Disclaimer: What follows is my personal recollection of part of the month that my girlfriend and I spent traveling across India last autumn. This is in no way intended to be a synopsis of the entire country or the vast mosaic of people within it. Indeed, I am sure any such compendium would be overly ambitious and likely ostentatious. Certainly an exhaustive account of Bharat with its many nuances and surprises is impossible.
On our first trip outside the U.S. as a couple, K. and I followed our shadows eastward into purpling saffron clouds, to India.
Delhi appears around us as the plane touches down, materializing all at once from the metallic blue haze. The instant the cabin doors unseal, the air perceptibly takes on ten pounds. Neither K. nor I mentions this as we are already fighting.
If India is equal parts fever and dream, the former concentrates in the nation’s capital.
I begin sweating the very moment we step foot outside the airport and do not stop for three weeks. Our friend A., who we have never met before in person, appears in front of us the second we exit customs. Twenty-four hours later we are sitting in his family’s bedroom in Noida, licking basmati from our fingers and singing “Happy Birthday” to his 8-year-old son.
Though our New Delhi hotel is billed four stars, we sleep on what seem to be stacks of plywood made up to look like beds, and bathe with a bucket that catches the cold water that leaks from the shower head. At night, we step lightly past not-quite-live-in employees dozing on the stairs out onto the roof, where the lights of the hotel reflect back at us from the particulate in the air. The city is intoxicating, the staff is cordial, the food is plentiful, and all are kind to us — but then, kindness is everywhere, especially here.
Putting New Delhi at our backs, we ride into Jaipur in a taxi with a permanent child lock and ride out on an elephant named Maya. I blink and cannot see, the air is so choked with spices and the sky so dark. My eyes are watering. The clap of fireworks echoes down from the Rajasthani mountains, beyond the horizon of ancient fortresses. My pupils adjust and marble walls rise sepulchral around us. I ask where we are and someone mutters “Bharat.” A tour guide announces that we are standing in the Taj Mahal, in Agra. I grab K.’s hand and in the perfectly symmetrical palace we are the center of the universe. She lets go and by the time I look up we are in a new state, a new city, a new hotel, a new car.
A. introduces us to a driver, who knows a rug maker who knows a pharmacist and a barber and a travel agent and a tailor and a constable and a saffron merchant as we ask for them. At one point — less than an hour after we tumble off a train and into the care of a new driver, a new eloquent English-speaking Brahman smiling from the passenger seat — we express a remote interest in Indian weddings. The guide who we have met less than an hour ago suggests that we come to Day 3 of his cousin’s wedding this weekend. From Uttar Pradesh to Tamil Nadu we are passed from one curator of memorable experiences to another so frequently we almost forget to have vacation sex. Okay not quite that often, but we stay busy.
In Cochin, a thousand miles south of where our day began in Maharashtra, we check into a new hotel and instantly collapse into the bed. I am drooling, generally sticky and damp. K. bursts into tears, physically exhausted. I text our new driver to beg for time to rest, to nap, but it is the middle of the day. He is already calling, hankering to know how we plan to pillage the virginal afternoon, how he can aide us to squeeze entertainment and experience out of every last possible moment of our short stay in this most interesting place on the planet. “Where to, sir?” he asks cordially even though we are the same age. “What you like?”
Chai and nothing else swirls in my stomach as I pull myself onto my elbows. K. wipes her eyes. So close to the Indian Ocean — as near as we have been since the unswimmable coastlines of Mumbai — I ask if he knows somewhere to get fresh seafood. Of course he does. He is also a chef, when he is not a driver and tour guide. He knows a place. Pick you up in ten minutes sir? Two hours? How about thirty minutes? OK sir, see you in one hour. I’ll be waiting, forty-five minutes, sir.
We peel the clothes off each other and get in the shower. The water is gloriously hot. I stand under the rain for twenty minutes with my eyes closed, fantasizing that I am just waking up from a nap, full-bellied and dry, perhaps also rich and handsome. K. washes the most recent flight from her hair, draws hearts in the glass as we talk about the past few weeks, everywhere we’ve been and the amazing and terrible things we’ve seen and experienced.
Today, a year on, it is still impossible for us to recall the unparalleled majesty of India without also remembering the shawls and scarves we wrapped around our faces to keep from gagging as we crossed over streams and open sewers; the children pushing soggy cardboard aside to surface in the lakes and rivers; the dark soot we sneezed into tissues when either of us inevitably got sick. While we are careful not to belabor the point in front of strangers, the ecological travesties we have encountered every day here are impossible to ignore, though we certainly try.
When K. is done showering, I watch her get ready in the bathroom mirror for another ten minutes. She is so beautiful and strange, all gold and honey and roses in this land of mulethi and coriander and cardamom. I laugh and when she sees she asks what I am laughing about and I am so exhausted I just keep laughing and that is answer enough for her to join in.
Our bodies feel weighed down after only a couple weeks of the heavy air here, but our hearts are light. We dress in fresh clothes.
We take our time meeting the driver outside. No sooner are we seated in the backseat than the doors open and we spill back out onto a restaurant patio some blocks away, where fish wrapped in banana leaves fall in front of us with rice and cucumber and kefir. Only the silverware stays polished and untouched: We have not used a utensil for 10 days. A stray cat appears at our feet and K. plucks the eyeballs from the fish to feed to it.
When we cannot possibly eat anymore, we pay the tab and ditch our driver, who is napping in the parking lot. We head in the direction of the coast.
In a cartoon, K. and I would wrinkle our noses as we approach the water, where dead things and inorganic matter splash up onto soggy shoals that might once have been a beach. But instead we only look at each other and narrow our eyes slightly against the gray mist.
Both blonde and fair, we are an outstanding minority here, and seemingly an anomaly far outside of a handful of landmarks. We are far from alone on the boardwalk, and there is a statistically significant possibility that we are being photographed or looked at during any given moment. There is no doubt that this experience which we are living now is singular and beautiful; but like most elsewhere we have been since arriving in India, we must pause to consciously recalibrate our presumptions of this scene in order to fully appreciate its beauty.
A cargo ship drifts past, pushing up a gurgling surf that leaves black silt on the rocks beneath the pier.
While K. and I are overtly conscious of the fact that we are only guests here, moments like this — the ones punctuated by gray waters and heavy skies and unignorable environmental degradation — are a devastating pill for an American treehugger like me to swallow, and one that has weighed guiltily on my heart as we explore the vast and enchanting land. The personal tragedy is overwhelming: Trash is literally everywhere.
We know already that municipalities and countries across South Asia are paid to dispose of some rich-world waste, which may be burned or buried or forgotten in any number of ways on a macroeconomic scale. But it occurred to me for the first time back in Jaipur, watching Maya the elephant use her delicate trunk to pick discarded plastic out of the way before retrieving sugarcane off the ground, that the sacrosanct values of environmental stewardship which I have always taken for granted might not be quite so ubiquitous here.
When I finally asked our driver why the issue seems to be so extreme, he thought then answered proudly that there is not nearly so much rubbish in the streets today — under Prime Minister Narendra Modi — as there was before, sir. He hearkened patriotically to the sacred Ganges River, a world heritage site which was briefly and at great cost made swimmable one year for the pilgrims of Varanasi. As he said this, without a wink of irony, he rolled his window up against the hot fumes of a bus we were sharing a lane with. Besides, he added, cracking the window again as we passed, that is not our concern.
The toxic streams, the dense air, the trash — these are the burdens of a lesser caste, and (though he did leave this part out) certainly not for visitors to judge. Someone else will pick up after you, he assured us as he opened a pack of cough drops and tossed the wrapper out into the street. Relax and enjoy yourself, sir.
At the time, I shrugged and, pocketing my trash, turned my attention to the amazing things unfolding around us every moment, at every turn. But as we watch the sun set on the horizon in Cochin, a man to my right finishes his bottle of water, caps it, and throws it directly into the ocean. Nobody so much as glances at him twice.
I am lighthearted with K. beside me, but I feel my thin blood begin to boil at the sight of the discarded water bottle in the foaming surf, bobbing and coalescing with a wall of plastics and textiles five feet thick against the rocks below us. We are only guests here, newcomers to this culture and its customs, but surely this is unacceptable! Surely there must be some sense of wrongdoing for throwing a plastic water bottle straight into the ocean — even if that is the way things have been done here as long as drinkable water has been available only from plastic bottles.
I am about to say something — loudly — when a woman’s voice calls from the direction of the setting sun:
“You guys are so cute!”
I blink, offended. “Did you see that?” I say in her direction before I can help myself, but the stranger does not hear me over the clap of the viscous surf.
“You are such a cute couple!”
The woman is in a tank top, seated next to a tall and dark man who, like her, is gorgeous and looks to be around our age. Her long hair falls in waves, and she brushes them out of her face before holding her phone up to us.
“Come!” She waves us over as we squint to see the screen against the foggy remnants of sunlight. “Sit with us!”
Her name, she tells us, is N. She has taken a selfie, and we are in the background. Though I can say with certainty that we were having a good time, this photo looks like every photo we have not been prepared for this month: we look haggard and annoyed. I am frowning, comical-looking in a red kurta. K. is flushed, glistening like a jewel in the last of the day.
But N. insists that we are the most attractive white couple she has met this week in Kerala. Those are the words she uses.
I ask who her partner is, and M. introduces himself as someone she has only just met here fifteen minutes ago. For the first time in a month, neither stranger calls us sir or ma’am. Something buried deep in my social-monkey brain clicks on when they ask what our plans for the evening are. My phone rings. It is the driver, wanting to know the same thing. I pause, looking from K. to N. to M. then back to K., and say that we are getting a beer with some friends. K. lights up, and N. instantly hugs her. I look at M. when I say this and he nods, smiling. Of course he knows a place.
Hours or ages later we plop down in the backseat of the car again, cathartic and already reminiscing about what feels like our first real night out on this continent. The driver gets in and the city begins streaking by — today Cochin, tomorrow Munnar, Thekkady, Alleppey. Once more, we are on the move, though neither of us can say for sure towards what. In this place we live in the moment.
K. touches the spot on her cheek where N. kissed her goodbye as she laughs. I thumb the cigarettes in my pocket that M. and his cousin rolled for us. If we have been floating through this vacation, we are suddenly on cloud nine.
Is this what they mean by “contact high”? I am feeling more lighthearted than ever. It occurs to me that for all the people we have met here, we have not made a single friend since A. whose company we were not expected to pay for. Virtually alone but for each other, our impressions on this beautiful and eclectic — albeit polluted — place have become compounded as we’ve rehashed them in beds and showers and tuktuks on our way across India. As we toss our judgments back and forth rather than around, our preconceptions have become exacerbated rather than recalibrated.
Though we are happier than ever to be alone together, both K. and I have forgotten the elation of making a new friend in a strange place. Our misgivings evaporate. Of course there is litter here, but there is also magic. Surrounded by new people, I am reminded tonight why I have chosen this one to love.
In a moment of bliss I ask the driver his name.
“V.,” he says — then, when I don’t hear him, corrects himself: “Sorry. V., sir. Is everything okay?”
“Yes V., everything is fine. You know you don’t have to call me sir.”
“OK, sir,” says the driver, rolling up his window as we approach the bridge.
TG
Great as usual ❤️