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.

Thali vs. Delhi Belly

We are currently in Jaipur, staying at the Madhuban heritage house, at which the Queen of England once stayed, or so they say. They have a lovely (by Indian standards...) garden where they serve breakfast (as well as show eyebrow-raising puppet shows), and as you can see from the photo, I have good reason to fear that my children are getting spoiled.

I must say that while this is a grand adventure for my kids and parents, it's kind of adventure-lite for me, considering how much of my traveling was done in my twenties and early thirties, with either my brother, my friend Andi, or Anthony, and generally on about $30 a day -- food, lodging, transportation, entry fees, bribes, and souvenirs included. Historically, I have just thrown caution to the wind. Whereas this is more like throwing rupees to the wind. I feel relatively okay about this for myself, and my parents, but fear that my children won't ever understand the joy of sleeping outdoors on a luggage cart at a train station in Germany, simply because one is trying to save the $7 overnight hostel fee. For other examples of the high life to which my children are getting accustomed, see the photos below: high tea at the Imperial Hotel in Delhi, our hotel room in Agra, and one of the many overpriced English-language-menu-with-Chinese-food-option-for-foreigners restaurants at which we dine.

Yes, we dine places that offer Aloo Gobi on one side, and Kung Pao Chicken on the other. And yes, of course I mock my father for ordering from the Chinese menu at each of our restaurants. I must sadly confess that my children eat an awful lot of scrambled eggs. My mother, who has lost her voice for much of the trip, orders just soup or tea everywhere we go. So it's only me ordering Indian food -- "no spicy" in the hopes that my children and parents might actually try and like it. I will say this: when I order well, my children and mother do like much of the Indian food (but my father will stick to his chow mein, thank you very much). At dinner tonight, for our last meal in Jaipur, our table order is typical: one bowl of wonton soup, one Chinese chicken stir fry, one scrambled egg, one chicken dumpling (called a mo-mo), and one "little spicy" chicken tikka masala.

Our favorite meal is at the least fancy restaurant of our trip, today for lunch. It is still very clean and obviously meant for some tourists, since there is an English-language printed menu. But it seems more geared at Indian middle class, and offers the local specialty, a thali (platter with many small dishes on it). In the "fancy" restaurants, they actually have a separate area where our driver eats, and I must say that bit of colonialism irks me each time. In this restaurant, he just sits down and eats with us, which we all prefer. He steers me away from one thali, "No, that is not for you," to the one below, which turns out to be my favorite meal in all of India, and the whole meal costs us $12 for the 6 of us, versus the $30 for the 5 of us (without the driver) that we've been paying at the fancier places. It's a vegetarian meal and is so good that even the girls and my mother keep asking for more and more bites off my plate. It doesn't actually look huge, but in fact there is plenty to share. The girls and our driver order dosa (Indian crepes, basically).

I will admit that between careful ordering and eating, along with brushing our teeth with bottled water, and sterilizing all fruits and vegetables that have been brought into my brother and sister-in-law's house, none of us get even a touch of Delhi Belly during our trip here (and knock wood, only two days to go...). But I'm not 100% convinced it's because we've been eating in fancy restaurants. The worst food poisoning of my life -- and Andi's too, I'm sure -- was when we ate in a so-called "nice" restaurant in Indonesia. It was fancy enough to have electricity and refrigeration, which only meant that instead of making the gado-gado sauce fresh, they re-heated it, and not long enough to kill whatever godawful germs were in it.

Because of that, and the fun of buying things from carts, I am normally a huge street food fan. As is my brother, and sister-in-law, neither of whom have had any street food here at all in the five months they've been living here. In desperation one day, I do have one street food fried-potato thing, but I must admit that while I am good at choosing carts that look quaint and trustworthy in places like Thailand, Indonesia, Peru, and Mexico, here they mostly just look dirty and scary. At one point, while I am shopping for scarves, the girls look longingly at an ice cream cart. Even the scarf shopkeeper, Indian himself, tells them unequivocably "No! You don't want that!"

  

Besides the potato, the only other things we buy from a cart are a coconut and a wrapped/industrially produced ice cream bar. The coconut is safe because there's juice to drink. Tip on coconuts that I learned in Sri Lanka: If there's still liquid in it, it's sterile (since with any hole the liquid would just evaporate). So sterile, in fact, that during WWII in Sri Lanka, they used coconut juice for intravenous liquids during surgery and recovery.

Other food factoids and explanations of the photos below, clockwise: 1) Do not adjust the color on your screen. Carrots in India are red. 2) In India people just live out their lives on the street, and the man below is probably upper-middle class, and using the sidewalk space to make 100 chapatis or naan in the barrel/fire-oven shown. 3) We still don't know what these little green fruits are called, but they're nearly flavorless. A candidate for the least interesting tropical fruit ever. 4) While jack-fruit is delicious when yellow, juicy, and ripe, I apparently don't know how to pick one. This is a young jack-fruit, and therefore more vegetable than fruit.

Leapin' Elephants!

 

Given that it's Leap Day, we feel like there's really no choice: Today is the day we ride an elephant up to the Amber Fort. My mother refuses since she is afraid of heights, slopes, and strange rides (along with speed and cold), effectively ruling out biking down-hill, skiing, hot-air balloons, and now, elephant rides. In a completely unexpected turn of events, my father opts out of the elephant ride, citing the fact that he sat on one in the Bronx Zoo at age four and still remembers it. This from the man who buys Peeps every year at Easter and hides them in the glove compartment.

This is actually my second time on an elephant, having ridden in Thailand in my twenties with my friend Andi, but that's certainly not going to stop me from getting on with my girls! Other than the joy of sharing this adventure with my kids, my favorite part of the ride is actually the fact that our mahut (elephant trainer) is on his cell phone nearly the whole way up. It's the ultimate ad for coverage:"Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? Sorry, the trumpeting is so loud here."

   

Photos at the Amber Fort itself:

 

 

 

Another favorite aspect of the elephant ride is that two different entrepreneurial photographers take our photos and call out to us from the walls on the way up. "Look for me! I'm Tony!" And "Look for me! I'm Ali!" Naturally, I don't actually look for either of them, but on our way out of the fortress, Tony find us. He tries to sell me the photos, which he's already printed out, for 500 rupees, but since he and I both realize it's a sunk cost for him, I give him 100 and we're both happy. More amazing is that after we drive away, we decide we want to pull into a viewing point down at the bottom, well outside the fort. It is there that Ali finds me, and I give him 150 rupees for his photos, since we are  so amazed at the magic of him tracking me down. We still can't figure out how he knows to look for us there, since even we ourselves don't know we'll stop in that particular parking lot till it happens.

Jaipur is known as the Pink City, for obvious reasons having to do with the main palace in town pictured below, part of which is still currently occupied (on occasion, at least) by the local Rajah.

 

  

 

The Pink City is pretty in pink and perfectly pleasant, but frankly we are just as enamored with a temple whose name alone makes it unlikely to every be as popular as the Pink City, the Amber Fort, or the Taj Mahal: "Maharaja Sawai Mansingh II Museum Trust, The City Palace, Jaipur, Gatore Ki Chhatriyan" has fewer tourists, probably because nobody knows how to tell the tuk-tuk driver where they want to go. Consequently, it is very fun to poke around and explore at a leisurely pace without scads of people popping up unexpectedly in front of your camera.

  

 

The only problem with celebrating Leap Day with a six and eight year old on an elephant in India is that it will be hard to top it when they're ten and twelve. I'll have to start my planning soon.