India's Duplicity: Beautiful Faces and Scars

"Do you know "Quit Playing Games with My Heart?" It is by Backstreet Boys.....It is my favorite song, all time."
    I keep a straight face, not wanting to offend my new friend Nitesh (Nitesh, if you are reading this, I am sorry....but i found this funny) who is a 32 year old employee of HP and lives in Ranchi, where I am currently headed on the Jharakhand Express. We met the previous afternoon in the Anand Vihar train station in Delhi when he became the first Indian man to ask ME a question about Indian travel. I was sprawled out on a bench reading "The Perfect Storm" and eating peanut butter out of the jar when he approached me and asked if I knew where he could store his bag while he waited for the train to arrive. As the train station was under construction, the cloakroom where travelers can usually store their bags was not yet built. I had found this out the fun way......by dragging my bag around the station and asking people who looked like they might know what was going on, piecing together the puzzle of broken English.

"Mean mugging" with train friends

    Now the cross-dressing Indian man/woman, made-up like an Indian princess, claps his/her hands in my face and asks for money. He/she interrupts me as I am sitting in the doorway of the train, legs dangling from the car, writing about my new friends on the train and watching the countryside with a breeze through my hair bringing the smell of dung being dried for stove fuel more pleasant than all the cities I have been in. This is my favorite place to ride. I can think more clearly in the doorway, all my senses stimulated in a way that brings out my creativity...everything in my head makes sense and I have, I believe, clever thoughts. That is until I pull out my notebook to write them down and my moment of clarity retreats at my ideas flutter with the wind out of grasp of my conscious mind.

    "Nahi" I say...."No." He/she pats my face and claps his/her hands again. "Nahi!" I say with more conviction......He/she walks away. It is interesting that I draw more attention than the cross-dressing beggar man/woman walking through the train clapping his/her hands and muttering repeated phrases. Here is a brief rant I wrote in my journal last night, at midnight, after being in the train station for 14 hours, as November 24th became November 25th bringing Thanksgiving with only a loaf of stale Tibetan bread and a jar of peanut butter, waiting for a delayed train that would eventually come at 2 A.M...........Reliability is relative.

Rant Begins

    It was funny at first, comical....then I had a 40 day break in the mountains where every man, woman, child, and goat I passed bid me "Namaste" and continued on their path. I was a mountaineer, that was my identity, more so than being white. But now, after half a dozen weeks in and out of Indian cities......I am tired of being so damn interesting! I run down the streets of Kolkata and every head turns. Back home I would wonder if that girl giving me the double-take thinks I am cute, but here, where I am bearded and pouring sweat, I know she is giving me what I now recognize as the look of "white-struck incredulity."
    In the US, parents have to kick their children under the table for staring; in India there is no age or maturity distinction. I enter a room with my backpack on and people snap pictures with their phones as I walk by. Try sitting in a luggage rack on the second class train for 28 hours....every time I looked up from my book I had half of a train staring back. When I met their gaze, there was no quick averting of the eyes....they stared at me openly. One man on the train told me in broken English "They all think, why you on train in general class, second class.....why not AC car, first class?.......you white." I told him that I was white, not rich. As I write this rant now in my journal, there is a man in a green sweater wrapped in a tan shawl on the train platform 7 feet to my right who's eyes are boring into the side of my head (I don't have to stare....peripheral vision) This isn't the first time I have wanted to turn, face him, and say "A BOOGA-BOOGA-BOOGA!!!"

                                              End of Rant

    It may be appropriate to call this rant a low point for the day, which had been a low point of a day.
16 hours in a train station waiting for a delayed train eating stale bread and peanut butter. This rant does effectively convey the occasional spikes of frustration that occur while traveling somewhere that is as unfamiliar to you as you are unfamiliar to it.
    India has received me in a Bipolar manner, like a manic/depressive disorder. Sometime manically wonderful, sometimes depressingly sad/frustrating, sometimes a middle ground close to normalcy.......normalcy is also relative. This is the nature of India as I have found it. As I roll through the countryside, steaming through city after city, I see a large comfortable looking house with ramparts. Not 40 yards later begins a shanty-town. These houses, if you can call them houses, look like the accumulation of garbage in a river slew. All manner of offcast is used to hold together the shreds of tarps, plastic bags, rocks, leaves, bamboo, and tires that make up the roof as well as the burned out cars, broken bikes, mud, bricks, tree limbs, and rusted tin that wall in the packed residents who take refuge from the coming night.

    In the slums of Kolkata, similarly constructed, you are equally likely to hear a laugh as a sob. Some slum dwellers go through their daily routine "with downcast eyes and despair, as if living was a habit they just couldn't shake (Che Guavara)" while others sing with joy at the coming of the day. Sometimes, it is my despair, not theirs, that I project upon them. While walking to Motherhouse one morning, I passed the carcus of a water buffalo that had been slaughtered, gutted, and all parts deemed unusable by the butcher thrown into the street. The smell of blood and meat with the buzz of flies mixed with the usual smells of slum and sounds of morning in the streets. Rickshaws passed by, cows and goats were herded through, and not a second glance was given to the naked children sifting through the intestines, fighting the crows, picking off any tiny morsel of missed flesh and depositing them into the folds of an older girl's stained dress to save for later. The older girl in the dirty dress holding scraps of meat close to her belly does not look sad, in fact she is smiling. She has a small bounty held right outside the stomach it will eventually fill. For every one of India's beautiful faces, you turn her cheek to find a scar.
    In Delhi a policeman tried to pull a taxi tout on me, telling me he would talk to the taxi and make sure it was a fair price. The policeman and the taxi driver talked in Hindi, then the cop motioned towards the door and said to get in. 3 months in India had taught me to always ask how much before I did anything, so i queried "Kitney Kah?"
    "Oh, only 800 rupees.....ok you get in now"
    I made a comment to the effect of "wow.....you're a police officer and you're still trying to screw me" and walked away, negotiating my own taxi for 200 rupees.
    The next day, after being told by a man that there was no bus to take me to McleodGanj, that I would need to take his taxi that would ONLY cost 600 rupees (He's a taxi driver....he's lying) I began to walk down the road in a direction that I hoped would eventually take me to a bus station. A man on a moped stopped behind me, asked where I was going, and said "oh, that is nearly 5km, can i give you a ride?" We weaved down the road, my backpack making us slightly unstable, and arrived at the bus stop where my brief friend told the bus conductor "hello...this is Cole, he is a student, please make sure he gets on the bus to McleodGanj." In only a 10 minute period I had seen both faces.
    On a 28 hour train from Kolkata to Delhi, my Chaco sandals were hidden from me by someone on the train who disliked my white face in the second class car while another man bought me tea and samosas, refusing repayment, pushing me back into humanity's main current when I had just been wallowing in a cynical eddy of its river. Later he helped me search the train, which was cattle-car packed, asking everyone to look under their seats until we eventually found them under a duffel bag on the other end of the train.

    This is how I have found India. Her sun rises on a land that is wealthy beyond money and filled with vibrant life, but sets on despairing poverty and a wretchedness in the being of her poor. It is the same land and the same sun. It is the same people and even the same day. There is a complicated duality of life unfamiliar to my western eyes. Rich and poor. Hospitable and hostile. Breathtaking and breath-stopping. Pure and polluted. Laughter and tears. Blink your eyes and you will see both. This country I have seen is impossible for me to fully describe, but begs to be written.