Road Rules & F***ing Asses

 

 

 

When I lived in Taiwan, and the Philippines, and traveled around Southeast Asia, I would often see families of four traveling together on one motorcycle. They might have their family pig strapped to the front, or a full-sized door balanced in their arms. Here in India, it's the same thing, and though it's hard to get the shot from inside a moving car, I am pleased to be able to show you my coveted photo of the family of four, along with families of three, babies, and -- of course -- very few of them wearing helmets. Perhaps these two gentlemen think their turbans would protect them in the event of a 60km/hr head-on collision.

 

 

 

There is a kind of space efficiency here that you just don't see in the US, or Western Europe. For example, a bycicle-powered school bus/cart that can easily carry ten children. Safety be damned.

The truth of the matter is that India has plenty of rules and regulations for driving. It's just that nobody seems to follow them. For example...

The rule: No rickshaws, bikes, animal-drawn carts, hand-pushed carts, or pedestrians.

The reality: rickshaws, bikes, animal-drawn carts, hand-pushed carts, oversized loads, pedestrians, and at least one hookah-smokin', turban-wearin', donkey-rider in the middle of the road, and frequently facing into oncoming traffic. The occasional lane markers are not so much a guideline as a suggestion, and not even so much a suggestion as a figment of somebody's fantasy.

 

Along with the braying, clomping, snorting, and the roar of the cars and motorcycles, you also have a near-constant noise from the horns. It is so extreme, between this and the garbage everywhere, that by the time we return to Paris and drive home on the highway from Charles de Gaulle airport, entering the city through a relatively ugly and industrial section in the 12th arrondissmenet, Gigi will turn to me and croon, "It's so peaceful here! It's like being in the countryside!"

 

But all of this chaos and disorder has a certain charm -- especially to us seat-belt wearin', rule-followin', red-light-stoppin' tourists.

While we undoubtedly have a special place in our hearts for the Taj Mahal, or riding the elephants in Jaipur, or being attacked by monkeys, you could also make the argument that riding in the rickshaws and tuk-tuks (the motorized tricicle rickshaws) may well be the highlight of the trip and the thing we will most remember. My mother normally wouldn't back out of the driveway without her seatbelt on, but here, she has no choice but to laugh about it as her grandchildren ride backwards without belts through crazy traffic. In fairness, she does point out that a) we usually aren't going faster than 20-30 mph in these vehicles and b) that the first time I brought home Gigi as a baby to visit my parents, I threw a hissy fit when they hadn't installed the car seat properly. But when I'm in Asia, rules and safety fly out the window. I just hope that the children don't.

In Jaipur, we hire out a tuk-tuk for our first afternoon to take us around the city (at 100 rupees or $2 per hour, after tip). Our driver Salim proudly tells us that his tuk-tuk is new. And it shows. 

 

It makes a big impression on Pippa, who writes in her journal entry above, "We went in a tek-tek that wos reely fancy and in the back thar ware lits and it lit op at nit." [Ed. translation:We went in a tuk-tuk that was realy fancy and in the back there were lights and it lit up at night.] The disco tuk-tuk is one of the first things she describes to anybody who asks about her trip here.

The following day our tuk-tuk is an old, shabby thing that our driver, Gopal, claims has been in service for twenty years. This does not seem likely, especially since we are later told that under commercial vehicle regulations, tuk-tuks are not allowed to be on the roads for more than twelve years. However, we've seen how much they follow other rules of the road, so why not break this one, too? Gopal, it turns out, is my father's kindred spirit, and my father is happy to get out and help make the necessarily manual u-turn in the small alleys.

At two different points in our afternoon, Gopal receives calls on his cell phone. Whether it's law or common sense, he does not drive while he's on the cell phone. But much to our amusument/ amazement, he doesn't pull off to the side, either; he simply stops in the middle of the road to talk on his cell phone, while traffic flows around us like a stream around a boulder.

We spend extra time in the way of traffic, because we also run out of gas in the middle of the road. But Gopal gets on the phone, and within two minutes, help has arrived. It is his son, also a tuk-tuk driver, who syphons off a touch of gas from his own tank. Pulling into the gas station to fill up, we are stunned to run into somebody we know. My brother makes fun of me for always running into people I know in incredible places. And it's true that on our second day in India, we are walking through the American Embassy compound when I spot a familiar face. As we pass by, I blurt out, "Didn't I go to Princeton with you?" And he turns around, and I realize that, indeed, he was a year ahead of me at university. My brother is further entertained by this as it turns out this man is the DCM (Deputy Chief of Mission, #2 under the Ambassador) at the U.S. Embassy, so within 48 hours, my social connections are, evidently, already better than my brother's. At the gas station, we see that the tuk-tuk in front of us in line is Salim, and we all cry out to him, as if he is an old friend. Here's a photo of Gopal (left, in blue) and Salim (thought by mother to look like an older Indian version of my brother-in-law Paul) -- two of the best Jaipur tuk-tuk drivers that $2/hour can hire.

My parents and I laugh till we cry when my mother, who has been looking for the perfect way to encapsulate our trip here, wisely notes, "Once you've driven in a tuk-tuk next to fornicating donkeys, you've pretty much seen it all."

When traffic looks like this, you need some sort of talisman or guardian angel. I can't give you either of those, but in the spirit of the old Irish blessings "May the road rise up to meet you," I offer you this, seen on the back of this truck and, presumably, trying to wish you Good Luck. I can't help but think that, along with the admonition underneath, to "Use dipper at night," it actually says something slightly different. 

What Runs Through My Head

When we were doing the renovation of our house in San Francisco and gunning for the permit from the city, our architect taught us the term EFSI, which stands for Every F***ing Square Inch. That acronym runs through my head a lot here, since the Indians seem to use EFSI for something. On the sidewalks, we see people fixing shoes, a dentist actually pulling teeth, barbers cutting hair and operating entire salons, and people living, cooking, working (in one photo below, she's ironing) and just, in general, living their lives. There are, simply, too many people and not enough space, so there's no choice but to take it to the streets. We even see people gardening in the median of the highway. This, of course, means that EFSI is not just full of people but also their stuff and their garbage, and usually all of the above. Granted, we have only been to a limited number of places, but it seems true not just in the big cities, but the smaller ones as well (Jaipur, Baradhpur, even in the drives between the cities).

 

 

We see many beggars, of course. Some are disfigured, sometimes self-inflicted in order to beg more successfully (but how can we know which is which?). The hardest may be the children who come up to the cars in the middle of the road. We try to give out pens and paper, and G is initially very enthusiastic about it, but it gets a little too intimidating almost immediately. The children start clamoring around the car and reaching their hands in to grab things. My father cannot help but give some money to some of the kids, despite the fact that a) they are sometimes sent out as part of a racket and b) poorer families will choose to send children begging on the streets, if they can be successful, rather than send them to school. My neighbor here in Paris is in full agreement with my father's approach, saying, "Yes, but these particular children are never going to school anyway, and they need the money." It's a very tough moral dilemma, really, and the problem is so entrenched in the local way of life, it's hard to imagine it will ever be solved.

Another thought that frequently runs through my head is "What a pigsty!" And, in literal terms, that's not so far from the truth. There are animals all over, in the cities as well as the country. Cows, pigs, goats. They are released from their homes for the day to go grazing around the city, eating whatever isn't plastic from the garbage piles in the streets and sidewalks. There is not as much manure around as you'd expect, presumably because much is gathered, made into cow patties, and dried out for use as fuel. Still, between the animal manure and human feces, you do get some pretty strong smells every once in a while. This would be another excellent use of Smell-o-vision, if it existed.

 

Also in my head: one of the reasons you can crate-train dogs is that they know not to crap in their own home. So why don't the people here know this? People throw their garbage everywhere. On approximately Day 11 of our trip, when we ride the elephants to the Amber Fort, we see a garbage can -- our first in the country. It's so noteworthy, I take a photo. I have been carrying our garbage around in my backpack or pockets ever since we got here, and can only unload it at my brother's house or at a hotel. I presume it is then taken from the house or hotel out to the road and dumped anyway. At one point we are going through what our driver tells us is a fancy neighborhood. It doesn't look much different, frankly, but I guess I can see that there are gated, guarded homes. A woman (maid?) comes just outside the front gate of her house, takes the family garbage -- food, papers, plastics, and all -- and hurls it like slop onto the road. We sometimes see people out sweeping -- but just sweeping, not gathering. They sweep it from one spot to another then call it quits.

  

When the women come up to us begging with babies on their hips, what runs through my head is that this country really needs to encourage contraception. Actually, that's a very gentle way of expressing what I'm thinking, which is so un-Democratic, so un-ACLU, and so un-PC that I don't think I can put it on paper... But basically, it strikes me that all of India's woes would be greatly, enormously, tremendously reduced if you could just solve the overpopulation problem. And the irony, of course, is the same worldwide: it's generally the poorest and least educated part of the population that has the greatest number of children. It shows more than usual here. P & G no longer wonder how people can tell we're "rich" and know to beg from us.

A couple factoids (compiled from Wikipedia):

• India is estimated to have a third of the world's poor, but just 17% of the world's population (1.2 billion)
• According to a 2005 estimate, 41.6% of the total Indian population falls below the international poverty line of US$ 1.25 a day.

Porno Puppets & Other Obscenities

We are in Rajasthan, an Indian state known among other things for colorful crafts including hand-stamped woodblock printed fabric (we buy a ton), camel leather shoes (Aunt Coca gets one pair for each girl to go with their saris), and hand-knotted Oriental carpets (the one thing I love but don't buy, since spontaneous $4,000 purchases are not in my current souvenir budget).

 

Of the crafts, puppets would seem to be one of the more accessible and appropriate for the children. However, the particular show we see, one evening in the garden of our hotel, is not just colorful but off-color, too. One marionette turns out to be a man one direction, and then a woman when flipped upside down. The puppeteer takes full advantage of this configuration and manages to manipulate it in such a way that both puppet heads show at once, as he graphically simulates the making of the beast with two backs, the makin' of bacon, a romp in the hay, bananas and cream, a feather-bed jig, getting Jack in the orchard, having a bit of giblet pie, nugging, quimsticking, some squat jumps in the cucumber patch, trimming the buff, vitamin F, winding the clock. In case you are getting worried about my in-depth knowledge of oddball euphisms, I would like to come clean about my getting dirty and tell you that most of these are taken from the Department of Translation Studies, at the University of Tampere, Finland. In the course of researching this paragraph, I come across this most excellent list of euphamisms for every private part and act both sexual and scatalogical. Sometimes I wonder how I ever made it through college without the internet.

I am relieved to report that my girls have no idea what the puppets are doing, but all the grown-ups are practically crying. My sister's family saw this same puppet show when they were here over Christmas and I am told that my high-school and college-aged nephews nearly peed their pants they were laughing so hard.

 

  

But what is really obscene is the amount my father tips at the end of the show. I am trying to get out some money to tip, and am fishing in my bills for a 100 rupee note. My father gets there first, handing the puppeteer a 500 rupee note, which is really far too much for the local economy (at $10). To compare: we have been told to tip 500 rupees per day for our driver/guide whom we adore. Or, we could hire a rickshaw driver in New Delhi to pedal us around for seven hours for that price. My mother gets the girls their own -- fully G-rated -- puppets, bargaining the puppeteer to a fair my-husband-just-drastically-overtipped-you discount.

There are two sides to the raging over-tipping debate: my father's side, which is that $2 per person is nothing to see a show and, besides, the $10 means nothing to us but a lot to the puppeteer. Valid arguments but, on the other side, we are supposed to do our best as responsible travelers not to raise prices egregiously on the local economy, thereby ruining it for the locals. Of course we will always pay more than a local, but if the discrepancy is too great, then the local shopkeepers/rickshaw drivers/restaurant owners/puppeteers will only want to sell to/drive around/feed/perform for tourists. I mean, how guilty will we feel if we read in the papers that the children of Rajasthan are suddenly being deprived of pornographic puppetry?