Delirious Delhi

by Dave Prager

  From Anurag’s perspective, having grown up in an economy shaped by such a substantial surplus of labor, nobody with a future as a knowledge worker would have a past as a sweeper. Even the fact that I’d mow my neighbors’ lawns for baseball card money was beyond his experience—not when there were so many people who’d do the same task to feed their family.

  (Incidentally, Anurag was also horrified that I used to play in the sandbox as a child. “Indian mothers,” he told me, “would never allow their kids to play in the dirt.”)

  Such is the middle-class lifestyle in the US. But this is a relatively recent phenomenon. Just a few generations ago, America’s economic structure looked different. My dad’s father was a dry goods peddler, and my mom’s father was a bartender. Jenny’s grandfather on her mother’s side was a poorly educated forester and part-time deputy sheriff who immigrated from Italy. Jenny’s dad never knew his own father, but the family that adopted him after his mother passed away was of equally modest means. None of our grandparents would have been surprised by the intensity with which my Delhi co-workers approached their jobs—because for them, the memory of war and migration and calamity was fresh in their minds as well, and the consequences of failure were also perfectly clear.

  Two generations removed from our grandparents’ suffering, the trajectory of the US economy has shifted to where Jenny and I are today: complacent enough to sacrifice our incomes in New York for lower-paying jobs overseas, and complacent enough still that I could quit working for a few months altogether to write this book.

  We’re sure that India will see a similar evolution.

  With India’s middle class growing so rapidly—the McKinsey Global Institute expects another 290 million of them by 20255—Anurag’s children will surely be the last generation to rise to prosperity without having to endure the indignities of working in fast food. And they may also be the last to see men supporting families by selling coconut slices at traffic signals. Even today, a generation of young, educated, English-speaking twenty-somethings are tearing movie tickets or taking popcorn orders in Delhi theaters. They will rise the corporate ladder in the next decades, and their career paths will mean the end of the taboo against lousy teenage jobs even as more of the poorest Indians are absorbed into the formal economy. Their children will be spending their teenage years flipping dosas, making cappuccinos, and cleaning their own rooms just like we did.

  1. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/indo-pakpartition2.htm

  2. http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1926146,00.html

  3. http://www.indianexpress.com/news/delhi-govt-to-buildshelters-for-migrant-workforce/489417/0

  4. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Cities/Delhi/Truthbehind-rising-infant-deaths-in-city/articleshow/4694480.cms

  5. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/IF01Df04.html

  11

  Expat Issues: We’ll Complain Anyway

  Back when we were still surrounded by supermarkets that spanned acres and a Starbucks on every corner, Jenny and I imagined India as the ultimate in adventure tourism: a land of elephant-powered mass transit, of monkey pickpockets, of giant spiders guarding booby-trapped temples, and of heat that would melt our belt buckles even as the food melted our tongues. Adventure in the true Indiana Jones sense of the word. For many of our friends too, and for countless other Americans, the mere thought of visiting India got their eyes shining and their hearts pounding. (Except for Americans like my grandfather, for whom the same thought got their stomachs churning and their fingernails gripping even tighter to their living room armchairs.)

  Knowing India only from the news, the movies and the posters affixed to the walls of Indian restaurants, we expected a land in which mosquito nets have to be worn at all times and even CEOs commute to work hanging off the side of a train. Risk! Danger! Excitement! Never mind moving there, even a two-week visit would be the adventure of a lifetime.

  But the adventure Americans seek in India is not to raft the Himalayas, surf the Ganges, or rappel down the Taj Mahal. We seek far greater thrills: to ride in an autorickshaw! To shop in a spice market! To travel in an overnight train! To experience what a billion people live through every day, in other words. We fly twenty straight hours and pay thousands of dollars specifically to take pictures of ourselves doing what most Indians would consider chores. The American mindset when we step off the plane that very first time is an expectation that everything that happens from that moment onward would blow our conservative Midwestern relatives’ minds.

  And so, arriving in India with a sense of grandeur overinflated by the gasps of friends and family who can’t believe we actually have the guts to make the trip, a very interesting phenomenon occurs in Western travelers: we refuse to notice all the other Western travelers around us. Americans in India collectively lose their ability to perceive the color white.

  We’ve predicated our egos on the belief that we are the natural heirs to Magellan and De Soto wholly by virtue of buying those plane tickets and queuing up for visas in the India consulate. With our egos set on pioneer mode, it would actually be quite disappointing to walk around Delhi and see all those other Magellans and De Sotos with their khaki shorts, meticulous sunscreen, and Lonely Planets open to the exact same page as ours.

  Which is why we’d pretend not to notice each other.

  Jenny and I called this behavior “gora evasion.” Goras are relatively rare in India, enough so that everyone wants a closer look when they spot one—even Jenny and I, after a few months in the country, would stare at them just like everyone else on the street. “Whoa, look—goras!” we’d whisper to each other, jerking our heads in their direction, the intensity of our ensuing stares (like that of every passing auto driver) increasing in direct proportion to the inappropriateness of their attire. And then the disappointment would set in. “This neighborhood isn’t even listed in Lonely Planet. How the hell did they find it?”

  The presence of goras in what we thought was an unknown neighborhood popped our bubble. It told us that we were not the cleverest travelers in all of India. So while we would stare at goras, we wouldn’t let them catch us staring. We would surreptitiously study them as judgementally as we could, ridiculing them for any naïveté we could spot or manufacture (“Ha! They’re looking at a map!” “Ha! They’re, uh, wearing socks!”) so we could congratulate ourselves on our own sophistication. If they happened to look over, we’d pretend we were studying the trees. No eye contact, that’s for sure.

  Nor would they want us to acknowledge them. Every American on a grand Indian adventure wants to think they’re the only ones. Our self-images rest on the perception that there won’t be any other American faces spoiling the photos we send to the folks back home. This is the American pioneer mythology drilled into us since grade school: the spirit of Columbus discovering a continent with millions of people already living on it. We strap on our backpacks and march boldly forward into the empty unknown, refusing to acknowledge our fellow travelers (much less the fact that the people who live in our empty unknown drink cappuccinos and watch Friends). The very last thing any American traveler wants is a reminder that India had over one million other American visitors in 2011 alone1—especially if that reminder comes in the form of insincere pleasantries exchanged with a smiling yokel whose son’s girlfriend’s sister turns out to have been in the rival high school marching band back home. Gora evasion is how we dismiss evidence of other goras already existing around us like so many indigenous civilizations.

  Thus, when two goras converge on a Delhi road, there are no hellos. No polite nods. Not even the raised eyebrows and tight smiles of two co-workers meeting each other in the office restroom for the second time in one morning. If gora eyes happen to meet, all involved sets look quickly away.

  Jenny and I have both experienced and practiced gora evasion in the alleys near Chandni Chowk, on passing houseboats in the Kerala backwaters, while jostling for viewing angles in the Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary, and even outside
the Reebok Store in Saket Select Citywalk Mall, where the two of us and the two of them mutually maintained our illusions of isolation while Kenny G. warbled at us over the mall’s loudspeakers.

  The more Frostian the point of convergence, the more comically awkward gora evasion becomes. On our visit to Mumbai, we found ourselves walking down a long, desolate road on the way down from Malabar Hill. It was twilight on that wooded lane, and the few people we saw were outnumbered by the giant bats swooping purposefully on two-foot wings. In the distance, at the bottom of the hill, two goras materialized: a guy and a girl, coming our way on the same sidewalk. Their very existence deflated the mystery of the trail we’d hoped to blaze, just as our very existence stripped their intended path of all the drama it might have held for them.

  Jenny and I had been discussing our theory of gora evasion for weeks, and on this moment in Mumbai we decided to put it to the test. As we grew closer, we intentionally ignored our instinctual aversion to our counterparts, and we continued to gaze pleasantly ahead.

  The other two, meanwhile, looked in all directions but ours. And then, just at the point where two pairs of polite people would smile and nod in every circumstance back home, that’s when the guy elaborately pointed to something above and behind and to the left of Jenny and me. And they both studiously contemplated this point in space as the four of us passed each other, greetings not exchanged, illusion of adventure still unbroken. They were still the only goras in Mumbai.

  All of which is to say that we stopped feeling like pioneers once we realized that Delhi’s expat population, while a small percentage of the whole, was still far too big for us ever to be the first to discover a restaurant, explore a neighborhood, or find some unknown wonder of the world. Foreigners were certainly rare enough to be stared at, but they were plentiful enough that we were able to identify a number of patterns in our sightings of them. We came up with three categorizations of expats in Delhi, in fact: three broad stereotypes that were fairly accurate in predicting how people got here, what they were doing, and whether or not they’d be our friends.

  The first category of expats was the short-term tourists. They were shell-shocked newbies wearing cameras that were too bulky and shorts that were too short. They were twenty-something girlfriends in town for the wedding of a college roommate, staying in the bride’s house in south Delhi, insisting that they not be fussed over but secretly reveling in the maid turning down their beds and preparing fresh mango every morning. They were hippie travelers keeping it real in Paharganj flophouses, seeking bhang for Thursday night Sufi music at Nizamuddin, planning trips to Varanasi to smoke hash with actual sadhus, and resenting their dads for insisting they moved back to Long Island to work for the family investment bank. They were retired people on packaged tours grimacing at the beggars, shoving away the touts, pursing their lips to keep out the germs, and fantasizing about the bar back at the hotel.

  This first category is expansive—let’s not forget spinsters on chaperoned adventures, photographers on poverty tourism, brave Midwesterners hopped up on malaria pills—but there are a few shared behavior patterns: they stick to the main sights, they fear the tap water even more than we did, they go on day trips to Agra and come back disgusted, and then they board the train to Jaipur and return to Delhi only to fly out. These short-term expats were the most evasive of all, refusing to acknowledge their fellow foreigners even when the waiters at Karim’s sat them directly across from us.

  The next categorization of expats encompassed the medium-term postings: the NGO interns, the Hindi students, the Rhodes scholars, the blossoming corporate cogs, the middle managers, and anyone else living in Delhi longer than a few months but not long enough to have their furniture shipped over. Like me, most of these mediumterm residents were worth a plane ticket to Delhi to their sponsoring organization but were not seen as valuable enough to receive the gold treatment. If we had one unifying factor beyond the duration of our residence, it was this: none of us could afford membership to American Community Support Association, which at the time opened up the US embassy’s amenities to its members for around $1,400 a year. Members (and their lucky, lucky guests) got access to everything Delhi’s Tucson-on-the-Yamuna has to offer: its swimming pool, its beef-serving restaurant, its Budweiser-serving bar, and its Western standards of cleavage acceptability.

  The long-term folks relaxing at the embassy were our third categorization, and they were in a league beyond ours. They were the heads of NGOs, the country leads for big corporations, the diplomats, the bylined foreign correspondents, the teachers at the international schools, the Westerners who married Indians and moved back with them. They lived in tree-lined central Delhi, in “farmhouses” with private pools on the outskirts of the city, or above the fray in shining Gurgaon. These were the lucky expats with beautiful cars and articulate drivers. And they existed on a plane through which our Delhi vector rarely passed. We’d naïvely concluded that between attending a few Democrats Abroad meetings and being active on the foreigner email lists, we knew most of the expats in Delhi; but when we showed up at the embassy’s Presidential Inauguration party, we couldn’t believe how many non-Indians also lived in India.

  Between Delhi’s two resident categories, there were variations and outliers, of course: some NGO heads lived modestly in north Delhi while other medium-term students shacked up in luxurious service apartments. But one constant is that the two resident categories almost always kept to separate social circles, and only the most outgoing members of each group were able to bridge the gap.

  This divide is due to one of the biggest perils facing foreigners living in Delhi: expat turnover. Every six months, it seemed, everyone left.

  And this turnover meant that for expats—and for mediumterm expats especially—it was a bad idea to grow complacent with one’s social circle. Because the moment one looked around a dinner table and thought, “I’ve got all the friends I need in Delhi!” is the moment when the going-away parties would begin: dissertations would be complete, postings would conclude, businesses would reorganize, or people would just miss Arby’s too much.

  One guy I met told me a story of expats’ lament that was the worst I’d heard: he’d gotten himself a girlfriend, spent six blissful months locked in his bedroom, broke up, and then returned to the Delhi social scene only to discover that everyone else he knew had moved away in the meantime.

  We personally went through three rounds of expat friends. In round one, we’d hardly gotten to know Tony, Parker, Karem, and Samantha before they jetted off; and though we quickly replaced them with Mike and Dana, we were attending the second round of going away parties soon enough. We replaced Mike and Dana with Scott and Sally late enough in our stay in Delhi that we became their statistic: Scott and Sally were the ones attending our going away party, followed shortly by their goodbyes for Suzanne, Michelle, Cailin, and Leslie, the last of our round three crew. “We began to feel as if we were the last men standing in Delhi,” Scott told me.

  But Scott and Sally, who ended up putting in nineteen months in Delhi, learned from our experience. “After a while,” Scott said, “we wouldn’t consider friends who weren’t going to be around for more than a year.” Natrece and Ashwin became their new Dave and Jenny, but only after the intended duration of that couple’s stay in Delhi satisfied Scott and Sally’s vetting process.

  This social reality is exactly why so few long-term expats socialized with medium-termers like us: it just wasn’t worth it for them to befriend people who would disappear so soon. This wasn’t snobbery, but rather the harsh lessons one learns in Delhi’s social economics. Delhi’s a challenging city for expats, so people living here naturally seek out those who are enduring the same sort of Delhi struggle. For the long-termers, that meant people who knew the names of the city’s politicians, who recognized the city’s foreign correspondents when they were spotted in the bars, and who could describe Delhi as it was before Café Coffee Day made air conditioning so easy to find. What insight cou
ld we offer them, those of us who tended to love Delhi vocally and intensely and then, just when our second summer began to kick in, pick up and move to Singapore?

  The few times we met long-term expats, our pleasant conversations would degrade when our accidental greenhorn sentiments (“You’re so brave to actually drive your own car in Delhi’s traffic!”) exposed our limited-time stay in the city. Even as they’d respond, we could see that we were already fading in their eyes like a photo of Marty McFly as they scanned the room for more relevant conversation partners. (“It’s not so difficult as you . . . oops, excuse me, the HT’s man is here and I have to ask him about the referendum.”)

  Don’t think that we only sought friendships with expats. Far from it. We were in India to meet Indians, and Jenny and I made great friends among neighbors, co-workers, and EOID members. But we needed expat friends as well, because we needed to talk to people who were going through the same challenges. Which is another reason the medium-term and long-term expat groups didn’t mix very easily: we the medium-termers would want to commiserate about the awkwardness of ordering peons or to show off the faded kalavas still tied around our wrists from the pooja we’d attended months before. Long-term folks were far more interested in discussing techniques for acquiring a Delhi driver’s license, determining whom to bribe to open a cupcake bakery, and sorting out passport issues for their newborns. We all needed friends who could empathize accordingly.