India: Arrivals

So concludes the series from Haiti. If you're interested in finding out more about Haiti, including blogs from others currently in the country, I highly recommend checking out the Blog on the Community and Friends section of this page called PAWÒL APRANTI-SAJ.

The next series is from one I wrote for Blueear.com. The pieces are snapshots and themes that emerged throughout my first few months in India.

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Arrivals

Delhi in June is brutally hot. I step off the plane at 11:00 at night to temperatures in the high forties. A dust storm in Rajasthan leaves the city coated with an extra layer of dust, in addition to the smog and pollution that comes with having a population of fourteen million. A train-station joke-book declares that in Delhi, if you want a breath of fresh air, have a couple of cigarettes. It's not so far from the truth.

I must admit, when I stepped off the plane, I was already thinking, "What the hell have I gotten myself into?" I had no plans, except that I was to arrive in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu in a month and a half. The jarring shift from academia, with all the regimental routine it entails, to a month and a half without much of a plan left me in a state of anxiety and mild shock.

I was a Canadian travelling in the wake of SARS, arriving via Toronto, no less. A friend had already been denied a visa to complete thesis work in Russia. Clutching my bright pink SARS survey, travel insurance policy, and passport, I made my way into a seemingly interminable cue. One could, if clever enough, write a travelogue based simply on the experience of waiting in a cue in India. For the impatient, they are agony. For those of us with social tendencies, they can be, as Vikram Seth’s character Mrs. Rupa Mehra (from A Suitable Boyˆ) puts it, “opportunities for expanding one’s social circle”.

With little more than a flick of the eye, I was waved through into the madness: the luggage carousel; taxi touts; throngs pressed against metal barriers – men with Hindi scripts, English signs with company logos and job titles printed in bold lettering, aunties clutching their purses. Irrational visions of political calamities floated through my head as I scanned the crowd for the friend who was to meet me: was the road closed on his way back from his hometown, Srinigar? Could he have been hit by stray bullets along the line of control? While I would later realize the foolishness of my panic, in the musty heat and waves of a language so foreign to my ears, I clutched my luggage cart with all the jet-lagged ferociousness I could muster.

"Sarah", he calls out, ensconcing me in a desperately needed hug. "Welcome to my home. Welcome to India."


My Rough Guide to India states:

India is the product of a complex and tumultuous past. It's climate and fertile soil, which have supported settled agriculture for at least 9000 years, have also given rise to countless regional dynasties, perennially covetous of their neighbors' land and wealth. For as long as written histories of India have existed, this same fecundity has also lured invaders across the deserts, oceans and mountains that border the subcontinent. Successive waves of armed colonists, from the Aryan tribes to the British, have poured down the peninsula, assimilating indigenous traditions and implanting their own. Scholars of history, archaeology, and religion are still trying to make sense of the extraordinary wealth of historical monuments they left behind.

For the months before I left, I waded through history books, articles and novels, trying to make intellectual sense of it all. The more I tried, the more any definitive statement eluded me: Where a Canadian government briefing report stressed the significance of the Kashmir conflict, another book emphasized Hindu-Muslim tensions as defining the "Indian Ethos". Is there such a thing? I think of my own country, Canada, and consider: I would consider it foolish for blanket statements to be made about the entire population based solely on our Northern geography. So, why should I expect the same to be true of any other country?

In my hostel room in Delhi, the months of reading and intellectual haranguing slip away. To gain my bearings, I focus on what's around me:

I walk wide streets in Delhi, near Connaught Place, where the shops are pricier than back home. Roads are filled with green-headed, yellow-fronted auto rickshaws, horns blaring and piercing through the mid-day air. Dust settles over the skins of everyone in sight, a sheen insulating us from the thick, dry heat that frizzes my hair and keeps those who can find shelter out of the street until late afternoon. Cows – scrawny and massive, with sagging jowls and wispy tails – lazily chew their cud and watch the traffic and madness of the street around them. They huddle under trees, away from construction workers with hand-trowels who dig ditches and labor to expand the ever-crowded streets.

In a filmi magazine, a Bollywood starlet comments, "Delhi is so much cleaner than Mumbai. There are so many trees – it's almost lush." In the afternoon, the abundant trees lining the ring roads are covered with a thin sheen of dust. Perhaps it will settle tonight – it began to rain, sweet, cool drops weighing down the heavy gashes of dust and sand that coat my ears and clog my nose.

Women in Sarees and Salwar Kameez are bright splashes of color among men in dark trousers and western-style clothes standing in clumps along the streets. They are waiting in masses for the "clean" buses that travel about the city.

Delhi has an ever present aroma of the Sandalwood incense that burns in shops with altars set up – shrines for Hindu gods, gurus, playing-card sized images or framed photographs bedecked with garlands of jasmine and chrysanthemums.


I am in India, officially, to spend a month at Tamil Nadu Agricultural University studying intercultural communication and international extension with eleven other students as part of my Master's work at the University of Guelph, in Canada.

I arrived early, to explore a country that has been hovering in my mind for the last twelve years. I have a friend in Delhi, a friend's mother in Chandigarh, classes in Coimbatore, and three months on my hands. I have Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy for company.

Over the course of this series, I will present snapshots: situations I encountered and themes that emerged from three months in a country that continues to hold me in thrall.