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A Week in India |
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| Jump To : Part I - Welcome to Gandhidham Part II - The American Part III - An Indian Wedding |
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My first indication that India would offer such drastic differences to these United States was when Sanjay, the friend I accompanied there and the groom in the Indian wedding I would attend, realized that I would need toilet paper. We sat at the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, awaiting our connecting flight to Bombay, when he sent a message to his brother to remind him I would need some.
I didn't ask about anything as simple as bathroom facilities and air conditioning before we left because I thought that would only be an insult. Surely a family as affluent as Sanjay's would have the most basic luxuries, and to ask if they had toilet paper or hot water would make me sound like an arrogant American who thinks India is completely backwards. So I just assumed they had at least the most basic luxuries I was accustomed to, and that I would be told in advance if I needed to make special preparations.
As it turns out, it doesn't matter how affluent your family is in India, especially in the remote city Sanjay's family lived. No matter how rich you are, you can't get around the fact that the water does not always run, that electricity is unreliable, and that garbage collection simply does not exist.
When I first stepped into the Bombay airport, I felt the intense nighttime humidity blow dirt and sweat into my face. There were no air conditioners operating to dry or clean the air, only brand new stainless steel fans, indicating the airport had no plan of adding air conditioning any time soon. The long line to get in the country went on forever, as a few immigration officials at the front of a winding line worked to handle the hundreds of people ahead of me. The only group that outnumbered the waiting entrants was the loitering airport workers, holdovers from socialist bureaucratic structures in India, who monopolized the few benches that littered the hallways while they watched the sweating herds.
After finally making it through immigration, we proceeded to wait in this environment for twelve hours, for the once-per-day domestic flight that would take us to our next stop. That stop turned out to be a military base near the Pakistani border. The only airport in that area had been destroyed by a massive earthquake a few years ago, so until it was rebuilt (reconstruction apparently takes quite a long time in India), the military was allowing one domestic flight per day to come in from Bombay. However, the rules for passengers were strict. No pictures were allowed inside, as they could be given to Pakistan as intelligence. The uniformed men in green berets, armed with semi-automatic rifles, made sure that rule was enforced. From the air, the bomb-proof hangars were camouflaged to match the desert ground so that they could not be seen until you came in for a landing. The reality of the tensions with India's neighbor hit home when one of Sanjay's family friends, who we met at the airport, said to me, "From this base, we could drop the first bomb on Pakistan within five minutes." Outside the base gates, one of the armed guards allowed me to take his picture.
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| Businesses like this lined the streets in and around Gandhidham |
From there, Sanjay's father picked us up with two cars, each with a hired driver. One car was for us, the other for our luggage. The ride from the base to Sanjay's home town, Gandhidham, was littered with poverty the likes of which I never saw from this side of the TV screen. Families lined endless miles of street, so poor that they did not even have a tarp to cover their living area on the shoulder of the road. Unclothed children ran along side the street, playing precariously between the dusty roadside and the raw sewage that drained off from more urban areas. I did not want to ask where they attained drinking water.
The few semi-permanent structures that did exist were three-walled wooden shacks with one side open to the street. Most were small businesses waiting for customers that did not exist. I tried to take a few pictures, but I was completely mesmerized by the sight of it all.
I knew the accommodations Sanjay's family would provide would be far better than what I saw, but I wasn't prepared for how drastically Indian life differed from life in the States. Beginning that day, over 48 waking hours since I had left Baton Rouge, I would find out. After an hour of driving through desert poverty, we arrived at his family home.
I put my hands together at my fingertips and said "Namaste" to each of Sanjay's elder family members. They smiled at my Indian gesture and responded with an embracing handshake. Adorned with every color of fabric flowing from her body, Sanjay's mother came to my first. His sister Sonal dressed similarly, but seemed more curious about me than anything else. His brother Subhash, about a year younger than I, greeted me but was more concerned with taking care of the business of receiving guests than with formal greetings. Sanjay's father, known affectionately as "The Lion King" for his stature in the community and the way he treats his cubs, walked and spoke with such an aura of celebration that one almost remembers confetti falling around him in retrospect. We were ushered into their bungalow by a throng of family and servants.
Sparse and modest pictures decorated the home, with only a few Hindu religious symbols scattered about. Two of the rooms in the house had window air conditioners, and in all of my time in India, I did not see a single central a/c unit. Electricity, it seems, is one of the few things in India that costs significantly more there than in the U.S.
Hands, not machines, washed the dishes and clothes. At the time I arrived, three servants were working for the three permanent residents of the house. After later discussion with the family, we determined that the monthly pay of a servant in their house would buy two hours of that servant in the U.S. At those prices, it's no wonder they don't buy a washing machine. Two servants cleaned and prepared food while one sat around and waited until somebody in the family needed to be driven. As far as I could tell, they didn't actually own any cars, as we had a different car and a different driver nearly every time we went anywhere. It seemed they called a personal taxi whenever transportation was needed, but I'm not sure about that. I couldn't follow their conversations well enough to tell.
Driving in Gandhidham is not for the faint of heart. Traffic laws exist, but they are not respected. People drive against oncoming traffic whenever it is convenient. Roads are dominated by motorcycles and auto-rickshaws. At the other size extreme are the large industrial trucks, which have colorfully decorated bumpers instructing traffic to honk if they want to pass. That is the one rule everybody obeys. Horns are an absolute necessity and are used constantly. Not a minute of driving ever goes by without the driver honking at something. I had one driver whose car was equipped with multiple horns, each accessed by a complex rigging of nobs and switches. My only guess was that he made himself seem like multiple cars to convince people to move out of his way faster. To top it off, speed limits exist, but they are unnecessary because cows and pigs walk among the traffic, putting to rest any hope of accelerating past 40 mph.
One might ask why cows and pigs roam among the roadways. Simple. They provide the garbage collection. Gandhidham, a city of about 300,000 people, does not provide garbage collection services. Instead, the cows and pigs eat whatever is possible, and the rest flies around indefinitely. Not a single open area in the city was left uncovered by black and white trash bags, which had long been ripped open and ravaged by the various animals looking for food. Even vast plains in the desert outside the city looked like a shiny black and white checkerboard from a distance.
The waste from these animals combined with the raw sewage that collected near the streets, some of it recycled by the animals themselves. The sewage and trash gave rise to flies that buzzed everywhere. Even deep in the recesses of buildings, the flies managed to find their way. They were tolerated by inhabitants, even as they crawled over food on a dinner table, battling for territory with the large black ants that rose from the ground. Many flies bit me, leaving red welts wherever they could. I imagine others received the same treatment from them, but I was the only one with skin light enough to show the evidence.
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| People like this on the roadside didn't quite know what to make of me |
That white skin also provided me with countless stares. In this remote desert city, nobody was used to seeing somebody like me. Some of the beggars looked as if they wanted to approach me, but were too mesmerized by the sight to move. They just stared, keeping a safe distance. Eventually I got used to the fact that no matter where I went, half the people around me would stop what they were doing and start talking to each other about me in a language I could not understand. By the end of my trip, I was still the only white guy I'd seen in the city.
As dusk came and the relentless heat trailed off just enough to bear, Subhash asked me if I wanted to run errands with him, in preparation for the wedding. I decided I should see the city, so I followed. But as it turns out, Subhash has a motorcycle, which I was expected to ride with him. The images that flew threw my head were of the dark, chaotic streets, with surprise vehicles moving against traffic, with witless animals jumping in front of motorcycles, with the desert dust blowing in my face, and of the lack of medical care when my unprotected head finally hit the pavement. So naturally, since I came for at least some semblance of adventure, I hopped on.
Riding so close to the street environment gave the impression of driving at racetrack speeds, even when we slowed to a crawl to dodge obstacles. The way people drive there is not based on what you "should" do but rather what you possibly "could" do. As such, he dodged in and out of traffic, often squeezing between cars so tightly that I had to bring my knees close in, only to feel the dusty wheel of an auto rickshaw graze my jeans. At one point, we missed being sideswiped by a cement truck by maybe a foot at most. This is apparently normal.
We pulled up on the dusty shoulder of the road to a man who was providing the ice cream for the wedding. After learning that I was American, he insisted that Subhash and I follow him into his freezer. That made me a bit nervous, but Subhash seemed to trust him, so I followed. He gathered us inside with him among walls of ice cream, pulled the door closed behind us, and started pointing frantically at the freezers cooling the room. I looked puzzled at him. He motioned to look where his finger was pointing. It was a metal, red, white and blue label that said, "Made in the USA." He just wanted to tell me how happy he was with his American-made freezer.
Needless to say, the motorcycle ride around Gandhidham was a thrill, and was the only thing that could have woken me up after a couple days of traveling. After some more errands, Subhash took us back to their home. There, the Lion King asked me to drink some whiskey with him. As he poured it, he said that I was their son now. To further solidify this idea, a few days later when Subhash and I went to run more errands, he gave all the money to me since I was the slightly elder son. My wallet would not properly close for all the 100-rupie notes he stuffed in it. Also on that day, I found out that it's unheard of for the children to drink in the presence of their elder family members. In retrospect, I don't know how to interpret the Lion King's offer of whiskey.
That night when it was time to get ready for bed, I was introduced to the bathroom and issued the toilet paper that they specially arranged for me. Apparently, Indians instead use a series of buckets, pitchers, water, and their bare left hand. I still do not know exactly how the whole process works, and it was perhaps the only aspect of their culture I did not try to learn more about.
They don't take showers, either. They fill a bucket with water and use a sponge, while standing directly on the tile bathroom floor, as there is no distinct shower area. Water is too scarce there to indulge in the two long, hot showers I take every day in America. If a foreigner is not careful, he or she may confuse the toilet bucket and the shower bucket, using the toilet pitcher instead of the shower sponge, or vice versa. I am not necessarily saying I actually did this, just that if you go to India, you may want to get your host to clear up which is which before you engage in various bathroom activities.
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| One of the main roads in Gandhidham; you haven't experienced life until you've sped through it at night on a moped |
I then found out what the "You'll have a room" promise means in Indian culture. As an American, I hear, "There will be a room just for you, where you can keep your things and lock the door when you want." But what an Indian means when he says that is, "There will be a place for you to sleep, though it may not be the same place every night, and you will share it with other people, and there is no such thing as privacy, so you'll never be able to lock the door." I was told that I could sleep in one of the two air conditioned rooms that night, but I wouldn't be alone. That was fine. I was asleep within seconds of by head hitting the pillow, ignorant of who was to join me later.
The next morning I awoke to the sight of Subhash dressing and the sound of Mig jets flying overhead. "Military exercises," he said. "They do them a lot near the Pakistani border."
Over a breakfast of yogurt and bread, I found myself in my first cultural tight spot. They asked if I wanted to plan to attend a Christian church on Sunday. I said no, that I didn't even go to church in America. Flabbergasted, Sonal, Sanjay's sister, exclaimed, "You don't pray?!" Everybody looked at me. The Lion King, who was walking around the living room, stopped and hovered at the table.
I gulped down a mouthful of yogurt, contemplating how I would reply. I had to think about the definition of "praying" by Hindu India's cultural standards. I decided that really, what I do qualifies. I said, "Well.... Yes, I pray." My brain struggled to qualify that statement with my next breath.
Sensing my distress, the Lion King walked near and set his rotund body down on the chair next to me, placing his hand on my shoulder. In a halfway informing, halfway agreeing tone, he said, "Christian God, Muslim God, Hindu God.... they are all the same God." He stopped to make sure I could understand his broken English. He playfully punched my chest at my heart and said, "God is in here." He looked back at the family. His word being law, they stood down. The servant, who didn't even know English but could tell something was going on, scurried to the kitchen. The conversations went on as normal, as the Lion King patted my back and returned to his previous activities.
While most of the family went on to make wedding preparations, I followed Subhash on more errands so I could learn more about Indian life. He said that a boy of about twelve who worked for their hotel had cut his hand on broken glass, and that we were taking him to get medical care. We climbed in an old truck and headed to the hotel, where we were to pick up the boy. His right hand held a bandage and his face held fear. I couldn't blame him, since I would be worried too if my hand was open to infection in a place like this. He took notice of me like most people did, but was too concerned with his hand to care.
We arrived at a small doctor's office of a type I have not seen in America. It consisted of two rooms. The first was a small waiting room with a receptionist, only marginally larger than a walk-in closet. The adjacent room—the air conditioned one—of about the same size contained both the doctor's desk and an examination table. That room seemed clean enough, though it did not have the same sterile white feeling that is pervasive in U.S. medical facilities. The color actually made it seem a bit warmer and probably puts patients more at ease. We were taken in ahead of waiting patients, though I am not sure if that was because of the severity of the injury, or just because of the stature of the family that was requesting the care.
The doctor laid the boy down on the examination table and covered his eyes with a cloth so that he would not be able to see his hand when the bandages were taken off. I peeked, and saw a clean slice in the flesh of his hand just below is thumb that appeared to go straight to the bone. The doctor bandaged him back up and said that he would try to get the boy back in a working condition as soon as possible. Subhash rightly replied that we were more concerned with getting him healed than getting him back to work.
The doctor sent us to a medical facility that appeared to be their version of a small hospital. It was a white building in the middle of a dusty yard. A red pay phone was on the receptionist's desk, and the receptionist had to feed it money to make calls. I am not sure of the economics which made that necessary.
The boy's hand was stitched up, but he refused to get a tetanus shot. Subhash forced him, in spite of the boy's many tears. He said in Hindi that if the boy did not get the shot, his hand could get infected and have to be chopped off.
We dropped him off and Subhash instructed him to keep his hand elevated and to stay inactive for a while. We later saw him walking about the dirty streets of Gandhidham.
Eventually we arrived at a tailor's shop downtown where our clothes were to be made, and saw the rest of Sanjay's immediate family there. I picked out fabric for the traditional Indian dress I would wear to the wedding, as well as the stitching to sew on by hand. The Lion King offered to have a custom silk suit made for me. I looked around blankly at Sanjay and at the family to see if that was something I should accept. It seemed like huge gift to me. After all, a custom suit in the U.S. would be frightfully out of my budget (or the budget of almost anybody, for that matter). The consensus seemed that I was supposed to take it if it was offered by him, and even they seemed impressed that he offered. I looked at a catalog of styles, and the tailor soon took all my measurements. Two days later, I would have a silk suit cut just for me.
After all the measurements for everybody were finalized, a frail old man came out from the back of the store. Sanjay leaned down to me and whispered, "He's the master tailor. He's been doing this his entire life, and all the stitching on your dress will be done by him." He discussed the measurements and fabrics briefly with the other men who ran the shop, and then went back to wherever he worked.
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| The Servant's Son |
Later that day I met more of Sanjay's family, and eventually their main servant's son, a boy about six years old. He was perhaps the most beautiful child I've seen in my life. Always quiet and well-mannered, he managed to communicate with me just fine in spite of not knowing any English. I shook his hand the first time I met him, and after that, he reached out to shake my hand every single time he came near me. Sometimes in pained me to think of the kind of life he would go on to lead.
Sanjay had apparently told his family that I was used to showers instead of just a decent sponge bath. The Lion King arranged for me to use a working shower in his hotel that night. It was quite welcome, in spite of the water being unreliable and cold, especially since it gave me a chance to wash my hair. I still do not know how people accomplish hair washing in a sponge bath. But like most bathroom activities, Indians seem to be unable to understand why anybody could possibly need more than five minutes to do everything imaginable. After a brief but welcome shower at the hotel, Subhash frantically called me out, rushing me on to an event already in progress.
"Van, hurry," Subhash kept repeating from outside my door. "It has started. They are waiting on you!"
I had no idea what was waiting on me, but I hastily dressed and followed him up the hotel stairs. With hair still wet, I followed him into the banquet room that had been prepared all day. Staring back at me were perhaps hundreds of colorfully dressed Indians. Some of them giggled to each other when they saw me. Some smiled. Some just looked confused, like they wanted to know what I was doing there. At the front of the room Sanjay and some of his closest friends and family danced to a live Indian band playing at near-deafening volume. They motioned me to come up there with them. The crowd stared at me, wondering if I was actually going to do it.
I felt it an honor to be invited into this inner circle, and didn't see how I could deny the request. Indian culture involves peer pressure on an entirely new level. I slowly made my way through the crowd, who were all sitting on the floor so tight that they touched. Each one stared up at me as I squeezed past. When I finally made it up to the front of the room, they pulled me into the tiny dancing area surrounded by fans. My arm across Sanjay's shoulders, I started matching his foot motions as I tried to learn the dance on the fly with a roomful of guests watching. It was remarkably similar to Middle-Eastern dance, which I'd done before. Plus the moves were simple enough so that anybody should have been able to grasp them with just a little practice. The style was simple but energetic, with most of the motion concentrated in the legs and most of the mood expressed through the arms.
Between the unrelenting intensity of the dance and the pervasive desert heat, sweat started pouring down my face, more so than the more accustom dancers. But it's times like this that the heat becomes a valued part of the moment rather than another annoyance. The line between discomfort and euphoria was merely a difference in my degree of surrender to the culture, like the point where the loud whine of the shehnais moved from hurting my ears to providing a baseline for my soul. This activity was a perfect metaphor for the idea that I had to accept this culture for what it was rather than judge it through the eyes of my experience.
The elder members of the family, following tradition, brought rupees to the dance floor, waved them around the dancers' heads, and then gave them to the band. When your body is overheating and sweat is drenching your clothes, when the silk shirts on the men and the flowing saris on the women fill your eyes with every color of the spectrum, when ancient instruments cry out from their depths, the feeling of those rupees cutting the air around your face is the final piece needed for a total saturation of the senses. In this little room, using the same techniques as a thousand years ago, these Indians created a sensory experience more powerful than the best pyrotechnics in the world, more complete than the West's greatest multimedia specialists, bigger than the biggest movie Hollywood ever produced. It was, transcending all cultures, ultimately human.
That night, I started feeling sick. At first I thought it was just a stomach ache, maybe from all the motion and food. But soon the aches turned to cramps, and my body started working completely incorrectly. I'm about to get graphic, so if you don't like that sort of thing, you may want to skip the next paragraph.
Imagine you've been overcome by diarrhea and crippling intestinal cramps. Now imagine you're staying in one of the hottest areas on Earth with little or no air conditioning, and no hope of escaping the heat. Realize that whenever you have to go anywhere, you'll be traveling in hot car with windows open, with no shock absorbers for the dilapidated roads, smelling the stench of raw sewage and manure that permeates the air. And when you finally get to where you're going, they try to force feed you thick buttermilk with little black things floating in it. It's their universal remedy. The best part? Remember, Indians don't use toilet paper. So that means that no matter where I went, I would have to make sure I attempted to bring some with me discretely in a bag. But that's not always easy when your hosts insist that you don't bring anything anywhere, since they should be taking care of everything for you. Thus, you'll almost always end up not being able to go to the bathroom at all, until you finally get somewhere that you've stashed toilet paper. But then there is no guarantee, since you don't know if you'll even have access to that room when you get there, because who knows who they may have given it to by then, or if somebody who has a key to that room will even be around. Thus you may find yourself in the precarious situation of having to try to sleep having held in a day's worth of nausea, in the oppressive heat of the night, with the hope that the next day, by the grace of God, you may be able to gain access to a bathroom with a stash of toilet paper. Compounding the problem is that diarrhea leads to water loss, which you don't really need since you're sweating like a hog all day long and can only drink the bottled water supply, which does not necessarily exist everywhere.
As the sickness got worse, I couldn't eat any more, much to their dismay. The resulting lack of nutrition and the slow progression toward dehydration made me extremely weak. I would try to eat what little I could to satisfy the family's need to feed me, but it didn't stay inside me very long. All I could stomach was water, and then only very slowly. I didn't actually want water, but I forced myself to drink it because I knew how bad I needed it.
Sometimes, I started to get a little scared. My body was crashing fast and I could hardly communicate with anybody. But my hosts were extraordinarily accommodating when they could actually figure out what I wanted. At one point, eldest members of the family, and thus the most senior ones there, let me take a nap in their air conditioned hotel room. Several people would come in to check on me or bring me medicine they insisted I take. Several times, the servant's son would come in to pay me a visit, but I would try to get him out as soon as possible because I did not want him to get in trouble if anybody saw him coming in on their guest. Eventually, everybody left me alone.
My body trying to recover, that nap quickly turned into a hard sleep through the night. When I finally awoke the next morning, I looked down to see an eldest member of the family sleeping on a floor mat next to the bed which I had taken. They had not even woken me up. I felt both horrified and touched. To express my feelings to them would have been hard in my most fluent English, but with the language barrier, all I knew how to say was, "Thank you." A testament to Indian culture built on respect and obligation, no other words were necessary.
Sanjay's aunt once told me that their tradition called for treating their guest as their God. In every way they knew how, the family lived that tradition. From the moment I saw that grey head lying on the floor by my bed, I knew what their obligation to each other meant, and what provided the strength in a seemingly indestructible culture. I was obligated from that moment forward to give whatever of myself I could muster to continue participation in this wedding and in this family.
This is not to say that they could not have provided medical care. As it turns out, I was surrounded by some of the most qualified doctors in the world, including the personal physician to the Prime Minister of India. Perhaps they did not have the best medical infrastructure in the world, but they would have committed their services to me at a moment's notice if my hosts asked for it.
Whenever any member of the family picked up on my needing anything, they were there to provide it. I remember several occasions where a throng of elder members would surround my pale, thinning form, trying to escape the heat. One would try to discern anything I needed in whatever broken English he or she could muster. And then when it was finally determined, they would start a firestorm of conversation, all discussing what I needed and how to provide it. Then, in a flash, they would disperse, commanding small armies of servants far and wide to bring me water, reposition a fan, prepare a better chair, find a cooler spot, ask a doctor for advice, and maybe bring some vegetables just in case I decided I could eat something.
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| Indian families form bonds so strong that many Westerners do not understand them. |
What preserved my sanity in this strange land was, appropriately enough, a culture strange to me. It was built on unquestioned resolve to support each other, on the idea that no lengths are too great for your guests or your family, and that there is no such thing as inconvenience when you take care of a neighbor. No matter how bad I felt, no matter how much weight I lost, I knew that they would find a way to move mountains for me if I asked for it. I knew that with a mere utterance from my lips, they would have brought the world's greatest doctors to my bedside, they would have put the full force of a dedicated staff to living only for my well-being. They would have had servants waiting on me night and day, and when I was finally well enough to ask to go home, they would have made it happen. They would have commanded whatever drivers and airplanes and camels and whatever else it took to get me to Mumbai. And when I was there, their collective will would have parted the monsoon season from the sky long enough for a silver bird to fly me back west. And after this display of unrelenting service to their fellow man, they would have topped it off by feeling joy that I was happy, without regard to the fact that it took leaving them to make it happen. In this knowledge, I never worried for my safety, in spite of everything I knew could go wrong.
Coming from a country where we embrace looking out for yourself first, this aspect of Indian culture amazed me. I could not deny that it worked.
At one point, I sat in a chair in an air conditioned corner, but still sweating, and hardly able to muster the strength to stand. The servant's son, a boy of maybe six years old who could not speak English, the same boy who extended his hand to shake mine every time he saw me, brought me a cup of water without a word. If I'd had enough moisture left in my body by then, I probably would have cried.
As an American intent on preserving my individuality, I went into India with certain walls around me. But India does not attack walls; it extends hands. You will feel perfectly secure in your individuality until one of those hands blindsides you, like the moment you awake to see a frail old body that has given up its bed to you. And from that moment, your walls crumble not from external forces, but from the awesome power of your soul trying to escape and return the gesture. You do not embrace them out of love and familiarity as we do in America. Instead, you embrace them in an acceptance of your mutual vulnerability, which is something far more human and far more potent.
Love, even in a marriage, comes and goes. We rarely see it in its idealized eternal form as we in the West were always brought up to imagine. Married couples may fall in and out of love several times over their lives. But in the end, what binds them and Indian families alike are the trials of raising children, the fear of what comes tomorrow, and the obligation to those who would save their mortal bodies. Their culture acknowledges a truth both heretical in the West and integral to arranged marriages; that love is not a prerequisite. If anything, it is merely a side effect that makes the friction in binding people a little less painful.
These thoughts first coalesced when three generations of family happened together in the air conditioned hotel room in which I was doing my best to stay sedentary. I feared that they would start discussing what to do about me again, which made me feel like an imposition, not to mention the fact that so many days of human interaction had stressed my introverted personality to its limits. But instead, after talking amongst each other in Hindi, one of them pulled out a book of songs and started to sing. The others sat perfectly quiet and listened, relaxing to the music. The tone and mood of the song was what an American might call a spiritual. When he was done, another started singing, then another, then another. Though I do not know what the words meant, I guessed that some were of love, some of melancholy, and perhaps some of war. Grandparents, parents and children all took their turn, sometimes equipped with a book of words, sometimes only with memory. All of them sang perfectly. I thought, "Now this, I can handle." I sat silent, the exotic music soothing my nerves. In reflection, I am amazed at how well listening to the songs of a family—for these few days, my family—would make me forget about my health and India's heat.
Eventually, they requested that I share a song, but between my illness and my complete lack of talent, I refused. They reiterated that singing in English would be fine with them, and to stress that point, one of the elders decided to demonstrate. He bowed his head for a moment and held his fingertips in the air, waiting for the words to be delivered from memories of long ago. His eyes still at the floor, he raised his head, and his lips produced a perfect grandfatherly rendition of Frank Sinatra. The others smiled silently as they had with all the other songs. I sat amazed at the surreal experience, surrounded by generations of Indians, all enjoying Frank Sinatra sung in a thick British-Indian accent.
Perhaps intentionally, songs provided the perfect calm and unity before the storm of a wedding. Though we were about to celebrate a new union, sitting in that room felt more like a tribe the night before battle. Maybe they were preparing for the emotion that was to take place. I found that Indians tend to express emotion in their traditions and cultural institutions more than through their words. With everything I had felt in the many ways they touched my life there, I can only imagine their emotional experience from the marriage of their children. As best I can tell, they were not losing a child to a wife, but rather gaining a daughter. In that sense, an Indian family experiences for a wedding what a mother's body experiences in a pregnancy. With the knowledge that their family would put the entirely of its being to give this new daughter all the love and dedication of which it was capable, it's no wonder that the wedding must be preceded by moments of song and days of ceremony. The family was about to give birth.
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| Family members talk about the upcoming wedding; the Lion King smiles in the background, as always |
This is not to say that they minded going through a wedding. If anything, they tried to have as many as they could possibly throw together. The question most asked of me while in India was, "Are you married?" And upon finding out that I wasn't, they would immediately ask if I saw any Indian girls that interested me. My typical answer was "Not yet," which really meant no, but left an exciting possibility open in their minds. The most notable offer was from a very senior family member who, after finding out I was available, told me, "If you see any single girl here—any girl—that you like, you tell me, and I will deliver her as your wife. Indian girls are very faithful, you know. They will stay dedicated to you no matter what." My first thought was, "That's horrible, how can he promise another human being to me?!" My second immediate thought was, "Wow, that's a pretty good deal."
Several times they even told me that if I found one I liked before the wedding, they could have the Hindu priest go ahead and marry us, since everything was set up anyway. I'm not sure if they were serious.
After several days of ceremonies and preparations, the actual wedding day was upon us. With music and fanfare, Sanjay was dressed in an elaborate outfit that included flowing crimson silk, gold trim and a religious crown. Sanjay left to see his bride for the first time since their initial meeting. I donned the traditional silk dress and slippers that had been sewn for me, to the delight of family that saw me. Sanjay's mother smiled and gave me her version of a thumbs-up.
Three-thousand guests were invited to the wedding and reception at a resort that was completely rented out by Sanjay's family. Chairs were set out on a grassy field, and chefs serving all kinds of food arranged themselves in a line of tables as far as the eye could see. An ornate temple-like roofed area without walls was built for the actual wedding to take place. Across the field towered an elaborate stage dressed in rich reds and gold, with two thrones at its center and smaller chairs extending out to both sides.
I congregated with some of the guests, mostly men, at the resort gates to wait for Sanjay's arrival. Some of them set out the kind of fire crackers that are illegal in the States. A moving platform of loudspeakers was placed at the gates so that when the car came, the music would precede the couple into the resort.
Finally, the car arrived and stopped behind the music cart. Excitement ensued. Men scrambled to light firecrackers in the car's path. Another man stepped up to the music cart and began singing into the microphone, his voice broadcasting across the resort fields like an air raid siren. Everybody, perhaps fifty of us in all, gathered in front of the singer and began dancing and cheering, with a few scouts who went out ahead to light more fire crackers in our path. All together, the whole entourage started moving as slow as possible into the resort. I used all the energy I could muster to continue dancing with them, with music screaming behind and explosions booming ahead. Whenever a new series of explosions started, I usually managed to dance myself in front of the servant's son to shield him from the shrapnel, because I really hated the thought of what might happen to his eyes with the medical care available to him. He managed to stay behind me pretty well, though sometimes he peeked around to watch.
It took us some twenty minutes to finally make it down a driveway that was perhaps a tenth of a mile. At the end, The Lion King waited for us, his sweat-moistened silk dress flowing in the desert wind. He led us into the fields where countless guests watched us arrive, moving to catch a glimpse of the couple's car. Sanjay, his bride-to-be, and his sister all waved to me from the car as they moved ahead of us.
The music stopped. The crowd dispersed and made its way toward the wedding temple like a painted ocean of silk finding its way to harbor. I took a seat near the temple to watch the ceremony up close, but the family later requested that I sit inside it. Sanjay and Sona, his bride, sat on the floor around a small fire pit, where for hours they repeated chants and fed the fire at the priest's direction.
What amazed me most about the whole ordeal was how much chaos surrounds the event. Children play, cell phones ring, guests eat, everybody talks. The only point of serenity seemed to be the temple itself, which was sometimes interrupted by children who would run up to poke their heads among the bride and groom. At one point, the priest even stopped in the middle of the ceremony, looked at me, and asked if I was American. He then proceeded to explain to me in English what was he was saying while the couple waited patiently for the wedding to continue. I looked around after he was done and nobody even seemed to care. This kind of informality juxtaposed against rich tradition left me constantly amazed.
The wedding ended quietly. The priest pulled me aside to express his excitement over the concept of marriage and what it means to a couple. I told him I enjoyed the event, which brought elated exuberance to his face. Everybody started congratulating the couple and getting their pictures taken with them. I followed suit and placed myself between the two, about to place my arms across their shoulders, American style. Remembering what I observed about sex relations there, I paused and looked at the new husband for permission to place my arm on his wife. He replied, "Just this once." We all smiled for the camera.
The couple moved on to the stage where their thrones awaited. I tried to eat what little I could to mingle with everybody. People began bringing their gifts up to the stage to deliver them to the couple. I decided to retrieve mine from the front desk clerk, where I'd stashed it. I brought it up to the stage and presented it to the bride. They thanked me and the family asked me to take a seat on the stage.
I sat down and looked out over the silken sea that was growing by the minute, filled by the river pouring in the front gates. Where I sat, I was the first person guests saw when they walked onto the stage. If they looked like they wanted to meet me, I stood up and greeted them. Many of them just smiled, but some stopped to ask me questions, including if I was married (and if not, that there was still time).
After some hours, the couple walked to sit at the head of a long table, where they invited me to sit with the closest inner-circle of both families. The crowd of thousands radiated around the table, eating at their seats. The guests at the table made every attempt to force me to eat more. A senior family member pointing out the background music said, "Do you know what that singer is saying? He is encouraging you to share in your friend's joy. How can you share if you won't even eat his food?" I finally accepted some vegetables and mango ice cream.
Some teenage girls, members of Sona's family, giggled at me trying to eat. They later got me to sit with them and picked my brain about what I think of Indian women.
As the reception ended, we went back to Sanjay's house. A room was prepared for the new couple. I ended up going to the family's hotel and sleeping with some others on the floor of the banquet hall. I talked about America and India with a man who slept near me, until we soon fell asleep. One thing I will say about India is that no matter what the conditions, I was worn so out at the end of every day that I had no trouble sleeping.
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| Eunuchs play a ceremonial role |
When I went back to the house the next morning, some guests arrived that I never imagined I would have seen there.
I was talking to some family in a room in Sanjay's home when Sanjay came in and said, "Hey Van, want to see some eunuchs?"
"Eunuchs? Like.... Eunuchs?"
"Yeah. You know. Eunuchs."
I curiously followed him out, and in his living room stood three people dressed like women but with not completely feminine faces. They took notice of me but continued with their talking and telling of fortunes to the family.
Sanjay sat with me and explained that eunuchs in their culture were honored and brought good luck. At the same time, family and eunuchs alike maintained an air of humor about the whole situation with laughing and ever-present smiles. The eunuchs had the same body language, facial expressions and voice inflections as drag queens in America, though they were speaking a different language. They loved to giggle and dance and tell fortunes. One of them told me my fortune, saying I would marry a rich woman soon. She then proceeded to ask if she could hug me good bye. When she did, she became giggly and flustered. I think it was the first time she ever touched a white person, but I'm not sure.
Most of the day was spent bidding farewell to wedding visitors, and closing out all the business from the events the day before. The next day would be my last full day with Sanjay's family. As much as I was amazed and delighted by my experiences, the pressures of the trip were mounting on me fast. First, I knew I was a person who required some privacy and alone time, but I didn't realize how much I needed it. After several days into the trip, I was starting to feel somewhat like mental health patient in a cruel psychological experiment of what happens when you take a compulsively orderly, private person, and throw them into an environment of public chaos. Second, on the health front, my body was deteriorating quickly. I was in constant pain and had been losing one to two pounds per day since I arrived. I didn't have that much weight to spare.
I didn't really realize the psychological implications until that night, when I sat outside with friends and family, talking about the wedding. One of them asked me how an Indian wedding differed from an American one. I first went into the diplomatic response, about how the Indian wedding was so much larger, more colorful, and more beautiful than any American wedding I had ever seen. And that was the truth. But then I started talking about order. And as I went on, I became more emphatic in explaining how nobody at an American wedding would stand for children peering over the priest's shoulder, or cell phones constantly ringing, or all the guests talking. And as I went on more, I realized I was explaining it like a Nazi general, obsessed with discipline. My hands were chopping the air with every "no." "No running, no eating, no talking, no cell phones, no chaos." Of course, the other guests did not seem to mind, as it was the first time I was speaking with the passion to which they were accustom.
I continued talking about order as I swatted away flies, denied requests to feed me, and battled the cramps shooting through me. A relaxed but impassioned group of Indians watched while stuffing their mouths with endless plates of food. I imagine it was a pretty funny sight.
In thinking back on that, I realize how much my society is built on trust of certain things happening. First and foremost, we trust that there will be order. We trust that people generally follow traffic laws, that people will not break in line, that the lights will turn on when we flip a switch, that the toilets will flush, and that business doors will be open at certain hours. None of this necessarily holds true in Gandhidham. The people who live there had adapted to it. They were accustomed to dealing with unrelenting heat with no electricity, in hot box houses, with fickle plumbing. I, however, complain about the fact that the path from my front door to my car is not air conditioned.
That night, I fell asleep to the sound of the family still talking outside.
Up until this point, I had tried to keep my problems to myself because of the wedding. When you're surrounded by hundreds of people preparing to receive thousands of guests in a once-in-a-lifetime experience of cultural catharsis, your individual problems suddenly don't seem very significant. But all that changed on my last full day there.
After riding around the city with Subhash, my body's last necessary moisture escaped into the desert. No matter how much I was drinking, it wasn't enough. We stopped to have dinner with some friends of his family, and when I got out of the truck, my body almost collapsed. I stood for a moment in the shade trying not to be noticed, until it was time to go inside. I asked for some water, and I knew I needed it fast. But they didn't have any bottled water, and they said that whatever they did have would not be taken well at all by my body. So they sent a servant out to buy some mineral water.
One of the men there tried to get me to eat, but the mere thought of food was making me want to throw up. After he kept insisting, I finally leaned over to him and whispered, "I'm really, really, really sick. I can't eat." Probably on the verge of tears, I think he realized I really couldn't eat. They started talking amongst themselves about me, until one of them asked if I wanted to lay down. That I accepted.
The owner of the house led me up to an air conditioned bedroom. Soon, Sonal brought some medicine and told me I had to drink it. Reluctantly I did, and it seemed to help some. Then, miraculously, everybody actually left me alone. I couldn't sleep, but I stared at the ceiling, completely exhausted. For the first time since I'd left America, I was in silence. All I could hear was the faint sound of servants' footsteps across a distant marble hallway. My body was too weak to do very much, but I could feel my mind trying to repair itself. It was the first time I had a moment where I was not dealing with some kind of intense interaction. It was the first time I could regenerate.
A couple of hours and a liter of water later, I emerged back downstairs, no doubt visibly a lot better. They gave me two scoops of mango ice cream, which I ate out of fear that my body would fail further for lack of calories. Sanjay talked to me away from the others, and I told him I'd almost passed out. I didn't want to introduce this for people to deal with, but I thought it would probably cause a much bigger problem if I actually did pass out. Soon we left, bringing one of Sanjay's uncles—a doctor—with us.
When we got back to Sanjay's house, the doctor pulled me aside and made me describe all my symptoms in detail. He gave me some electrolyte powder and prescribed a regimen of what to eat and when. That night Sonal made me some tomato soup from scratch. It was the first time in my life I'd had homemade tomato soup, and it was the best I ever tasted.
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| A guard stationed at the military base where I left Sanjay's family |
The behavior of the family toward me changed. Suddenly, they were much quieter, and seemed willing to leave me alone. I'm not sure, but I suspicion Sanjay talked to them and explained the cultural gulf between us, that I might actually need time alone and that I wouldn't feel neglected. They told me that for my last night there, they would give me my own air conditioned room in their hotel. I verified what "my own" meant, and as it turns out, it actually meant that I would be alone, and be able to lock the door. This was truly a sacrifice for them, not because of the material cost, but because of the little piece of their culture they had to let go to make me happy. Subhash dropped me off there and told me they would pick me up in the morning. He gave me a room, he let me keep the coveted roll of toilet paper that I carried around with me, and he let me lock the door. It was one of the few rooms that had a working shower, and it felt so good, even if it was cold. I collapsed on the bed and stared at the ceiling. For the next few hours, I continued to stare, with a sporadic tear trickling out the corner of my eye. I wasn't crying. I was just finally absorbing everything. All the images and sounds from my trip were slowly starting to make sense as they built into a higher awareness that I could achieve through reflection. I turned out the light and fell dead asleep, with Gandhi's biography to one side and a packet of electrolyte power to the other.
The next morning I awoke, showered, and went downstairs. The staff of desk clerks perked up. I pointed to their telephone and said "Subhash." They all jumped to attention at once, as if it took the whole army of them to dial his number. My ride was soon to be there.
When I arrived back at Sanjay's house, we did not have much time before we left for my flight out of Gandhidham. Sonal already had some more tomato soup ready for me. I know I was a great deal better looking by this time. I fear they thought it was because I was so happy to leave, but in actuality, it was only because I finally had time alone to recuperate (not to mention a little medicine).
We bid our goodbyes. Sanjay and the Lion King drove me to the airport, an hour or so away through the same roadside shacks that had brought me to their home. I hugged them both, happy to be going home, but regretting that I wouldn't experience more of their life.
Going out alone as the only foreigner in site, I was frisked several times at the military base and received a lot of interesting stares. When I got to Mumbai, I tried to find where to situate myself for the twelve hour layover, while endless streams of salesmen tried to pitch me a tour and hotel room. I was seriously tempted to take one up on it, but I thought the last thing I needed was to be left alone at the mercy of a stranger who saw me as dollar signs, especially when I was so sick and so close to getting home.
I passed much of the time of the layover after striking up a conversation with somebody wearing a "Geaux Tigers" t-shirt, indicative of my alma mater. It turns out his former roommate lives in my apartment building.
Once my plane touched down in Washington, my body began improving. I waited my turn in the immigration line, not remembering being so impressed at how incredibly orderly American airports are. When I walked up, an official scanned my passport and said, "Welcome home, sir."
I replied with the casual American, "Thanks."
But as I began to walk off, I remembered the immense sincerity of the place I had just been. I stopped, turned around, looked back at him and said with a respectful nod, "Thank you. It's good to be back." And with that, I was home.
Copyright © Van Goodwin, 2003 Last updated 2003-09-16 at 07:11 GMT Contact Van