The Land of Make-Believe and the Monkey God of Nimble
Added on Friday, July 11th, 2008 by Carole Nash Editor
Old Delhi
Geographically a similar size to Continental Europe, India crams in enough people to populate a world. Consider too that villages close by will hardly know anything about each other apart from by name. A few kilometres may separate a community but in terms of social group, religion and economic parity, it might as well be a country split into a million parts. In this sense, India is small.
I left Rahul and his family before noon and set off for as far as I could get in the direction of Bangalore. Sagar looked a possibility via Jhansi, and perhaps with more excitement in my heart than for several days I sprang into action and almost leaped onto my bike. The R1 looked bedraggled, tired and worn but she wasn’t. If we think of her as a woman, she could remonstrate with a crowd and still get to journeys end. Her make-up had run but I was back on top form.
The road to Jhansi was rubbish. The road to Sagar was worse. The route was described as an ‘expressway’ on the map, but on planet earth, away from the bottle-glass wearing boffins in dull-witted Delhi, there were pot-holes in the pot-holes with climbing routes well marked should you fall in and want to get out. Riding around such craters required a GPS, so it seemed that the map makers in their bungalows along the Janpath, must have entrusted to their junior clerks the verbatim press release from government road planners. That dusty old memorandum which junior clerks assistants memorise over their tiffin informs us that a new road is planned for such a date, then never gets built at all. This was it. I saw it first hand.
North of the Deccan Plateau, bushes and small expanses of water came up to the road edge. Occasionally puddles of muck and clay spread from the lakes fed by the monsoon, which had at last started. Falling more frequently from a sky dirty with rain, sheets of water creamed across the road.
Overtaking tractors covered in yellow tarpaulins and carriers with sheets roped down to their dirty brown bodies, I lurched across this, the worst road I’d seen since Kenya. Hit constantly by wave after wave of filthy wet weather, half of the dust of another state was sitting as particles on raindrops as it flew across Madhya Pradesh. Wherever I stopped, groups of people would gather, the size exponentially proportional to the time I stayed still. Two minutes and I would have ten jolly faces around me, assessing me for crossness until of course I had to smile. Ten minutes on and the ten people would have risen to a small crowd. If I did something other than sit, people would run from all directions, doorways and side streets to scan a look. ‘Fair and lovely’ is the phrase all India knows and whilst not lovely I am fair. Take out my movie camera and I am Bollywood and fair which is why millions of Indians pay their penny ticket at the cinema and you become the legend of frenzy.
If this sounds condescending to Indians, then come and see. Ride with me for five minutes and you will laugh and cry. As Pranab in Delhi said; “you only have to look into their eyes to know what they feel,” he said, “I see hope and I see sadness but more than anything I see in the eyes of my fellow Indian, the look of resignation.” That this is what it is and that this is what it will always be and it took an Indian to say it.
Jhansi looked tidy and prosperous and since leaving Delhi I saw the first restaurant with a glass front. Car and bike showrooms are the palaces of small town consumerism and patronise with their bloated importance the kitsch of the pan and beetle sellers. Colourful though they are, and whilst Indians are the corner shopkeepers of the world, I sense a similarity of sales sense that borders on functionality at the expense of any originality whatsoever. There are phone shops selling mobile phones and small sheet metal shops selling light engineering. Neat piles of thin tyres advertise a bicycle shop and electrical stores cater for the simplest needs. Everything can be bought in this great country but at village level a sense of shopping deja vue highlights function over form. The industriousness of what I see is beyond reproach and apart from those taking a breather, you will never see an Indian standing still.
India is a charming place and Indians are the most charming people in the world. In my land of make-believe, an Indian’s most violent act to a foreigner would be to smile you to death. How much can I cram into a few sentences which condescends an Indian as much as it charms him: he is maddening when he drives a vehicle, emotional if he likes you, kind always, colourful and conservative, uncomprehending complex and noisy. He is child-like and gentle and loyal as a friend. Utterly likeable but so unworldly in their millions, it is like an assembly of aliens when we do get the chance to meet.
Sagar was pumped up with a wedding procession. Men with neon lights wrapped in polythene bags walked like sentries around the bride and her groom. Seated on a small white horse she only looked thirteen. Chewing her fingernails as her husband passed by the gas station where I was re-fuelling, she already looked bored. So distorted was the music it was the cultural equivalent of flu, and the drumming was like beating on a dustbin, yet somehow it worked. Inch by inch, drive shafts linked to their horn, trucks and buses honked their way forward whilst two-wheelers gathered in fields of traffic like mechanical corn. The town was jammed to a standstill. So compromised was the normal pattern of everyone’s chaos that you forgot for that moment what it was that had made you cross. Invaded by such vital testimony to an instinctive past, all I had to do was sit on my bike in a bubble of smiling calm and that was enough for folk to think I was joining in.
The first hotel I tried was full but the second had a room. Fuel consumption for the bike had been markedly lower, so much so I suspected a leak. Underneath the sump a pool of petrol was forming whilst a crowd of people stood around. One dropped beedy and the whole lot would blast a bit closer to God, so taking a bit of Indian’s population with it. I went to change and without my asking, the management had phoned for a mechanic. An allan key nut had worked loose underneath the tank and was something I felt qualified to fix, but alas the Monkey God of nimble thinking had beaten me to it. Suddenly, a young teenage lad stepped out of the crowd and shook my hand which he then refused to let go, “my heart is sensitive to you I have to be telling, please sir is it that you can tell me your name?” Yes doctor.
Indeed, there are a billion inhabitants in this rather pointy country and if a tenth of a tenth of one percent are not like the rest, that’s a lot of special people of whom I have the oddest fortune to be meeting every day. To bed, and it all starts again in the morning.
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