FEBRUARY 18, 2022 – I adapted readily to the pulse of Delhi. After my daily breakfast of toast, eggs, and bacon at the “Y,” I’d hit the streets. Each foray took me farther, mostly on foot, but I often hailed an auto-rickshaw to expand my radius. Besides, it was fun to make conversation with the driver as he competed with bustling traffic. The auto-rickshaws were also galleries of “costume jewelry”—beads, fringe, pennants, and other cheap wonders, arranged according to the creativity of the driver/owner.
On occasion I’d hire horse-drawn conveyances, and more than once, the driver’s amusement allowed me to assume the reins.
I let a snake charmer charm me out of a few piasters, and I attended a Bollywood movie, which had high production values to compensate for the plot and laughable product placement for Compa-Cola, an upscale competitor of “Gold Spot.”
There was the night-time Hindu wedding celebration that surrounded me as I wandered down a back street: picture a fireworks display gone awry to the sound of wild music.
In my letter home, I described a typical outing:
“Yesterday I took a [long] walk down the most bizarre streets of Delhi. The curious looks cast my way revealed what a stranger I was. Obviously, few Europeans had walked the same path. In three hours I ran a gauntlet of sacred cows, beggars, chapati stands, coolies, hawkers, tailors, rope-makers, rickshaws, horses, dogs, children, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, bad people, good people, lazy men, busy women, garbage, mud, stenches, excrement, flies, and music. At one point I even encountered a horse lying dead in a bustling market.”
In another run-in with Indian bureaucracy, I consumed a half-day attempting to call home. The effort was a multi-step process at the central telephone/telegraph office. First was an interminable queue, at the end of which a bureaucrat required multiple forms to be submitted. Next was a queue to pay a deposit. Then followed a two-hour wait for the call to be placed. When my name was announced, I wrestled my way into a phone booth. Yet, the effort was unsuccessful. Eleven-and-a-half time zones away, my dad said “Hello?” and I said, “Hi, it’s Eric!” After that exchange, our voices turned faint immediately, then unintelligible.
* * *
In the “Y” common room one evening, I had an extended conversation with “George,” the 20-year-old apprentice Maître d’ of the “Y” restaurant. His salary was the equivalent of $10/mo. He loved to paint and enjoyed athletics but had little opportunity to pursue either. Orphaned soon after birth, his life had been tough. He asked, “Take me to America and give me a chance.”
“I had to explain reality,” I wrote home, “but that wasn’t easy. For lack of better advice I told George that education and a marketable skill should be his primary concerns; that a gift of 8, 800, 8,000, or 80,000 rupees wouldn’t solve his problem. Since he is Christian, I encouraged him to consult the R.C. priest near the YMCA.”
How glib, naive, and arrogant those words sound today.
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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
