APRIL 3, 2020 – Social distancing now being imperative, I recall my encounter with its polar opposite.
Thirty-nine years ago, in my callow youth, I saw fit to see India—alone, or so I thought. Naïveté, I soon learned, is an essential human trait—without it, wholly insane but totally wonderful things in life would never occur.
I’d “read up” on India before venturing forth, but as trans-India European travelers I’d encountered Down Under had warned, reading couldn’t prepare for “the real thing”—or more precisely, for “anything.”
All I encountered was a radical departure from all I’d known. Moreover, back then, once you arrived in India and entered steaming chaos—realizing you’d made a horrible mistake, you couldn’t simply catch “the next flight” out. I tried to do precisely that but to my consternation, learned I’d have to wait three weeks for the next available seat.
I swallowed hard, wished myself well and . . . adapted. In the end, I not only survived. I thrived. I extended my stay to a full six weeks, and contrary to all representations and warranties of those trans-Indian traveling Europeans I’d met in Australia/New Zealand, I never got sick.
In Kashmir (controlled by India but in perpetual dispute with Pakistan), I would explore places high above the clouds and far distant from the masses of the Subcontinent; in fact, far from people generally other than an occasional Himalayan herder. But in the big cities of India, I navigated through crowds that made rush hour at 42nd Street (my biggest previous encounter with population density) seem like the Great Plains.
My first, most memorable experience with the opposite of social distancing came in Mumbai (then, “Bombay”). I’d checked into a cheap hotel outside the center of the city and decided to catch a local train into the heart of things. There on the teaming platform, I waited as a succession of incoming trains charged down the track and screeched to a halt to take on more passengers. Each train, however, was already filled—crammed, packed, stuffed. After half a dozen trains, I (as sole idiot-white-guy-foreigner) realized that all trains would be this way. Unless I wanted to walk through an endless sea of slums, I’d better figure out a way to cram, pack, and stuff myself onto one of these overloaded trains.
With the next one, I did what I’d seen everyone else do—plunge into a school of converging human sardines hellbent on shoving themselves into the can. With my arms clutching my daypack tightly against my chest, I let myself be smash-packed onto the train. With what felt like all of humanity pressing against me, noses on the back of my neck and my own nose centimeters from another’s sweating neck, my nostrils filled with a thick mix of aromas and little to no oxygen.
It would be 15 minutes and five more stops before we sardines would be released for a semblance of . . . social distancing . . . and a proper breath of (polluted) air.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
