Travel Blog: India, Day 8 - The Market

You ever watch a travel show on TV and watch the likes of Anthony Bourdain stroll through an obscure street market in Southeast Asia?  Sitting at home in Pensacola, Florida, by far one of the most sensible conservative shopping environments one could find in the continental US, I always wondered if the markets in other countries were really that busy and colorful in other places, or if the TV crews purposefully shot them to look as exotic and non-Western as possible.  Well, on this last trip to India, I found out. The markets really are that incredible.

After our harrowing race back to town, I accompanied my host through the back streets of the neighborhood to emerge in a brightly lit square, where the town market was in full swing.  Again, my presence caused a bit of a splash.  Several people followed me around to observe me in the most transparent way possible, eyes narrowed and mirroring my movements.  I'm usually okay with the Indian street stare-downs, but I have to confess that it got a little old by this point; I actually started to wish that one unpleasant-looking codger in particular would make a move on me just so I could knock him down.  But no harm was done on either side.

In most of India, meals are curried or fried.  If the meal is an Indian fry-up, it's a pretty simple affair: chicken and oil, plus whichever vegetables are going to be served with the rice.  Curry, however, requires quite a few ingredients, and they are usually bought fresh that day.  The staple shopping list for a full curry meal, assuming that you don't have any herbs laying around, includes:

• Meat (usually chicken, sometimes goat or mutton)
• Onions
• Garlic
• Ginger
• Chiles
• Assorted vegetables

The above ingredients are simmered in a particular order in a bit of oil, spiced with turmeric and a few other seasonings, and eventually become a curry whose base ingredients are cooked down so as to be barely recognizable, but still incredibly tasty.  My hosts all over the country were desperately hoping that I wouldn't be able to handle the spiciness of their curries--"is it too spicy for you?" seems to be the country's national motto--but I am proud to say that I was always able to eat Indian curry.  The cumulative effect was less than optimal after a month, but I definitely enjoyed the the individual meals.

India, Day 8 - A Race.

I've written before about Indian traffic, an ongoing and constant phenomenon that would initiate wetting of the pants in most Western drivers.  Lest you think that the highways in India always operates on a basis of "just the way it is," think again.  Our driver, simply called "Driver" by my host, has been driving for twenty years.  He is good.  Very, very good.  He can nudge cattle out of the way with a fender with less effort than it takes for most US drivers to coax sparks out of their cigarette lighters.  Every now and again he would execute a particularly daring lane change and throw a grin in my direction, just to let me know that he drove to impress.  Even in our language-barriered relationship, we became friends with a few common gestures and the phrase "no problem." And, at the end of this afternoon, I discovered that he takes it very personally when he is not allowed to rule the road uncontested.

We were on our way home, passing all other vehicles as per the norm, when a motorcyclist stubbornly refused to let Driver pass.  Driver's eyes narrowed into a determined squint, and it was on like Donkey Kong.  The Bolero revved, my host laughed in the backseat, and our afternoon turned into a Bollywood remake of Bullitt.  Driver attempted pass after pass, but the canny motorcyclist cut him off every time, his purple plaid shirt flapping in the wind around his slender frame.  A hint of peevishness played over Driver's face, but it was obvious that he was enjoying the race immensely.

I pride myself on my ability to relax in Indian traffic.  I mean, when you're not the one driving, what can you do?  Indian roads are best driven by resident Indians, and if I spend all my time second-guessing their every move, I would be wrinkled and gray-haired long before my time.  However, as the race escalated and we roared through tiny villages, careening around women, children and animals in a series of closer and closer calls, I was forced to confront the true bounds of my comfort zone.  I decided to remain silent and see if Driver was as good as he always seemed to be.  And, to his credit, Driver may have caused a few people to drive out of the way, but he didn't hurt a soul.  He still ranks as the only person I've ever seen who could drive 40km through a crowded street market without causing any damage to person or property.

Driver never did overtake the motorcycling son'v'gun.  The cyclist drove on past our own final destination, and Driver was forced to pull up to a sharp stop.  If he hadn't been a consummate professional under a verbal agreement to stop at the appointed coordinates, we might have chased the motorcycle until the Bolero coughed on its last fume of petrol and ground to a halt in the grey space between somewhere and nowhere.

India, Day 8 - The Village Sunday School Class

In the last of many, many stops on my busy eighth day in India, my host and I visited a friend of his who teaches children out of his home every day.  The kids had some pretty unforgettable faces.

The Village Mad Boy

India, Day 9

Today's India images are a little hard to look at.

Tim Johnson was not much more than a speck in the distance, but he was closer to us.  He walked erratically, as if his right legs were shorter than his left lefts.  He reminded me of a car stuck in a sand-bed.

I thought mad dogs foamed at the mouth, galloped, leaped and lunged at throats, and I thought they did it in August.  Had Tim Johnson behaved thus, I would have been less frightened.

Nothing is more deadly than a deserted, waiting street.  The trees were still, the mockingbirds were silent, the carpenters at Miss Maudie's house had vanished.

- To Kill a Mockingbird

This chapter from Harper Lee's opus came back to haunt me halfway through my eighth day in India.  Much like Tim Johnson, the mad dog whose appearance portended the coming maelstrom in Maycomb, the arrival of this boy eclipsed every other immediate sight and sound.  It was my first such encounter.

My host and I stood in the center of a village street, fresh from one of our many outreaches.  The grey-brown slurry of mud had hardened in the middle but was still soft around the edges.  Then, he appeared.  A malnourished, heartbreaking personage.  Completely naked, he half-staggered, half-shuffled down the center of the street.

"What is wrong with him?" I asked, keeping my voice low; my organic Western tendency to minimize the unpleasant suddenly reemerging in India's boldfaced culture.

My host had seen this boy before.  "He is mad," was his simple reply.

I watched him come down the street.  I would have been mesmerized, but I still wasn't sure if I should give the boy a wide berth.  My discomfort and perverse fascination grew as the boy drew closer, then stopped, dead still in front of me.  He looked at me hard.  In this respect, he was like everyone else in this remote area of India: I was white and therefore a novelty.

This boy would have been memorable for his condition if his condition had been the only thing to set him apart.  If that had been the case, I would have marked him down as another sad case of mental illness.  The lower half of his face was filmed in the mucus from his unwiped nose, and his bony body  was peppered with grains from the reapings currently drying in front of every house.  But for all this, it his look held me spellbound.  Because it wasn't just a look, it was a glare.  There was hatred in that look; an overarching, resentful disgust for the world at large.  His unblinking eyes bored into me with merciless loathing.

I do no ascribe every minor inconvenience or disagreeing circumstance to be a direct act of Satan, but I believe strongly in spiritual forces.  And when I looked at this child, and he looked back with such unabashed spite, a single word came to my mind: possession.  This feeling felt validated when I raised my camera to take a few closeups of the boy after he stopped in front of me.  I edged closer to capture his visage, and he immediately turned away and stalked off between some huts.  Even through the grey haze of his "madness," something in him did not want to be photographed.

There could be a dozen different explanations for this boy's unpleasant intensity.  Perhaps he was a simple case of mental disadvantage.  Perhaps there was abuse.  Perhaps an occult village ceremony, performed in an attempt to correct his mental handicap, opened the unknowing child up for outright demonic possession.  I'll probably never know.  In the meantime, this boy stands out in my mind as one of the most remarkable encounters I had on my non-stop, episodic eighth day of my journey through India.

The first image in this series contains nudity.  [nsfw]

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Travel Blog: India, Day 8 - The kids at the riverbank.

While at my host's cheerful home village, an oasis in the middle of abject and depressed poverty state in India, we met a group of children doing laundry in the nearby river. Let me see...

A gaggle of village kids.  India.  A river.  An open field of epic proportions.

Why, yes, a photo op was in order.

Every time I visit India, I am always amazed and overjoyed by the people's capacity for kindness, unhindered friendliness and hospitality, and their sheer willingness to participate.  Shy though they were, this group of children stayed true to Indian hospitality by eagerly smiling and waving at the camera when I started clicking the shutter.  They giggled and laughed elatedely when I turned the SLR around showed them their photos in the camera's monitor.  I took dozens of photos of the little guys.  I don't know what these children's lives are like on a normal day, but in that environment, with those kinds of smiles, they made this scene look absolutely idyllic.