Two Stories About Begging

A barefoot boy of about six walks up to me with his hand held out in the Kolkata train station. He brings his hand to his mouth several times, in case the open hand wasn’t clear enough. I’m not looking directly at him, but I can tell from a few quick glances that his clothes and hair are filthy.

The woman sitting next to me—I’m sitting on a piece of newspaper on the floor, like almost everyone who’s seated in the train station—makes a “psshhht!” noise at the boy and waves her hand at him, the way you would shoo off a misbehaving cat.

I’m eating an apple, but I have a couple of those premade samosas that I bought from the Delhi supermarket in my backpack. I pull them out and hand the plastic baggie to the boy.

He looks at it for maybe two seconds. I am surprised to see that he not only fails to look grateful, but he actually looks indifferent or even distressed. He points to the apple and makes a whining sound.

“Are you kidding me right now?” I say to him. “I just gave you food, kid. Come on. I need this.” And I do. I’ve been short in the fresh fruits and vegetables department and I just invested a lot of time in cleaning this apple. “I need the fiber, kid. No way.”

“Apple, apple,” he whines. I shake my head.

The woman next to me says something in Bengali—I think she’s mad I gave him any food at all—and tries to shoo him away even more loudly. But the kid just stands and points at my apple. A small crowd is gathering. “Apple, khana, khana!” the boy whines. It means “food.”

“I just GAVE you khana!” I say, pointing at the baggie. “Khana, there!”

“BAH!” he shouts at me, then sprints off. I shake my head, saying to no one in particular, “How do you say, ‘You ungrateful little shit’ in Hindi?”

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At the train station in New Jalpaiguri, the transport hub just south of Darjeeling, I’m just sitting down to eat my dinner when a barefoot boy of about seven walks up to me and holds out his hand.

I’m about to go to Kolkata and an American friend, Anne, has told me about a volunteer opportunity there with Mother Teresa’s motherhouses, homes set up for the destitute, the dying, and the handicapped (both mentally and physically).  My Lonely Planet’s paragraph about the motherhouses says that the nuns strongly discourage people from giving to beggars, because it encourages them to continue to beg rather than seek more sustainable help from institutions like theirs.

I’ve been giving away some rupees here and there to beggars, but since I’m about to go to Kolkata, I’m thinking of this bit from the Lonely Planet and I think, Right, don’t encourage him.  I unwrap the first part of my dinner, an omelet made fresh at a food stand downstairs.  It’s still very hot.  It’s been cooked in lots of oil.  It’s delicious.

The kid holds out his hand.  I ignore him.  He stands there, getting jostled as porters and men with briefcases push past.  I continue eating my omelet.  He pushes his hand closer, so it’s almost in my face.  I shake my head.  The omelet has chilis.  I crunch down on one and pant from the resulting heat.

The kid holds out his hand.

I ignore him.

I finish my omelet and unwrap a samosa.  The kid moves on to a teenager standing next to me.  The teenager ignores him for a minute, then hands the kid a cookie from a package he’s holding.

The samosa is surprisingly hot.  I take a bite.  The inside is a beautiful deep brown.  It’s richly spiced but not too hot.  Excellent for train station food.

The kid walks past me and tries a trio of men leaning on the railing across from me.  One doesn’t look up from his cellphone.  Another tries his pockets for change, finds nothing, resumes talking to his friend.  The teenager finishes the cookies and drops the wrapper on the ground.

The kid disappears down the stairs to the platform for a while.  I eat the samosa slowly, reading snippets of an article printed on the newspaper my food was wrapped in.  I’m almost finished with the samosa when the kid comes back.  He just holds his hand out.  I haven’t even looked at him.

“Go to school, kid,” I say to him (to myself).  ”That will do you much better than this.”

He waits.  I finish the samosa and take a long drink of water.  He pushes his hand in front of me.  I unwrap my ladoo, a sugary orange dessert.  I start eating the ladoo.  Not terrible.

The kid walks away.

I package all the wrappings from my dinner up into a small plastic bag.  I watch the kid disappear down the stairs.  I suddenly feel very bad.

I realize I have an apple in my backpack.  I pull it out.  I’ll give it to the kid if he comes back, I tell myself.

But the kid doesn’t come back.  I stand up and look for him.  He’s descended to the platform, where he walks onto the train tracks, even though there are overpasses he could easily use to cross them.  He kicks at some trash along one of the rails.  He scampers up onto the platform on the other side and saunters along it.  I can see from here how dirty his clothes are.  When he comes to a leaky pipe, he stops beneath it and rinses his hands in the drip for a moment before sauntering on.

I think about calling to him and tossing the apple down, except I would probably miss and then there would just be an exploded apple on the platform.  He crosses under my overpass and I look for him on the other side, but I can’t find him.

The disgust I feel when I see Indians (or Americans) ignoring each other’s suffering — that’s the disgust I feel for myself right then.

I sit back down on my backpack and look at the bag of newspaper pieces where my dinner was.  The teenager’s cookie wrapper is still on the ground.  I think about getting it, but then a train comes and a hundred people hurry past, stepping on it, and then it blows out of reach.

I realize I am crying.  It would have been so easy to have given the kid the apple. It would have been so easy.

NEWSFLASH: Darjeeling Is In India, Not A Wes Anderson Movie

I realize this shouldn’t have come as a shock. But the city and The Darjeeling Limited had some gotten linked together  in my mind, so that when my brain opened the file marked “Darjeeling,” it found only  images of preposterous brothers train-tripping around a Hindu landscape charming snakes.

 

Well, the real Darjeeling has neither Adrian Brody (truly a real shame) prancing about in kurta-pyjama nor forlorn American widows staring out monastery windows in ironic, Wes-Anderson-fashion. It actually doesn’t have much in the way of Hindus (except the Indian tourists) or snake charmers, either – the bright colors and Hindustani aesthetic of the movie is much more reflective of the desert state of Rajasthan or the Hindu heartland of Utter Pradesh than Darjeeling.  It does have a train, but it’s tiny and slow, not the express service with chai-wallahs and luggage racks that dominates the rest of the country.

 

What IS Darjeeling, then? It’s a Buddhist-Christian enclave tucked into the folds of the Himalayan foothills – a 110,000 person slurry of Nepali-Hindu-Tibetan cultures spilling down long, steep hillsides. The town could give San Francisco a run for its money on the score of severely pitched streets.  You quickly learn the flattest routes around town.

 

The town has two main industries – tourism and tea – and these are visible everywhere in the central part of the town, which is laden with hotels and restaurants.  (The most popular backpacker hangout is a cafe called Sonam’s that serves pancakes, French toast, and omelets for breakfast, complete with hashbrowns.  It’s good to know where the backpacker hangouts are—on my second day, I meet a fellow lone traveler American, Nick, and we join forces and tour around Darjeeling together for a few days.)

 

There are also a few dozen tea parlors and shops selling bulk tea leaves.  I had no idea there were so many kinds of tea beyond black, oolong, green, and white.  Beyond that you have specifications about when it was picked (“first flush” are the first leaves taken off the plant, while “summer” teas are picked later and are stronger, and “autumn” teas are stronger still) and specifications about what part of the plant it was picked from (“silver tips” is a term I see thrown around a lot, although I’m still not sure what it means).

 

There is also a fairly good zoo, with a couple great signs…

 

 

…and a fairly bad natural history museum, which is less a museum and more a physical catalog of poorly taxidermied birds and mammals.

 

(Media Matters people, especially Justin Berrier, this picture of a loris is totally for you.)

 

A few days ago Nick and I went for a joy ride on the “toy train,” a tiny locomotive that takes about an hour to motor the 11 km betweeen Darjeeling and nearby Ghum.  The tracks are about 2.5 feet wide and the train seats four across, with a narrow aisle.

The train weaves in and out along the main road between Darjeeling and down-country transport hubs Siliguri and New Jalpaiguri, chugging along inches from storefronts and houses.  The ride was enjoyable enough, but Nick and I agreed that the continual horn blowing—every motor vehicle in India blows its horn as it approaches pedestrians or other vehicles, to indicate, “Hey, I’m coming through, so get the #@%@ out of my way”—detracted from the trip a lot.  I laughed out loud when I later opened an email from my mother:

 

“[I am reading about Darjeeling] on Wikipedia. ‘Did you know that The Darjeeling Limited, a film directed by Wes Anderson, features a trip by three brothers on a fictional long-distance train based loosely on the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway?’ … Here was another interesting tidbit: ‘To warn residents and car drivers about the approaching train, engines are equipped with very loud horns that even drown horns of Indian trucks and buses.’ ”

 

Very loosely, Wikipedia/Wes.  But dead-on about the horns.

Gompas And Mandirs: Religion Is Everywhere In India

Visiting temples is still one of my favorite things to do in India. I like to visit both Hindu temples, mandirs, and Buddhist temples and monasteries, gompas. The two, like the two religions, are fairly different—though both are colorful and usually splashed with wonderful paintings and/or statues.

Hindu temples usually center around altars where there are pictures or statues of at least one god or goddess. Most temples I have been to are large enough to have several altars and shrines, each with their own god or goddess idol. Usually the bigger temples have a “main” altar, where a pandit (priest) or sadhu (holy man) may be reciting prayers, pouring milk on the altars, accepting prasad (offerings of food, incense, and money that worshippers bring to the temple), or waving incense or fire around the idol or the worshippers in a gesture of cleansing and blessing.

The entrance to the temple is usually ringed with bells that worshippers ring as they walk into the temple. My friend Saurabh told me this is to “wake up the gods” and make sure they are listening. I like the idea that the gods need you to grab them to get their attention.

Worship and blessing always feels simple, open, accessible to anyone who wanders in. Parishioners kneel before altars, hold their hands in front of them in prayer position, offer prasad to the gods, then receive some prasad off the altar in exchange. Sometimes you are also given a dab of red or orange paint on your forehead, to show that you have offered prayers and received blessings.

The air fills with the ringing of bells, the chanting of priests, the wafting smoke from incense, the scents of fruit and fire and human sweat. It always feels very holy and spiritual in its otherwordliness—it feels, without you knowing, like something very, very old.

Today I went to a very interesting set of holy sites on top of Observatory Hill here in Darjeeling. My Lonely Planet told me the site was “the site of the original Dorje Ling monestary that gave the town its name” and is “sacred to both Buddhist and Hindus.” Indeed, while the complex atop the hill is ringed with the pink and orange shapes of Hindu mandirs, the whole area is heavily draped with Buddhist prayer flags and altars are topped with Buddhist butter candles. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Darjeeling is literally in the clouds, and sometimes you will find yourself in the middle of one. As I climbed the hill to the temple, a vast cloud rolled over the town, so that the entire hill was shrouded in mist and fog, adding to the ethereal feel.

I stood in front of a statue of Nandu, Shiva’s bull, and watched a woman pour milk over a lingam, a phallic representation of a Shiva, as other worshippers walked clockwise around the central shrine, hands joined in prayer. A group of men nearby chanted “Hare Ram, Hare Ram, Hare Ram, Hare Ram, Krishna Ram Hare Ram” and shook bells as a sadhu stood over shelves of butter lamps. I tiptoed, barefoot, watching, before offering prasad.

(Before you accuse me of being culturally insensitive because I took pictures at a temple, let me assure you that every Indian there with a camera was taking a million pictures. Indians really tend to not be uptight about these things.)

Buddhist gompas are usually much quieter, less crowded, less kinetic. There are brilliant colors, but usually in white, red, yellow, blue, and green—the colors of prayer flags—rather than the lurid pinks and oranges that dominate most mandirs. There is often a central statue of a Buddha and a few statues of holy men. These are often guilded in gold and can be elaborately painted. There are bells here, too, affixed to the top of prayer wheels that Buddhists spin—clockwise only—for good luck as they walk past. The bells chime once per rotation—a quiet metronome percussing worship rather than a constant background choir as at a mandir. There are also usually large cabinets filled with holy scripts, which are covered in brightly colored fabric.

Yesterday I went to a Buddhist gompa called the Yiga Choling Monastery. Just like today, a cloud rolled in as we pulled up to the gompa, which is atop a hill near Ghum. Swirling mist made it difficult to see the temple and meditation hall from the parking lot. Friendly monks nodded hello as they trod across the courtyard (some checking their cellphones as they went).

One monk followed me inside, watching as I trod the perimeter on quiet tiptoe, taking in the faded elaborate paintings of Buddhist spirits and gods covering the walls and the rows of burning butter lamps, surrounded by offered piles of rupees. He and I were the only people inside. Colored lights flickered on and off as an audio tape of chanting monks played in the background, filling the otherwise almost-total silence.

Finally I sat in front of the enormous golden Buddha, letting my eyes trace the elaborate carvings of dragons and clouds and smiling mediators surrounding the statue. I took one picture, dropped 10 rupees into a box, and then resumed sitting in front of the statue, surrounded by thousand-year old Tibetan writings and tattered prayer flags, to meditate.

EXCITING: India Has Supermarkets!

Okay, it’s quite possible – likely, even – that there have been supermarkets in India for years already. But I had no idea these existed until I stumbled on one underneath a Delhi metro stop on the outskirts of the city a few days ago.

I originally went inside to buy water, because I knew it would be cheaper than whatever the street vendors were selling it for. However, once I got inside, there was just a world of delightful snacks that were ready and waiting to serve as potential breakfasts (or lunches or dinners).

Then I realized there was also fruit – fruit that was probably cleaner than what was being sold on the street. (Maybe.) And, well…there were apples, which are some of my favorite fruits and were too hard for me to pass up.

Turns out Indian supermarkets also sell…Nature Valley granola bars! I…..yes, I bought some. In my defense (there is nothing I can say in my defense), I bought the mango and cardamom flavored bars, which I’m pretty sure are not a thing in the United States.

Also in my defense, I did purchase a large snack bag of pre-made samosas – also not generally available in the US — which were delicious in the way that Cheez-It mix is delicious: really tasty and almost totally devoid of nutrients. This did not stop me from rounding out* meals with a handful of those suckers.

Bottom line: India has supermarkets, and if it makes me horribly Western to be excited about that fact, I guess I’m just Western.

*By “rounding out,” I mean sometimes I ate 6 of them for breakfast. They were not that big! But yeah. The half pound (is that what 400 g is? Half a pound? Sure) bag did not last more than 36 hours.

Darjeeling!

Views of some houses perched on a hillside. The whole city just kind of spills over a steep slope.

Roadside laundry drying

View from my hotel window

I know the Rudman crew will appreciate this one It made me laugh and laugh.

More pictures tomorrow, after my ride on the adorable Himalayan Railways toy train (the tracks are literally two and a half feet apart).

Also, I Speak Hindi! (ok not really)

But I did have my first complete conversation in Hindi today with people who could not speak English!  They were those lovely gentlemen in the white garb from the last post.  They saw me taking a picture with a few boys, and then they came over and gestured to the camera and started lining up.  But they didn’t have a camera.  So I was confused about what they wanted me to do.

My Very First All-Hindi Conversation ensued.  Here it is, in its entirety:

Me: [pointing to camera] Meera?  Apka?

Man: Apka.

Me: Accha.  [takes picture] Accha tikke!

Translation: “Mine? Yours?” “Yours.” “Good, OK. … Very good!”

And…that’s it.  Although, actually, addendum — then the  boy who asked for a photo earlier heard all this, came back to where I was standing, and said:

Boy:  Madam! You speak Hindi???

Me:  Chhota, chhota.  (Small, small.)  ….bahut chhota.  (…very small.)

Making Friends With Old Indian Men, Or, Delhi By The Pictures

Today I had a very good day. I woke up in my little room at Hotel Namaskar…

…and walked to the train station to buy tickets. The streets were packed, as usual.

After I successfully bought train tickets (!!!!!! it only took an hour and a half of waiting in line.  Believe me, this was a very small price to pay.  I consider it a miracle that I was able to buy tickets for all three of the trips I wanted), I went to Old Delhi for some sight-seeing.

First I walked past a beautiful gurdwara, or Sikh temple…

…and then I went to the Red Fort (Lal Qila), a huge fort/mini walled city built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (the same one who later commissioned the Taj Mahal for his wife).

It was hot, but I didn’t think it was too bad, until I saw that the birds were panting.

I had my picture taken alone…

…and then with new friends (a LOT of Indians at tourist sites ask foreigners if they can take a picture with you, so I just asked if they would take one with my camera, too)…

…including some old men who I would have thought would be more likely to call me the White Devil than request a photo.  But I was wrong!  They were very nice and friendly.

Then I traveled to south Delhi to see the beautiful Baha’i Lotus Temple.

I learned a lot about the Baha’i faith.  Their major tenants include “equal rights for men and women” and “we should  improve the condition of life for all humanity” and “there should be universal education.”  I’m not in the market for a new religion, but that sounds like a good set of principles to me.

Then I had dinner at a(n overpriced semi-tourist trap but the food was fairly good) restaurant in Connaught Place, where I made friends with some American college students.

Afterwards, I discovered that there are currently free outdoor concerts happening in the middle of Delhi!

It’s apparently part of a Culture Week or something to that effect.  An MC came out at the end and handed each of the players in the band a bouquet of flowers.  I cannot explain.  I love this crazy country.