It’s hard to explain the contrasts I’ve experienced in India since I’ve been here – just over a week now. Delhi is a massive, and massively unregulated, city. It is as if urban sprawl has been allowed to go unchecked for the last three thousand years. But from the chaotic network of roads that holds this place together, to the breathtaking view of the Himalayas from the small mountain town of Mussoorie, this country has ups and downs both of altitude and of character.
We live in a gated neighborhood called Niti Bagh, in New Delhi, and the first few days our group of twelve students mostly spent being oriented (or dis-oriented, as the case may be), and exploring the markets around us and the nearby neighborhoods. We got health and safety lectures, history lessons, and then on Saturday morning we woke up at an hour so early it shouldn’t be named and boarded the Shatabdi Express train to head up into Mussoorie, and the mountains, for the weekend. The first leg of the journey was a five hour ride to Dehradun, a small city at the foot of the mountains, wherein in the train tracks simply stop short, unable to cope with the suddenly sloping foothills and so just ceasing to exist.
(We had a twenty minute stopover in a dirty town called Saharanpur, but besides the fact that they’re famous for furniture, you don’t need to know about that. What you do need to know is this: the bathrooms on Indian trains are downright foul. Not just because they’re filtyh and unhygienic – though both of those are true. But because the toilets funnel down a slope through which, if you angle your head back and peer down, you will notice opens directly onto the tracks. So no matter what business you enter the powderroom to carry out, whether it be standard or, erm, executive, an underhead view of the train would be most unpleasant. I read that morning in the local paper that India has the highest rate of open defecation in the world. I can’t imagine why.)
It was an additional two hours by car from Dehradun up the winding roads of the Himalayas. They say the only substitute for bad manners is good reflexes, and Indian drivers seem to prove that rule ineffably true. Our cab drivers were both kind and courageous, darting in and out of insane sorts of traffic, whether it be vehicular, pedestrian, or animal.
Seven hours of travel and the sheer exhaustion was worth it, though. Mussoorie is a lovely small tourist town in the mountains – about 8,000 people which is hefty to my central Pennsylvania standards but nonexistant by Indian ones. The town is one large bazaar, either a single expansive market or an interwoven series of dozens of small markets, I’m not sure. The prices were cheaper than Delhi, and the haggling was fun and sometimes even successful. The accomodations of our hotel left much to be desired, but this was fast becoming a matter of habit for us so while complaining was one option, which some people chose to exercise at some times, most of us just shut up and dealt with sleeping on damp mattresses and taking cold showers and considered it Part Of The Experience.
This experience also included a side trip to a small mountain town called Dehnolti. It is worth pointing out here that Mussoorie is at a higher altitude than Denver, Colorado, and Dehnolti higher even than that. At around 8,000 ft. above sea level, ears were popping all over the place. Upon our hike up the mountain Dehnolti sits on, past 10,000 ft. to reach a Hindu temple devoted to Shiva, the hardiest of us were breathless and I was close to dead. Additionally, hiking up the Himalayan mountains with a messenger bag is a feat. Additionally to that, doing it in open-toed shoes makes it interesting. Oh, and also, clutching your inhalers for dear life makes it hard to climb, and once you realize you’re climbing in harsh rains and wading through mud and donkey dung, it is truly nothing short of a novel experience.
The only way I was able to make it up, straggling past the entire crew save one girl who kept pace with me, and breaking every five minutes or so, was by promising myself that it would be worth it when (if?) I got there. That turning around would suck.
“Maaf kejiye,” I’d huffed, stopping a family that walked by as my friend Laura and I sat on the rocks gulping down the thin mountain air. Excuse me. They turned around to look at me in surprise. I stumbled for a moment, mangling what twenty words of Hindi I knew but determined to psych myself up for the last leg of the journey. “Chalia bahut.” We’re walking too much. I gestured to my chest. “The temple – is close?”
The husband nodded cheerfully. “Yes!” he said. “Close close.”
I nodded and thanked him, standing so we could continue walking. It turned out that his definition of close was nowhere near as close as I would have liked it to be.
The temple was nice. Not mind-blowing as I’d expected, but watching other people’s reactions to it was almost more rewarding than trying to gauge my own. I took some pictures and encountered agan the family I’d stopped on the trail up. The husband signed to me to ask if I could take pictures of their family with his camera – his beautiful wife, two gorgeous little boys, and a grandfather. I obliged, and then held up my own camera, gesturing to the boys, and said, “Tikh hai?” Is it all right? He nodded and roped them back in for a photo shoot, their faces so stony serious for what couldn’t have been more than three, four years old each. They were rigid, like the statues of Shiva behind them. It was adorable.
As I found myself thanking this family for the second time now, our group reassembled and prepared to turn back around and hike down to Dehnolti, when the husband gesture to me from outside a locked door above us, that led into a worship room of some sort. One of the other guys, Sean, and myself exchanged looks and went back up the staircase to the family.
The man noticed the rest of the group I was with and waved to them as well, and slowly, unsure, we all came up to the door as a temple worker unlocked it and ushered us inside. As soon as the tin plates arrived we knew what was happening, and as the grandfather and another old man joined us and gestured for us to sit and join them, the lot of us exchanged worried looks. We had been asked to dine with the family, to eat the temple food, and while incredibly kind of them it was also incredibly dangerous for us. Problem being that it is incredibly rude to refuse food in India – it is fine to nibble, to leave extras on your plate, but suspect to deny outright. Doubly so for a family that had been so gracious.
Trying not to grimace, we requested small portions, and ignored the rainwater they poured for us to drink altogether. We each had a few bites of the rice and curry, trying to converse between the broken English of the husband, grandfather and young boy who’d served our food – and our even more broken Hindi.
“We are so asking for it,” Sean whispered to me as he looked down at his plate.
“Yes,” I said. “This is tempting fate. I wonder who of us will be sick first.”
The experience was an incredible one, though. The family was kind, the food was good, despite potentially deadly, and after a fond farewell the hike back down was nowhere near as devastatingly demanding as the hike up had been. All went smoothly for the rest of the day with shopping, laughing, and the following day’s preparations to visit a few surrounding schools for Tibetan refugees and walk around the markets some more and visit a Buddhist temple that the Dali Laama visited regularly.
And, well, in case you were wondering the answer to the “who’ll get sick first” riddle, I can give you a hint.
No, really, guess.
