Leaving India Already?

Umaid Bhawan Palace

Houses in Mumbai ^

'2 weeks? Is that all?' Every time I told someone in India, especially Americans who have been there for a few years, they can hardly believe I went halfway around the world to visit India and only spend 2 weeks and now I can see why. I want to stay until I get sick of Indian food. I want the driving style to not seem so unbelievably absurd. I want to be able to speak Hindi, or at least say a few words and get my h's and t's and d's to sound right. I want to understand how such extremes can coexist in the same time and place and how so many people can have so little yet seem to be so content. We talked to rikshaw drivers who have been living in Mumbai for years, driving all day and sleeping in their rikshaws at night, making a few dollars a day and sending most of it to their families back home, somewhere far away. I haven't written much about the darker, underside of India, the slums, the poverty, people with no legs, crawling around on the street, between cars in traffic, begging for a few Rupees, the endless shacks made of sticks and tin and a plastic tarp for a roof, the beggars who cling to you until some upper class Indian yells at them to get lost. I haven't showed pictures of this either. I've taken some, but it's hard to take them and it's hard to write about. But it's something that compels me to comprehend it, because despite it all, there's an attitude in India that somehow enables people to transcend these things and take things in stride and not be all angry. As an American, I see India and think about our problems in the West and I feel like, for the first time in a long time, I'm starting to get some actual perspective, and more wouldn't hurt. I have to suspect lots of people like me fly in, look around, eat well, stay in decent places and when we're tired of the chaos, the construction, the noise and the dirt, we just get on a plane and take off and go back to where we came from. We can turn it off as if it was all on TV. After all these years of hearing and thinking about it, I thought I could go and check out India for a couple of weeks, and finally see what it was all about. The problem is that I've just started this show and I'm not ready to turn it off yet. 2 weeks is like pilot and a lot of good episodes are yet to come.

I was sitting on the plane just before takeoff remembering my first impression of India. It started several thousand feet above Mumbai not long before we landed. It was the smell. A deep earthen smell. Not the dirt smell you get from camping, or the bad smell of socks you wore for 3 days, but an old smell that you can't comprehend and need to smell again, a sort of mysterious smell that evokes feelings and memories, like the smell of truffles or the smell of an old room of old furniture that suddenly reminds you of a summer cottage that you stayed in as a kid. Anyway, I'm sitting on the plane as it's boarding, realizing that I can still smell India, which is kind of a surprising thing because your senses usually become desensitized with any constant stimulus like a smell, and after while, smells stop smelling and become part of the background. And here it is after 2 weeks and I can still smell India, perhaps because it's so complex that you don't desensitize so easily. And it's not a bad smell or a strong one. It's more of an aroma than a stench. There were certainly enough smelly things around--garbage clogging waterways and open gutters (garbage cans don't seem to exist here), food being cooked at roadside stands where ever you go, cows and dogs roaming the streets, endless digging and construction with piles of dirt, mud and water, temples and ashrams and hotels with incense and flowers all around, rikshaws and motorbikes choking the street with dust and exhaust. So I'm sitting there contemplating the smell of India when this guy walks around the plane spraying some kind of aerosol bomb and I realize that he's sanitizing the air, getting rid of the smell of India right before take off, and I'm kind of annoyed and insulted. I'm annoyed because the aerosol smell seems like some kind of artificial new plane smell and it completely obliterates the smell of India, instantly, and I can't help but think of this as a metaphor for the Western world's way of dealing with things that aren't not going it's way. I'm leaving a place where the smells weren't blotted out by chemicals and it was like the curtains were pulled back and life was revealed in full color at it's best and worst and you could walk by and try not to look, but it was right there and you had to take notice. And it makes you think about who you are and what you do and what you want and why. And that's a good thing to think about now and then. No question... I'll have to come back for more.