I look forward to my trips to India with trepidation. I visit India fairly regularly, but always for a very short time. Unlike those who go to India once every two years with many suitcases, assorted gifts for relatives close and distant, grand plans to visit the houses of all those who mattered to them in the past and spend a few days “traveling” and tasting the “home-made” food, I go for four or five days with no gifts and no plans to visit anyone in particular. Sometimes there is a reason to go; often it is just a need to be in the country.
Even as I complain, I long to walk on those streets. I don’t have any specific plans. I have learned that making plans is the first step towards ruining a short break. Following through with the plans is the next step. So I go with a couple of change of clothes and see where it takes me.
But I feel the trepidation. First of all, I am concerned because I never know what to expect in India. Sometimes the whole experience is so breezy and comfortable that you have no idea why you were worried. Then without warning, things change. You get hassled by customs or emigration. Or your flight is late. Or there is a general strike or violence because someone desecrated a statue or threw a pig carcass into some sacred building. All the things that make India unpredictable and yet fascinating are also the things that in a real sense worry you.
I sit here amongst all these books about India. I feel like I have a tendency to find answers in books instead of the world around me. May be it is because the reality is so complex that you would much rather leave the thinking to someone else. I remember when “The Idea of India” came out, every dinner party conversation centered around it. There was not one person in my friend circle that had not read it. Same with India Unbound and Maximum City. These books look at modern India in a way many of us would understand. They are not complete chronicles of life in India (can any book ever completely chronicle any country?) but draw broad conclusions about those aspects that we care about personally.
Then I have other books that shed light to those parts of India to which I have no direct connection with, India with its rigid caste system and hierarchy, religious polarization, poverty and micro-economic factors in rural India. I once had a chance to drive from Allahabad to Kausambi to see the remains of the old city. (For those of you who don’t remember this was one of the greatest cities of ancient India, a city that witnessed sermons by Buddha.) Mayavati was the Chief Minister then and she had just made it the seat of a new districts aptly named after the city. There was a brand new road that connected the two places. The whole ride felt like a trip through some desert plain with a forty-five Km ride taking over four hours. There, I saw two curious things. A twelve-year-old boy called Gorey Lal jumped into my Qualis without any fear or worries when I stopped at the Mandi (local market) and asked him directions to the ruins and volunteered to take me there. I spoke to him as much as my stilted Hindi would communicate with his dehati. In the end, when he was about to be dropped off, he turned and said, “hamauko paisa chahiye”(I want money) in a demanding tone. I still remember that boy vividly because the whole exchange with him illustrated how life is lived in those parts still. Secondly, when I was walking through the ruins (the place evidently gets very few visitors) a crowd of villagers showed up and tried to sell Gupta-period seals, a small clay horse and elephants, coins and other material scavenged from the site.
Not much had changed.
But this time I don’t have time to visit villages. Even though that is where I’d rather be.
What to do? We are like this only!
