MAY-A-2
MAY A-SERIES BEGINS IN HIMACHAL,
INDIA
DECAMP EARLY FROM NOBULINKKA TO CHANDRIGARH
ENDLESS HARD DRIVE TOWARD TRAIN STATION, ARRIVING IN DELHI,
STAGING AREA FOR OUR MORNING TRIP TO AGRA
MAY 1, 2001
It was well before dawn when we rousted, breakfastless and bleary, to assemble bag and baggage and our weary selves in the dark Norbulingko car park, and set out on the Indian roads. We had to dodge sacred and arrogant cattle in the dark, since their learning curve is quite quick to pick up just who has the right of way. We pounded through the first few hours of the hard ride, until we stopped at a fork in the road where we had "chai" and a farewell. The one vehicle would peel off for the road to Simla, carrying Santush, Anuj, Ravi, and Raju, leaving only Hem as our fesidual guide. Unflappable and of good and gentle disposition, he made up for the whole group, even when we were getting more than a little weary with this long day in rough transit.
The single most important locomotive device in an Indian vehicle is the horn (or "hooter" if you want to be British). The backs of the battered lorries have hand- painted signs, which implore "Horn, Please!" I wanted to scream: "No, thank you, if it pleases you!" WE blared along the road scattering quadrupeds and primates, and some very unperturbed women turning slowly and gracefully under their head-carried loads of water or dung pans, as their saris flapped in the breezes of our near-misses. This is countryside, traffic was light, and this was now daylight-and, still, the incessant horn-blaring seemed only to affect the unaccustomed passengers with little apparent effect on the pedestrians, except to subtly shift the onus of blame-"You have now been served notice that reckless endangerment is on its way toward you: it is now your reck, or you are less, and we all know who will be at fault!"
I saw a hornbill flushed from the roadside to a tree, where he might be at greater danger than near the passing wheels, since, as in Africa, several of the small boys we passed were packing a "catapult", or what you west-of-the-Atlantic types would call a slingshot. It got hotter and harder, as we reached past the "dust roads" (a British African term) to semipaved and pocked roadway. As parched as this dry-season countryside is, there are gurgling streams and canals spreading out into the Deltas fathered by the waters of the "House of the Gods" behind me. I tried to think cool thoughts, which were remarkably assisted by the sight of small little nudeniks diving and splashing into the muddy canals, some of them quite near water buffalo who were submerged with just their upturned nose showing. One of the very black buffalo cows had an albino calf, very like the rather frequent phenomenon I had seen in Mindanao. The Indian adults are also bathing in these dirty waters, but always with very significant modesty, fully dressed, and looking more like laundresses than bathers. They might as well be winnowing grain, which some of them had just been doing, standing near the little donkey engines which knocked the heads off the rice they needed to toss up in the wind to have the broken chaff fly away. Oxen in most cases, donkeys in a few, and one lone camel in a single case, plodded around in endless circles driving a pump or turning a grinding wheel. We were watching the pre-industrial (and still contemporary) world close up.
Various of our traveling companions were grumbling about discomfort of the kind that afflicts gastronomic adventurers in the subcontinent which is a Pandora's box of gastronomic pitfalls that would make the Tantric paintings of death and hell we saw in the Shorbuling Monastery look like a heavenly scene. They were hydrating in substitution for eating, and that required a few more stops. At one of them we came upon a place marked "basketground" and we no longer had Christa with us to translate this from the British by way of Canadian into "basketball court." I was able to translate a few numbers---which is not as easy at it may seem, since the have names for collective units such as the "lakh" or 100,000's, or the "cror" or 10 million. At least we are not stuck with the British ambivalence about a billion, to which they have assigned the awkward term "a thousand millions", preferring to think of a billion as a million millions. But, they are still going to be using the pound and the pence when the rest of Europe is counting up decimal Euros.
One of the objectives for this transit day, besides getting from points A to B for the recently enthusiastic was to shop until they dropped. That looked sooner for some than the shopping itself, but they had hoped we would have free time in Chandigarh, Delhi twice, and Agra to go stock up on presents for friends, the payment that could be made in advance for them listening to our stories and seeing our pictures of faraway lands they have never seen nor have any hope or interest in seeing. I was recruited for two reasons: I am an old veteran at the haggling of the bargaining process and rarely get taken as a pigeon to the cleaners, and second-I ha need of nothing myself, so could bargain bloodlessly as a mercenary brought in to haggle for the others, since I had plans to buy nothing and had a desire for exactly the same total in commodities. The other motivation for them to buy whatever they could carry was "Just when did I think I might ever be back in this corner of the world again?" For me the answer to that rhetoric question, rhetoric aside, is "Next month, two month after that and one month later, with six times next year." When the exotic becomes familiar, some of the rare and bizarre attractions get reduced to commodities, and the fascination our shoppers had with the bargains was still higher than the reverse fascination of the hawkers for US currency.
CHANDIGARH AND THE TRAIN RIDE BACK TOWARD DELHI
We had the obligatory "chai" stop in Chandigarh while awaiting the train. We saw there were two "First Class waiting areas" which were made first class only by the sign designating them, looking otherwise no different than the benches on the train platform except that the were in a room off the side. Michael Eiffling went into one of them following a man who was herding a group of women in saris into the area. One older woman was affronted by Michael's presence, and shooed him away with a vehement denunciation in a language none of us understood, but with unmistakable arm movements. She got more and more worked up, to the point that I stood back on the platform and Michael soon followed. We went to the other first class room, no different than the first, and saw that three men and two women occupied it. We sat down inside and got a fresh bottle of water. What the older woman ha been so upset about is that the other waiting area was for women only-no matter that it contained three men at the time that we were in there, but they were Indian men and did not constitute an invasion of the privacy of the women as did the presence of two giant foreigners. So, we had betaken ourselves to the other waiting area-which without any sign designating it the "gent's" waiting area, and also seemed to contain two oblivious Indian females-was our proper place. When Michael went back in to the other area to distribute bottles of water that H had purchased, the older woman again went into a frenzy, somehow violated by his presence despite the fact that there were now four Indian men in that same room. You would have thought she had planned on nude bathing. I wanted to vouch for my friend Michael to point out that he was "of good family" and was hardly to be considered an outcaste, but I thought that might be playing the Indian card too hard.
I read and wrote only one thing while on the train to Delhi, and that was the from for evaluation and grading for Christa which she had given me which needed to be turned in to her supervisors in medical school in Calgary so that she might get credit for the course she was taking with me. She ha also still been in pursuit of a three week course in meditation, which was hardly under my supervision, nor did I think it would satisfy the requirements of a medical school elective, so I suggested she consult with whomever would be supervising her in that next part of he elective out here. She was getting sponsors' funding, so we wanted to help her everyway short of endorsing what she is doing when I am not here to know what it is. She has an excellent opportunity to work with the new medical faculty, which had just started its first class in what is Himachal' s second medical school, the first being the faculty we had visited in 1998 in Simla. We had come to visit with them before leaving Dharamsala, and I had thanked them for taking Christa under their wing and teaching here along with their first year students and a few the others for the clinical curriculum they are developing. We had stopped to talk to them on a scheduled meting for which they all eagerly appeared-a professor of anatomy, an assistant professor of "Obs and Gyny" (to use the British phrase) and a professor of medicine. The female instructor in OB could not believe that we would have such a meeting with them and not stay several days to visit, and at least sit with them and have coffee so that we could hear about the marvelous program they had organized in cardiology the following day. Since we were planning to be on this train to Delhi on the time of the program, I had delegated Christa who will be staying for several weeks more, and we went off to our farewell dinner in the Hotel Baghsu.
On the arrival in Delhi, we were taken back to the same hotel we have used on arrival each time, and the group was immediately interested in getting into a series of taxis and going off to the small shops along the street near the flea market. I went along as an escort, partly to give a second supervisor besides the shepherding of Hem, and partly to identify things that perhaps were souvenirs of value here, and what would be seen in greater abundance in Agra or at the Cottage Industries. The problem with each of the shops which employ English speaking salesmen, is that they must not pay them a salary and only award the commissions on the gross sales receipts they tally, since they are very accomplished high pressure salesmen, who first try to engage, and then get a commitment-"just to look"-but looking is lusting, and you simply cannot live without this wonderful item, and I make good price!" That "good price" for starters must have been too good, since I was always able to get them down by a third to a half. They enjoy the contest of wills also, but a number of shops try to deceive the customer into saying that the merchandise has a fixed price-right! In much of the Asian or African world ("Orientals") there would be no face saved if such a gullible buyer walked in and gave the asking price. It takes a far better merchant to work at this and get the customer down to within double his cost, and the skill with which he manages this margin determines the commission. I am their worst opponent-someone without blood or lust into the contest with no concern about the merchandise, but just to pursue the game and keep others from being ripped off more than they will be by walking into a merchant's stall with money, that from that moment of entry, should become the property of the proprietor.
So, we are spending a brief night in Delhi after a very long day in transit, the hardest of the transits being by road from Dharamsala to Chandigarh in the Tatas and Mahindras. The train ride was an uneventful one for us since we had already had the novelty of what had been the first ride on an Asian train and its peculiar little amenities for those of us in the upper class cabin (do not try to imagine what the trip is like for the majority of train passengers in less favored circumstances). But the long day in transit had, for some, the pot of gold at the end of that dubious rainbow-a shopping spree. I escaped with all of that imagined gold that I carried in to the fray since I bought nothing. But I had assisted sales in everything from silver bracelets to embroidered pillowcases to full sheets and matching ensembles-enough shopping to hold me up until the pre-Christmas day that will finish it off!
But, wait! I had promised them even more and better souvenir opportunities
in Agra tomorrow, so that the best is yet to come! Sigh!