place for people who are tired or sensitive or who suffer from anxiety. It needs to tackled head on. You can imagine why Atreyi would try to convince me to not go to Agra in the state I was in, and instead to come up north with her to a place called Dehru Dun in Uttarakhand, in the foothills of the Himalyans. But I was stubborn, and what made me more anxious than going to Uttar Pradesh, was the thought of changing the plan. The plan is holy and the plan is scared, and I was going to Agra even if I had to take unadvised transport to get there.
Well….
Here’s the message I sent to the ‘INDIYAH’ group thread the following day.
‘Right. Story time.
Got on my bus last night. I booked a non-A/C private bus. Some hassle, but normal amounts of hassle. the bus was late, there were staring men (like proper, not-looking-away-staring), it was bumpy and not Air-Conditioned, but I could deal with all of that. I was knackered and passing out all over the place. At around 1:45am, we are getting close to Agra (but 2hrs later than we should have been, but eh). The bus stops, and then people are telling me to get off the bus, and some other people get off too, so I am like, ‘maybe they are letting me off first, that is nice?’, and I get off, not really paying much attention to where we are. Someone had told me to get a taxi with the other people who are also off the bus. and then the bus drives away and we are left there. 5 other people, around my age, and 2 of them girls.
So suddenly we are left on the side of the highway, 19KM away from Agra. These Delhi people were also like ‘what the fuq. we thought we were being taken to the bus station’. They order a taxi, and we find out we are staying in places that are about 300m apart along the same road, which is good.
throughout all of this, I wasn’t stressed. I was just calmly looking at everything going ‘oh, this is what is happening now’. my anxiety is stupid. maybe it was adrenaline. but I was in near tears from stress in trying to book shit in Starbucks in CP. Stuck at the side of the road in Agra - eh. but. very glad there were other people there. they weren’t particularly friendly, they were tired, but they let me travel with them, and could speak Hindi and a bit of English. We were waiting for a cab for maybe like 25 minutes. At one point the police drove past, and and pulled up to our group. One of the officers spoke to them for a I could tell the guy was berating them for going with Private buses. And at one point, he looked at me, and they were like ‘yeah, she’s a foreigner’. I cannot speak Hindi, but I can understand loan-words and body language. yay.
eventually the cab turned up. there were 6 of us in enough seats for 4, but it was fine. They got dropped off at their hotel… and then just left without paying anything. I was too tired to even bother calling after them.
the cab dropped me off, and charged me 500R, and honestly I couldn’t care by that stage (although now i am starting to get really a bit iffy with the scamming, and everyone seeing me as a walking bank-machine. and ‘it’s ok. she can pay’. like. uuuuhhh) I got into my hostel, and got into my bed. and only there was I like ‘….shit. that could have been really really bad’.
I have slept. I have had breakfast. I got money out. I want to carry 1000R in my bra at all time. because fuck. if I didn’t have money or a power-bank to charge my phone. praising the gods for my Indian SIM and GPS. but yeah. I am having an easy day today. staying in the hostel. going to get rid of like 5-7kg of my stuff, because having a 24kg bag is stupid and dangerous too.
I am also trying to work out if I am either unlucky, or an irresponsible idiot who is going to get herself into serious danger. so genuine advice would be appreciated. because as much as I am like YOLO, INDIA, EXPERIENCES. I have people who love me at home. and I don’t know if this is fair to them. I also don’t know if I am overreacting. if I am fine. if I am not.
Atreyi met me in Starbucks when I was really really stressed and an anxiety. and she was like ‘come to Dehrudun. nothing happens there. you can stay in my room, with a family, we have good internet. and you can rest’. and right now i am so tempted. but also don’t know if I am running away from difficult situations. not sure if I am taking too many risks. i just don’t fecking know anything. and I feel incompetent and too reliant on people. gonna get rid of my shit and seriously learn some basic Hindi for sure.
lot of questions today.
***
That bus was a mistake. It was a private (non-Governmental) bus, and a non-A/C one. The A/C buses tend to be Volvos, and have their proper licenses, and the private non-A/C buses are known to pull shit like this. It was fine, I got to my hostel safely, just Rs 500 poorer than I should have been, but that is not money I am upset over. I was safe and unscathed and had a bed; much to the relief of Morgaine who had coincidentally messaged me whilst I was on the side of the road. I had responded with ‘change of subject, funny story, guess who is stranded on the side of the highway at 2AM 19km away from where I should be?’. She had be no-so-quietly freaking out on the other side of the planet on my behalf, whilst I had been in some weird calm haze. Best exchange was this
Lily - Almost at their hotel. Going to be a hilarious story tho Mum is going to flip her lid
Morgaine - I AM FLIPPING MY LID
She also told me to ‘be safe or I’ll kick ass’. She is fab.
That next day I ended up hiding in the Zostel in Agra, panicking, and playing with the puppy that lived there (she was called Francesca. I was in love). I didn’t want to be on the street. I didn’t want to be around any Indians who would stare or leer at me, or try to sell me things, or yell things. I didn’t want rickshaw drivers to quote Rs 300 at me as a starting price when I know it was at least 1/6 of that. I couldn’t cope with the noise and the heat and the vivid differentness of the place. I didn’t want to be in India, at that moment, I wanted to be back in Edinbugh with Tesco and chippies, and microwave meals, and everything that I knew and understood.
Slowly panicking in a foreign country, whilst there is no one around to say much more than platitudes is hard. I wanted to cry and I wanted someone I knew well just to hug me and stroke my hair, and watch stupid YouTube videos as I blubbered about how I felt. I had a very long, slow and quiet panic attack during that day, and it took me until the late evening to find a random American guy, and start talking about how shitty I felt. I had hit a wall.
On my first day in India, I met a guy in Stops Hostel. He had been travelling and working in India for 15 months, and at 15 hours in India, I was feeling pretty overwhelmed. I asked him for all the tips possible, and one stuck in my mind solidly. It was this ‘Just to let you know, at roughly 2 to 3 weeks in, you will get depressed. You will be sad and incredibly homesick, and you will think ‘what the fuck is this place? what am I doing here?’ and all you will want to do is give up. That feeling will happen, there is no avoiding it, it will come, but it will also pass, and you will love this place again’.
This was me hitting that wall. I called a tactical retreat from Uttar Pradesh two nights later, and booked a bus and a train up to Dehru Dun to stay with Atreyi at her house, with her mother and her dog.
By the fact this was 4 weeks ago, and I am still in India (but desperately behind on my blog, sorrrryyy), I obviously did not quit or stop travelling although. Thankfully it is still the most unpleasant and borderline dangerous experience I have had in this trip, and I’d like to keep it that way! That would be nice. As I am writing this, I am in South Goa, in a place that is a few shades away from being a beach paradise, so from my pictures, it is hard to think that travelling isn’t anything but idyllic and amazing. But I don’t call this a holiday; India is not a holiday, unless you stay on resorts in Goa, or have a perfect package deal that handles all the drama for you. I call this a trip, and a trip where I have been learning an awful lot about myself and how I handle things.
All my love, from a close-to-the-beach-but-not-quite-Hut in Palolem, in South Goa.
In the evening of Day 17, I got on another overnight bus, and 12 hours later was back in Delhi. The bus dropped me off at 5AM in the morning up in North Delhi, and immediately when you get off the bus with a massive backpack, you are swarmed by drivers and rickshaw drivers asking ‘auto rickshaw ma’am? where you go? where you go?’. I have learnt to bat them away and ignore them until I have GPS coordinates of where I am going, and how far away it is, so I can negotiate the right price. That particular morning of Day 18, I had not slept at all, and was suddenly wary of auto-rickshaw drivers. I tried calling ahead to my hostel, and they told me the cost would be around 100R. The taxi drivers looked offended when I quoted that price, telling me it was early morning, and prices were different. I got them down from 800R to 500R, but gave in, because I just wanted to sleep. The receptionist at my hostel gave me a quiet earful for paying so much, but I didn’t care by that point. In place like Delhi, where there are not functioning metres, you eventually just get tired from fighting. It is also important to switch your thinking from ‘Western Prices’ to ‘Indian Prices’. A 20 minute taxi at 5AM in the UK, would cost a lot more than £5, but it was about five times what I should have paid. Allowing that happens, makes people continue to rip off tourists, because who wouldn’t jump at the chance to make 5 times your normal amount for a short trip?
And so we nicely segue to whiteness in India. I have quickly learned that being a white woman in India is to get attention. I walk down the street, and I get attention. I stand on a corner on my phone, and I get stares, and I sit in cafes or diners, and I get attention. The type and intensity of attention changes from place to place, some places it seems more curious, some places more friendly, some more predatory, but there is no way for me to blend in in India. It’s alright. You get used to it, but it is definitely a mixed bag. Being white gives you two things, what I call ‘White Bonus’ and ‘White Prices’.
Let’s start with the White Bonus. In short, most of the time, I get treated really really well by service people. I think I have had maybe one or two poor service experiences, and one of them was at 1AM in the morning, in a random hotel on an overnight-bus pit-stop, and I think the waiter was high on something. When going out to resturants in Delhi with Indian friends, the waiters sometimes *literally* leap up to serve you. I get amazing service in very very fancy places, when I am in my baggy pants, and obviously haven’t showered all that recently. Being white elevates me in society, and it is absolutely ridiculous, and honestly, makes me uncomfortable a lot of the time. Because I am not a Queen, or a Princess (however much I claim to be Queen), I am an unemployed graduate from a middle-class family, and have worked service for the last 3 years. I am nothing special.
Upon that day back in Delhi (Day 18, October 25th), I met up with Pulkit again, and we went to Grubfest, this massive food festival south of Delhi. There were fairy lights, and music playing, and the vibe of the place was amazing. We ordered burgers at this very very busy burger stand, and our burgers were late, as one would imagine. Honestly, we had someone appear and apologise to us every 3 minutes, each time I would try and say ‘dude, it’s completely fine, shit happens’. When we did get the burgers, they gave us extra burger each and extra chips. And that was all basically because I am white. It got better, because then I went to the Absolut Vodka stand; they had ‘Indian Cocktails’, and I wanted to try an ‘Absolut Chutney’. I went to the cash booth to buy a ticket, and they smiled and told me to have one on the house. This was a 300R cocktail. I regretted not trying to order two. Pulkit and I looked at each other, and were like ‘did that genuinely just happen?’ Maybe it was because I looked particularly cute that night, or they liked my scarf, but I am 99% sure it was because I was white.
There are a few factors here. One, it is you are viewed as an affluent person. It is inevitable. I worked minimum wage jobs in the UK, and I can still afford to live in hostels, hotels, and eat out at resturants and cafes several times a day. Some people understand the difference in the cost of living from here versus the UK, but most people just see you are people who are made of money. Also, as a tourist, people will consider you a guest to their country as a whole, and the Guest is God. People will do their best to make sure you are heading in the right direction. I have had more white-knights come to my aid than ever before, including people angerily making sure no one sits next to me on a predominately male bus. People get up from their chairs for me at chai stalls, despite my protests. You are a visitor, and a guest, and that is important. Also, you are also someone that is interesting, and something different, and people are genuinely curious as to who you are and where you come from? Whiteness is valorized. So many people have told me that I am ‘beautiful’, and it is a complicated mix of issues, from remanents of colonialism, the caste system, and the interplay of Indian and Western media (too much to unpick, and this post is already far far too long).
Then of course, you get the White Prices.A ‘special price, just for you my friend!’ As a tourist, the worst side of India that you are in regular contact with, is the scamming; there are far far worse parts, but as a tourist you are sheltered from experiencing that. So far, I have remained relatively unscathed. I have had double prices for rickshaws charged for me, and lost 300-500R, I have lost my phone (but that was entirely my idiocy) but no suffered no major scam. I have had people try, but thankfully reckonised it, and batted them away. I’ve heard stories though. Some travellers land in India, exhausted after 14-20+ hours of travelling, and cannot find their driver who was meant to meet them. They then can get taken from one ‘official tourist bureau’ to the next, and are told ‘There is a strike on’, or ‘All the roads are closed’, ‘there are no hotels available, only this particular one’, often at several thousand rupees per night. These people will call up other hotels, often friends, involved in the scams, and they will tell them that there is no place to stay. I have met tourists who were moved around for 3 hours through Delhi until eventually finding a place to stay. It is a terrifying and awful start to a country, and I can understand how tourists get jaded and wary of Indian that they meet.
I haven’t even mentioned selfies here yet. Selfies are a big thing in India, and I have had probably more than 50+ people or groups ask me for a selfie by this stage. I almost always say yes, apart from requests by young men (mostly because I don’t know what they will do with that picture, and I don’t want them putting it on Facebook and them declaring I am their girlfriend. Buy me dinner first). Sometimes there are families, or young women, and they come up and shyly ask, and it is a bit ridiculous and wonderful, but I smile anyway. The places worse for selfies are places where there is a lot of Indian tourists visiting, like the Golden Temple in Amritsar, or Haji Ali Dargh in Mumbai, but they happen all over the place. Mostly they are fine, we all smile at each other, I use my poor Hindi (Namaste, mera naam Lily, aap kese ho?) much to everyone’s joy.
However few days ago I was exhausted and standing by the road near Haji Ali, trying to work out what I was doing next and barely functional. Within 5 minutes, 3 groups of people ask me for selfies, and one particular group of women didn’t even ask. They walked past, and noticed me, and started speaking to each other, and then stood right next to me, and took their pictures. They didn’t make eye contact, they didn’t gesture with their phone, I understand that English is not always widespread, but you can communicate a fair amount with gestures and smiles and nods. These woman just stood next to me, and I smiled because I was too exhausted to do anything else. I felt like some kind of exotic animal, that people wanted to take pictures with, and not like a person whatsoever. It has been a mostly isolated incident, but it was dehumanising, and unpleasant, and nicely illustrates the way I am seen sometimes.
Sometimes it is exhausting to be the thing that everyone is outwardly staring at. People do not mean any harm by it, but if you are having an anxious day, there is no way to hide. Blending in is something I have never appreciated more. My best friend in the UK is mixed-race (hi Moogs, u smell). She’s half-Indian, but could pass as Turkish, Palestinian, Mexican, Spanish, or Iranian. She has had people come up to her and tentatively ask ‘Are you Iranian?’ And when they are obviously Iranian, Kurdish, or Palestian themselves, it is them reaching out to her, to be like ‘Hi, You may be like me?’. Having lived in predominantly white places, I have never *personally* understood that, or felt that. If you are white, ask yourself, have I ever been in a large room of people and been the only person of my ethnicity? Before coming to India, it likely never happened to me. Now, if I avoid tourist traps, it is very commonplace. And now, I can understand that reaching-out. You want someone who speaks your language, may understand your cultural references, and the place you are from; particularly as India is so different in so many ways. It’s awkward as I feel like I should be embracing and immersing myself in Indian culture, but sometimes you just bloody miss home.
A final point. The difference from being white in India, versus brown in the UK is worth noting. The worst thing that people assume about me is that I am filthy rich, someone to be scammed, or sometimes, sexually promiscuous (nothing wrong with being promiscuous of course, but having people *assume* that you will sleep with them at the drop-of-the-hat is not pleasant). The ‘being-viewed-as-being-easy’ thing is more complicated, and I’ll get into it another time. However, In the UK, if you look South Asian, people will at best, ask you where you are from, and worst, people will be racially abusive, and think you are a terrorist. I am not going to pretend that I know what that is like, but I am willing to be that it is far worse than the hassle I get. Sometimes, it is exhausting being a solo-white-female-traveller, and Lord, what I would do to blend in sometimes. But even here, I am privileged and mostly protected by my skin colour, and I reckonise that, and acknowledge that, and near 6 weeks in, I have began to get used to all the weird shit that happens around me.
That was probably too long, you can tell this has been on my mind muchly. All my love, from a cafe in Mumbai, watching the sunset over Girgaum Chowpatty.
The Golden Temple, or Harmandir Sahib truly is golden, and it is beautiful, and it gleams at night, and one of the most reverent places I have been. The water is still, fish swimming under, and Sikhs bathing themselves in the water. The prayers in Punjabi on speakers echo all around. During the prayers, thousands of people face the centre, thousands face the temple, and thousands of hands clasped in prayer and heads bowed in supplication, and even if you can’t understand what is being said, you can still feel the power of this place.
Prior to coming to India, I had only significantly encountered the Christian and Islamic faiths, but travelling here, I can feel the sheer diversity of faith, and the diversity of ways of worshipping God, or Gods, or the Divine. How the Indian subcontinent came to be the origin of four of the world’s major religions is incredible to me and I would dive back to university just to find out.
So. At the Golden Temple, faith here needs modesty. There is no priesthood of believers, and all heads are covered, and bowed, regardless of gender. Everyone is barefoot, leaving their shoes behind - shoes being considered unclean. I am not Sikh. I have only a basic knowledge of the religion, and even less of the character and sense of the faith. But here you feel welcomed and humbled. The feeling is the same as in the Lotus Temple. I went to the Golden Temple four times during my stay in Amritsar. The best time was at midnight, and me and Rachel sat there for about 20 minutes in silence, just facing the water. I would have stayed there for hours.
I wish I could feel what bowing and pressing your head into the floor felt like. How that feeling felt. How it was to press your hands together, and pray ernestly and humbly. When people ask if I am religious, I tend to say that either I am a ‘spirtual shithead’ or that I have ‘a complicated relationship with God, that I am trying to work out’. And it is true. I am still trying to work it out. And it is a subject where it is hard to be confused and in the middle. You are judged by the radical atheists for not believing, and maybe pitied by the deeply religious. Of course, this is my paranoia, but it is a subject that I am still trying to fathom for myself. The way to do this, is to take selfies with a temple, obviously. #selfiequeen
I can’t avoid mentioning the Langar however. In all Gurdwaras, there is a Langar, which is a community kitchen which serves free food to all visitors of all faiths, race, and traditions. The Langar in Harimandir Sahib is one of the largest community kitchens in the world, and serves on average 75,000 people daily, and up to 100,000 people on busier days and festivals. You are handed a metal tray, a bowl for water, and a spoon. As far as I could tell, there were two halls, and one would be used, whilst the other was cleaned. You sat on long rugs that ran the length of the hall, and volunteers would walk past with buckets of daal, serving you right there. Men with giant baskets of roti would hand them to you, as long as you held your hands for me. There were one, sometimes two types of daal, and kheer (which similar to rice pudding, but not as thick), and roti. The food was simple, and genuinely delicious. Men with these giant barrels on wheels would distribute water along the lines. It worked incredibly well. Easily a hundred people, sitting together in a hall, eating together. When you finished, you got up, handed your dish to more volunteers, and could see more volunteers cleaning the thousands of bowls and trays. I had a glimpse at one of the kitchens, and saw the massive wok-like pans, that could have happily fit about 3-4 men inside them. Later, I was told that that was the ‘small kitchen’, and the large one was about 4 times the size.
The Golden Temple was one of my favourite places I visited. It felt safe. There were men walking along carrying spears and knives, and I felt so welcomed and safe and incredibly comfortable. To me, it is everything that a place of worship should be. Reverent, welcoming, and peaceful. I’d go back in an instant.
Also I took what is probably my favourite photo in the entire trip, which is this 10 month old girl raising her hands in response to ‘Sat Sri Akal’, which is Hello in Punjabi.
It is almost uncool to be homesick or sad or frustrated whilst travelling. It’s against the ethos of being free, and being a rolling stone who gathers no moss. If you wear haram pants, then you can have no troubles; just smoke a joint and make a joke about how crazy India can be, eh? But unfortunately, I don’t work like that.
It is 4 weeks in, and I am tired of hostelling.
I felt it getting into this hostel. Arriving, and seeing new faces, and knowing that you need to introduce yourself again. ‘Where are you from? How long have you been in India for? Where have you been?’ And it gets repetitive. And all I want to do is just enter a room and not have to explain everything about myself.
This is a good place, and a chill place. But still, it is not home. And someone told me ‘well, it is hard to be in a place like India for a while’, and it is not about it being India. It is that it is not home. It is not familiar. It is having my entire life on my back, and not having my own room, or having a room that you know where everything is. It is hard to find personal space either. You sleep in a dorm with 4, 6, 8, or 10 other people, and the common areas are filled with people who are, on the surface, chatty and happy and talkative and filled with the joy of travelling. And then there’s you, who wants to cry, who wants to sulk, and in a room filled with strangers all you get are platitudes.
Pardon my language, but I fucking hate platitudes.
So I sat on the roof of my hostel, and only there do you finally find space. Rooftops are my solace in India. Then the kids who live on the houses adjacent and share the roofspace arrive and start playing, and you cannot angst or be sad, when there are three children under 5 years old playing and laughing around. Life carries on. And I am deeply scornful of myself when I complain. Oh boo hoo, I am travelling, it is harrdddd. I am travelling and seeing some utterly incredible things, and I am so privileged that I have the money to do this, and the opportunity, and the health. And then you are travelling in India, and there is so much that is so deeply and ridiculously unfair here; then your complaints about the hardships of travelling seem to fall flat and feel spoilt and privileged. And I say all that, and I know all that so well.
But dear God, would I love to be home sometimes. Invent a teleport, and bring me back to Edinburgh for a weekend, and then send me right back into the fray in India, and I’ll be perfectly happy with that. However, running a quarter of the way around the world means it is a bit harder to pop back home.
I will be fine. This too shall pass.
This is why I call this thing a ‘trip’, and not a ‘holiday’. A holiday is a week on a beach in France. This is something different.
Trigger warning for accidents and animal injury and death.
After spending an extra two unplanned days in Amritsar, I finally boarded the government run bus to Dharamshala with a German medical-student from my hostel, Sebastian. After hearing horror stories all day, it was not nearly as bad as people made them out to be. Windows were opened, and there was no AC and not a whole lot of suspension on the vehicle, so it was a decently jostley ride, but it was not particularly uncomfortable. We met an Australian couple and a Quebecois couple, and had some good conversations. The bus hit a roadblock about an hour in, due to the continuing strikes with Punjab, and we had to sit about for an hour, and then eventually turned around to head back to Amritsar and take another route in. Such is the things that happen with transport in India, and we were back on the road soon. I had my head and arm out of the window, and I could feel the wind going past us, and it was a beautiful day, and the land around was interesting and different from anything I had ever seen. I could see people farming, some of them looked at this bus going past, the sky was clear, and it was hot but not humid. I was in a good mood, I felt ok and genuinely happy to watch the land go past and looking into villages as we drove past. This was good particularly in contrast to the day before; I had been sulky and grumpy due to being delayed for a day because of the strike, and feeling anxious and worried about my trip and not having enough time. That lasted for about 30 minutes, until I was reminded that it is so rare to be free to be lost, lazy, and late in life, and that opportunity should be embraced. In that moment on the bus, I felt like I was there, and embracing it, and it was good.
Then we drove in a village, and collided with something in the road. The bus had suddenly braked, not in the way one often brakes in India, due to the hectic nature of driving, this was a sudden, emergency brake, indicative of something going badly wrong. I peered out the window, and saw this black goat’s head crying in pain, and nearly threw up and burst into tears simultaneously. We had hit a goat, and suddenly the entire village was around, and the bus driver was out of the bus, and everyone was shouting at each other angrily in Hindi or Punjabi, and this animal was just wailing in pain. Never have I so badly wanted someone to just kill something, just to end its misery. Later, when the bus moved onwards, and they moved the goat from under the wheels, I saw the extent of the damage. Some of the women from the village were feeding it water, whilst most were just yelling at the bus driver, and a couple obviously looking distressed. I could understand what they felt. After 20 minutes of much shouting, the bus finally moved away from the village; I don’t know if the bus driver paid something to the owners or not. I don’t know. I do know that that animal will have died not long after we finally left. You don’t recover from injuries like that.
I was actually in the middle of messaging a friend when it happened, and within five minutes it went from ‘fantastic time, feel so alive and happy!’ to ‘good mood gone, we just hit a goat. fuck’. Never quite had such a rapid mood swing, and it was difficult to handle.
I have had so little exposure to severe injury and to death, and it really badly affected me. Sebastian, the German guy I was travelling with was more mellow about the situation, but he was a medical student, and you learned how to be dispassionate, because an emotional Doctor is a useless one. I don’t have that. There was something that was alive one moment, and then a violent and random and meaningless moment happened and then, soon, it will be dead. And it was ‘just’ a goat. It was not a cow, or God-forbid, a child. But it was still a creature, and that kind of sudden end hurts. Most of our death and violence happens behind closed doors in the UK; sanitised and hidden. Or maybe it is because I have had a sheltered life and been lucky to never been exposed to this. India is not inherently more violent or more dangerous; traffic accidents are traffic accidents. It would be a shock to the system wherever.
I spoke to a few friends after this happened, as I was a bit shaken by it all. They were lovely and wise, and supportive, reminding me to breathe and stay level. Something paraphrased from that conversation is below.
There is this constant challenge of finding life beautiful and wonderful and full of joy, whilst also reconciling the fact is it cruel and capricious and utterly meaningless sometimes. And knowing that that is what life *is*, and that it wouldn’t be life without being both simultaneously.
From a garden in Dehru Dun, this was a story. Love. L
It is through distance and contrast do I find that I get a better sense of a place. I understood Edinburgh better, through visiting Glasgow, and noticing all the little facets of a place that stood out in contrast. The same is with Delhi. So I can work out what is due to Delhi and what is due to India, and what is just completely out of the blue. Of course, I am under no illusions to the idea that I can be in a city for a week, particularly one the size of Delhi, and get a proper grasp of it. And when I say ‘size of Delhi’ I mean it is massive. There are 16 millions people living in Delhi, and the awkward density is 7400 people per square kilometer. For comparison, the Randstad in NL is 1500 per square km, and the City of London is 2600 per square km. But statistics can’t grasp it. No one can grasp how many people there are. We just can’t imagine that many people, having lives, and loves, and thoughts, and complex inner lives. Delhi is always noisy, there is always traffic, and people and movement. If there is one way to describe it, is it that there is so much. Not just in terms of people, but in terms of everything. Noises, smells, people, cars, dogs (so many strays), people selling lemonade on the street, hundreds of little shops that don’t seem distinguishable from the next. On the backs of every truck or auto, there are hand painted signs, saying ‘Horn Please’, and ‘Keep Distance’, and phone numbers and addresses. Inside each auto, many of the drivers would hang icons of gods or goddesses, or draw moustaches on the wing mirrors so their passengers would see that overlay’d on their face as they sat in the back. There is colour and life and not all that regulation, but it seems to somehow work.
With regulation, on thinks of ‘health and safety’, and that doesn’t seem to be much of a thing in Delhi so far. Life is cheap. But when I say ‘life is cheap’ in India, I don’t mean that people don’t love or value each other. There isn’t the culture of health and safety though. Food can often be unsafe, the tap water is unsafe, and the traffic. Traffic in Delhi is about 40x more dangerous than in London. I was told to never think about how dangerous it is, always ‘it will never happen to you, don’t worry’. Which is kind of the only way an anxious person can survive in this city, when you need to walk and take autos, and zip around the city constantly. People walk across the middle of the road, barely looking, just with a hand held out towards the traffic. Horns here are not used as a ‘what the hell?’, it is used more like sounding device, as a ‘hello, I am here!’. Many people told me that driving without a horn in India is like driving blind, as you have no way to alert other people of your presence. My mantra from Edinburgh, particularly Princes Street, of ‘Cross with conviction, and you won’t get hit’. Which is followed with ‘If you get hit, you did not have enough conviction’. This is particularly true in India. Pedestrian crossing are rarely a thing. Roads are partitioned in the middle by concrete dividers or a fence, but you find a gap, and you hover there until there is another chance to cross.
Also, on these concrete barriers in the road, you often find people just sleeping on the ground, both at night, and in the middle of the day. It never gets quiet in central Delhi, it just gets ‘quieter’, so these people just acclimatised to the sound of constant horns and traffic and driving. That initially was a hard thing for me to try and… be ok with? It’s the same with the begging. The first time a child came up to me to ask for money was tough. And it never gets easier. It is a hard thought to shake that this is a person here, in front of you, and that my 10 or 20 rupees could get them food for tonight. But the need here is so much. I remember being in Nigeria, in Lagos and asking my mother there about the beggars on the street, and she told me that I could give all my worldly possessions and the clothes off my back and it would barely make a difference. Maybe this is me being a selfish relatively-rich person, trying to justify and sooth my guilt, so I can keep my money for myself, for jewellery and clothes, and fancy meals out. I honestly don’t know. I don’t think there is an easy or simple way to think about it. I don’t think there should be, because as soon as seeing children begging gets easy to deal with, then something has gone dramatically wrong.
On a different note, my last 3 days in Delhi were good. The anxiety abated and I started leaving the house again and breathing easy. I visited Old Delhi, and Jama Masjid, a massive Mosque within Delhi, and on my penultimate day I went to the Lotus Temple with Mel and Sonia from my hostel. The Lotus Temple is a Bahá'í temple, and is the mother temple for the Indian subcontinent for the Bahá'í faith, and was probably was my favourite temple of my time in Delhi. Beautiful architecture, and the inside was wonderful and simple, and the feeling of the place was just completely different. You sit inside, and it is genuinely silent, despite there being a hundred people in there too. Much like when I have been to Quaker meetings, the silence feels gathered. The Bahá'í faith emphasizes the spiritual unity of all people, and of all faiths, and their ethos and beliefs are wonderful.
From faith, we also have friends (check out that seamless topical segue). In Delhi, I really have appreciated the value of having Indian friends (happy to call them friends now, rather than ‘friends of friends’). They looked after me, and kept me safe and out of trouble. I have mentioned Geetika and Pulkit here before, but there is also Mayuri and Shambahvi too. Trying to battle through Janpath, one of the cities large markets is difficult without the lovely Shambhavi wasn’t worth trying; she could basically rip the sellers into shreds when they tried to sell myself, Mel, and Kristen tops for 900 rupees (about 5x the actual price).
And it was lovely to see people find the treatment I got (either negative, or weirdly celebrity-like-positive) absolutely ridiculous. I either get ripped off, or treated like the Queen, and always am stared up, and some support in that is appreciated. On Tuesday night, I met up with Pulkit and two of his friends, and we went to Praneet’s rooftop with a telescope to try (and fail) to see the stars through the light pollution and the smog. The city stretched in every direction for as far as I could see. It was wonderful and humbling and so different from my little and beautiful Edinburgh. Friends and locals give a different side to this city, that is just incomprehensible to most people. They make Delhi more than just a point on the Golden Triangle, but try and help me understand it as a place where 16 million people actually live. I don’t understand Delhi. I can’t. I have been there for a week, and there are multiple cities inside one, and no way for me to ever understand it, even in a year. But I warmed to Delhi. It’s like walking upstream against the current, and it is exhausting, but you start to learn how to move, and it gets easier. But it considerably easier with friends, who happen to have an allegorical boat for you to hop into.
On my last night there, Pulkit took me to the Ramlila fairground. Ramlila is a dramatic re-enactment of a battle between Ram and Ravena, and for most part, most people treat it as a carnival, and I was taken to this particular fairground in the centre of Delhi. It was loud and wonderful and full of colour, and the rides looked so incredibly dangerous and unregulated. We went on this particular ride, something akin to a caterpillar, going around in a circle and up and down, and it looked relatively safe. Then we got Smoke was coming from the engine, and it kept going faster and faster, and I have never felt closer to death, and more alive in my life. It was a lovely memory to end my time in Delhi with. I got dropped off at my coach, and the overnight coach to Amritsar, in Punjab began. Delhi was my introduction to India. When I got on that coach, I had been in Delhi for just 7 whole days, and it felt like I had been there for a month. A very mixed and ridiculous month, where it felt like so much life happened in such a compact time, and I am ok with that.
So there is a 20min wait for a Doctor, so I finally have time to write something.
I fly out tomorrow morning. In 24 hours, I will be in the air. In 48 hours I will be waking up in Delhi. The list of things to do seems never-ending, however many I cross off, more things seem to jump in their place.
The Goodbyes have started in full force, and it just doesn’t get easier. Leaving my ‘Glasgow Cru’ was hard, but I think I still believe I’ll see them next month, like I alway do. It isn’t even a particularly long time away, it’s just the sheer distance - I can’t just leap on a train to Dunkeld, or Glasgow, or Aberdeen if I miss anyone.
I have a great fear of being stuck, or penned in. I like feeling like I can just leave if it all gets too much. But it’s harder to do that when you are in an unfamiliar country halfway round the world. And so, this trip is a test. Everyone keeps telling me what fun it will be, and how amazing it will be, but I see it as a test of my will, of my assertiveness (highly necessary in India), of my self-reliance, and perseverance. This is all getting a bit hippy and new-age-y, so I’ll stop.
Things left to do are… Try and fix my music player that stopped working a while back, set up my Currency card, check-in on my flights, write some cards, download a massive amount of podcasts that I will undoubtedly consume on many a long train ride, and then ‘Pack’, which is the most mammoth of tasks.
And so, I wonder what things I will think about myself when I get back. I am curious to see what I will learn, about life, about packing, what is necessary to travel, and what is necessary in a brief friendship made on the read.
