I’ve been posting my notes from India, scribbled and scrawled all around the country last summer, while I get things up and running around here. Now that things are humming nicely, I’m spending less time fixing things, leaving me more time to post tasty content. But although I’m not quite so desperate for filler anymore, I’m honoured to see that some of you actually seem to like these, so I’ll keep posting them sporadically until they’re all up. I’ll be away from my computer this weekend, so to keep the content fresh, this dispatch posted itself this morning and another one is set to go up tomorrow. If you like, you can keep track of them on a brand spanking new dispatches page.
Thanks for reading!
-mark
________________________
2:41pm Thursday, Jul 26
I’m sitting at my hotel in Varanasi. The power has gone out, but the computer is powered by a generator. Crazy day.
My autorickshaw driver was supposed to show up last night around 2:00 am, to take me to Bangalore’s airport. As 2:00 approaches there’s no sign of him, but as fate would have it a kindly older English couple is standing in the hotel courtyard, waiting for their own taxi van to the airport. It turns out they’ve lived on and off in India for decades, and are dressed in traditional local clothing — even in an age and a city where most everyone wears slacks and a t-shirt. They offer me a ride in their cab, but I feel bad about ditching a rickshaw driver who has agreed to meet me in the dead of the night — or at least I feel bad until he shows up late and doubles the agreed-upon fare for the short drive because of a special new “nighttime charge.” Fortunately the English couple is still loading their luggage into the cab and their offer still stands, so I leave my very annoyed rickshaw driver at the hotel and head off with them.
I end up at the airport at 2h30 for a 6h15 flight — my wake-up call the day before never came, and I was nervous about sleeping through my flight, so I got here early. I decide to pass the time calling home, and a phone boy, around 17 or so, assures me — three times, since I’m skeptical of this very good deal — that he charges only 4 rupees per minute to Canada. When the meter starts up, I see that I’m being discreetly charged just over double that. I cut the call short and get into an argument about the fee — by now I’m used to fighting (and often winning) these little mini-battles that inevitably pop up five or ten times a day. A cab driver walks over and comes to the phone kid’s defence, angry that I’m quibbling about a measly 20 rupees, and I tell him this isn’t the point — that I’m annoyed with the deception, not with the price (which incidentally is only a little inflated over regular charges, and probably reasonable given that we’re at an airport). I tell him that the heart of the matter is that I don’t like to be cheated.
If I’m honest with myself though, that isn’t the issue either. The real issue, the ugly truth, is that after weeks of haggling, warding off cheats and being scammed anyway more often than not, I just don’t want to pay 20 more rupees than I have to, dammit. I end up paying the full fee, only because I think to myself that the kid may well be docked or beaten for the shortfall at the till, but I’m more reluctant than even I understand. The cabbie tells me — correctly — that 100 of my dollars is 3600 rupees, and says I ought to be ashamed for arguing with a kid that he says earns 700 rupees a month. Truth be told, 20 rupees won’t buy a pack of gum back home. And then I realize that even as this place is opening my eyes to inequality, it’s also hardening me towards it. It’s that 50th child who begs you for money today, the 100th cabbie who quintuples his fare because you’re white. It’s the thousandth merchant on the street who treats you like a sucker for the sole reason that he thinks he can get away with it and usually does. And it’s that age-old motto, the one we always conjure up with righteous indignation when we feel cheated: “I work hard for my money,”
But, if I’m going to stick with this theme of being honest with myself, then that’s not really true either — at least not entirely. I did work for my money, and was paid for my work. But I don’t work harder than most Indians — certainly not harder than a teenager selling phone time at Bangalore airport at 2:30 in the morning. Really, I don’t deserve these 20 rupees any more than he does. And frankly, this is a meal for him - back home it’s about 60 cents.
The English couple from the taxi have an old-world colonial attitude towards India: Indians are quaint, noble, majestic in their primitiveness, and wear just the most beautiful outfits… There’s a lot of the “noble savage” myth from the American frontier days in their mentality, and their admiration is more condescending than edifying, even if it does seem genuine. The woman does all the talking in the cab, and reveals enough that I’m pretty sure she’d have fought tooth and nail for those 20 rupees. And she’d have got them too. But I’m not sure she’d have been able to come up with a better reason than mine for doing it.
—
I’ve grabbed a wink or two on the flights this morning, but I’m exhausted by the time I land in Varanasi and in no mood for another round of the inevitable grinding haggle-fest that awaits foreigners at every bus stop, airport and rickshaw stand in the country. Varanasi’s touts and cabbies are considered among India’s worst, and mine lives up to the reputation.
After five minutes or so of haggling with a mob of drivers, I’m down from a ridiculous 500 rupees to an only slightly-silly 300 for a cab to my hotel. But no sooner am I in the van than he starts on me for a 25-rupee “parking fee,” which I refuse to pay on the grounds that I’m paying him to drive, not to park. He’s not impressed with my argument, but I’m not about to give in - if I do, I can likely look forward to a gas fee as well. And a luggage fee. And who knows what else…
He’s not happy, but knows that if I were less exhausted and more patient, I could probably get another driver to bring me to town for 50 rupees less than I’ve agreed to pay him. We set out and he takes his frustration out on the other drivers - bumping a rickshaw from behind and whizzing past a bike within a half-inch of the poor guy’s handlebars. I’ve seen nothing but crazy, insane, swing-from-the-chandeliers driving in India, but this guy wins special bonus prize.
My room at the Haifa Hotel is as clean as my Lonely Planet promises. The sheets are clean and there is toilet paper (!!!!!) in the bathroom, but the real selling point is that all fruits and veggies here are washed in purified water. This is a big deal — my mom may not want to read this next bit — in a town where the Ganges, the main water source, contains 1.5 million faecal coliform bacteria in every 100 ml of water. A safe maximum is 500 — three thousand times less. India’s holiest river is so polluted that it’s actually septic (it contains no dissolved oxygen).
I get to the hotel around 2:00 pm, and after spending the last 12 hours in airports I end up napping for six hours before dinner. Incidentally, Delhi’s is not the best designed airport I’ve ever seen — to get to my connecting flight, I need to leave the airport, dash for five or ten minutes through unmarked back alleys and cargo areas, and clear security all over again at this new terminal.
But I’m in Varanasi! More soon, after I start exploring the oldest city in the world!
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.
Leave a Comment