Planes, Trains, and Auto-Rickshaws

by Laura Pedersen

  Once you’ve found your place on the train, don’t bother searching for the buffet, dining, or bar car, since there isn’t one. If you’re traveling first class, food is included in your fare, and the attendant will come to take your order. Whether you want to eat what’s on offer is another matter. Many people bring their own food, which is probably a safe bet. Whereas the largest gamble in Las Vegas is said to be the ninety-nine-cent shrimp cocktail, the word on the tracks is to steer clear of the coconut chutney. This is often diluted with water to make it go further, the way that large families in my neighborhood added Quaker Oats to stretch the meatloaf, only this filler wasn’t harmful to your health.

  You’ll soon hear the chai wallah’s hypnotic shout of “Chai, chai, garam chai,” breaking the word chai into separate syllables, “chai-eeee,” as he makes his way through the cars offering milky sweet tea. Chai is actually the Hindi word for “tea.” And a wallah is a person who performs a certain task, thus you have chai wallahs selling tea, rickshaw wallahs driving rickshaws, bidi wallahs hawking cigarettes, the cable wallah, the coal wallah, and nowadays the all-important wedding video wallah. The Chinese wallah, as it happens, is not Chinese, nor does he sell Chinese, but is in fact an Indian vendor of Chinese food.

  Tea is the number one beverage in India and keeps the populace going the way Red Bull does college students in the United States. India is the world’s largest consumer, second-largest producer, and fourth-largest exporter of tea. Chai wallahs are on every corner and encourage customer loyalty by using specialty ingredients, such as a pinch of crushed ginger, a dollop of cardamom, or a strand of saffron. Or by creating a bit of performance art by swirling the pot until it almost boils over, sweeping it back and forth between two pots several feet apart, and then sending a thin stream of chai into a brown clay cup held as far away as possible. In the movie Slumdog Millionaire, the game show contestant is referred to as a chai wallah, and the character who stars in Salaam Bombay also works as a chai wallah.

  As you pull into most railway stations, the train is greeted by newspaper wallahs, fruit peddlers, and numerous vendors pushing their wares, including toiletries, eggs, vinyl belts, bottled water, tobacco, and toys for children. In the evening, you’ll be supplied with clean sheets to cover your bunk, along with a blanket and pillow. Most first-class compartments have four sleeping berths. Is it possible to end up stretched out above or across from a man you’ve never seen before who reeks of chickpea curry and wants to talk all night long? Yes, indeed. Is it a little weird? Absolutely.

  Still, on a train trip you quickly come to see how social, polite, and hospitable Indians are, as it feels like one big group hug. People are so amiable that it’s difficult to tell in the midst of so much happy haphazardness which clusters are friends or families traveling together and who just met on board. It’s not treated as a federal offense to use someone else’s bag as a headrest or for a child’s arm to flop across a stranger’s lap. Passengers don’t scowl or grumble as you climb over them and push past to find the lav.

  Whereas we have good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and good night, Indians use namaste for all that and more, much the way Hawaiians put aloha to work as a utility player. The word namaste derives from Sanskrit and roughly translated means, “I bow to the divinity that is inherent within you.” The Hindi word kal means “yesterday” and also “tomorrow.” Sorting out these last two can solve a lot of transportation problems before they happen.

  Indians smile almost continuously while talking and ask lots of questions about you and your travels and what kind of family you have and about the country you’re from. It’s rather the opposite of France, where it’s considered rude to ask personal questions of people who are merely acquaintances or that you meet in passing. Or Cuba, where locals strike up conversations with the aim of getting married that evening and moving back to the United States with you. Not surprisingly, just as we have preconceived notions of India, so do Indians of the States, mostly from shows like Desperate Housewives and Baywatch (perpetually in rerun), where we’re not shown in our most intellectual light. Also, Indian men who look at porn see a great deal of American content, and this leads them to believe that at least half of the young American women they meet work in adult entertainment and will welcome their flirtations.

  When discussing America, I always tried to give a balanced view, that there’s plenty of opportunity—look how Barack Obama’s mother was collecting welfare at one point and now he’s president—but we also have problems with drugs and violence and a high rate of teen pregnancy. After that, all anyone ever wanted to talk about was teen pregnancy. It would seem that abstinence hasn’t exactly worked in India either, based on the fact that the country’s population has skyrocketed from 435 million in 1960 to 1.2 billion today. In other words, flash mobs are redundant.

  Down South

  India has forty-seven hundred miles of coastline and the South is the place to enjoy lolling on white sand beaches and canoeing through tropical rainforests that haven’t changed in more than a thousand years. As a matter of fact, some tribal people live in the forest much as they did a century ago, and when the modern-age Department of Forestry encroaches on their resources and lifestyle, they’ll take thirty or forty of them hostage to protest. I was reminded of the toxic chemicals seeping to the surface in Western New York’s Love Canal neighborhood in the seventies and how frustrated locals took a few EPA workers captive. Soon afterward, Love Canal became the first Superfund cleanup site in the nation.

  Goa is India’s smallest state and is most famous for being the laid-back hippie hacienda of the sixties. During the Earth Shoe era, every free-thinking, dope-smoking, magic-bus-riding, tie-dyed- and denim-clad hippie in the world seemed to wash up on Goa’s mystical shores for full-moon parties fueled by psychedelic drugs and exceedingly casual sex, much to the horror of its residents. Many died of overdoses or went home when their trusts funds ran out. Some stayed. But now you’re more likely to find HUGs—hippies until college graduation—who will soon shed their L.L.Bean backpacks and become professionals, though possibly with a yen for hashish brownies. The occasional flash of a rusting orange-and-white Volkswagen van abandoned in the jungle still catches the eye, while the Anjuna market, better known as the hippie flea market, keeps the smell of sandalwood incense alive for newcomers.

  Goa is the perfect place to get outfitted in colorful loose-fitting clothes and groovy jewelry, acquire some body piercings, visit the dreadlock creator, and tie on some smoky quartz crystals so you’re ready for the techno music trance parties that begin around midnight and rave until dawn. Nearby boutiques and workshops sell wonderful handcrafted cane furniture and hand-painted ceramic tiles. Goa remains a heavily marketed tourist destination around the world, with clever taglines such as “Have fun in Goa” and “Give it a Goa.”

  The Portuguese landed in Goa in the early 1500s to seek Christian converts and ply the spice trade (not necessarily in that order), and the area remained a colony until 1961, when Indian troops seized the territory. Goa features European-style buildings with red tile roofs and art nouveau balconies in various states of dilapidation. Among the baroque church courtyards and graceful public squares, which are distinctly lacking in human density for India, old folks still gossip in Portuguese before purchasing the codfish and garlic cloves needed to whip up a batch of bacalhau.

  For me, arriving in Goa was like being transported back to the heavily Catholic Buffalo, New York, of the sixties, where a crucifix could be spotted around every corner and throngs of parochial school children wearing uniforms dotted every street corner. Instead of packing everyone in wood-paneled station wagons as we used to do, entire Indian families pile atop motorbikes with book bags flying in the breeze. Otherwise, taxis double as churches, with interiors covered in Holy Family holograms, a dashboard statue of Jesus dying on the cross, and Mother Mary peering from behind the rearview mirror. The Mary statues looked so woebegone that I couldn’t help but wonder if she�
�d been hoping for a girl instead. All that was needed to be a kitchen in my old neighborhood was an apostles spoon collection, Ten Commandments place mats (Sunday school project), and a stained-glass Lord’s Prayer hanging in the window. After two weeks in mostly Hindu India, this was indeed culture shock.

  Goa is unique in that the area features bullfights as a result of its deep Iberian roots. However, these aren’t the kind Ernest Hemingway wrote about, where the matador flashes a red cape at the bull (who arrives already pissed off because his testicles are tied) and taunts it until somebody gets gored or killed. These spectacles are more like raves in that word spreads underground and a group of people gather in a field around two bulls that are encouraged to fight each other, and the winner is declared when one runs away. Such fights are illegal because there’s a tremendous amount of gambling involved, and they’re also dangerous—if you took careful note of the logistics here, the people are in a circle around two bulls, and one runs away. Spectators are expected to quickly part for the bull, and so obviously these events are somewhat participatory and not for the fearful or infirm. Still, they’re a regular attraction since the police are paid to look the other way, ideally not in the direction in which the bull is running.

  There are museums and churches galore to explore around here, and you can’t toss a coconut without hitting one. The Basilica de Bom Jesus houses the mummified remains of Goa’s great saint, sixteenth-century missionary Francis Xavier, who is said to have had miraculous powers of healing. Actually, the church is more like the home to the remains of his remains, since his body made a few stops before finally landing in Goa. A Portuguese woman, overwhelmed by her encounter with the saint’s corpse, bit off the little toe of his left foot and attempted to sneak it out of the church in her mouth back in 1554. This brings us to the right forearm, the one Xavier used to bless his converts, which was detached and dispatched to Rome around 1614. Another part of his arm bone went to Macau and has been making the rounds over there ever since. And seemingly just for the heck of it, a holy fingernail lies twelve miles to the east in the village of Chandor. Outside of Bom Jesus, it’s possible to shop for healing aids such as prayer cards, candles, statuettes, religious medals, vials of holy water, and, if that’s not enough, wax body parts. Cue the “Hallelujah” chorus.

  Most of all, Goa is a great place to chill out and enjoy some warm sand after the endless bustle of city life. However, the tides can be dangerous, so it’s best to swim in view of a lifeguard. Dogs will stop by and inquire if you have a sandwich that you’re not going to eat or a Coke can that needs peeing on. I saw hundreds of free-roaming dogs in half a dozen different cities across India, and oddly enough they appeared to be from the same litter, all with long noses, short hair, upturned ears, and weighing about forty-five pounds. In short, they all looked like dingoes. I don’t call them wild dogs since they’re friendly and outgoing and appear to have made a pact with the general populace with regard to mooching food and being permitted to laze around in exchange for remaining on good behavior, so perhaps liberated is a better term.

  I was also in the country long enough to observe that public places such as airports, malls, and hotel lobbies seem to favor instrumental versions of 1970s American movie soundtracks over traditional Indian music. In particular, the melodic strains of Marvin Hamlisch’s theme song “The Last Time I Felt Like This” from the American film Same Time, Next Year appear to be all the rage, whether you’re ordering Goan egg curry or having henna applied. I’m guessing the DJ in charge doesn’t know that the movie is about adultery.

  On the beaches in the South, you’ll be approached by women wearing exquisite silk saris who are peddling scarves, shawls, and jewelry. However, it’s a soft sell, and although most never went very far in school, if they attended at all, the English they’ve learned solely from conversing with tourists is impressive, along with their Italian, French, Spanish, Russian, and smattering of Japanese. In fact, their language capabilities and interpersonal skills greatly exceeded those of the men working in most of the good hotels, yet they were earning 1/100th of the pay. If it’s a slow day, the women will happily chat and ask you about your family, and if you’re interested in their lives, they’ll tell you everything you’d like to know.

  Although the cows in Goa appear to be independent operators, in reality they’re ladies who lunch. The gals leave home in the morning to visit friends, graze, apply a mud mask, and sunbathe by the roadside while catching up on all the gossip, and then return to their abodes in the evening.

  Tourists usually head to the North of India and travel no further south than Jaipur, but the South is now a real contender. The success of information, biotechnology, and pharmaceutical companies in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, and Chennai (formerly Madras) have brought economic success, while social progress resulting from a meritocracy based on education (as opposed to nepotism and the caste system) have made it a wonderful place for travelers to enjoy. Hyderabad is in fact nicknamed Cyberabad because of the new infrastructure, five-star hotels, fashionable restaurants, and global companies that have been building state-of-the-art glass-walled campuses and skyscrapers throughout the city. Business people are in such a hurry to get there that flights leave from Mumbai starting at three in the morning.

  Located to the south of Goa is the historic seaport city of Kochi (formerly Cochin) in the state of Kerala, which is known as the Venice of the East. This group of islands shares a mixed heritage, as evidenced by the enormous Chinese fishing nets on display at the tip of Fort Cochin (which contains just about every type of monument except a proper fort) that were introduced by traders from the court of Kublai Khan around 1400 CE, Saint Francis Church, constructed in 1503, Portuguese Mattancherry Palace, built in 1555, and the (Protestant) Dutch Cemetery, which was consecrated in 1724. As if that’s not cultural crossroads enough, Mattancherry Palace shares a wall with the Paradesi Synagogue. Built in 1568, this is India’s oldest synagogue and is located in an area with the bouncy name of Jew Town. The first wave of Jews arrived in India following the capture of Jerusalem in 587 BCE and settled in Cochin. Paradesi Synagogue contains a number of antiquities worth visiting, including a floor composed of hundreds of eighteenth-century hand-painted porcelain tiles (which, according to the caretaker, Queen Elizabeth II claimed to adore on her 1997 visit and kvetched about how they’re impossible to find nowadays), a number of stunning Belgian chandeliers, and an Oriental rug that was a gift from Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I. Despite being an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian, Selassie traced his roots back to Solomon, a King of Israel, according to the Hebrew Bible. Meantime, the Rastafarian movement in Jamaica was built upon the premise that Selassie was a messianic figure destined to lead the African people into a new era of peace, righteousness, and prosperity. Talk about being different things to different people.

  A day trip from Kochi is the tranquil riverside village and popular picnic spot of Kodanad. This rural hamlet was once the largest capturing camp in South India for elephants that would be sold to circuses, zoos, and private game preserves, but hunting was made illegal in 1977, and so the camp has been converted into a rescue and care center. It’s also a tourist destination, with river walks and the opportunity to ride elephants, visit the babies, and, if you’re prepared for full-contact and complete submersion, a plunge into the river to give an elephant a bath using a coconut husk as a loofah.

  Other popular attractions in the South include Mysore’s Maharaja Palace; the temple ruins and giant boulders of Hampi; Ooty, so stunningly beautiful that the British named it Queen of the Hill Stations; and Puducherry (formerly Pondicherry), on the East Coast, which retains a delightful Gallic atmosphere, having been an on-again off-again colony of France until 1954.

  Between Puducherry and Chennai is Mamallapuram (popularly known as Mahabalipuram), the ancient port city of the Pallava kings (rulers of the south from the fourth to ninth century CE) and a showcase of architectural wonders. Its rock-cut caves, friezes, temples, and ba
s-relief sculpted artwork, constructed mostly between the seventh and ninth centuries, are a sight to behold. The Shore Temple is dramatically floodlit at night and is probably the second most photographed monument in India after the Taj Mahal. Meantime, if you’ve been thinking about a four-armed Lord Shiva statue for the entranceway back home or an elephant-headed Ganesha to top off the garden, Mal (as it’s called) is a great place to purchase a stone carving. Mal’s fine local chiselers are regularly commissioned to create sculptures for new temples being built around the world. After haggling over the price, scratch your name on the bottom and request that it be shipped home. Mamallapuram is also a backpackers’ paradise, so expect the requisite Internet cafés, coconut sellers, food stalls, love beads, marigold garlands, aphrodisiacs, Bob Marley T-shirts, and what must surely be faux iPhones, based on the price. If you’re looking for a good place to have a midlife crisis, Mal could indeed be the ticket.

  In the southeastern state of Tamil Nadu, there are bull-taming festivals between January and May as a part of Pongal, the harvest celebration. Rules differ from place to place, but the ritual, known as jallikattu, usually involves trying to hang onto the hump of a colorfully decorated, fast-running bull for a predetermined amount of time. In another version, unarmed villagers attempt to gain possession of a bundle of cash that’s been tied to the bulls’ sharpened horns. The animals are not killed, like in Spanish bullfighting, but more than two hundred participants have died over the past twenty years, and thousands have sustained injuries. Opponents of the sport, which they call bull baiting, object to the fact that the bulls have chili pepper rubbed in their eyes, are force-fed alcohol, and have their male parts pinched in order to rile them up sufficiently.