Some Stories

A collection of observations from our lives here.... hope you enjoy.
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People Do the Strangest Things Here in India

India stretches the boundaries of one’s credulity.

Whatever assumptions you have about the boundaries of human potential, India will change them and, in so doing, India will tug at each end of your psyche. If you let it, India will stretch you to untold levels of delight. It is indeed a place where you can experience wondrous things found nowhere else on earth. Conversely, India can sink your soul down to depths of sadness in a way that no other place can. One can count on India to change one’s heart.

This is because India will simultaneously grow and break your heart.

On one hand, there are those events that grip you in an enchanting way. For example, when you see the splendor of the Taj Mahal for the first time you are filled with a serene sense of awe at its majestic beauty. The things that they focused on during the construction of the Taj Mahal are simply captivating. The front entrance of the Taj Mahal is approximately forty feet high and is framed in Koranic verse. The letters of the verse are made of black marble that is inlaid into white marble, providing a striking contrast to the sweeping arcs and swirls that make up Arabic letters. It is aesthetically stunning. What is especially incredible is that the height of the letters change based upon their position. The script at the top of the entrance is one and a half times the size of the script at the ground level. This variation in the size of the letters creates the optical illusion, from ground level, that all of the letters are the same size all the way around.

The four minarets at each corner of the Taj Mahal lean slightly outwards, away from their common center. You don’t even notice it until someone points it out to you. This slight lean was done to ensure that in the event the minarets ever fall, that they would not hit the main dome. Brilliant.

These are but a few examples of the delights to be found in the Taj Mahal. Yet, there is also a sense of horror built into the Taj Mahal. It is said that the workers who built the Taj were executed so that there could never be a second one. The calligraphers who created the Koranic script around the perimeter of the entrance had their hands cut off. The chief architect was beheaded.

India pulls you one way, and then the other way. It leaves you delightfully off balance.

India will show you things that will stretch your credulity into a chasm of despair. India presents the Western observer with an ongoing recalibration of what humans can endure in life.

On one particular rainy day in Mumbai my driver took a shortcut to the airport through a slum that was ghastly in almost all of its physical attributes. Grey skies hung over a crowd of humanity that was experiencing deprivation the likes of which I had never seen before. Children were defecating in the streets en masse. Scrawny crows leapt through heaping mounds of garbage while competing violently with the huge rats for scraps of food. A humanity comprised of the poorest of the poor, the starving, the lame, and the insane toiled together in a shared desperation. Everyone in this slum was thin. Conjoined shacks made out of scrap metal and cardboard provided these people with a meager and insufficient shelter against the elements. Crowds of young men stood in the rain, arm in arm. Young girls walked quickly in small groups. The oldest members of the community had the least to show for their long lives spent in poverty, looking as if they had been pushed out from even the smallest comforts as an acknowledgement of their impending deaths. These elderly people had their hands extended out to the passers-by, asking for a rupee here and a paisa there with which to fill their malnourished stomachs. With each slow turn through the muddy streets, my expectations of what India could be sunk to a depressing level. Such environments fill you with a mixture of emotions. One emotion is anger. You find yourself asking How could they have let this happen? – although you are never really sure who “they” are. You have a nagging sense that perhaps “they” also includes “you”. Also, you feel sadness. Suffering of this sort just should not happen. And, frankly, you feel a bit of disgust. An Indian slum is a place of incomparable filth.

Yet, it is of great significance that you do not readily feel fear in the slums of India.

As opposed to places of poverty in Mexico, South Africa or the US, where violence seems, at times, to be just a moment away – there in Mumbai’s slum I felt completely safe. More than that, I saw people smiling and laughing. Incredulity colored my psyche that day in ways that I still wrestle with. How could anyone find a reason to smile in the midst of such squalor and suffering? What exactly was at work here in India that made some amount of joy spring up in places of such dismal poverty? It is worth pondering. Many have given answers about the spiritualism of the Indian people and how it makes their outlook joyous. Others have offered that they simply don’t know anything better, that their expectations are set to the level of what they have and nothing else. Some others offer a biting word that they are just too simple to seek even the basics. I will leave it to the reader about what may be the wellspring of joy in places like the Mumbai slums. But this evident vibrancy of the soul is real and it is unmistakable to the observer who spends time in India.

India pulls you one way, and then the other way. It leaves you a tad less clear about human existence.

India is a land that values education to an uncommon degree, yet one out of three Indians cannot read.

India is a land with deep family values, but it is also a place where gender-based abortion is so common that ultrasounds are currently illegal.

India is a land that heralds Gandhi’s message of peace to the world while seeking to arm itself with more nuclear weapons.

In so many ways, India is a place of deep paradoxes.

From the Taj Mahal to the slums of Mumbai, India pulls your heart in conflicting directions. The best way to summarize it is to say that there is very little that is tepid about India. As opposed to the US, a place that spends immense effort at developing and protecting a tepid middle ground of order and consumerism, India is a place where chaos reigns. In the words of an erstwhile American ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith, “India is a functioning anarchy.”

In the middle of these two extremes, the beautiful India and the horrid India, exists a huge middle zone of idiosyncratic human folly.

Put simply, people here in India do the strangest things...

Upon arrival, the Western observer immediately noticed that there is something “a little off” about India. Nothing in India quite works like you would expect, and very few things work like they “should”. Despite these two facts, things actually eventually get done. By hook or crook, and one sees plenty of both here in India, things gets done.

What follows below are some of the better stories about what we have experienced as a family in this vast expanse of territory that is Indian folly, in that middle zone between India's gorgeousness and its depravity. Each story is true. They are all indicative of this strange things that happen here every minute of every day.

It is entitled “People Do the Strangest Things Here in India”.

Part I :: “Sorry, madam….”
One evening when we were still new to India and Her ways, we were invited out to a dinner to meet other expats at a place called The Walden Club. With interesting company from around the world, lively conversation and comfortable surroundings, we felt as if we were in a cool oasis after a parched walk through a new desert of uncertainty. It was a great night, the first of many like it. During that evening, my wife ordered herself a potent libation of the colonial sort. This drink has long been a favorite since the British occupation of India - the gin and tonic. Reputed to keep malaria at bay through the quinine in the tonic water, people have been indulging Queen Victoria on the Bombay Gin bottle for more than a century.

Upon ordering it, Tara sat back and continued to enjoy everyone’s company for the intervening minutes. Eventually, and a good bit longer than it actually *takes* to make a G&T, the order came. The waiter put a shot glass of gin in front of her. She turned to the waiter, puzzled.

“I ordered a gin and tonic?” she said, questioningly.

He replied, “Sorry, madam, we have no tonic water tonight.”

Tara sat there with a mixture of amusement and shock on her face. “What am I supposed to do with this gin?” she asked, pointing to the shot glass.

He moved his head from side to side in affirmation despite the fact she had asked a question.

She looked over at me and had a look of utter befuddlement. Several of the more seasoned expats at the table just chuckled lightly. Already versed in things like this, they looked at the waiter and asked him to take it away.

“What….” she started to say. The others at the table all had a knowing smile on their faces.

One of the more seasoned expats said, “You just have to get used to things like that. It’s best not to fight it.”

We were beginning to learn... people do the strangest things here in India...

Part II :: “One, Two, Three, Four, Six….”
A few weeks later, we were at a hip place in Hyderabad called Mocha. A coffee house with hookahs and eclectic food, we enjoyed this place as a family during our first few months on the ground. During one particular visit, we ordered hummus and pita bread, a few nice mocktails, and sat back to enjoy the ambience of the place. When got the things we had ordered, plus the obligatory bottle of chilled water. There are five of us in the family, yet four glasses came out for the water.

I was a little tense that day, and looked at the waiter, stating firmly, “There are five of us. There are only four glasses.”

The waiter looked at the table and the glasses, and back at me with a mildly puzzled look.

I got to the point, “We need another glass.”

He gently moved his head from side to side in affirmation of the error.

He returned back in a timeframe far *longer* than it would ordinarily take to retrieve a glass, this time with two glasses. We went from being down a glass to having a surplus. Four to six glasses in the blink of an eye – for a family of five.

As he held the glasses in his hands I looked at him, perturbed out of proportion during those early days of our time in India, and said, “We only needed one more glass, not two.”

He gently swayed his head from side to side in affirmation of my statement and gently put both down at my table setting. He looked at me for my consent that he had done a good job. I just stared, the look one my face surely a mixture of befuddlement and a twinge of anger.

Indeed, we were starting to learn from these small events…. people do the strangest things here in India...

Part III :: “A Bouquet of a Different Sort”
Flowers play a huge part in Indian life, especially the marigold. It is used in garlands during every festival, regardless of which faith is celebrating. The marigold is also thrown at the feet of Hindu deities during many religious rituals that we have witnessed. We have also seen marigold garlands hung around the entrance into Islamic masjids, as well as around the ubiquitous statues of the Virgin Mary that sit out in front of the old-line liturgical churches of India.

We immediately noticed this love of flowers that we and India share, and we bring flowers home regularly. It is nice to have one or two fresh and beautiful bouquets around the house. One day we purchased variegated carnations from a street vendor. A beautiful mottled bouquet of purple, pink and white were prepared for us in the typical Indian method of packaging street flowers – wet newspaper was wrapped around the bottom of the flowers, then two tiers of rubber bands were wrapped around that newspaper, and then the entire bouquet was placed in fresh, dry sheet of newspaper. Sucilia was new in our house. She was the sister of Anita, who worked upstairs. Sucilia was nice and productive, tending to our every need, but it was readily apparent that she did not have a background as a domestic engineer. Still, we welcomed her onto the payroll and benefitted from her help.

As she grew in her role around the house, she asked that she be allowed to prepare the flowers instead of Tara. Tara had the precise habit of cutting the flowers to a common length and placing them in a beautiful vase filled with clean water. For Sucilia to take over this responsibility was a validation of her growth in her role as one of our domestic workers.

One day, Tara handed the flowers over to her and went up to the room to cool off. When Tara came downstairs about a half hour later, she noticed that the flowers were indeed in the vase – with the wet newspaper still wrapped around the bottom. The flowers sat in a sparkling glass vase with the glob of wet newspaper fully intact around its base. We were a little puzzled, but we were clear that Sucilia’s experience with flower arranging had probably been extremely limited in her rural village. So, we were quick to forgive and we laughed it off.

But, it continued.

Finding certain items in India is not easy, and when they are available, the women in the expat community send each other SMS messages declaring that goat cheese is now to be found in a certain store, or that Dijon mustard is in stock at yet another store. Through this networking, rare items are attained. Tara had to learn that “aubergine” means “eggplant”, but after those small lessons Tara became completely versed in the workings of the circuit in which the hard-to-find things could be found.

One day it was asparagus.

There is a small vegetable vendor that supplies the best quality produce to the top restaurants in Hyderabad. In a small and unassuming corner of a Banjara Hills neighborhood the expat women come and acquire that which could not be found elsewhere. One day, Tara got some beautiful asparagus and we were excited to eat this vegetable which keeps on giving after consumed.

We remained enthusiastic about what was for dinner.

As Tara brought the asparagus home that fateful day, the domestic team brought the bags into the house for her. Tara thanked them and went upstairs to sit in the room and cool down. After about a half hour, she came downstairs and into a kitchen where everything had been put away. As she looked for the asparagus in the refrigerator, she noticed that she could not find it. Upon walking out of the kitchen and into the dining room, Tara noticed something looked a bit different. There was a new bouquet in the middle of the table. The asparagus had been delicately placed into the flower vase in the middle of the table. Mistaking them for some odd flowers that Americans must enjoy, they had prepared our dinner as a centerpiece for the dining area.

To both of these events, we responded with sympathetic laughter. No ill intent was meant by either act. It was simply a complete lack of familiarity with the process, as well as no understanding of what asparagus was.

For the record, we ate the asparagus.

Indeed, people do the strangest things here in India...

Part IV :: “Houses of the Holy”
In the early days, we attended church as a way of connecting with a Christian community while here in India. The first church that we attended was during a Methodist church that had an English service. Our visit was smack in the middle of a heavy monsoon downpour. Built by the British, it was an older church with a painting of a Victorian-era British missionary hung on the back wall. As the rain came down from the sky, the church’s roof did an insufficient job of holding the deluge back. The walls of the sanctuary actually were flowing with water. The water then cascaded through the floor around the pews and into the center aisle. The water was a few inches deep. The deluge was rich with symbolism in a place that spoke in hushed terms about Living Water. As all of our expectations had already been dashed by our first few weeks in India, we just watched the water cascade down the walls with numb expressions on our faces.

The church’s usher walked down the center aisle, seating people in their respective areas of preference, illustrating to us that the Protestant tendency to have a favored pew for each family was, in fact, a universal one. Upon seating one particular family, the usher slogged back toward the back of the church and promptly slipped. He fell onto the marble floors with a huge thud. Many congregants rushed to his aid and slipped themselves because of their open-toed sandals. A melee of activity followed as people tried to lift the usher to his feet. Many more people slipped and others tip-toed through the water in an effort to make the situation right. It was alarming to watch, and I got to my feet to help. Tara grabbed my hand, knowing that my addition to the situation would only make things more awkward. I sat back down, and we watched the event with mildly-alarmed tension. Eventually, everyone got to their feet and all was quiet again. One third of the congregation was wet because of the incident. But things proceeded….

As a family, we let out a collective sigh of relief.

As the service unfolded, we sang familiar hymns in our own language. It was a comfort to us. Our hearts and minds began to settle into the peace that passes all understanding, as only church worship can do. The cascading of the water down the walls changed from a discomforter to a source of gentle noise. We had never worshipped in a state of siege as had so many Christians throughout the centuries, so we began to participate in the service in new terms that only India could produce.

Near the end of the service, the young people of the church were invited to play some rock music. In India, as well as the US, some segments of the church are responding to the new aesthetics of the 21st century by integrating rock music into the act of worshipping. The young people of the church came forward with microphones, an electric guitar and a huge Bose speaker on a tripod. The electric guitar was then plugged into the speaker and feedback shot through the sanctuary. We all jumped a little bit. Then the first few strings were picked and a song started to take shape.

Blessed be your name
In the land that is plentiful
Where the streams of abundance flow
Blessed be your name

Tara leaned over to me and whispered, “He’s standing in water.” It was a whisper filled with concern, the kind that qualifies as a barely-audible shout. The young guitarist was standing in two inches of water. One of the wires from his guitar extending from the instrument into the same water and then into the speaker. He was without shoes.

It was the perfect storm.

My mind turned to pictures of Indian ascetics lying on a bed of nails, or with spikes penetrating their lips while dancing to rhythmic drumming in a Hindu ceremony of self-denial. I had once seen a Jain ritual where men ripped the hair from their beards and heads in observation of spiritual self-denial. This felt a bit like that. We watched in collective alarm as this young man exhibited these same Indian tendencies to mix danger with worship. It must have been what it is like to watch someone in the mountains of West Virginia handle a copperhead snake while gyrating to frantic music on an electric keyboard.

Selwyn Avenue Presbyterian was a million miles away at that moment.

Blessed be your name
When I'm found in the desert place
Though I walk through the wilderness
Blessed be your name

We looked around at the others in their pews. Every face had a sedated smile, either oblivious to the fact that this young man acted out the role of a modern day fakir, a self-denying worshipper who forsook bodily safety in the act of worship, or fully aware of the fact yet appreciative of the devotion that it took to take this risk. Each second seemed like an eternity as waited for the moment when this teenager would scream out in agony with his jaw muscles clenched in electrical paralysis. We waited for the speaker to shoot forth sparks and then burst into flames, rendering the contiguous water on the floor of the sanctuary a body-frying primordial soup.

Thankfully that moment never came.

The songs completed. We walked out of the service after shaking the vicar's hand and then got back to the car. We spent several minutes taking deep breaths, filled with relief that no one had died in that odd mixture of bad judgment and worship.

We had learned to expect it and kept our eyes peeled for the next event– we now knew that people do the strangest things here in India...

Part V :: “Single File, Please”
Indian traffic is notorious. It has been stated that there are two principles at work in Indian traffic. First, that the car you are in will attempt, at all costs, to pass the car in front of it. Secondly, the car in front of you will attempt to pass the car in front of it. These two impulses lead to traffic jams that are notorious around the world. In short, Indian traffic is an utter mess.

One time we were between drivers and had a temporary driver. All drivers that a company will put behind the wheel of a car driving Westerners are nice young men. This guy was no exception. Polite almost to a fault, he was typified all that was good about young and ambitious Indians. We really enjoyed him. His name was Srinivas.

Srinivas was in charge of driving Tara and the boys out to Hyderabad’s only water park. After a year in India, we knew full well that this place was not going to hold nice things. Yet Tara and the boys departed, nonetheless. Now, it was established early on that Srinivas had no earthly idea where the water park was. As a consequence, he was directed to follow John, the intrepid driver of the Ward family.

You can see that the planets were in alignment to produce a calamity.

As Srinivas drove Tara and the boys to the pool, he assumed the natural posture of an Indian driver. He cut people off, took blind turns on the wrong side of the road, occasionally went off of the road itself and did some off-roading through crowds of children and chickens, and once or twice slowed down for the ubiquitous water buffaloes in the road. None of that phased Tara. After all of this time on the ground in India, we had a solid understanding of how driving is done here. The tense neck and rapidly beating heart of the early days were behind us. The good news is that most of the time, the speeds achieved are low enough in the dense Indian traffic that a serious wreck is unlikely.

As Srinivas followed, Tara saw him take great pains to keep up with John. He was simultaneously heroic and reckless. But Srinivas did manage to stay behind John for most of the time.

Except when he tried to pass John.

It started when Srinivas got into “the zone”. Srinivas was at his best that day, gracefully dodging goats and people, doing pirouettes around the rickshaws and the motor cycles, and always keeping John in sight – until he came to that moment of reckoning. The traffic thinned out. It was just John’s car and ours. The road was uncommonly clear. Srinivas could not resist. He started to pass John, the car he was following.

“Stop, what are you doing?” Tara blurted out.

Srinivas’s command of English was not the best. He simply glanced at her in the askew rear view mirror.

“Yes, ma’am?” he said, filled with curiosity.

“You are supposed to follow him! Don’t pass him, you need to follow him,” she stated.

No glimmer of recognition, as he started to pass John’s car. Tara saw the need and reverted back to the basic speech forms that must be employed in such situations.

“No pass! Stay. Stay! You follow, follow!” she said, with emphasis achieved by pointing to Srinivas and then back to John’s car, which was now on the left.

“OK,” he said, finally comprehending. He let off of the gas and returned to his spot, behind John’s car.

Tara had her hand on her forehead. She had to get to the bottom of it.

“Srinivas, you don’t know the water park, correct? Right?” she asked.

“No, ma’am. I never go there before,” he replied.

“You need to follow that car, then. Follow, follow,” she stated, firmly.

“Yes, madam,” he said, slightly contrite. His head gently moved from side to side in affirmation.

They drove onward.

The traffic stayed remarkably light for another mile. The water park appeared to be a bit outside of the city, so they were on a road with mild traffic for this stretch.

Uncommon. Enjoyable.

As they continued to drive, Srinivas again threw the car into fifth gear and gunned it. He was trying to pass John again.

“What are you doing?” Tara yelled. “Stay behind him!”

Srinivas was somewhere else. Wild-eyed, he put the pedal to the metal. He started to pass John, the car he was supposed to follow. Tara could see into the other car, and John’s right hand was raised as if to say, “What is he doing?” The lurch of the car made Aidan and Jonah giggle with joy.

“Stay behind him!”

“Yes, madam.”

“You’re going around him, don’t.”

“OK,” he said, eyes still glazed as if in a trance.

"Stop!" she yelled.

He slowed down again. He returned to the spot behind the car he was supposed to follow.

The remainder of the drive he continued following John, taking the right turn when John turned right, and taking the left when John turned left. But the whole time he appeared to be fighting the impulse to pass with every ounce of his strength. His brow had broken out in a slight sweat. It appeared that his heart was beating out of his chest. He kept tapping the steering wheel, fighting with every ounce of his will power the desire to pass the car he was following.

Two cars, single file in a quiet road. An Indian first.

They arrived at the water park, safe and sound. That day Tara saw women swimming in full bhurkas while their husbands stood next to them wearing speedos. But that is an essay for a different day.

People do the strangest things here in India...