Coexisting in India

April 24, 2008

Dear DC,

At midnight, a day and a half after I left Cape Girardeau, the air near the Delhi airport looks hazy, almost like it's raining. "No, it's dusty. From the construction," my driver says.

Delhi is building two new runways to accommodate the intercontinental travelers coming to this capital city of 13 million. Many arrive like me, late at night after an eight-hour flight from London. At midnight, the Delhi traffic looks like St. Louis' at rush hour. Later I would learn this was a tame brush with Indian roadway behavior.

When the driver delivers me to the eight-story Taj Palace Hotel, I am shocked.

The two-tiered lobby inside the modern Taj Palace is populated by smartly dressed young men and women who want nothing more than to anticipate your every need. Everything in my room operates by pushing buttons, from summoning housekeeping to lowering the blind in the bathtub. The doorman in the Sikh turban and beard wears a flowing, ornate uniform out of some movie filled with gin and aristocratic British accents. Bollywood movies and cricket are India's two national passions, my tour guide Neelam says the next morning.

My tour has paired me with a couple from Brookings, Ore. Kevin's luggage went to Munich, Germany, so he's been unsuccessfully searching the bazaars for clothes to fit a man the size of a football lineman. He found a pair of shorts to fit, but when we go to Jama Minar, the largest mosque in Asia, he is required to wrap a blanket around his legs. "No knees," says Neelam.

No shoes, either. Cloth paths are laid over the red sandstone floor inside the open-air mosque, but the temperature is close to 90 degrees and it's like fire-walking. I guess you have to want it to get to heaven.

Neelam is a former schoolteacher with three children. She escorts us through the narrow and crowded passages of the markets in Old Delhi. We travel the only way that makes sense — on bicycle rickshaws. The smells of Indian spices and vendors' cook stoves envelop us as we charge ahead, encountering well-fed sleeping dogs that belong to no one and snake charmers wooing cobras out of their baskets. Cows and dogs and pigs take care of the ample garbage on the street.

At a place called the Red Fort, a fortress covering several blocks with soaring walls that repelled invaders many times. The ruler's harem lived in a building cooled by a stream of perfumed water running through the middle. Billowing curtains hung from the ceiling. All that's gone now, leaving only a shell, but the sumptuous life they lived practically materializes before you eyes.

India is nothing if not contradictory, a country where the coexistence of extreme wealth and poverty seems to be accepted. My choice was to stay in fine hotels or hovels. Little exists in between.

Driving in India is not for sissies. Our driver Vinay honks his horn most of the time, and lanes seem to be invisible. It's a free-for-all in which cars and trucks muscle motorcycles out of the way and pedestrians don't even count. The five-hour drive to Jaipur is out of an Indian version of "Blade Runner," a bizarre cavalcade of scenes. Cows roam the streets, safe in their sacredness. Women in bright saris cut wheat by hand in fields along the highway and men work on car engines wherever the car has broken down.

The Jai Mahal Palace is not modern but once was the home of the maharajah who ruled Jaipur. You can't see one end of the property from the other end. A big wedding with lots of fireworks is held in the courtyard. India loves movies, cricket and weddings. The Sunday Hindustani Times has a matrimonial section in which the families of women and men advertise for mates. I was shocked to see women described as "homely" until Neelam explained that the word in India means a woman is a good homemaker. Many of these homely women have MBAs as well. Welcome to Mother India.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.