Mumbay is amazing.. you wake up because of the 60.000 black and yellow taxis playing  the horn, but taxi drivers are always smiling... so it's like a noisy game and you cannot get angry.

When I decided to go to India I did'n care about monsoons, but once there.. I had to. Also because of the poor children playing naked in the mud.

Supposedly, anyone who can drive in India can drive anywhere in the world.

Not (only) because it's mostly stick shift (manual, as oppose to automatic, for those of you who don't know) here, but because it's insane: the lines on the street and the lights just seem to be more of guidelines, really.

It's insane, but really fun.

The really wierd part is that even though there are, like 4 people on a motorcycle (we saw these people, one guy was driving, a girl on the back sitting what would have been saddleside on a horse, another woman in the sidecar, and a boy on top of the sidecar.) and no one has a helmet, there's no need for seatbelts for passengers, just the driver (in some cars there are actualy no seatbelts), there are supposedly less accidents here than in Montreal.

Probably because the limit is, like, 40 mph. Or something somewhere close to that.

Insane. But you gotta love it.

Yesterday on of my cousin took us to the Atria, which is like the equivalent of the Eaton Centre. Well, it's not underground, but it's basically the fact that the Atria is one of the few big shopping centers in Bombay.

In the evening my parents, my aunt and uncle, my cousin, my sister and I went out for dinner. We went to this place where you get bhel puri. Bhel is sort of the most popular junk food here...it's like...um...well, when you're a kid, standing for the ice cream truck. Actually, I don't think we ever got and ice cream truck in Montreal, but I'm sure you've all seen movies. Anyway, it's like that. There are these roadside stands that you can buy it at-like a hot dog stand. But you can still get the ice cream at Ben and Jerry's (<3). Sorry I keep jumping examples. I mean comparisions. But it's just that the roadside stands aren't all that hygenic, so it's not always the best place to go. Instead, we went to this restaurant, really nice. Ridiculous wait though. You can either eat outside or inside. When we went, the outside wait was 25 minutes, and the inside an hour.

We finally got in, though. It was sooooo goood! I love the bhel.

I'm (finally) done. For now anyway.

Bye.

P.S. HAPPY NEW YEAR. (OMG, its true:it's still the 29th there!!)

Umm...sorry abou the title, I just had no idea what to write.

You'd think that I just wouldn't write anything, wouldn't you?

So I dont have much to tell, it's the third day of my stay, but I made this video for what I was going to say. I apologise in advance for the way I look in it, I had just woken up.

I'll upload the video when I'm not feeling so lazy.

Might be a while.

Hi everyone.

    So, as you've probably gathered from my title, I'M FINALLY IN INDIA!

    The flight here was interesting. We ran into several problems, but I won't bore you with them-yet, anyway.

    It's 8:37 a.m. here, which makes it about 10:00 in Montreal. Wow. And it's already tomorrow here, too. Friday, I mean.

    Anyway, it's gorgeous here. It really is.

    So we borded the flight on the 26th, which was a task in itself. On Christmas, one of the pipes in the bathroom...er...leaked, I think. Well, just something along the lines of "died". Even though a pipe can't die.

    ANYWAY. So as everything was closed on the 25th, we had to wait for the Boxing-Day-Schedule-Following stores to open, then get the replacement pipe, an fix it. Although by the time my dad got it, it was already a quarter to 3, and we wanted to leave by 3:00, 3:30.

    Yeah, right.

    So we (finally) left, ran into some more trouble on the way there (such as thinking that the best place to put the luggage that wouldn't fit into the boot was the roof, then freaking out when we thought that the suitcase had fallen off), we finally all got into the airport. At Trudeau, we found more trouble. We were checking in our bags when one of the bigger and heavier bags went and decided to be over 32 kg, which is the limit. If a bag weighs more than that, we have to take out stuff until it's under, and, usually, throw the stuff out. Luckily. we we in the line of a really nice woman who let us repack our stuff, so that it fit. Finally, we made the limit. So we checked in the rest of our bags and went to customs with our carry-ons. All of our bags go through, except the last one. The last one has some dips and some spreads that we thought family here might enjoy.

    Apperently, spreads and cream cheese are considered "gels". Which means that we could either throw them out, put them into checked luggage, or send the bag they were in as checked luggage. As we had already checked in all our bags, the next option was to check in the carry-on. Which we were going to do until we were told it was $150something. For this little, teeny bag that would barely make it as a gy, bag.

    So we didn't want to throw it away, and paying $150 for the extra checked luggage was insane. Rock, hard place, nice to meet you, we're the Jani family.

    What did we do? you ask. We gave it to the nice check-in lady who let us repack.

    Would you shut up laughing? I'm serious. This is stuff you can't make up.

    So we were now free to go through customs.

    I can't even begin to tell you how mad I was. I was furious. Livid. I was...hang on, give me a sec to check merriam-webster online.

    Just kidding.

    So we finally got on the plane, and then we went to the runway to take off, and then we stopped. Why? To de-ice the wings. Yup, I'm serious. Only in Montreal.

    So we finally took-off. The flight was okay, bordering on boring. The food was tasteless. Bland. Icky.

    But I watched Transformers. And Harry Potter and the Order of the Phenoix. And I didn't sleep. At all.

    Then we got to Heathrow. We were a little late, as there was congestion around the landing area, or however you say it. But we got there. While we were looking at some of the shops, it struck me as utterly STUPID that you couldn't bring cream cheese onto a plane but you could drink alcohol before boarding and on the plane.

    I dunno, maybe none of you agree with me, but I'm just saying.

    So we boarded the next plane. Heathrow to Mumbai. We boarded, took-off (no need to de-ice anything) and started our 8 hour flight. FUN.

    It was an...interesting (read: pretty boring) flight.  Okay, no, that  somewhat a lie. It wasnt't bad. I watched a bit of Transformers, a bit of Hairspray, and even a little bit of Ratatouille while waiting for The Bourne Ultimatum to come on, since I missed half the first screening because I fell asleep. Oops.

    Anyway, again, the food was not totally bad. Let's just say I came off both flights hungry. Very hungry.

    So we FINALLY arrived at the Mumbai Airport. We went through customs, got our baggage etc, put our coats on and walked outside. That's when we realized something was wrong.

    WE WERE DYING OF HEAT!!!

    Ha. Gotcha there, didn't I??

    I don't mean that I gotcha about the heat, I meant about the something being wrong.

    It's gorgeous here, as I mentioned before. It's 20something degrees celcius.

    IN DECEMBER.

    It's great to look outside and see everyone walking and stuff. We have the majority of the windows open here, and the fans are all on. The only thing I can really complain about (and want to complain about) is the humidity. But that's the only downside.

    So anyway, back to the story. We were walking out of the airport (without our coats on, we're not that stupid, I mean, my parents grew up here) and we walked pass the many, many people waiting to pick up other people, and realized that no one from our family was there.

    No one.

    So we called, and everything got straightened out-turns out there was some kind of miscommunication and everyone here thought we were reaching here on the 29th, meaning tomorrow. So we had to wake up on of my cousins and one of my uncles so they could come and pick us up.

    So that was an adventure.

    But it's all good, we're at the house, and we're fine.

    Just a little tired as my sister showed and which I can show you when I upload the photos of her sleeping. (MUAHAHAHAHA)

    So it's been a...an...well, it's been a hell of two days, take it any way you want.

 
    Bye,
             --Akhila

   

I have a million pictures from India.... On the other hand, cobbling together a story from my journals and letters and trying to do justice to how that country has coloured my memories and my perceptions from that day to this, has been, um, a challenge.

April 29^th 1993

Delhi India

I am almost ready to begin the story of India… if I can figure out where to start. Never was much good at such annoying details

  donc ensuite, encore...

  in media res

He told me his name was Dada, tho I have since found out that "Dada" is an Indian label of respect, so I think he was pulling one over a poor tired looking solo newcomer.

But he was young, maybe 10 or 11, too young to be working the street scene this late. He showed me the way to the hotel I had picked out from my guide; in return (as promised) I bought his string of jasmines for 10 rupees and a smile.

Bombay, 12:30 a.m.

I always seem to be arriving in these places at inopportune hours--when it is dark, and a wandering blond female with a backpack looks like she needs some help.

“Yes?” “Yes Mam” “You need something Man, yes?” “Change Money” “Yes Auntie, Cheap hotel, yes Mam, you follow me.” I would soon learn how to wade thru swarming ‘I’ll be helpful' moments, a necessary trick as I head up through Northern India on my way to the mountains.

Always aware of the price at the other end.

In India they call it back-shish. Young guys literally tear the bag off your shoulders, even though you’ve told them you can manage yourself. They march off (inevitably to the wrong place) and then demand a tip-payment for their troubles. Hah!

Dada was sweet, however. He’d sold no jasmines all evening, and my offer was high.

There are not many tourists in Bombay these days, what with the weather averaging 40 degrees, and, um, the riot bombings. (Can’t decide which is worse, myself.)

As we plodded the six to ten city blocks in the after-midnight humidity, we passed two cat-sized dead rats (long tails straight, scaly and unmoving now--the reason for their demise unknown), and many crumbling old colonial buildings which, the next morning, I would find all look exactly the same as the hotel I eventually settled into. The buildings themselves brood and sweat, even in the deepest dark of a late April night. It seems almost as if the bits of that sea I notice, reflecting under the moonlight when we turn down one alley or another, must be ready to boil. The still water's surface tension an illusion held together by the old kettle Shiva drops hot rocks into, when he wants to create steam for his sauna.

On the plane over from Bangkok I sat with a Bahranian man who handed me an American twenty dollar bill and the address of a place to stay, should I ever get to Dubai.

Then, there was the sign as I stood in line awaiting my “you may enter India” stamp. It was the kind of lit-up digital scrolling letters sign that you might see in the Queen Street Subway station in Toronto. This one letting me know in slowly passing English words that the airport terminal offers free limited porter time

        for the elderly, the disabled, and “unaccompanied ladies”

& finally, materializing out of the group of people the airport was disgorging, an Indian Canadian gentleman who helped me through a flash strike by the taxi drivers at the airport. An unexpected glitch to betray my lack of expectations.

He got me onto a bus that would head for the city's old port area, where the backpackers congregate. He gave me a lesson in how not to let anyone see my money and, with total old world courtesy, reached over to show me the fleeting shadow of the mosque out on the water as the bus headed to town.

The next day, refreshed, there was Bombay to explore: like the intriguing but off-limits Towers of Silence--a Parsee burial ground where bodies are foisted onto platforms and left to be picked clean by vultures... which may seem somewhat macabre, except the Parsees believe that fire, earth, water, and air are sacred elements, and so they will not corrupt them with dead bodies and stinking flesh.

An elegant argument, if one stops to contemplate the logic.

& I heard the railway stations in this city push thru 70,000 people per hour

That’s a lot of flesh, no guff.

Like so many things in India, it blows all sense of perspective

Sure, it’s all overwhelming at times.

Took a night train from Bombay to Delhi. I wandered out of the New Delhi terminal into the sun and the heat-blasted streets…. Everywhere, again: “Yes” “Yes Mam?” “Yes, you buy” “You take my rickshaw” “You need information where you going? Where you come from? Mam, yes”

no no NO!!

knowing nothing

I am on my way to Dharamsala. A little mountain town overlooking the Himalayas, where the Dali Lama and his Tibetan Buddhist followers live in exile.

“Slow, quiet and peaceful.”

God! It sounds like paradise. A week in Bangkok, four days in Bombay, and an afternoon in Delhi:

Too many people. Too much heat blasted flesh.

       does this flow of people never stop??

The press of people in these cities is, I figure, more monumental and more uncompromising than the mighty Ganges herself, goddess though she be.

Still, if you take a picture (exchange elbows and action for the press of a button), this India is as hot and as colourful, and as frustrating and as fascinating as everyone promised.

The women’s saris: a riot of colours too bright to be found in nature. Indian women are intoxicating, with their fabulous flowing silks and chiffons, their dark faces and shiny smooth black hair, pierced noses, ankle chains, and forehead adornments

“Yes, Mam” “Yes?” My head is spinning with so much seeing. The sounds crowding together under the sun’s glare. “Yes?” a rickshaw knocks my bag almost off my shoulder.

Then, in the midst of it all, this afternoon: a guy 20ish, well dressed. He is amused by the stanch “I’m not interested. No!” expressions that I have learned to adopt. 

“You are too strong,” he complains, smiling. “It will just make me try harder!”

I allow myself a smile at that, and he follows me, pressing his card into my hand with his own bright smile. (The family’s export business.) I am in the old Delhi market. He finds me a restaurant. “Maybe I will have tea with you too!” he says, seating himself.

When he finds out I am writing (a disguise I use to convince myself that something concrete might yet come of all this wandering), he tells me he is from Kashmir, tries his best to press-gang me into the cause. “I have letters, hmnn, from friends… One woman from England. She is a writer too, and she puts together an article on what is happening there. Maybe you would be writing too. What do you think of all this in Kashmir?”

Be it cowardice, or maybe just fatigue, maybe foresight, or even just plain sloth, I stick to a pacifist line. “I don’t believe in violence”.

“Not in the cause of justice?” he asks.

I have sympathy for his cause, like the Mayans in Central America… in fact, however, I don’t really believe in his idea justice, either. This feels different from the Maya oppression. I have been reading V.S Napaul. I have read Rushdie, and some of the writings of Gandhi. I distrust any “justice” that enlists violence cloaked in nationalism as a focus for its cause.

But I don’t say that… it would sound cryptic even to my ears.

Just before I make my way back to the railway station where I plan to hole up and while the hours ‘til my train departs this evening, he convinces me to visit his family’s business where everything on display is hand-made in Kashmir. There is a persuasive argument, upon my entry, in favour of maybe taking some information back with me to America about the region.

Photos for Amnesty International, or maybe coded messages for guerilla supporters outside India, who knows?

The opportunities abound for intrigue, and me, new-comer-to-it-all, I grew up on Ludlum spy thrillers.  I pull myself out of the illusion, just as the possible scenarios start spilling into the many colours hanging from the alley shops. Saris like flags over the street to create shade

(pulling the wool over here eyes)

it is all of a piece/peace…

???

full stop

I am off, I remind myself, to Dharamsala, where they are pacifists, and meditation rules. Where, if I am lucky, people don’t focus quite so much on the desperate commerce of poor people’s “Yes, Mam”s, needing my trade to feed their families, or fuel their causes.

Howsoever just they may be.

We we arrived, safe and sound in Mumbai (Bombay).  The humidity here is unreal, I think this is where toxic mold got its start.  They seem to have some really interesting test sites for new crops in our hotel room .  The hotel is the typical Exodus ecomomy class big city hotel, the usual rats inclusive package (bed bugs extra) .  The rats here are actually a pretty friendly lot all in all.  There not your huge cat killing, carry off the small children variety, more like hampsters with bad hair,  long noses and tails.  Speaking of rats we had an interesting visit to the Rat Temple outside of the major town of Bikaner, called Karni Mata Temple.  It is a Hindu temple dedicated to rats. Apparently the rats are the reincarnated male relatives of a long ago female diety, Karni Mata who is the patron goddess of Bikaner.  The rats have really taken advantage of the holy hospitality on offer.  Nothing is quite so heart warming as to see a couple of dozen of the little devils chatting and drinking together over a bowl of warm milk.  The only real down side to te whole experience was that of course you had to take your shoes and socks off before entering the temple. It did appear that the rats were not exactly what I would call litter trained.  Can you catch the plague through the soles of your feet??  In the centre of the city of Bikaner was a a great walled fortress made of red sand stone and inside was a palace, you can just imagine slaves and servants with giant fans made of feathers and gold, trying to cool you off, as it was pretty hot there.  And of course outside the palace everybody, at least all the male residents, are standing around peeing quite freely in public, (did I say it was really warm outside???) Once I heard that the Iniut in the Northern Arctic had 137 different words to describe snow, we are compiling a dictionary of at least that many words to describe the smell of s**t.  Sometimes in the morning the riversides are covered with hundreds of parishioners praying to the god of Immodium!!  We spent a lot of the last week and a bit,  travelling through the Thar desert in Western India snuggled up against the border of Pakistan, at times we were only about 60 kilometres away, but as our Indian guide Avtar said as he looked into the blue sky, " No they aren't sending us any presents today".  It was great,  I love deserts,  but I must admit (D) that I missed a lot of it. I think I must have offended one of the rat gods (must have been all of the cats jokes) and they put a fever curse on me.  But fortunately we stayed for a few days at a very nice hotel (it was actually a Palace) and I seem to be over the worst of it.  After travelling through the desert we went to Udaipur.  This is where they shot the India segments of the James Bond movie Octopussy.  A really beatiful area with large lakes and several beautiful palaces out on  the small islands in the lakes.  Very spectactular.  We had expresso and cappacino out on one of the islands surrounded by this wonderful visa of small mountains capped with hill top palaces.  Very nice.  India really is an amazing place.  A bit like traveling across a gigantic land-fill site dotted with amazing forts, temples and natural wonders.   More later.  TTFN