Indian Impressions - First Installment

I'm gradually transcribing a selection of the stuff I wrote in my notebook while we were in India. 

With very little knowledge, one tries hard to understand what one experiences, to fit it into what one does know.

February 10, 2015

Mumbai.

The very name resonates. A vast city. Twenty-million people, all of them out in the street at the same time – or so it appears: selling and buying. The traffic noise is oppressive: constant honking, like birds jockeying for position in the branches of a tree, here I am!

We ran into India's cumbersome bureaucracy upon arrival. I applied for our visas on line and apparently reversed the last 2 digits of Judith's passport number. It took two hours and a phone call to Delhi, and a dozen or more officials, to figure out how to let her in. So we got to the hotel at 12:30 instead of 10:30. After lunch in a very ordinary local restaurant, not catering to tourists, we walked down the main avenue of the Fort neighborhood: Dadabhai Naoroji Road (which people call DN Road), past dozens and dozens of people selling good from tables or blankets spread on the sidewalk. What kind of a living can they make like that?

On the drive in from the airport I was thrilled by the commotion in the street, but as we drove past dilapidated apartment blocks with laundry drying on the railings, I wondered, who lives there? How? Do they have toilets, showers, adequate electricity?

There was an art fair in the Kalaghoda neighborhood, just down the road, and we happened on a free cooking demonstration in the Westside Department Store. Suddenly we were out of the noise, dirt, hustle, and in a totally Western setting, except for women in saris and a surplus of salespeople and guards: wages are low, people are plentiful. The cooking demonstration was in delightful Indian English, with words like “capsicum.”

Later on I wrote a kind of poem about it:

Capsicum, with so little information.

Before the cooking demonstration

In the clean Mumbai department store

In the Indian English it took getting used to

I didn't know what a capsicum was

Pleasant to sit in air-conditioning

Among well-behaved, wealthy people,

And taste samples

Away from streets teeming with the poor

Who always want to sell you something

The word “capsicum” keeps slipping from my mind

Making me suspect incipient dementia

Two charming women who own a trendy restaurant

In a part of Mumbai we never got to

(I wouldn't mind living in Mumbai for a couple of months,

Trying to get a handle on the city)

Cooked and spoke encouraging words

To plump women in silk saris

Who apparently were afraid to cook

They probably have servants in the kitchen

Help is cheap in Mumbai

I got bored with the cookery

And I hate department stores

Privileged tourist that I was,

I walked through the guarded entrance

Unimpeded. Would they let someone in

Who didn't look as if he could afford to buy?

I lingered in the street and bought

A short bansuri from a peddler

*

I can't place the people I see. What caste are they? Are they Hindus? What ethnic group do they belong to? What language are they speaking?

Since many of them speak English well, we could tell each other who we are, if we had enough information and curiosity to ask and answer the right questions.

February 12

After a day in Mumbai:

Too much stimulation.

Too much noise.

Too many smells.

Too many people, too much traffic, too much to look at.

Now we're in Ahmedabad (they pronounce it “Amdabad”) after an uncomfortable overnight train ride. I shared a compartment with three Indian gentlemen and had an open and enjoyable conversation in English, though two of them kept slipping into Gujurati, no help to me or to the Kannada speaker from Bangalore, a fat Muslim engineer.

All three of the men agreed that corruption is the worst problem India faces.

How long would you have to live her to know what to expect when you step out into the street? On the way to the textile museum in Ahmedabad we passed two elephants. Our guide in the textile museum was a severe little woman with a strapped on loudspeaker who rushed us through and treated us like elementary school pupils. I suspect she didn't know English all that well, so she went through her memorized spiel without giving us leeway for questions.

At dinner I told our guide, Durga, a dignified, intelligent woman, whose English is better than perfect, that everyone in India seemed eccentric to me – an impertinent thing to say after only a couple of days in the country – and she took it as a compliment.

It's tempting to look at India as a tangle of problems so severe and snarled that they can never be solved, or to look at India as a creative jumble of improvised and uncoordinated efforts to deal with life as it comes. To the outsider it appears that people accept things as they are (an observation that comes from reading and films more than from the little I've experienced). But under the acquiescence there is intense, energetic striving, immediately visible.

*

We visited Gandhi's ashram. I had not been aware of the severity of his asceticism or of the intense religiosity of his movement. I imagine Britain would have liberated India after World War II whether or not Gandhi had been so influential, because the war depleted her so thoroughly. But that doesn't detract from Gandhi's spiritual stature or from his vision for the nation.

The ashram was full of tourists, almost all of them Indian.

*

On Friday night we went to services at the Magen Abraham synagogue in Ahmedabad.

Until that morning we had no idea there were any Jews there, but our Muslim guide on a tour of the disintegrating old city told us about it when he heard we were from Israel. The large, unsplendid synagogue is directly across the street from a Parsi fire temple, and we were told that nearby are a mosque, a Hindu temple, and a church – a uniquely situated Jewish house of worship. When the synagogue was built in 1934, the community must have been prosperous and hopeful. Now about forty families are left.

*

Our tour is focused on textile arts: weaving, dying, printing, embroidery, and quilting – traditional handicrafts that must find a way to survive in a modernizing society (one weaver told us proudly that his son was studying electrical engineering).