I wake up in a strange place

It's been a long time since my last blogpost because it's been a long time since I had time to write one. I've been on the road and in places without much internet access for a long time now. I look at a map of India with some bemusement. I didn't intend to do this. I didn't intend to visit all these places. How did it happen? It happened because some nice people I met invited me to visit their native places, and I thought, ok. And then once I started, I perhaps found it hard to resist opportunities to continue, because there is something addictive about being the sweaty solo traveller in strange places, trying to communicate with Hindi, Marathi and now a little Bangla, none of which come out in an entirely usable form all the time. I have my suspicions about all these fat guidebooks you get which provide information about tourist attractions in every town in every state of India. I think maybe they're offtrack. You don't need such fat guidebooks, at least not for India. You only need four things: the ability to recognise touts and say nahi to them, a few words of the local language to back up your point, the willingness to ask every person on the street if they know the place you're going to and how to get there, and acceptance of the fact that you're going to be late. That's my theory anyway. And if you're going to ignore the local advice people repeatedly give about trains - which is "always book your seat a couple of weeks in advance" - then maybe you need one more thing: enough padding at the rear end to stand long bus journeys across hundreds of miles of potholes. My suspicion about these guidebooks is that they exist merely to enable a small number of travellers to continue travelling indefinitely - funded by the proceeds from the sales of the fat guidebooks they write.

It's been a lot of fun, these past weeks. But I'm now reaching a point where I'm tired of this way of being. I'm gathering no moss, and I miss the old mosses I've left behind. Maybe there's an irony in the fact that so many westerners come to India to lose their old moss, when the key lesson that Indian society might teach them is how important our moss is. I'm going back to find mine.

Nomenclature

I've been travelling northern Maharashtra and southern Madhya Pradesh (MP) by bus for the past couple of weeks. Very interesting, very productive, and very dusty. Everyone I met tried to convince me that a couple of months ago when the monsoon ended all these dustscapes were lush green. And a fellow bus passenger tried to convince me that normally the roads aren't as bad as this, that every year the government resurfaces them after the monsoon, but with poor quality materials that get washed away in the next monsoon. I guess the roads I was on were scheduled to be resurfaced sometime in the next few weeks. I don't know. How am I supposed to believe such statements when there is a city in northern Maharashtra called Dhule which, I am told, translates as 'Dust'? Presumably this city doesn't change its name during the monsoon.

A note on nomenclature. One of the things I discovered in my trip is what image should spring to mind when an Indian settlement is described as a) a village, b) a town, c) a city, and d) a metro. In England we don't use the term 'metro' very much, although London is one. The usage of the term in India is important, I think, because there's a lot of difference between Mumbai, with a population of 13 million (compare to Australia's population of 21 million), and a city I visited in MP with a population of 1 lakh (100 000), no functioning cybercafe, no rail links and no rickshaws in the morning. A town in India can be a crossroads with a few small shops (no Sainsbury's, Walmart or Reliance Fresh - at least not yet) and a market place. And a village is where people live. I'm not sure whether the small cluster of ten houses I sheltered in during the last, furious dying gasp of the monsoon rains counted as a village or a mere hamlet, as my Marathi wasn't up to framing such a tax collector question and my companion was a Keralan with less Marathi than me. At least travelling in MP forced me to revive the basics of my Hindi, which will be useful during the coming weeks when I'm once again out of Maharashtra (although having said that, half the people I spoke to in MP seemed to be Maharashtran).

Learning Indian (3)

"You need to practice your pronunciation more," says he, "because when I said let's talk, you said ok, dog."

(Dog, in Marathi, is kutta. I meant to ask, Ok, where? (Thik ahai, kuthe?)).

"Thanks for not hitting me," says I.

"Just don't say you intended to say it," says he.

Ganpati Bappa Moraya

It's official: these people are mad. As I'm typing this I can hear the man who has been jamming on an organ for the past hour somewhere out in the street, and occasional explosions, near and far. It's 10.30pm. The processions of drummers, always accompanied by fire crackers being set off in the middle of the road, began where I'm staying at noon. My friends tell me there's another 10 days of this, and that I'd better not complain too much now or I'll have no words left by the end of it all.

Ganpati requires that every family buys a small Ganesh statue on the first day, keeps the statue in their house for ten days, and then puts the statue into the river as part of a big procession in the centre of Pune that goes on non-stop for 30 hours. The statues are made of soil and so disintegrate and get washed away. A new statue must be bought for each Ganpati festival. There is a small village on the Bombay-Pune road which is making a killing out of this, as the soil for the statues comes from there and the villagers are responsible for making the statues that are sold in Pune. Demand is so high that they spend the whole year making the statues, with a ceremony some time after each Ganpati marking the beginning of production for next year's festival. Or so I was told by a kind old kaka (uncle) who gave me a piece of apple while I took the photo below of a stall outside a department store on Tilak Road, which was doing good business at 11pm on the night before Ganpati.

That night I wandered the streets and my cynicism kept me company. For the past couple of weeks teams of men have been digging holes at the sides of the roads, sticking poles in them, and building structures along the sides and over the roads. Aha, I thought, these are for traditional decorations. That night, the night before the beginning of the 10 days of Ganpati, I observed that the structures had been covered with posters that admittedly had Ganpati themes, but were mainly advertising various luxury products. I recalled the comments of a jaded friend that Ganpati is no longer what it once was; it is no longer a festival of the community but of the corporation, one in which more money floats each year and what was once done within the community for Rs100 is now done for Rs10000 by the local department store. Or by the local politician, sometimes using money from the public services budget.

But there's more to it than that. For a start, Ganpati is not some quaint and innocent tradition of throwing a statue in the river that has only recently been distorted by business and political interests. From conversations with various Punyachas I have gleaned the following account of Ganpati's history. Long ago Ganpati was a festival conducted in private within the home, comprising offerings to placate elephant-headed Ganesh. Ganesh was a fat and lecherous god who represented the tribal 'Other' within the Hindu pantheon, demonstrating, through his debauchery (apparently he normally had "at least two wives"), the lack of civilisation among the tribal communities that existed outside caste society, and thus the necessity of the caste system. One of the stories explaining the origins of Ganesh involved Parvati, the second consort of the god Shiva, bathing in a river after a long time without washing and moulding a figure out of all the dirt she washed off herself; this became Ganesh when she breathed life into it. During the struggle against the colonial power, the nationalist Tilak (known to the British as "Father of the Indian unrest") completely changed the nature of the festival into a noisy community celebration of Ganesh as a 'good' God, in order to exploit a loophole in British laws that prohibited public gatherings. And then in more recent years, the emerging Maratha nation has emphasised the Maharashtran roots of Tilak's Ganpati (Tilak was a Punyacha) to assert their identity as something distinct from all the non-Maharashtrans migrating into the state.

As if that wasn't complicated enough, the very same progressives who gave me this account of Ganpati went on to surprise me when the processions returned to the street where we were. I made a face. "It's so loud," I said. One of the men grinned. "I know. And I love it." And as the fire crackers exploded in the street outside for the umpteenth time and the young men danced round, I figured that as I have no choice in the matter I might as well try to enjoy life at too many decibels.

Learning Indian (2)

Last night I ate out at a licensed restaurant. My experience of such places since I've been in India is that the title 'Restaurant & Bar' means that the clientele will consist of middle-aged men sitting alone, drinking spirits, eating snacks and engaging the waiters in lengthy conversations. I assume the occasional addition of 'Family' to the title is intended as a joke. Invariably the lights are low, the cigarette smoke thick. All such places that I have visited had an air of what can only be described as 'slight dodginess'. But I wanted a beer with my dinner so I went in. The middle-aged Indian man at the next table started a conversation with me in Hindi, I converted it to Marathi (Mi Marathi bolto thoda thoda. Mi Hindi bolt nahi), and we talked while he drank whiskey and ate parathas and I drank beer and ate chicken. One question he kept asking, and I kept misunderstanding, involved a word I couldn't decipher. I guessed the question was 'When did you come here from London?' This morning, as I opened my notebooks to begin Marathi shiktoy, I saw the word he'd used staring me in the face, and realised he was asking me when I'm going home.

However, this experience has been the exception rather than the rule in my Marathi conversations so far. I learnt early on that 'thoda thoda', meaning 'a little', is the most useful phrase for a foreigner to know in Maharashtra. Say anything in Marathi to someone and their surprised response will be to ask 'Tu Marathi boltos?' ('Do you speak Marathi?'). If you say 'Thoda thoda' to this they will be all smiles.

Various people in the areas of Pune I most frequently frequent recognise me now and greet me when they see me, the white man who tries to speak Marathi to everyone even when they speak English. My longest Marathi conversations have been with rickshaw wallas, for obvious reasons. One gave me his mobile number at the end of the journey, and stopped to say hello (and to ask where I was going) when he saw me out walking a week later.

I've also made friends with a group of boys who hang around on the street near my lodgings. On our first meeting their ringleader commanded me to stop (Bas!) and introduced himself as Sachin. I nicknamed him Tendulkar, whereupon he introduced two of his friends as Kemel (Lotus) and Kajul (the Indian equivalent of mascara). On our second meeting he approached me borne on the shoulders of Mascara (or was it Lotus?), asked my father's name, and told me he was off to visit his wife. Tendulkar can't be more than 10 years old. Even if I understand most of his Marathi (or at least the sentences he speaks to me, rather than about me), it's hard to know when he's being serious and when he's teasing the white man who keeps asking him to huloo huloo bol (speak slowly).

And the obligatory factoid: although recorded alcohol consumption per capita has fallen since 1980 in most developed countries, it has risen steadily in developing countries. In India consumption by 'adults' (15 years and above) increased by 106% between 1970-2 and 1994-6. In addition, during this period the international brands have claimed a large chunk of the market. In the places I've been to, the price of a bottle of beer is equal to, or greater than, the price of a meal. Cheers.

Horn Ok Please

My feeling is that the Indian motorist's use of the horn, like the Indian headwaggle, has certain rules of usage, but these rules are not the sort of rules that western minds are accustomed to (see Wittgenstein and Bourdieu). Despite this feeling, here is my attempt at interpretation.

The head waggle means neither yes nor no; it means 'I understand what you're saying'. So if you say 'Deccan Corner' to a rickshaw walla and he gives you a headwaggle, climb in. If you say 'Do you know where Deccan Corner is?' and get a headwaggle, change your question.

Shortly after I began cycling in Pune, it became apparent that Indian motorists do not, in fact, honk their horn a) continuously or b) whenever the hell they feel like it. Neither do they do it just to say hello, as someone suggested to me. Rather, the horn has a very precise meaning: 'I'm about to do something really quite dangerous, so be aware of my presence and don't hold me responsible if one of us winds up dead, because I did warn you'. The horn is necessary, I presume, because Indian motorists keep their eyes on the road ahead, or rather on the next motorist, who is invariably so close you can see the whites of his eyes even though he's looking the other way. Without the horn, they would have no idea what is just behind them or to their side, and might be tempted to brake or swerve into a space that isn't there. The horn is necessary because it is the only rule of the road they've got. Thus the mantra 'Horn Ok Please' is emblazoned on the back of every truck, just in case anyone should forget.

Sorry if this all sounds like I've spent too long thinking about it. I clearly have. But what made me think about it was the fact that no Indian I have spoken to has been able to explain these things to me; they're just things Indians do without thinking.

Hence Wittgenstein (and Bourdieu). Mwah.

Hints and Tips (1)

If your landlady offers to show you the basics of Pranayam, clear your nose before you begin. Otherwise the breathing exercises that follow will.

A Million Armpits Now

I now have a bicycle, so I can avoid rickshaws and buses and get some exercise. On my first night here I was told Pune is a two-wheeled city, and it is. In a city which has recently seen massive growth but little change in its public transport system, motorbikes and scooters are the vehicles of choice of middle-class youth, and bicycles transport [a statistic I couldn't find, and who cares anyway] people to work each day. No helmets. When I told them of my plans to get a bike, Sid asked if I knew the rules of the road in India. We drive on the left here, he began. I asked him if he’d seen how people drive in Pune. People do drive on the left here – when it suits them. And while one or two cyclists in London sometimes jump traffic lights (no names mentioned), here the hordes of motorbikes and scooters commonly jump them too. But don’t worry too much mum, the traffic in Pune moves only marginally faster than Bombay’s snail pace and a lot slower than in London. And knocking off cyclists doesn’t appear to be a sport here, as I sometimes suspected it was in London. Still, I’ll try and introduce Critical Mass if I can.

Bombay, unlike Pune, is a city of trains. Two north-south lines connect the tip of the peninsula in the south with the mainland in the north. I love Bombay trains. I seriously think British theme parks should consider developing a ride that simulates the experience. At the least, London Underground could install some mechanical device at tube stations to lift passengers on and off trains in a fashion similar to the way a crowd of commuters lifts passengers on and off Bombay trains. And the simple genius of obviating the need for A/C by having no doors on carriages never ceases to amaze me. Several people die as a result of falling from the trains each year, usually during rush hour. Rush hour on a Bombay train really has to be seen to be believed. Long before the train comes to a halt, people are jumping in and out of carriages that quite obviously have less than no space in them. I grit my teeth and ready my elbows for action. A million armpits now.

Learning Indian (1)

Being an account of how I came to accidentally ask a waiter if he had an erection,

First, a factoid. There is no one Indian language; Hindi is spoken by about 20% of the population (mainly in the northern states), but across India there are hundreds of different languages spoken as a mother tongue. In a similar way to how different languages in Europe all use the Roman script because they have their origins in Latin, the official languages of the northern states have their roots in Sanskrit, whereas those of the south have a common Dravidian base. Bombay and Pune are cities in the state of Maharashtra, where the state language is Marathi.

Sitting in the hostel canteen last night I was served dinner by a boy who couldn't stop grinning. My new friends Sid and Vicious, two south Indian students staying in the hostel, suggested he was grinning because he knew I couldn't communicate with him. Au contraire, says I; earlier I asked him "kiti wasta?" and pointed at my mouth. Sid and Vicious look at each other. "What does kiti wasta mean?" asks Sid. "It means 'what time?' in Marathi," I reply coolly. "Well we don't know Marathi, and he probably doesn't either, because he's from Karnataka," Vicious laughs.

Later I tell them about an incident that happened at lunch. "So I'm in this restaurant eating Khichdi Kadi, and I want to practice my Hindi, so I ask the waiter 'kya yaha kadi hai?' and he gives me this weird look like he's trying not to smile, and he calls another waiter over, so I repeat the question and they both burst out laughing and walk away." Sid and Vicious burst out laughing. Sid tells me the phrase has two meanings; Vicious explains that while 'kadi' is a spicy sauce served with khichdi, if the pronunciation isn't spot-on it could be misheard as 'khada', the verb 'to stand'. Which is also slang for 'erection'. So, Vicious explains, while I thought I was saying 'is this kadi?', the waiters may have heard 'is this standing?', or, 'do you have an erection?'

Pune

I travelled to Pune by coach yesterday, my linguistic deficiencies compensated by my luck and ability to get friendly middle-class Indians to help me at both ends of the trip. The Bombay end was a bit hectic, as several agents for coaches to Pune all operate from stalls right next to each other at Dadar station, and when I arrived there several guys ran to drag me and my kit out of the taxi and towards their stalls. A bit of British stiff upper lip and a couple of determined cries of "Nahi! Nahi!" saw them off. Young scallywags. What-ho.

Then at the other end I easily got a rickshaw to the hostel where I will be staying for the next week. I got settled in, and then suddenly realised I didn't have the fan on and that I wasn't sweating. Such a situation would never arise in Bombay. Pune is further inland than Bombay and located at a higher altitude in the Western Ghats (foothills): hence the more European climate. Also it isn't surrounded on three sides by the sea, like Bombay, and doesn't attract thousands of immigrants/economic refugees from other parts of India every day, like Bombay. As a result there is a bit more space to breathe (and air - a day of just breathing in the air in Bombay is equivalent to smoking two and a half packs of cigarettes). So Pune is a healthier city, and cheaper to live in. But I think it lacks the energy of Bombay; there doesn't seem to be the same dynamism and variety here that results from Bombay's magnetic attraction to people and businesses from inside and outside India. Maybe it will grow on me.

One

So I'm in Mumbai and alive and well, so far.

I walked out the airport at 5am this morning, and at about the time I got in the taxi it suddenly hit me how much I loved India when I was here in 2005. It's something I can't explain. I know it's almost all to do with the people; India is her people. Anyway I got to my hotel ok, jumped in the shower, and then headed out. Saw my first sacred cow within a few minutes, and took the time to introduce myself. Hi, I'm Brendan, I'm new in the neighbourhood. Do you come here often? She didn't seem interested in talking though so I moved on, and soon saw more sacred cows and an elephant.

I'm not the same boy who arrived in Mumbai for the first time two years ago, but the senses pick up the same things. That mix of smells: chai, rotting vegetation, excrement, exhaust, damp heat, and the stuff they burn on the street for whatever they burn that stuff on the street for. And the food-related fear came back. I bought some bottled water, opened it, examined the seal and discarded it as it was covered in tiny white moving things. The next bottle I bought was fine. Then I bought some kind of cleansing lotion to wipe my hands before eating, and eno sachets in case there was a problem in the food itself. These preparations in place, I found a suitable restaurant, found a dish I recognised on the menu, and negotiated it with the Marathi-speaking waiter. Alu paratha (potato pancake with vegetables in it) with curd. Better than anything I've tasted in an Indian restaurant in England in the past two years. For lunch I gorged myself on a Gujarati Thali (a thali is a huge metal plate food is served on; ordering a thali is ordering an ongoing relationship with a waiter who brings more and more food just as you think you're winning with the stuff you've got in front of you). Having fun.