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Published: January 28th 2008
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Jaipur - 27/12/07-31/12/07
As we reach the outskirts of Jaipur, capital city of the state of Rajasthan, with a population of around 4 million, it becomes very clear just how low standards of living can be for many in India. People are packed in their hundreds into makeshift tents and wooden shacks. They share the roadsides with dogs, goats and the contents of the sewers, and their clothes are the dust and grim of the earth. Beggars crowd around the sides of the jeep, knocking on the windows, hands outstretched for rupees. Mothers hold their blackened children aloft, raising their fingers to their mouths, the Indian mime for "feed me".
You need a strong stomach for shit like that, and India builds up the lining of your guts and turns them to iron better than any place I've been. There's nothing here that isn't touched by the grime and the filth, there's no smell that isn't tainted by the masala-mixed aroma of a hundred different types of feces. When the shit hits the fan in India, you'd better fucking duck and cover.
We glide through the untouchables, and through backstreets to the headquarters of
IDEX. We're fed and given a brief introduction, then we get transferred to our Indian host families, where we will spend our nights, and be served our breakfasts and our dinners. Again, it's me and Laurence together with one family, and the girls with another. We arrive. Our hosts are Ritesh and Anju Saxena, a young couple I'd guess in their early thirties, with two boys - Aryan (6yrs) and Emon (6months). They, like most Indian families, live with two of their elderly parents, whom we have little or no contact with during our stay.
The experience of staying with the Saxena's is best described as a pleasant acid trip, at times skirting along the edges of danger and paranoia, as though any moment you could drop off the edge and things turn nasty. They overwhelm us with hospitality, sometimes to the point of exhaustion. It's apparently a great honor for Indians to have others come to stay in their home, and so they try hard to impress.
Although I enjoy their company, especially that of Ritesh, the softly spoken head of the house and a web designer by trade, and Emon, the almost silent youngest
son, at certain times it's a struggle to keep my head from falling into my hands, or my fingers from reaching into my eye sockets and tearing them out at the root. Tiredness plays a big role in my troubles. Sleeping at night is a fucking Olympic feat. The "bed" is a thin mattress laid on a rock hard floor. The pillow barely keeps my lips from kissing the ground. I take sleeping tablets, but even then, my body is shook awake every hour or so by intense cramps and aches, or by the freezing cold air, which the blankets lack the will to keep at bay.
Then there's the fucking dogs. Everywhere in India, dogs, dogs and more fucking dogs. If I had my way, I'd stalk the streets at night with a stun gun and a tank of pure napalm, and put the bolt straight through the skull of every canine fucker I came across. I'd burn out their nests and strangle their puppies, cos you can't get no sleep when the sun goes down and they open their gullets and howl at the moon from dusk til dawn.
Three or four hours sleep
a night makes everything harder, and meal times are the hardest. At this point, my body still belongs to England, and my stomach hasn't adjusted to the concept of filling itself with food anytime before twelve noon. So, at 7.30am, when we're presented with plates of dry toast, bowls of strange, spicy cereals, dried fruit, bananas, and the wide, expectant grin of an eager housewife, every mouth full is a trial. Each morning, and often in the evenings, I battle to force back the gag reflex as my body tries to reject the food I cram into my shrunken stomach.
It's not that I don't like the food - I do. The problem is the quantity I feel obliged to consume out of politeness, and the total lack of an obvious source of protein. One thing we quickly learn is that there is little meat on offer in Rajasthan, and what there is you would be better off avoiding. So, the stable of the diet is usually various forms of vegetable dal, with chapati's and rice. This is good for the first couple of days, before repetition renders it almost inedible. It takes me until the third or
fourth day in camp before I rediscover my appetite and begin to enjoy food again.
The other danger to my sanity is conversation. Our hosts speak good English, but not good enough to make conversing easy. Many things are lost in translation, and concentration is required at all times. There are constant questions, particularly in relation to Anju's desire to set up her own business so that she can work from home, hosting and entertaining travellers full time. It appears we are required to provide full consultation on the process, and we give it our best shot, offering advice on the website, the means of building contacts and the type of services she should offer. I wish her luck, and request a healthy share of the profits when the money starts to role in.
The rest of our time in Jaipur is divided between site-seeing and workshops on Indian culture, and what to expect at our work placement. We take a trip to the Amber Fort, riding up the hill to the fort on elephants, and the Palace of the Winds, or Pink Palace, and make an unscheduled stop at the Water Palace, a building which
sits in the middle of a huge lake. Then, we get an introduction into shopping Indian style, as we trudge through the markets, bartering with shopkeepers for their clothes.
Initially, it's hard not to get ripped off. A little green around the gills, you get offered the high tourist prices, and even if you negotiate down to half, it's still about twice as much as an Indian would pay. However, with a little practice, and some hard bargaining, you can end up ripping off the sellers. Once they see your money, and your sweet white ass as it exits the shop with the promise of going elsewhere, they almost always give in to your price.
The girls seem to largely enjoy this process and are better at it than me; they have plenty to choose from, and almost all of it looks good on them. For guys, it's a little more difficult. We're told we should make an effort to dress in Indian style when we are working, but everything I see or try on makes me look like a cunt. I end up buying two long sleeved shirts and a long man-dress thing which stretches
down to my knees. I never wear this in public, and it, along with the shirts, which I wear once or twice, gets left behind in camp.
The other experience in Jaipur worth mentioning is our trip to the cinema to watch the Bollywood blockbuster, "Welcome". The cinema itself is an historic building, a lavish old theatre. The film, which is in Hindi without subtitles, is a fucking mystery, but hilarious nonetheless. Watching a movie is India is very different from home. In England, if any fucker dares make a sound, answers his mobile or slurps his drink, he'll receive a hard stare, and maybe even a physical reprimand. Not in India. There are constant cheers, roars of laughter and banging of seats. Everytime a fit female walks on screen, the men whistle and leap out of their chairs. Phones go off constantly, and every plot point is a discussion. It's a total mad cacophony of noise, and the joy is totally infectious.
To this day, I have no real idea what the fuck the plot of "Welcome" is. I know it involved the mafia, and there was a love story, but it was near impossible to work out who all the huge cast of characters were, and their relationships to each other. It was a slapstick comedy, and a fucking funny one at that, and a musical, with a soundtrack I now own, and I will never understand why the fuck it went on for three hours (there was an interval) when nothing really happened. Despite this, it's now in my top three films of 2007.
After four nights in Jaipur, we leave and embark on the 15 hour train journey to Barmer, a long night filled with fear, madness and flesh-eating bugs.
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Mucky Phil
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Genius
A reet riveting read!