The nearly three weeks that I spent traveling in India and Nepal don't yet seem like a blur. It's not yet melding together, it's not yet more emotion than action. I can still pick out specific moments and emotions with relative ease, can still grasp that fleeting feeling of the wind in my hair, the excitement of being on the road again and hurtling forward into the unknown. But in my experience, I've found this glow does eventually subside, the routine returns and the memories fade in potency. I have always been reticent to write emails and catalog my travels during the actual course of a trip, especially when time is limited. I guess I just consider that time precious, fertile for more adventures, more experiences. Each moment spent before a computer screen or even a notebook is a moment not spent experiencing my surroundings. In this vein, I averaged a 5:30 a.m. wake-up time and only about 2 full meals per day on this trip and, as a result, lost 5 pounds, gained significantly more blisters and emerged with the feeling that I saw more of each city than I really had any business seeing considering my relatively truncated stay.
That is why it has been my aim to write and record as much as I can immediately upon my return, when everything is still freshly slithering its way down into my brain. Easier said than done. However, I was granted an unexpected boon this time around. Originally slated to begin teaching classes on the morning of Monday, the 24th (for those keeping track, a scant 23 hours after landing in Incheon Airport after nearly two days of straight air travel and walking around Kuala Lumpur hauling everything I brought on my back), my school instructed me to take a week off to make sure that no swine flu symptoms develop as I was traveling in the high risk countries of India and Malaysia. So instead of a rude and rough return to the daily grind this morning, I now have time to decompress and prepare for classes to resume. But more importantly, it is an opportunity to live up to my original aspiration of writing as much as I can about the trip now that I don't have the convenient excuse of the work day to get in my way.
Doesn't exactly help me decide where to begin. But so be it. I'm drinking masala chai, making frequent bathroom trips (the return has not been gentle on my digestive system) and trying to rewind my mind. Here goes.
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If you were to turn the ratty pages of the small leatherbound notebook I carried with me on the trip, you would find one page labeled "life changing moment" next to another with "my greatest moral failure" scrawled across the header. Allow me to explain.
It happened August 4th.. my second and final full day in Mumbai. I had spent the whole day exploring the caves and stone temples on Elephanta Island, a small jungle island about an hour away from the city mainland in the Arabian Sea. A ferry ride costs less than $3, so naturally I took it. I've taken so many ferries by now that I get memory flashbacks each time I board. Watching the Taj Palace Hotel (scene of last year's terrorist attacks) and the Gateway of India recede into the horizon, I couldn't help but think back to similar boat rides in Mozambique, Japan and Jeju. Whether you're in the Arabian Sea, East China Sea or Indian Ocean, water pretty much looks the same. That does not, however, mean it ever gets old.
Teeming with monkeys and emaciated dogs, Elephanta was beautiful and a welcome solace from the frenetic traffic congestion and chaos that characterizes Mumbai's streets. The rock temples were dedicated to Shiva, the destroyer, one third of the Trimurti and a personal favorite among the pantheon of different incarnations of the one Supreme Being that Hindus believe in. They were also ancient, with some of the carvings dating back to the 9th century. I spent a great deal of time in them, not solely due to the fact that Mumbai was experiencing sun showers in the aftermath of the monsoon's full wrath. I had the good fortune of visiting Mumbai directly after the worst of the monsoon had passed, meaning the temperature was far more moderate than it would have otherwise been and, of course, all flora was out in full bloom. I largely avoided any significant rainfall in Mumbai, which was not what I was expecting after seeing a straight 5 weeks of thunderstorms forecasted when I checked the weather out in early July.
I wandered the caves for a number of hours, stopping to watch puppies play and pesky monkeys attempting to snag anything they could from the passing tourists. Interestingly enough, I was one of very few tourists who did not appear to be Indian. This was the case throughout Mumbai, which came as as a surprise to me. I had expected Mumbai, being the most cosmopolitan and well-known of India's cities abroad, to be swarming with my white-skinned ilk. Perhaps it was the fact that I was visiting during the notoriously hot summer and not the more temperate fall. In any case, it earned me a lot of stares.. more so even than I usually receive in Korea. I shook off a few touts (the ubiquitous friendly-at-first-glance strangers who approach you and try and solicit their services as tour guides/sell you all manner of junk/take you to their friend's uncle's shop for a ludicrous price.. much more on them later) and stopped by a street vendor to buy some grilled corn. It should come as no great surprise to anyone who knows how large a role corn plays in my diet at home that this became one of my favorite (and safer) go-to street foods. The salt, spices and lemon that they rub the cob in make it incredibly delicious and each cob averages around 20 cents US.
On the ferry ride back to the port, I had a long and interesting conversation with a quite precocious 11-year-old Indian child who was traveling with his family. He offered me some chips and a mango drink and we discussed all manner of topics from his favorite places in India (Varanasi, my next destination for which I left by train for that evening, topped his list) and the various other ships in the harbor. He pointed at a large and rather imposing grey military ship and said it was checking all of the cargo ships coming in to ensure they weren't carrying arms or nuclear weapons. He seemed to regard Pakistan as the greatest threat to India's security, which came as no big surprise. I told him about America and teaching in Korea and he was pretty enthralled. I found that Indians, for the most part, have a very high regard for America. I believe it is more likely the economic opporunity and strength they associate with the country rather than any perspective based on political and military actions, but everytime I told a local I was from America (touts and beggars not included.. I often told them I was from Israel to throw them off.. again, more on that later) I would get a big smile in return. Eyes would alight and they would often repeat it. "America" usually followed by "great country" or a similar statement. Sometimes I would ask them if they had been there. The common answer I would receive was "Yes.. every night in my dreams."He asked me how many countries I'd traveled to and I told him 21.. which was the number at that time. He seemed taken aback. "You are a very lucky man," he said. I tend to agree. When we parted, he gave me a small Eiffel Tower keychain to remember him by. It seemed strange and ironic that he had an extra one to give me even though he had never been to Paris, nor laid eyes on the actual tower.. which I am fortunate enough to have visited on two occasions. It just served to strengthen the acute awareness I had developed years ago of my relative privilege and fortune at being born in the country I was, to the family I was, with the upbringing I received. This was a perspective that would be continually reinforced throughout the trip. I would later see street children selling the very same Eiffel Tower trinkets on my train from Delhi to Agra.
Following the return to shore, I wandered through the Colaba markets for awhile, observing the hustle and the bustle. I meandered through chaotic markets, watched sellers sitting barefoot beside sprawling heaps of vegetables and eventually found myself in what appeared to be the Muslim majority area of Colaba. I had to return to the apartment of Waseem, the middle aged Indian man whose family I was staying with while in Mumbai, in the evening for a dinner he had invited me to share and to pick up my backpack before leaving on my train to Varanasi. I had gotten in touch with Waseem using the website CouchSurfing, which pairs travelers up with willing hosts, and he had been quite gracious and generous, explaining to me how to take a prepaid taxi from the airport (a swarm of taxi and rickshaw drivers descends on any foreigner who steps foot out of the airport, usually with highly inflated prices, so a prepaid taxi is the best bet for getting a fair fare), readying a bed for me, tea in the morning... When my rickshaw driver got lost, he also helped explain where his apartment was by phone. He had two lovely children and a very kind wife. When I first arrived, there was a German girl staying there as well and we explored Bandra (the western "suburb" where Waseem stayed... which is completely unlike any suburb that most American readers are used to) and South Mumbai on my first full day in the city. He also had a lower caste cleaning woman/nanny who slept in the same room that us Couchsurfers did... I originally mistook her for his daughter when I first arrived. The caste system is a very complex issue in India, one that survives in many forms to this day despite being technically illegal.
I flagged a taxi driver and told him to take me to Chowipatty Beach, Mumbai's most famous beach. He demanded 200 rupees at first, which I balked at and eventually worked down to 40 or 50. He tried to pretend he did not have sufficient change when we arrived, but I called his bluff by telling him I'd have to go make change then and he handed it over. Overcharging and shortchanging is commonplace in India, haggling is the norm and I would say my skills got exponentially better during the course of my trip.
Chowipatty was a long strip of beachfront situated along Marine Drive and parallel to the bulk of Mumbai's skyline, dotted with juice stands, food vendors and groups of friends walking and relaxing as the sun neared setting. I bought some grilled corn from one of the vendors and chatted with them about America. They were quite curious and before long I had drawn a small crowd around me. As it was getting dark, I realized I had to get back to Waseem's and asked where the nearest train station was. A friendly guy by the name of Biswajit told me he was heading there too so he walked there with me. He told me he was studying animated films, for which the market is quite small in India. I guess they cannot compete with the all-powerful Bollywood film industry, which is why he wants to come to America.When I got back to Waseem's, dinner was a long way from being ready and so he poured me some whiskey (one of the very few times I drank on the entire trip.. alcohol consumption is not a big part of Indian culture as far as I could tell, a marked relief from Korea) and we talked about the mountains of Nepal and hows they compared to the ranges of northern India. Waseem was very fervent that if it was mountains I wanted, I should look no further than India, that Nepal was entirely overrated. I smiled and humored him, but with an eye on the clock as my scheduled departure time inched closer and closer. A number of discussion topics and another glass of whiskey laer, the time had neared 10 pm and dinner still had yet to be served.
I did not want to be rude, but I was rather uncomfortable about my ability to make it to the correct train platform at the correct train station in my time for my train. My glances towards the clock became more frequent and obvious and I think they tipped off Waseem to my thoughts, as he yelled something to his wife and began serving me food before the rest of the family could congregate at the table. The food was delicious.. vegetable curry, dal, rice and salad and I devoured it at a shocking speed. Although Waseem seemed unconcerned that I might not make my train on time, I was getting nervous. Having only navigated the Mumbai local trains by day and having never been to the station I was supposed to catch my intercity train from, I wanted to leave myself a buffer period in case of calamity. But Waseem, kindhearted soul that he was, wanted to talk more, wanted to take a group picture, etc... until I found myself heading out the door nearly an hour and a half later than planned. As soon as the door closed, I kicked into high gear, bounding down the stairs and flagging an auto-rickshaw. Whiskey and the pressure of fleeting time pounded in my head as we zipped off, intent on Bandra station.My rickshaw driver was doing his best to alleviate the pressure, even though he would have given my mother a migraine had she known, by weaving through the insane traffic at a breakneck speed, laying on the horn to warn pedestrians and bicycle rickshaws that he would give them no ground. However, despite his best efforts, there is little one can do to overcome a traffic jam caused by two sleeping cows in the road, a common phenomenon in India. We were stalled, my head was aching with the pressure and I was nervously glued to the flickering LCD lock soldered to the rickshaw's dashboard.
Just then a figure appeared, hobbling into my plane of vision, leaning into the auto-rickshaw. Difficult to see in the darkness, I made out the visage of an old man standing in the street.
He extended a dangling appendage, what appeared to be malformed hand. It was impossible in the dim light to discern if the defect was developmental or the result of a horrific accident. His craggy face and sloping nose were all that were truly visible in the streetlight's bleed.
"Sorry," I said. The response came almost frighteningly automatic.
He persisted, creaking and wobbling closer to the interior of the auto-rickshaw, his misshapen limb still extended. He was muttering something unintelligible, likely the usual litany of self-effacing statements accompanied by pitiful expressions and attempts at eye contact. But I could not see his eyes. The pressure was on, throbbing in my head.
"No. Sorry."
The cows had evidently been cleared and the traffic had resumed ahead of us. We were frozen however, motorcycles and taxis careening by us on both sides, and I suddenly felt a flash of anger that I was being held up at this most critical of junctures. The beggar continued his gestures.
"NO... thank.. YOU."
The words were loud, spoken slow, terse and with weight. It didn't even sound like my own voice, like something I would say. The words felt almost vitriolic or acerbic, especially the "thank you" end bit, which I immediately regretted. I had practically snapped on the poor man.
He turned away and shuddered off into the night. And it was in that moment that I saw he was supporting himself entirely on a walking stick, the reason grotesquely apparent. His legs were atrophied, flaccid and dusty, hanging like limp noodles over his shoulders and dangling near the small of his back. The rickshaw roared to life. And then he was gone.
The guilt was overwhelming, it was all-encompassing. It commanded my attention and I felt a sick realization that I had committed what I considered to be a truly terrible act. In the ensuing moments, I would have gladly showered the poor man with as much as I could afford in exchange for another chance. I came very close to turning the auto-rickshaw around and trying to find him. But logic won out. I doubted I could have found him again in the crazy bustle of the dark Bandra streets. I had a train to catch. I sat there, paralyzed by shock and self-loathing as the Bandra train station drew nearer. In that moment, I wanted to distribute my life savings on the street, wake all the sleeping urchins, the one-legs and no-legs and thrust bills into their hands. I wanted the disfigured and deformed, the lepers and abounding amputees, as great a conglomerate of human misery as I could assemble upon which to unload my belated charity and ravaged conscience.. anything to erase the image of the beggar's swaying legs as he hobbled off into the lonely darkness. My greatest moral failure. Or so I wrote when I arrived at Bandra station with tears in my eyes, the first time I can recall crying in more than 4 years.
The notebook then reads: "I was disgraced. I was completely disgusted with myself. This was not the Matt Medved who befriended and defended Cape Town's legless from police brutality 2 years ago. My action had run categorically contrary to every notion of compassion, justice and assistance to the unfortunate that I espoused in my mind, the very virtues I sought to define myself by in my life's work. But my action had exposed me. Had I changed? Or was I deceiving myself all along?"
With a 28 hour train ride ahead of me, I had more time than I needed to scrutinize my reaction and subsequent breakdown. In retrospect, did I overreact? Perhaps. It was hardly the first or last time I've sent away a beggar empty-handed. But perhaps not. Because I recognized something ugly inside me, an aversion that offended my most core sensibilities. I wrote about a similar but fundamentally different feeling based on an experience I had covering a serial killer's trial in South Africa in 2007 when the family of the victims (primarily indigent farmworkers) were lead in. The excerpt from the unfinished fiction novella reads:
"A young man with a bruised eye, swollen shut, hung his head, raising it every minute or so to peer up at where the magistrate would soon stand. Next to him, a horse-jawed woman’s greasy black hair splayed across her precariously off-balance face as she moved to whisper in Afrikaans to another mummy-like woman steadying herself on a wooden staff. My gaze was drawn to an older man’s forehead that was cracked and puffy, with scars that carved swathes of scalp through his closely cropped hair, giving him the appearance of a broken statue.
My eyes roamed over their stilted features and I wondered at the shameful feelings of repulsion that I couldn’t help but feel. It almost appeared as though their material poverty had wormed its way into their genetic makeup, creating a ghoulish poverty of appearance. Sunken cheeks, toothless gums, blotchy birthmarks and dull cow eyes; a sick sea of faces that tugged at me in the wrong directions, arousing deplorable demons within me that I had not realized were there, that I had assumed I was too educated, too open-minded, too sympathetic to harbor. There was a collective sharp intake of breath from the room as the accused made his entrance."
While my guilt was not exactly born out of repulsion I couldn't control this time around, I had felt that I was, however you want to call it, a better person than one who would snap on an old beggar like that. What had really given me cause for so much of the self-disgust that I had felt immediately following the Bandra beggar incident was the fact that I had been annoyed, angry even, with someone whose quality of life was so vastly inferior to my own, whose handicap and tribulations were so much more serious than any adversity I've ever faced over something so trivial and selfish.. that I was worried about missing a train. My worst case scenario was an extra night/day spent in Mumbai and a bit of additional expenditure for a rickshaw back to Waseem's and another train ticket. But the best case scenario for this man was begging enough to fill his stomach before retiring on the street to awaken and be confronted the next morning with his ruined legs and dim future. The contrast infuriated me. And it cast my reaction in such a completely unbearable light.
I am, however, glad that I reacted the way I did following the incident.
At times in the past, I have felt somewhat detached and have had trouble conceiving of a situation that could break that composure. I recall a time that my family was driving on the highway and we saw an SUV run off the road and flip over and crash. I remember the remarkable contrast in our reactions. My mother was in tears and hysterics, my father repeating "oh my God.. oh my God.." as he pulled over to assist them and yet I was calmly rational, warning my father to stay a safe distance from the vehicle and ensure there was no gasoline leaking before he approached it. Even my younger sister was far more calm and collected than my parents and, at the time, I chalked it up to desensitization on our parts.. perhaps due to movies and video games. I figure I've seen at least three hundred cars flip over on the big screen. For whatever reason, it just didn't phase me in the same way it did my parents. But the beggar incident was an indelible reminder of my own humanity and thus, my own shortcomings and capacity for emotion, alongside the stark and unavoidable parade of humanity that is on daily display in India's crowded streets. Even in the depths and worst of my guilt following the incident, I was very cognizant of the fact that this was the kind of experience that could only make me a stronger and more compassionate person and I tried to appreciate it for those reasons, as difficult as it was.
Throughout the trip, I was also constantly wrestling with the moral conundrum of how best to combat the abject poverty around me, how to do something to give back to the country I was visiting. In South Africa, I almost always refrained from giving handouts to the street children because the majority of them were drug addicts and employed by gangs. The reality of the situation was that the 20 Rand I gave them to buy bread would likely be spent on crystal meth or given to a gangster (who would then spend it on booze or meth). During the course of writing and researching the feature I did on the street children of Long Street, I would sometimes buy food for my sources, a moral gray area that I cannot even be sure directly benefited them, as they would often scurry off to an undisclosed location to deposit the gifted milk or bread, a friend or relative with a refrigerator, or so they claimed.
In India, I made the same decision but it did not come as easy. The reality of Indian panhandling is that many children are also corralled and exploited by adults, some of whom purposefully deform them to make them more marketable. I told myself I did not want to propogate or support such a system, nor did I want to give something to a child if they would not directly benefit from it. I told myself I would send a check to a legitimate India related charity upon my return, resolved to do something to effect positive change here. But by some token, I also feel like that is a colossal copout, completely bullshit. At some point the fact that the 100 rupees in my pocket (less than $2 US) means nothing to me but could provide three or four meals for one of these beggars outweighs any rationalizations and logical conclusions I can draw from the situation. At some point, there's no more direct and legitimate way of helping someone than by helping them, not middlemen and not a charity set up in their name or in the name of their socioeconomic group, caste, class, or however you want to deem it. And as a result, I found myself unable stick by my rule at all times in India.Later on in my trip when I was in Sarnath, the place where Buddha delivered his first sermon and somewhere that I will discuss more in-depth in another post, I saw a leper sitting in the middle of the road begging passersby for handouts. His hands were decaying rapidly, one was nearly fingerless and the other was a bandaged mess of ailing stumps. He was repeatedly raising them to his mouth, which was open in a strange expression that resembled agony, to indicate that he needed food. I only realized when I got closer that his frozen expression of horror was due to the decomposition of his facial muscles. I went out of my way to approach him, hand him rupees and greet him as I would anyone on the street ("Namaste" with my palms touching). Now maybe I would have done that anyway had the Bandra beggar never hobbled over to my rickshaw on that fateful night. Maybe not. It certainly does not exonerate me by any means in my own eyes. But I know for a fact that the old man was in my thoughts when I saw the leper sitting there and I felt compelled to action. And that's something.
India is not for the weak of stomach or weak at heart. But it may very well be my favorite country I've ever traveled. Lessons were learned and they were not always simple or clear cut. My friend Deepa once told me that India "is a really complex society and there's little chance you'll leave feeling you know India." I think she was entirely correct. However, I also feel that even though I may not and may never know India in the absolute sense, I know far more and am far better for having traveled there than I would be had I stayed within my comfort zone.
