Weddings and Whitewater: Intro to India

By Tom

New Delhi, India

Many Indians say that Westerners don't understand India. After three days in India, I realize how true this is. I don't understand this place at all. Not yet. And despite the help of our wonderful hosts, Nainu and Dima, in their quest to explain India and its people, I don’t know if I’ll get it anytime soon.

Julia's friend Dhruv's lovely sister Nainu has generously been showing us around Delhi

Dhruv's grandmother with Julia

For instance, there was no one there to explain to me what to do during my first visit to a public bathroom. I think of myself as a pretty worldly traveler, equally able to use a squat toilet as the familiar Western toilet, but this time I was in over my head. We were visiting one of the famous mosques in the heart of downtown Old Delhi, where the streets are a thick paste of mud and garbage. I had to pee and found the men's room of the mosque. Unlike the public bathrooms of Turkey or Latin America, the caretaker did not ask for a couple of coins to use the facility but instead angrily tapped a piece of paper taped to the wall. I eventually made out the scribbled words "urinating while standing is prohibited." I nodded to the man that I understood, but he still looked at me angrily, sure that I was going to mess it up.

I walked up to the toilet, which was a long trough running the length of the wall of the room, filled nearly to the brim with urine. There were two wet bricks at the edge of the trough, presumably to put your feet on while peeing. I stood up on the bricks and with my back to the wall, loosened by pants and started to squat. The man across from me immediately started yelling at me in Hindi, waiving is finger at me. He motioned with his finger that I was facing the wrong way. I looked around the room and the couple of other men were facing the wall rather than away from the wall. I was dumbfounded how I was supposed to both squat and pee forward, without most of it ending up in my shoes. I was also at a disadvantage as the only one in the room wearing shorts rather than the traditional floor length tunic, meaning that when I squatted facing towards the wall, the person across from me would be able to give me a visual colon exam. Eventually, I decided that the only thing I could do was to pee in my normal way standing up and facing the trough, but that I would compromise and bend my knees as much as I could while I did it. My quad muscles burned as I stood there in an awkward semi-crouch and luckily the attendant was distracted for long enough to not run over and chastise me.

Another thing that was a mystery to me was the subway system. Delhi has had a basic subway system for a while, but many of the newer lines just opened up within the last few weeks. Clearly, there is some worry that this transition from using trains to using subways will not go smoothly for some, because among the list of "Official Offenses" posted on the walls of the subway entrance is "Riding on the roof of the train," for which the offender will be fined 50 rupees (roughly $1) and will be removed from the train. I'm no expert in the enforcement of urban transportation laws, but I'm pretty sure that the ceiling of the subway tunnel will remove the offender from the train before the city gets a chance to collect those 50 rupees. Also, among the items prohibited on the subway cars are

Manure of any kind
Decayed animal matter
Human skeletons

I can't imagine a situation in which someone carries a human skeleton onto a subway car only to see the posted regulations and learn that what they are doing is in fact prohibited. The embarrassment they must suffer having to get up and drag the skeleton, the bones all rattling and clanking, off the subway car while everyone watches.

Not allowed on a Delhi subway! (From Google images)

Aside from the potential for subway mishaps, another problem facing Delhi officials were discussed in several articles in the weekend edition of the Hindustan Times under the following headlines:

Monkeys spread terror in East Delhi -Threat returns
MCD: We don't have enough monkey catchers
Simian fury spreads terror in East Delhi

Residents even tried bringing in a larger species of ape called a "langoor" to fight off the threat of monkeys, but the cleaver monkeys stayed one step ahead of the residents, as was discussed in the article entitled:

Residents hire langoor, monkeys kill langoor

According to the article, before his untimely demise, the residents were paying the langoor 6000 rupees a month for his services, which leads me to wonder how the langoor was spending his hard earned money. I know it is not a joke to the poor people on whom the monkeys are targeting their reign of terror, but as two people not accustomed to this problem, Julia and I found it very hard to take it seriously when reading the articles. It seems from some lines in the articles that even the authors had a hard time taking it seriously.

"Monkey business acquired a whole new meaning in Delhi recently."
"Monkey menace, that has riddled the city for long, does not show signs of ending any time soon."
"Precautions to take: Don't mess with a monkey. It gets easily irritated."

As Julia and I read the news articles late at night, we laughed ourselves silly, which, like a couple of aging smokers, always turned into fits of coughing due to the air pollution of Delhi. We hope that the rest of our trip to India is this much fun and that we may eventually be able to wrap our heads around this perplexing land.