Before I talk much about traveling through the countryside, and the hazards of high Himalayan trekking, let me digress for a minute and tell you about New Delhi. When I arrived in India, all the contingents of the trip that were associated with geology from the University of California arrived at the same time, but other individuals on the trip were still due to arrive. The trip was billed as a “University extension class for Himalayan trekking” that allowed people from across the country to sign up and go on a trekking trip through India with a trip leader that knew the ins and outs of getting into the high Himalayas. This was more or less an excuse to get registration money to cover the cost of the geologic research that would be happening on the trip. The trip was actually an effort on the part of the supervising professor to collect dissertation research data for one of his students on the trip, and as geology students at the same university, we were “encouraged” to sign up for the class and come along on the trip to help in the process of research data collection. The second day we were in India the rest of the trekking members of the trip were arriving from the airport, and so we essentially had a free day to tour the city. Several of us rented a very small minivan and visited some of the sites in New Delhi. I remember it was bright, sunny, very hot, and very humid which made for an interesting, although exhausting and dusty, experience visiting some of the historical old palaces and fort complexes in the city.
One of the trekking members who arrived with us on the first day was a young lawyer from San Francisco who spoke Hindi, and he did the communicating with the van driver as we visited a few of the relics of the city. Towards the afternoon he told the van driver that we really didn’t need to see any more of the relics. Instead, what he (and therefore we) really want to see was a normal, middle-class suburban neighborhood in New Delhi. The van driver told him that he knew just the place and drove us winding around through the city to a certain neighborhood that he was familiar with. We wound up getting out of the van on a vacant lot next to a “suburb” of buildings and streets, and the young lawyer negotiated with the van driver for him to come back in a few hours and pick us up at the same location.
The street that we got out on was a two lane road separated by a dilapidated island in the middle that sometimes had a concrete curb around it, and sometimes did not, and was weedy throughout. I remember in the traffic island was a white Brahma cow wandering around with a bell around its neck dangling and dinging, while traffic poured down the road on both sides. The cow seemed oblivious to the traffic and wandered along on the island chewing weeds and grass on the way, and I remember the thick hot air bore the unmistakable sent of a barnyard which implied to me that this was pretty much a common daily experience on this traffic island of the street. Throughout New Delhi I saw many cows wandering around in this manner, and upon inquiry I found that the owners of the cows let them out during the day like dogs. The cows would wander throughout the day finding food for themselves, and in the evening they would come back to their owners in order to be milked (like dogs coming back for food). Since the cows and other animals are sacred in India, nobody bothered to hit the cow or shoe it out of the way (it could very possibly be your reincarnated mother), and the animals wandered wherever they wanted throughout the city eating whatever they want. This process is looked on as a form of social welfare provided to the family of the owner of the cow. Meanwhile the cows provide a critical service to society – the cows being the only form of weed control throughout the entire city. This also explains why there are no flower gardens in New Delhi.
We headed down one of the streets that separated from this main street into the buildings of suburbia New Delhi. Every street we turned on throughout this area had buildings in it that were exactly alike. Many of them look like they were hooked together, and if they were not they were built so extremely close that you could not tell where one billing stopped and the next one started as far as you look down the street. There were buildings on both sides of the narrow street, and the bottom floor of each building on one side of the street was a lower room that could have been a garage, but instead was some kind of a store/shop. Each building on that side had a shop; there was no other lower part of the buildings, just the shop. On the other side of the street there was just the building with occasional doors and no garage opening, and I had the feeling that we were seeing both the back and the front of the same style building over and over again as we walked down the street. On the top of each store opening (garage opening) was a metal role down door and inside was a display of shop merchandise with usually one attended gesticulating anxiously for us to come in and look. We must have looked a little bit peculiar in the area because this was a very off the road location for tourists, and there was nobody else there that look like they were from anywhere but India. Some stores were filled with unrecognizable food items in cans and small boxes, and some of it may have been candy, all wrapped in colorful wrappers and written with Hindi. Other shops had clothing (most of which would not fit an American), while other shops had a variety of other merchandise. I remember several of us bought umbrellas at one shop because our group leader had recommended them for trekking in the Himalayas; the monsoon season was just ending and there was still quite a bit of rain in the mountains. I paid two dollars for my umbrella and I still use it today – one of the best deals I ever made!
The streets were narrow, and seemed even narrower because the two and three-story buildings towered over the little alley-like streets. The second story of each of the buildings was the obvious living area for the occupants of the buildings. Windows lined the top stories of these buildings, and as I recall they were usually barred. The young lawyer from San Francisco commented that you could tell the building occupants that were well-off because they had a window unit air-conditioner, and the ones that were really well-off were actually running them. Along the sides of the buildings between the first and second level was where all of the power and phone lines were strung in a haphazard array of wires winding everywhere nailed directly onto the buildings. Sometimes they crossed the street from building to building draping overhead, sometimes they ran up the sides of the buildings – the organized chaos of wires added an air of crowded confusion to the street below them.
The street was narrow so that it would just barely accommodate two small India made cars as long as there was nobody standing on the sides of the street. It was paved sort of, but the pavement was broken up so badly that much of the street was mostly dirt and potholes forcing you to watch where you walked or you would twist your ankle. It was significantly sloped on both sides such that down the middle of the street was of a drainage channel of sorts. Down this channel was a stream of fluid dribbling, puddling, and slowly moving through the alley way-styled streets. It had the unmistakable stench of raw sewage. This was a smell that I could not get out of my nostrils for the whole time that we were in this suburb. One of the people with us that day was a young lady (geology student) who I will call Debbie. You will hear about her from time to time in these accounts. She seemed to be the kind of person that either made the wrong decisions at the wrong time, or was just unmistakably unlucky. During this stroll down the sewage laden street she had made the mistake of wearing flip-flops. Being from southern California and knowing that it was a hot day, perhaps the attire choices of shorts and flip-flops would have been a good idea in the states, but here it was a disgusting mistake. She spent the entire time that were walking through the suburbs hopping from one side of the narrow street to the other trying to avoid the stream of stenchful pooling, puddling water in the middle of the street – usually without success.
There were probably not more than five kinds of shops in the whole area, so looking into the shops as we strolled became quite monotonous. This combined with the disgusting stench of the “water” that I was constantly trying to avoid stepping in made the whole experience quite unpleasant after a short time, and within an hour I had seen enough and was ready to go. Unfortunately, Debbie was very keen to have Henna inked onto her hands and arms. Henna is a type of natural die that can be used to temporarily tattoo your body, and it wears off within about two weeks. In India there are traditional henna designs frequently used for marriages and other ceremonies, and Debbie really want to have this done on her hands even though it was going to wear off before we ever left the Himalayas. So we spent a lot of time traipsing around through this area trying to find a henna shop, and once we found it we were in for over an hour’s worth of waiting for the intricate designs to be inked on her hands and lower arms. I finally left and went out to join the cow waiting by the vacant lot for the taxi to return, preferring the fragrance of the barnyard to the fragrance of sewage in a typical Indian suburb. It was overall an “enlightening” day, and I would have been happy to put an end to the whole ordeal and go back to the guesthouse at the University of New Delhi, except that the “guesthouse” was about as appealing as an India suburb.
Next week: the sights, sounds, and smells of traveling through northern India