Into the Mountains - Part III

In the middle of our week in Leh the wedding took place. It was an unconventional event: neither legal nor religious and was very carefully planned. It took place under a multi-coloured, patterned marquee set up on a completely flat piece of ground surrounded on all sides by streams of the Indus, one of India’s three holiest rivers. We reached the island by clambering across a series of small, flat, and rickety plank and pole bridges that lay across the gurgling water. The ceremony and lunch that followed it lasted about two hours while the mid-day sun blazed down on the marquee and we the guests lolled on fat pillows and soft mattress laid out to form three sides of a square under the canopy. After lunch the thirty strong party piled into a veritable fleet of big 4x4s and set off back to Leh.

But the wedding was not the only event we celebrated in Leh. On the Thursday it was Dani’s birthday and we were determined to mark the occasion with pizza and beer; so that’s what we set out to do in the evening. The first ‘garden restaurant’ that we decided to stop at was the Flambe (these restaurants lined the winding road into town from our hotel and ranged from blatant tourist watering holes serving ‘Chinese, Maxican, Israelian and Continental’ food, to more serious and reassuring eateries with narrower culinary tastes). We were after beer, not food, and the attentive waiter didn’t fail us despite the restaurant not having a license. He poured a large Kingfisher into two cups in order to hide the contents and we sat outside under a tree decked with fairy lights, almost the only people there; the muted roar of a fast running stream behind the back wall of the garden providing the background ambience. We moved on from the Flambé after that one beer and next stopped at a rooftop restaurant in the town centre. Here we ordered more Kingfishers (thinking: to hell with the inflated price tag) and gorged ourselves on thick based pizzas heavy with tomato sauce, onion, herby melted cheese and scorched peppers. It was heavenly. In between mouthfuls we reminisced and swapped stories, laughed about old jokes and embarrassments, and occasionally looking up at the open, inky night sky and the bright dots of stars.

The day before we left Leh we had the opportunity to visit another Gompa, this time accompanied by another of the wedding guests, a Christian Delhiite who was studying for his PhD in the US, and one of the other guests at the Oriental Guest House, who taught ‘band’ at the American School in Bombay. This man was in his forties and from the US. He lived a life apparently largely cut off from the reality of Indian existence around him, traveling from the culturally American school to his hugely expensive accommodation every day.

We hired a taxi and set off for Thiksey Gompa late in the morning. The monastery at Thiksey tops a small hill of grey rock and scree, and sprawls down its sides with squat, square buildings that have white painted walls and dark, square windows. These look out onto a valley floor of flat green pasture dotted with white boulders and the odd thin tree, at the edges of which are rocky ridges that rise up to the high mountains forming the valley. The Gompa is the headquarters of the Gelugpa Tibetan Buddhist tradition in Ladakh and is about 600 years old. Entering the Gompa via a series of white washed steps, we stopped to admire a high-ceilinged prayer hall painted in intricate patterns of bright, rich reds, blues and yellows, in which a red robed monk sat silently by the door, before proceeding on up to the central courtyard, or Choera. This was a perfect rectangle, flat and dusty, and kept from view of the valley by a wall which on the courtyard side supported a slanting roof over a broad colonnade. On the hill side of the open space, used for dramatic ceremonies during Buddhist festivals, and to our right, were steep steps up to the second storey of a high-sided building. Climbing these stairs and stepping in through an open doorway, past carved wooden pillars, we were confronted by a huge head of Buddha; golden and serene looking, supported on a slender neck and broad shoulders. From the ground floor of the building the figure, perhaps 30 ft high, reared up to nearly touch the ceiling of the second floor. At shoulder level to the statue, we walked round a balustraded gallery, marveling at the figure. The Maitreya’s face gleamed dully, its eyes staring blankly out of the room’s open windows to the sun-baked valley beyond.

Returning to the hot courtyard by the steep stone steps, we turned this time to the left end of the space, where more steps lead up to an open platform from which we could access, through a roofed portico, the Gompa’s Assembly Hall, the Dukang. Inside the dimly lit hall the afternoon prayer service would shortly begin, so we slunk in, shoeless, and explored the room from the walls. Making our way slowly around the room, we reached a door at the back that intersected floor to ceiling cabinets of the kind we had seen at Spituk. Through this door and down a single step was an even darker room in which four or five almost man-size figures stood in a row. There was an orange hatted llama, smiling broadly, and a fierce, snarling manikin, the spear in its hand surmounted by two human heads and a grinning skull. The walls of this ante-chamber were a grimy orangey-brown and uneven. Behind the row of figures were wall paintings of flayed animals, the skins depicted dripping blood. In the half light we could also make out the occasional painting of a man’s skin, the features of the face frozen in terror. The room was heavy with pungent incense. As we stared at the walls in horrified fascination, a commotion began in the main hall that drew us back into the larger space. Near where we stood by the glass-fronted cabinets was a seat, reserved for high ranking Buddhist clergy and the Dalai Llama, that was raised to almost shoulder height. Opposite this small throne and sat behind a low bench was an elderly monk with a stubbly, round head, who had started to recite mantras into a battered microphone.

Leading from where the monk sat crosslegged and bent-backed opposite the throne were long straight benches, perhaps six in a row at 90 degrees to the bright upright triangle of the entrance doorway. At these benches sat more monks, the oldest nearer the door to the ante-chamber, the younger, and novice monks as young as 10 or 11 years old, closer to the entrance. We sat down to one side of this bright doorway as the prayer service began in earnest. Sitting there crosslegged on thick rugs we had a perfect vantage point from which to observe the ceremony. At first the youngest monks, just young boys with bright smiles and shaved heads, almost swamped in their dark red robes, took around large metal kettles and poured out tea for their elders. This was done with a hasty lack of reverence which aroused no complaint. Next an older monk wearing a yellow hat with a long, curved tip hurried into the room bearing a brazier from which incense poured in grey clouds. The monk swung the metal object this way and that as he rushed down the aisles, finally halting when every part of the hall had been covered. Now the elderly monk’s chanting, coming to us from crackling speakers fixed high on the narrow wooden pillars of the hall, increased in intensity and the rest of the monks became more focused.

On the two benches running down the centre of the hall were large flat drums, their skins a dark, leathery brown, suspended by rope that kept them from swinging when hit. On each bench there were two drums and in front of them sat monks with curved drum sticks. From the cushioned end of each stick the wood formed a question mark, the base of which the monks held tightly. As the chanting increased in volume still, each of the four monks suddenly poised and then in unison they stared to pound the flat faces of the drums in front of them. With their other hand, each also picked up a white conch shell and blew into it with long breathes. The cacophony from these instruments lasted for about a minute, the drums pounding and shells blasting eerily away, the sound bouncing off the walls and ringing in our ears. Then suddenly, with one or two muted last breathes from the shells, the chorus stopped and the hall returned to the crackling chanting of the elderly monk alone.

This explosion of sound happened again and again, until we felt we had seen and heard enough. But before we roused ourselves from the floor and stepped out into the sunlight, a monk came round with a metal vessel. In it was water, earthy and oily, which we were to first sip and then smooth over our heads. For this we each received a small amount in our outstretched cupped hands. This done, we eased ourselves up and moved back out to the portico. I felt that we had witnessed something mysterious and archaic, and I wondered how many times those blaring shells had sounded across the valley in front of us. Perhaps on the plain far out on the valley floor the sound could be heard by animal herders and other local inhabitants, who hearing the familiar sound might glance up at the angular shape of the distant monastery and know it to be a certain time of the day. With the wonder of the service still in our heads we made our way down through the complex and negotiated the flights of stairs to the exit.

Fear and loathing...on campus in Delhi

I was lucky recently to have an opportunity to gain a real, albeit small-scale, insight into what young Indians think about the state of their country and its society. This opportunity presented itself while I was interviewing final year students in the grounds of a college at one of India’s most prestigious universities. What these informal discussions revealed about what some Indians in their early twenties think was largely negative to my mind. I admit that ‘fear and loathing’ is an exaggeration; ignorance and condescension would be a better way to describe the opinions that were expressed.

We were talking about rural India and about conditions in the slums that are a part of every city in the subcontinent. Knowing that very few well-off urban Indians know much about the realities of village life or even those of slum life, I was not expecting much insight. But I was surprised at how little insight there was. People living in slums were described to me by two different sources as being “criminal”, while the rural existence of 70% of India’s population was seen as “simple” by another. Associating poverty with crime is of course something that a great many people do. There is everywhere, in any country, a gut reaction that the majority amongst the middle-class experience when faced with poverty. It’s a feeling not far from disgust. This is brought out clearly in a recent documentary made for Channel Four in the UK, where an upper middle class girl and a working class girl spend a day together. Before they meet, the girl who goes on skiing holidays declares that the other is going to be a ‘chav’. Chavs; travelers; the underclass in Britain; they have long been seen as a primary source of criminal activity. In India, slum dwellers may well occupy the same space in many better-off people’s minds. Equally, spinning a utopian idyll out of rural life is a well worn activity. M.K. Gandhi was a great fan of the uncomplicated and harmonious existence that, supposedly, is village life in India.

I was surprised partly because several of the students I spoke to had spent time in villages or were from semi-rural areas themselves (although not from agricultural families). One had even been into a slum for a day, which is saying a lot for a university educated Delhiite. Revealingly though, this visit had been organised by a college environmental group with the aim of educating slum dwellers about how bad the use of plastic bags was for the environment. I had to stop myself from suggesting that going to the wealthiest enclave of the city with the same message would have made more sense (though been less rewarding for the soul). Perhaps this ignorance is borne of the particular way many middle-class lives are lived in India. Living in something of a bubble, effectively cut off from the deprivation around them, many people, young as much as old, seem unable to fully comprehend that reality even when they look closely.

But these young people were actually telling me they wanted to do something about inequality; they wanted to devote themselves to social service. Despite their ignorance they were aware that something wasn’t working in society and there was value in being part of the fixing. This puts them well ahead of the morally lost campaign launched by the Times of India newspaper, ‘India Poised’. By describing half of India as a “leash” holding back the progress of the rest (this ‘half’ cannot be other than those who don’t read the English Times, live in the booming metro cities or consume conspicuously), this campaign not only effectively acknowledges the bubble of middle class urban existence but denigrates all those excluded from it. This belief in a bright future for India, if only the poor would get up off their backs, can even be expressed in terms that deny the very existence of India’s 300 million or so citizens who are officially poor. For example there is a Facebook group entitled ‘India is not a third world country’. If not ‘developing’, what is India? Almost developed, as some have told me confidently? Riding on the Delhi Metro, sitting in a multiplex, shopping in a gleaming mall, one might well think that. But it would mean being duped by aspiration and blind to the reality of life outside the enclaves of progress.

Into the Mountains - Part II

It was with a certain amount of relief that we left the hotel in Pahaganj for the domestic airport and our flight to Leh. The room was not very clean and had just one small window that looked out onto a cement wall. Had we stayed there any longer the surroundings would have become quite depressing.

After the heat and grime of Delhi, the air-conditioned relative luxury of the plane was extremely welcome. And the flight to Leh was spectacular. Although there was little to see for the first hour or so, after that we were into the mountains and soon the snow peaked ranges were all around us. Cloud drifted beneath the tips of the peaks and as we slowly lost altitude the lower slopes could be seen clearly, their jagged outcrops of rock casting shadows in the morning sun. There were a few audible gasps in the cabin as the plane banked and the sun glinted off snow fields higher up. The sky was a perfect blue: it was one of the most beautiful views I have ever seen. I stared long and hard out of the small window, trying to imprint the view on my memory. As we started the final descent to Leh’s tiny airport we flew across a parched valley floor, a river coursing through it with the sun reflecting off it too.

Standing on the tarmac in Leh we took our first breath of really fresh, unpolluted air in India. It was crisp and delicious and I recognised the familiar smell of the Himalayas; a smell that I can’t describe. As we had just climbed 10,000ft in under two hours we spent our first day in Leh relaxing. I quickly found that even the smallest exertion could give me a head-rush and send dark spots dancing in front of my eyes. We spent most of that first day sitting on a small terrace at the Oriental Guest House, our chairs shadowed by tall shrubs and our hands clutching books. I would occasionally order small china cups of sweet chai. The terrace was separated from another, bigger, one by a neatly ordered vegetable garden with tidy irrigation channels, which an old woman in a headscarf tended carefully. Surrounding the terraces and garden were the three large Ladakhi houses comprising the Guest House. On the larger terrace we ate our breakfast and sometimes lunch. Breakfast in particular was excellent: banana and honey pancakes for Dani and omelet with soft, exquisite, freshly-made Ladhaki bread (an extravagant cousin of the pitta bread) for me. With butter and homemade apricot jam or stuffed with ketchup laden omelet these were heaven. From both terraces there was a stunning view of the distant snowcapped mountains.

We were only able to get out and explore Leh on our second day, after an eagerly-looked-forward-to sleep in a bed with an actual duvet and comfortable mattress. Leh is a small town with dusty lanes leading away from a busy centre with heavily laden trinket and carpet shops, rooftop pizza restaurants, internet cafes and backpacker tour shops. There are also lots of Indian Army personnel: in regulation-green jeeps, piled into trucks and out on the street in matching running gear. Leh is of course near India’s contested borders with China and Pakistani Kashmir, both of which have been fought over in the last fifty years.

The centre is overlooked by the square, flat-roofed shape of the Palace, built in 1553; its sheer walls rising up from a rocky promontory that juts out of the tangled lanes of the old town. Seen from different parts of the centre the Palace forms an impressive backdrop to less regal but equally old shops and houses. It was built when Leh and the Tibetan capital Lhasa maintained regular trade connections and as a result the Palace bares a strong resemblance to the Potola Palace of the Dali Llama. Although we were put off actually entering the place by the exorbitant entrance fee, we did walk up to get a closer look at the outside.

It was almost midday when we headed past the town’s principal mosque and into the narrow lanes of the old town on our way to the Palace entrance. It was very hot in the sun, but once we were well into the old town we were able to keep in the shade of the almost featureless light brown brick houses on either side of us. Down the centre of the lane ran a waste water channel and in the cool patches by the base of the walls lay silently slumbering dogs, their thick coats designed for Leh’s harsh winters and not the summer’s fierce sun. As the lane narrowed further and the incline increased appreciably, there were twists to the left that gave us glimpses of the steep stone walls of the Palace ahead. After only ten minutes of walking we found ourselves within twenty feet of the base of the walls and looked back to see the town stretched out in front of us, bleak, craggy hills in the middle distance and beyond them the empty air above the valley floor where the Indus River snaked below the tall mountains rearing up with their white slopes to the clouds above.

Beyond the Palace and on an even higher mound was a Gompa, a Buddhist monastery. We managed the steeper climb up to this point later in the week, but even after several days of acclimatization the uphill stretch on a dusty, tightly zigzagging path was painful and made us lightheaded. The Gompa was closed when we visited it, but the view from that height was spectacular: the mountains looked even more beautiful from high ground and those nearest to us were a canvas for the shifting patterns of the shadows thrown by the slowly moving clouds above. The Gompa was interesting to see from outside: its 500 year old exterior was rough and weathered, its small wooden doors and window-shutters locked shut and uninviting. We learnt in the middle of our week in Leh that the plain exteriors of Gompas hide enchanting interiors.

The first Gompa we actually entered was Spituk, a short bus journey from the town and past a large Indian Air Force base. We took something of a leap of faith to get there. The most common method of getting anywhere outside Leh seemed to be by big jeep, but balking at the cost of hiring one, we decided to try local transport instead. And so we spent half an hour standing in the sun in an exposed minibus park, our noses and throats assaulted by acrid diesel fumes and the sharp stench of urine, before we managed to find and board a bus that would pass the monastery. We paid Rs.7 each for the twenty minute ride. But we were not entirely sure we had gotten on the right bus until the ticket collector motioned at us to get down at a dusty corner of the main road, where an untarmacced road led off over a bridge and up to where we could see the Gompa nestled against the top of a small hill. We walked the 400 metres from where the bus dropped us to the monastery’s steep entrance steps in the blazing sun of 2:00 in the afternoon and were relieved to find a small shop outside the main gate where we could buy water. Opposite the shop stood a huge prayer wheel, perhaps a metre and a half high and three quarters of a metre in diameter, which one set in clockwise motion by pulling on a metal handrail at the bottom of the drum. As the drum-like wheel turned a piece of metal at the top hit a small bell, making it clang in a dully melodious way.

Inside the Gompa it was cool and silent. Lying in the corridor that the entrance doorway opened onto was a scruffy dog that had been asleep, but which looked up with reproachful eyes as we stepped in out of the sun. The monk that appeared after we called “hello” showed us up a flight of stairs to the wood-paneled prayer room, where golden statues of sitting Bodhisattvas were positioned behind glass in a floor-to-ceiling cabinet covering one wall. It was dark in the small, low-ceilinged room and the smell of smoky Ladakhi incense permeated everything. We took our time inspecting the small figures behind their glass panes, offerings of rupee notes stacked on the ledges in front of them, and taking in the peace of the still room, in no way hurried by the expressionless monk who lingered outside with the key to lock up the room. When we were done we walked further up the hill, still within the monastery’s walls, and ducked under a mass of fluttering prayer flags in red, white, blue, green and yellow to enter an older part of the site. Here there was a grotto-like room: small but with a high ceiling, no natural light and lumpen, misshapen walls. Occupying most of the floor space bar a small area to stand in were massive figures, sooty-looking in the gloom and one much larger than the others. The face of this figure was obscured by material, no doubt to protect us from the horror of its features. In its brawny, upraised arms were various weapons and from its groin protruded an obvious symbol of fertility. The gloomy room with its eerie statues and flickering electric bulbs was fascinating and spooky in equal measure. On our way out we paused to blink in the sunlight. From a doorway we had not noticed on our way in, a voice called out goodbye and was followed by the silent emergence from the shadows of the head and red robes of a monk who waved a hand at us in farewell.

Into the Mountains - Part I

In early June, Dani and I had our first opportunity to travel in India together and to take a well-earned holiday. We had been invited to the wedding of one of my colleagues in Ladakh, a region in Jammu and Kashmir, and had also to leave the country in order to apply for new tourist visas. For this reason we made arrangements to spend a week in Kathmandu after leaving Ladakh.

Our journey to the small town of Leh, 10,000 ft up in the Himalayas and where the wedding was being held, involved a stop in Delhi. Having done the train trip from Ahmedabad to Delhi several times we had thought we could relax about it. But on the day we were due to leave, someone shook me out of my smugness at having arranged everything so perfectly by declaring that there was no way we would get through. To my disbelief I had failed to make a connection between our intended journey, which would take us through Rajasthan, with mass disturbances taking place in that state. An Other Backward Caste group (a designation near the bottom of the caste ‘heap’), the Gujjars, were agitating for their caste status to be downgraded. They were demanding to be recognised as Scheduled Caste (otherwise known as Dalits or untouchables) and to receive the reservation of jobs and privileges that go with such recognition. More importantly though, they were sitting on railway tracks in large numbers. Twenty-seven trains through Rajasthan were cancelled. Although I expected the worst, our luck held: our train, the Ashram Express, was running until Jaipur, from where we could hire a car to get us to Delhi.

Having boarded the train in Ahmedabad, we were in for another change of plan. We were fully prepared to get down at Jaipur and catch a taxi, but while we waited with bleary eyes in the darkness early in the morning, the train slowly drawing into the station, we by chance heard that this was not the last stop; that the train would go on to Delhi. There are no announcements on Indian trains but a steward had mentioned this piece of rather important news to someone who spoke English, who then told us. After calling the poor taxi driver to cancel, we crept back onto our bunks and tried to fall back into sleep, pleased at avoiding the extra expense of the car.

Several hours later we woke to views from the train’s tinted windows of Delhi’s crowded and ramshackle suburbs, multi-coloured litter liberally spilling down the railway cut at intervals. We got down at Old Delhi station feeling disheveled and stopped at Comesum restaurant for a quick and over-priced breakfast before taking a pre-paid auto to Pahaganj. This area behind New Delhi station was to be our base for a day, as the flight to Leh was early the next morning.

Pahaganj is, in a word, seedy. But also quintessentially Backpacker India. Its narrow streets teem with hawkers, hotel touts and package tour charmers. Autos and cycle rickshaws squeeze through the lanes, nudging past placid cows and baggy-clothed hippies. Restaurants and hotels vie for the attention of the strolling Europeans, Israelis and Japanese, whose cloth shoulder bags and dreadlocks swing as they move through the crowds, sunglasses firmly in place. The lanes feel close; signs jutting into the space above head-height, electricity wires strung in confused profusion across and between the buildings.

We largely ignored the trinket shops after a doze and shower in our room at Vivek Hotel and instead walked to the nearest Metro stop, R.K Marg. This was my first experience of the Dehli Metro and I was very impressed. The stations are justifiably spacious, allowing for crowds, and the trains are a pleasure to ride in for anyone familiar with the Tube. In only a few minutes we arrived at Rajiv Chowk station beneath Connaught Place. I had stayed briefly in CP on my way home after trekking in the Himalayas in 1999. This time I stared at the white-painted circular arcades, the shadowed shop fronts and Raj-era architecture to try to conjure up clearer memories than I immediately could. But to no avail. I wasn’t able to place where my group of trekkers had stayed or the restaurants we had eaten in. I was disappointed at not being able to find a corner or shop front I recognised and so reach back across the nine years that separated me from my 17-year-old self. Looking around me I had a feeling akin to deja vue: something told me I knew the place, that the surroundings were familiar, but on closer inspection nothing around me was familiar and I might just as well have been there for the first time.

Delhi for the first time (since '99) - Part II

There is surely no better way to get to know a new city than to stay with a friend or a friend of a friend who knows the place well. On my first trip to Delhi since I passed through on the way to the Himalayas in 1999, I stayed with friends of Nishant, one of my colleagues. These two bachelors, who had studied with Nishant at prestigious Delhi University, rented a flat on the top floor of a featureless housing block somewhere South of Central Delhi. The block was reached from the busy road through a series of narrow and overshadowed lanes, lined with parked bikes and cars, and uneven underfoot. Out on the road smoke hung in the air, the morning sun shone down on omelet stalls and chai stands, and a noisy crush of people at an alcohol shop spilled into the street. But in the lanes it was quiet and shaded, and we saw only a few people on the way to the flat. Ascending a steep flight of stairs that spiraled up anti-clockwise we passed three doorways before reaching the top of the building.

Now, whether this flat was indicative of bachelor flats across India, I don’t know. But it was certainly an atypical bachelor’s flat in one regard: extremely low levels of cleanliness. It was seriously grimy. All the light-switches were covered in the black grime of ages of unclean hands, the bathroom walls had a veneer of slick soapy grease and the many books piled tightly into bookshelves were caked in grey dust. It was a nice place though. There was a recluse-like feel to the flat; it was an intellectual’s hide-out in an otherwise unremarkable residential colony. The books gathering dust reflected the opposing politics of the two residents: one was keeping the Marxist credo alive; the other was a fan of free-markets. Both were Biharis like my colleague and all three came from the same small area in Bihar. They had studied History together and remained in close touch still.

We had dinner that evening in the flat with only one of Nishant’s friends. He ordered in dal, subji and rotis, which we ate sitting on the tiled floor of the room that doubled as the bedroom of the other occupant. To accompany these staples was a homemade Bihari pickle. This was very hot and came in an old and not very clean plastic jar. It had been made by someone’s mother and matured for years in that jar. When it was hot, I was told, the jar was placed out in the sun to further preserve the contents. I decided not to overindulge.

On our second day in Delhi my colleague and I were to be part of a field visit to several primary schools in slum areas. We were helping with a recruitment process and part of the two day event involved a ‘live’ group exercise, where information on school needs had to be collected by each team of potential new staff members. We left for the meeting place by auto. During the 30 minute drive we were passed on a busy main road by a newly cleaned Mercedes sporting UN plates. Further down the same road a brand new Toyota saloon also overtook our auto and it too had the distinctive UN plates. This seemed a surprising coincidence until we passed the large offices of the World Health Organisation, into the entrance of which several large cars were turning.

The field visit was extremely interesting: I was seeing Delhi slums for the first time and witnessing young middle class urbanites encountering an environment largely alien to them too. Some were obviously ill at ease, though more with the schoolchildren than the (not actually extreme) poverty evident around them. Others were happier in the school environment and confident interacting with teachers, the headmaster and the often rowdy kids. I had a rather embarrassing episode within the first five minutes of entering the school, when I stepped into one of the classrooms and was mobbed by a mass of blue-clothed children who had dashed forward from their seats to touch my feet. There were too many of them pressed together for me to restrain them, but I felt extremely awkward at this traditional sign of submissive respect and did what I could to at least stop any of them falling over in the crush around my legs. In other classes this scene was thankfully avoided and the kids just stood and saluted when I entered the classroom. My response was to clasp my hands together formally and say ‘namaste’. In one class each child in term left the safety of their desk to come up to me at the front of the class and introduce themselves. They were not very confident in English and said their names so quickly and quietly I struggled to hear them, though I picked up the names I was familiar with and they had fun: most prepared to approach me by nudging their neighbours and giggling.

We spent about two hours on the field visits and then caught autos back to the office we were using as a base. I sat in the front of one, next to the driver, and was pressed up near the glass windshield. The side mirror a few inches to the left of my head was printed with the words ‘objects in the mirror may appear closer than they are’.

We left Delhi the next day, catching a different train back to Ahmedabad from Nizamuddin Station. Nishant helpfully accompanied me to the station in the cycle rickshaw he flagged down near his friend’s flat. It was a sunny day and the rickshaw wallah worked up a sweat leaning down onto the pedals to keep the tricycle going. It was a slow journey but we had plenty of time and rolled up to the station entrance eventually. I had thoroughly enjoyed my second experience of Delhi, a city I much preferred now I had visited it again.

Delhi for the first time (since '99) - Part I

The Rajdhani Express is really the best way to travel by train to Delhi. The ticket is more expensive than those of other trains on the same route, but with your Rajdhani ticket you get food. And it is much better food than what is offered for sale on the average over-nighter, where dinner is usually a pretty unappetizing and spiceless subji and dal that needs the addition of lime pickle to be vaguely interesting.

The first time I visited Delhi during this, my second sojourn in the sub-continent, my colleagues and I took the Rajdhani, having reserved berths in the 3AC carriages. We monopolized the compartment in which most of us had berths, seven of us squeezing onto the bottom bunks that serve as seats during the day. The elderly couple sitting opposite each other by the window and small table didn’t seem to mind us taking up so much room in a space meant for six people and they even took an interest in the conversation in Hindi my colleagues were carrying on and laughed at their jokes.

My experience of the Rajdhani’s catering started with a late afternoon snack (we boarded at 5:30), which arrived at our compartment in the arms of a white-jacketed steward, who distributed small boxes to each of us in turn. In the box was a sandwich with an invisible filling (possibly mayonnaise), a small vegetable samosa wrapped in waxed paper, a cartoon of mango juice and a bottle of water, and a ladoo-type sweet for dessert. We each also received a mini-flask of hot water for tea or coffee, so the snack became something of a picnic, each of us sipping a drink and balancing our trays of food on our knees.

Dinner three hours later managed to go one better than this afternoon picnic. To my delight the steward taking orders was asking for a preference between veg and non-veg. Of course, I opted for non-veg and so enjoyed a chicken curry accompanied by the ubiquitous dal, rice and roti, which was followed by individual tubs of vanilla ice cream. Soon after we had finished eating, the train pulled into a station that I was told was famous for its chai. Two of my colleagues hopped out onto the platform and quickly went in search of a chai stand. I got down too but stayed within a few feet of the door, not confident enough to stray further away from safety. I had an inkling that once the train got moving it was not going to stop for anything. I got back on with at least another minute to spare and waited in our berth for the tea to arrive. Once it did, my colleagues pleased to have got the small cups and plastic bag of hot tea onto the train in time, we sat back and sipped the chai and I talked with Nishant and Monal about Paul Robb’s A history of India, which I had brought with me. At about 9.30 the elderly husband and wife at the window indicated that they wanted to go to bed, so our group broke up and we each set about unfolding the sheets for our narrow beds. I had a top bunk; my ankles and feet stick out into the aisle and mean the middle and lower bunks are best avoided.

The next morning we arrived at New Delhi station and Nishant and I split off from the rest of the group to make our way to the flat of a friend of his. I rarely sleep well on the train, the bunks are too narrow, too short and either you end up surrounded by snorers or the light at the end of the bed wont turn off. So it was with slightly gritty eyes that I looked out at Delhi from the auto for the first time in nine years. It looked different. I had a vague memory of lusher vegetation, more chaos and greater noise. Although this was early in the morning, the feel of the city was not the same as I remembered it to be. I mentioned this to Nishant and he agreed, the city had changed, especially in the last five years. It struck me that the buildings had been cleaned up; the plethora of old hoardings had been replaced with state of the art advertising displays with ads for Tata Indicom, Airtel and Vodafone.

After ten minutes or so we were into the broad, well-maintained avenues of central New Delhi. Traffic here was orderly, regulated and well accommodated by the wide roads. A car ahead of us at a light had a ‘Press’ sign in the rear window. As we turned off a cross roads onto one of these identical looking streets, we were flagged down by a policeman in standard khaki uniform, brown beret and polished black shoes. I assumed this was a routine check, but instead of asking the driver for his papers the policeman stepped forward to climb in and perch on the driver’s seat. The driver protested and waved the officer back in with us, where there was just enough room for him to squeeze in next to Nishant. On his shoulders were big dull silver stars. Nishant adopted an expressionless face and asked our passenger how far he was going. It turned out not to be far, just 500 meters down the road, where the policeman got down without paying anything and looked at least a little sheepish. Nishant looked at me and said ‘this is Delhi’.

Making the papers

The 15th August is Indian Independence Day and so both Dani and I worked from home on the morning of that Friday; my office and Dani’s school were closed. In the afternoon we took an auto to Law Garden, where the charity run by Dani’s Principal had organised a road closure and street fair. This was meant to be for all children, the well-off and those surviving on the streets, and it was good to see them queuing up to go on a swing, watching a magician and trying to keep up with a serious-looking dance instructor giving rapid instructions in Hindi. There was also a band and a DJ.

Unfortunately for us we drew a lot of attention from the crowds, admittedly mostly after we had had orange, white and green stripes daubed on our cheeks like many of the kids. We were hardly able to walk 20 feet without a press cameraman or amateur with a camera phone asking us to pose. After a while my grin became more of a rictus and even that I could barely keep up. We made it into the Ahmedabad editions of the Times of India and DNA newspaper though. The Times captioned our photo in front of the Indian flag, ‘Crossing over the spirit of India!’ In both montages we had almost as much space as Rahul Bose, the Bollywood actor drafted in to make the charity event extra news worthy.

The weekend feeling the street fair gave us had actually started the night before when we went out for dinner. I think we committed something of a sin doing this, as we ate in one of Ahmedabad’s seriously up-market Italian restaurants. This one, poorly situated behind a petrol station but on the SG highway that skirts the Western edge of the city and where the land prices for expensive ventures must be attractive, was actually rather fun. A huge neon sign-board blaring ‘TGB’s Little Italy Ristorante’ in bright white italic lettering identified the place from afar and we headed past the petrol pumps to approach the door down a walkway covered by white tenting adorned with the Italian flag. We were early for dinner at quarter to eight; the place was empty. But this suited us. We settled into deeply comfortable seats in the air-conditioned chill of the slate, wood and glass dining room, got carried away and spent Rs.850 on crostini, garlic bread, pizza and calzone. That’s four times the cost of an average meal for two in Ahmedabad and eight times the cost of dinner in a road-side dhabba. We were not, suffice to say, surrounded by a cross section of Gujarati society once other dinners began to arrive. The food was good, though the crostini were overly oily and the calzone immense. We were both defeated in the end, which rarely happens. The capers, olives and mushrooms I welcomed as if long lost friends though…and then ate with pleasure.

On Saturday, the day of a festival called Rakhi where sisters give their brothers a bracelet in imitation of a goddess, we both worked in the morning again, sitting either side of our plastic table in the living room. In the late afternoon we set out on a walk, a ‘power walk’ to use Dani’s term, with the aim of getting some exercise and ending up at Star Bazaar. It started to darken after half an hour of us starting out. After several twists and turns down seemingly identical residential streets, we began to think we had gone wrong somewhere, as no supermarket loomed at the end of any of them. At last we could make out the glaring spot lights of the building between two tower blocks. Making our approach through a part of Satellite we had not ventured into before, we followed a road that cut through two open and empty lots, overgrown with weeds and scattered with rubbish and building debris. In one, two peacocks screeched in the dark. As we walked, large bats flapped through the darkening sky above us, their total wing span perhaps a foot a half, their bodies moving lazily through the air. I counted more than fifteen of them. Within a short while we finally found ourselves opposite Star Bazaar, thankfully with our blood un-drained.

Walk to work

At the first char rasta (char means four and rasta means road) on Jodhpur Gam Road, four streets meet at an open tarmacced space in the middle of which is a small traffic island. Chalky lime is occasionally scattered around this island and at the ends of the concrete traffic dividers that stop at the edges of the circular space, the dark skinned worker allotted this task digging into a cloth sack filled with the bright powder with his bare left hand.

The road ahead leads to Jodhpur village itself and to Anandnagar Road. The road to the right leads off into a residential area of two-storey houses sitting behind low walls and ten-storey high apartment complexes that rear up out of the flat land. At the entrance to this road there is a square expanse of wasteland off to the left that flooded during the rains and afterwards in the evenings resounded with the deep croaking call of frogs. To the left the road runs straight to the Shymal char rasta road which links with the flyover to Vejalpur. This is the route I take to work every morning.

Walking this way, keeping clear of mopeds, superbikes, bicycles, battered hatchbacks and gleaming Toyotas, there are several things that catch the eye. On the left hand side of the street as you proceed down it, a building, a small house, is being renovated. There is a pile of sand by the side of the road and two mongrel street dogs lie there curled up, sleeping in the morning sun, their fur patchy in places, their ribs showing against stretched skin. They are oblivious to the small-framed man, perhaps in his early twenties, who with bent back sifts grit through a large, square wooden sieve next to the sand, sweat on his face and bare arms.

Further on, at the side of the road, stands a small white-tiled shrine with an entrance space enclosed by a metal cage that has been painted white. On the wall of the shrine facing the road is a single colourful icon tile depicting a god-like figure with no head, from whose severed neck bright blood spurts left and right to where there are smaller figures standing by. Occasionally in the caged entrance to the shrine there are men and women kneeling or standing in prayer.

At certain times of the morning you will be passed here by a middle-aged Jain man, dressed in unstitched white cloth, wearing sandals and with a yellow tika marked on his forehead. He will be on the way to his morning worship at the Jain Temple on Jodhpur Gam Road and carries a small metal pot in his hands.

Past the shrine there is a large Banyan tree standing out in the road, its base ringed with thick concrete and surrounded by tarmac. There are three or four Ganesha statues leaning against the tree trunk, several of which have broken arms or elephant trunks, the plaster showing white where the statue has cracked. To the left of the giant tree a line of old men wearing white homespun are sat on two concrete benches in the tree’s shade, some with walking sticks, and others with spotless white Nehru caps on their head. They say little to each other as you pass, but together take in the passersby and watch the traffic.

Beyond the old men there is a junction and an open space to the side of the road, on one corner of which are four rectangular concrete slabs, stained by oily food and rotting vegetables. On these slabs are placed dried rotis, piles of yesterday’s pulao and bags of vegetable peelings. Into these bags a magnificent white cow is pushing her bristly nose, her sharply curved horns arching up above her head and her drooping neck folds gently wobbling. On the cow’s back, between the shoulder blades, is a large, basket-ball sized hump: the product of thousands of years of domestication and alignment with man’s needs through the plough and cattle cart.

Passing the cow, engrossed in its urban grazing, you come upon a man of nineteen or twenty, his face angular and his hair parted down the centre of his head in wavy lines thickened with hair oil. He is sat behind a small table on the narrow pavement. Above the table is a canopy of plastic sheeting rigged to keep off the sun in the summer and deflect the torrential rain of the monsoon. The man is a tailor and is leant over an ancient-looking black sewing machine, his elbows stuck out either side of the desk and his knees tucked under it, his concentration focused on the cloth in his hands. He will be in exactly the same position in eight or nine hour’s time.

On the opposite side of the road are large bungalows, some mansion-like, with high gates and protruding balconies. In the road, where at times sweepers work with long-handled brooms, there are empty packets of mouth freshener, silver and white. Gobs of spittle and dried cow dung mark the tarmac. Back on the left hand side of the street is another shrine, smaller than the last; it is only knee high. The small roof is adorned with a dozen hairy coconuts strung together and an orange pennant with a gold fringe. Strange sculptures made from silver foil are perched in the branches of the tree above the shrine. They look like squat spaceships and glitter in the sun. Next to the mini-shrine is a low-roofed chai stall with stone slabs set on bricks for seats. There are usually four or five men sat here in the morning, their motorbikes parked up in a row in the road in front while they enjoy a sweet cup of tea.

By this point you are nearing the end of the road and only the bright yellow school buses of the A-1 school parked up ahead are much distraction between here and the junction where it easy to catch an auto to Vejalpur. The walk has taken eight or nine minutes and been accompanied by a raucous cacophony of beeping cars, tooting autos and sputtering mopeds.

Khanna

One of the purposes of this blog was to record something about the food we have come across in India and although we have eaten in dozens of restaurants and have been cooking at home since February, I have given food little space in my postings so far. So now to redress the balance, but, where to start?

Well, let’s begin with the basics. There are onions and potatoes in abundance of course and it is not difficult to find cauliflower. More unusual, at least for me as I don’t normally eat it, is okra (known here as bhindi), which makes a fantastic spiced dish (any vegetable dish with oil and spices is called Subzi in Gujarat) because it softens up deliciously and soaks the spices up. There are also plump, round and deep purple aubergines (brinjal or bengen), which I have taken to cutting into cubes and adding to Toor dal when I make it in the pressure cooker. This has turned out to be the key to making proper dal (if I can call my attempts that), because the lentils never quite break down in the right way if only cooked in a pan. Yes it is potentially dangerous, but I have the hang of it now and always stay on the alert for an explosion of super hot liquid when the pressure is building, just in case.

Of course there are lumpen carrots too and oblong tomatoes. We also buy corn on the cob when we fancy a break from dal and rotis. The corn is imported from the US. We can get peas in the pod, French beans and green peppers, as well as spinach (palak) to keep up our green vegetables quota. All of this is cheap and usually good quality. Although we’ve been intending since the start of the year to buy vegetables from the roadside stalls and roving sellers (whose incomprehensible calls and creaking carts haunt me in the mornings), we’ve almost always gone to do a big shop at the local supermarket, ‘Star Bazaar’. This has everything one could ever need and so is very convenient, and what’s more is only five minutes walk from the flat. Before images of Tesco’s come to mind, remember that this is India. The trappings of a modern supermarket are there, but I’ve still seen a mouse and a cockroach in the aisles. Anyway as we can’t judge how much we get ripped off by the small sellers, we opt for somewhere where the price per kilo is displayed.

We get fruit from this local ‘supermarche’ too: sweet pineapples, at least four different varieties of melon (the local Gujarati one is the cheapest) and mushy apples that we now avoid. Until a few weeks ago it was mango season and we could choose from five different types of the perfumed fruit. The most expensive is the Alphonso, which is sweet and pungent. We have more often bought the Kesar (saffron) variety, which is smaller, green rather than yellow on the outside and more tart. These have been a regular dessert (alternating with Cadbury’s) and we sit in the living room and eat one or two, discarding the skins into a bowl on the floor that will quickly be surrounded by roving bands of miniscule ants.

The Star Bazaar, one of the Tata Group’s innumerable enterprises, is also where we get a lot of spices from. And what spices. They are not expensive, but the scent and taste is so much better than that of the stuff which arrives on shelves in the UK. Take black pepper for example. Here it’s not just an addition to food; it transforms it. There is also more variety. Cardamom (elaichi) comes in green, black or white varieties, and you can choose between large and small mustard seeds. Admittedly this last choice had me stumped the other day: what difference does it make?

Cheap Labour

We live a comfortable middle-class life in Ahmedabad, but it is hard to avoid coming face to face with the reality of the desperate existence many others endure. In fact, evidence of injustice and suffering is not hard to come by in India. And sometimes it is right outside your door.

Several weeks ago I left the flat on the way to work and came across a group of road diggers working in the morning sun on Tulsi Row. They were digging narrow trenches to lay a gas connection for the bungalows that surround our block of flats. What struck me, but is really unremarkable in India, was that whole families were at work in the road. There were slim women in the trench, hacking at the mud with pickaxes; boys of fourteen, who should have been in school, were bent-backed to shovel earth out of the trench and onto the verge. Either side of the trench were several children and toddlers with matted hair playing in the dirt and with bits of plastic picked up from the verge. As I walked by with my laptop bag, my shirt sleeves rolled up in preparation for the heat that was already building up at 9:00 o’clock, I noticed a women breastfeeding a baby. She was sat on a pile of earth next to a trench, her sari dirty and her feet on the tarmac of the road. But where else would she go? Manual construction workers like these are often basically homeless and build makeshift camps of wood and plastic sheeting wherever they are paid to work. Across Ahmedabad, where ever road works are taking place you can find a tattered encampment with blue plastic sheeting, where in the evening families cluster around cooking fires fed with scavenged kindling. Paid for a discreet piece of work of only a few days duration, the families on Tulsi Row must have had to travel from their homes to the Satellite area on a daily basis.

This grim scene highlights the reality that labour is cheap in India. And that must be a reason why so many projects in the construction, services and other unskilled labour sectors suffer from so much shabbiness and poor execution. Apart from the injustice of paying people a pittance to work all day at backbreaking tasks, this set up means few tasks get done properly. The trenches in Tulsi Row had been filled after a couple of days, the mud loosely packed back in and rubbish caught up in the refilling sticking out at crazy angles. A pleasant road was suddenly ugly. But then why would anyone expect those worn out mothers, young wives and children to be bothered about the quality of their work? Their working day looks like slavery, with the rest of society the slave driver.

A less extreme example of the effect of paying people very little for their efforts is the work of cleaners in India. I have mentioned before that we do not employ a cook, cleaner or washer women, which is uncommon for a household with our level of income. Apart from the unease we would feel in having someone clean and wash our clothes for us, we know the work would not get done properly. At my office the cleaner sweeps the floor in the morning with a short-handled, feather-like brush, the basic design of which forces her to stoop low to the floor to use it. We have one of these brushes at home but don’t use it because it is less effective at getting dirt up than a normal broom. After this sweeping, which is a brisk affair, the cleaner's adult daughter washes the floor with a cloth. She squats down and swabs at the floor with it, moving the bucket and shuffling backwards every so often. The job gets done but in a more painful and less effective way than is necessary. Even after being cleaned the floor looks grubby at the edges. When I asked a colleague about this, they admitted that they had to almost stand over their cleaner to make sure they did a proper job or even worked at all. A colleague of Dani’s stands and instructs her cleaner to move furniture when dusting item by item, maintaining constant vigilance. Our feeling was that if you have to stand over someone to make sure they do their job properly, you clearly have the time to do it yourself. But then this type of manual work is not something most middle-class Indians would contemplate doing themselves, despite M. K. Gandhi’s best efforts to dignify manual labour. Even in the simplest of tasks then deep rooted social conditioning determines people's action or inaction.

In India, wages for unskilled labour have no doubt always been low. But with a growing urban middle-class in the metros (Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta) and B-class cities (Chennai, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Jaipur etc) with expendable incomes, there is a convergence of a conditioned aversion to manual labour, the existence of a mass of uneducated peons willing to act as ‘staff’ and growing incomes to pay for them. This struck me when I watched a group of Delhiites having their bags carried to their carriage at Old Delhi train station. This family was perfectly capable of carrying their own bags but not even the adolescent children had their hands occupied. Instead sweating porters balanced the family’s hold-alls on their heads, their metal license discs gleaming against the red shirt sleeve of their right arms. Behind the porters the kids ambled, quite possibly having paid a small, fixed amount for their luxury. An even better example of this convergence is given by a colleague. He joked that if you have a bad back and driving your car becomes difficult, don’t pay to see a doctor or physiotherapist, just hire a driver. It’ll be cheaper.

Auto ride in the Old City

Monkeys

It is now high summer and even the mornings are becoming difficult. Although there is often a decent cool breeze that blows in when the kitchen windows are unbolted and open, on the whole the flat stays hot and the air stuffy. Without a fan on overhead you quickly break into a sweat. Fortunately the water in the bathroom is cool in the morning, a luxury that is gone by 11:00 o’clock, but soon after drying yourself sweat is breaking out on your forehead again. I wore my blue kurtha today and that helped. The khadi is thicker than my western style shirts, but more air is allowed to circulate around the body and that adds to the feeling of comfort. Yesterday I had my hair cut short; a no.2 on the back and sides and a no.3 on top. It makes a big difference.

I had cold pasta and pesto for lunch today, the pesto from the stash Dani brought back from home. I ate it with my fingers from a tupperware box while sat at my desk.

I left work at 6.45, stopping to buy a clay bowl to serve as a bird bath on the small balcony. I’m hoping to tempt the wood pigeons and minor birds closer. When I had reached Tulsi Row I saw two grey monkeys sat on a water tank behind one of the bungalows on the right side of the road. The nearest, and larger, of the two glanced at me, its bright eyes darting here and there. But it showed no other interest in me, not even when I clicked my tongue to get its attention. Once I had walked past it bounded down to the road and across it, leaped onto a car roof with a metallic bang and sat on a low wall next to another monkey that I hadn’t noticed until then. I have seen these grey furred monkeys on several occasions since we have been in Ahmedabad. Last week I came out of ICICI bank to find two perched on the hand rail of the access ramp leading to the door. The way they squatted on the bar was exactly how a human would. Their small faces were black and their eyes darted left and right as they took in the honking traffic on the road in front of them. Like the monkeys on Tulsi Row, they showed no interest or fear for me, though I was no more than a metre and a half away. They weren’t aggressive either. I could see that around the side of the bank was the rest of the troop; half a dozen adults of varying sizes and one baby perched on an air conditioning unit. As I stood there and watched, the two on the railings were joined, in leaps and graceful bounds, by four more, until there was a line of grey mammals perched in front of the bank, their long tails trailing down almost to the ground. I have never wished I had my camera on me as much as then. I stopped to admire them for about three or four minutes, until the bank’s security guard came out and started waving his shotgun in the general direction of the animals. As this space included me I decided to move out of range and went to find an auto.

Rickshaaaw!

Ahmedabad’s auto rickshaws are unremarkable, at least in India. The bodywork of each is a rich green and the roofs are bright yellow. Their drivers perch on square seats, hunched over the steering column in front of them and will often try their best to swindle you, especially if you are taken to be a tourist, which is avoidable to some degree only in the less touristy parts of town. The autos run on liquid petroleum gas, which is less polluting than petrol itself but means a crush of vehicles at a busy junction releases billowing fumes that coat the back of the throat.

What is remarkable about the city’s autos is the panels fitted to the interior roof struts either side of the passenger seats. These metre high boards, although missing in some cases, are commonly vivid displays that can be startling as you clamber ungainly in behind the driver. There are often pastoral scenes with women carrying pots and mustachioed men in homespun khadi in the foreground, and a village hut or house set against dark forest in the background. In these scenes the moon is invariable painted big and bright. Equally popular are lake or sea side idylls, with fishermen, a gaggle of ducks and one or two palm trees in view. Equally alien on Ahmedabad’s bustling streets are the scenic vistas of snow capped Alpine mountains, rocky outcrops adorned with fairytale castles and, lower down the slopes, picturesque chalets burdened with thick powdery snow. These are however more pleasant than the more often seen image of a dream American house, all modern clapboard, large windows and an expensive sports car superimposed onto the drive, or bizarrely, onto the landscaped flowerbeds.

Many of these colourful images are accompanied by snippets of a message, such as ‘Happiness is…’, ‘True love knows…’ or ‘Your heart…’, the full meaning of which is sadly never revealed. One of my favorites, because of the work on school leadership I am involved with, is a close-up of a snarling tiger with the message that ‘A leader walks alone…’ Who knows where these panels come from or why they carry such sentimental smulch. Given the apparent Guju sense of glitzy, garish style, the smiling babies against lurid pink backgrounds and metre high red roses glistening with water droplets make some sense. The promo photos of Bollywood stars are also not surprising, posing thugs like Salman Khan smirking out at you as the auto squeezes between mopeds and Maruti Swifts at a char rasta. Of course, despite not knowing where these panels come from, it is still a pleasure to admire them, especially the snow-laden panoramas on a day when the temperature reaches 40 degrees. Another favorite, which made me smile when I first saw it at the start of an evening out, is a view of Tower Bridge lit up at night with the Thames gleaming darkly beneath it. An odd sight in Ahmedabad.

Holi, Holi

Yesterday was the Hindu festival of Holi and for the last few weeks specially converted shops and roadside stalls have been selling a variety of powdered paint colours, water pistols and water bomb balloons across Ahmedabad. Holi is a goddess and for some reason her demise by fire is marked with water fights and people throwing paint at each other. This only seems to happen on the Saturday morning nearest to the special day, when I managed to avoid seeing any actual action. The evidence was visible though, with paint splashed people standing around chatting on Vejalpur road and multi-coloured splotches appearing here and there on pavements. Fires are also lit on the Friday night before Holi and there was a large bonfire outside our block of flats, around which women in saris walked and sprinkled ghee or water in offering.

I was in Vejalpur until 11:00 and then did little else during the rest of the day. In the evening we were invited to a colleague’s parent’s house for dinner along with the rest of the Pratham-ISE crew. Dinner was delicious; potato fried with mustard seeds, raita with beetroot, a thin and liquidy dal, fresh and crispy papad and a sweet pickle. After dinner all eight of us played Pictionary and, briefly, Taboo. It was a really fun evening.

Rajasthan for the first time

Today is Sunday and our one day off in a week. I only returned from Rajasthan on Friday morning, having left for Jhunjhunu, a Northern district bordering the neighbouring state of Haryana, on the Sunday before. I caught a late sleeper train, the Gari Braith (‘Chariot of the Poor’), from Kalupur station to Jaipur where I met a colleague and caught a cramped local bus heading north. My four-day stay in Jhunjhunu was so I could help the team there prepare for a meeting with our first major donor, a billionaire-businessman and head of a family-run pharmaceutical company. We put in long hours and I at least was exhausted when the meeting took place on the Wednesday evening.

Jhunjhunu district is hot, dry and largely flat. In the summer the temperature can reach 50 degrees. Outside the towns the land is sandy, semi-arid plain and dotted with monkey-puzzle-like trees, thorny shrubs and tall, slender grass. The effect of irrigation is visually stunning, turning a sandy field into a vibrant green crop. In places beech-like trees line the road and occasionally hairy goats can be seen rummaging around in the verge and in the alleyways between small habitations spaced along the highways. These are hamlets or isolated houses, where the concrete dwellings are painted white or beige, or unpainted altogether, and thatched huts stand nearby.

Jhunjhunu town itself is small, with three roads named One, Two and Three. These are wide, well surfaced and sandy at the edges. The nights are quiet apart from the bark and reply of dogs who have marked out their territory and guard it jealousy against interlopers. Walking down one of the streets at night the sky is clear and the stars bright and visible. During the bright day you can see a high mound, rocky and boulder-strewn, rise out of the plain in the distance. On the walls of the town are blue and white BSP posters, Mayawati’s chubby face smiling out from the top right-hand corner. Elsewhere are hammer and sickles, inexpertly daubed in red paint on low walls and sides of buildings. On the way out of town in an AC taxi on Thursday, I saw a slogan that read ‘Democracy, Freedom, Socialism. Long Live’.

Pratham's DLCs

Over the last few days there’s been an auto strike and it has been impossible to find a rickshaw anywhere. I have had to walk into work in the morning sun and navigate the fumey rush-hour chaos on my way home in the evening. The drivers are protesting a CNG petroleum gas price rise of 10 Rupees a litre, a mark up which nevertheless leaves heavily subsidized fuel costs a long way from their actual market price. It was a relief to find autos back on the road by this morning, when I accompanied a visiting teacher from Bombay on a trip to some of Pratham’s ‘Democratic Learning Centres’ in Ahmedabad’s slums.

After breakfast at DJ Rocks (or Deepak’s as Dani and I know it), a small and grubby but friendly and very cheap ‘restaurant’ on Vejalpur road, we rode in an auto for half an hour, ending up far into the old half of the city. All three DLCs were essentially the same: a classroom with one shuttered window, one fan and one tube light. In the first session were twenty or so 6 to 8 year olds, of varying ability and cleanliness, a division repeated across all three groups. Most had exercise books and pens, though one or two were using slates and chalk. In the second centre a young teacher supervised ten listless 3 to 5 year olds who stared at me but didn’t return my smiles. My companion thought they were too young to be there and certainly they looked doleful, although the coal which some Indian parents apply like mascara to their children’s eyes perhaps exaggerated this look beyond reality. The most fun were the 11 to 14 year olds, all of whom were boys, studying in a small room at the top of a very steep flight of metal stairs. They were learning and practicing Maths problems, directed by a Pratham trained teacher from the local area who firmly reined in their messing around. All the classess took place in the morning, with the kids going to their municipal schools at midday. My presence caused something of a stir amongst the kids and in the immediate surrounding area of slum housing, an old women taking the effort to climb the stairs just to get a look at the foreigner sitting in the classroom. None of the slums were really desperate; residency was obviously well established, with houses made of concrete and rigged up with electricity. But the absence of money was visible.

Notes from a dusty city

When I first arrived here I was mildly disgusted by the thin film of yellow-brown dust that covered the screen and keyboard of the laptop I had inherited from my predecessor. But several months in and I have realized the futility of cleaning the thing on a daily basis. When I open it up in the office each morning the dust is there again, fine and clogging. Where does it come from? Over the course of each day in the office and evenings spent emailing, checking the news or watching DVDs, the dust must pile up, be swept into the air by fans and the occasional cool breeze and settle gently over everything. The whole city in fact is dusty. The earth, where it is visible despite the tarmac and concrete, is packed down and dry. The wind sweeps the fine top layer into corners, piles it up at the sides of the road and deposits it on the floor of our flat when the windows are open. The roadside is often like sand; soft and gritty underfoot.

On Tulsi Row the tarmac eventually gives way completely to the dusty earth, which blows into the parking space underneath the flats to obscure the circular patterned floor tiles with a gritty covering. Nearer Jodhpur Gam Road the tarmac remains and in the morning sweepers brush the dust and grit off to the right and left of the road, their brooms leaving fine lines in the sandy spaces where cars usually park in an orderly row. There is a futility in this labour also, the women in once brightly-coloured saris scraping the fine earth and sending up clouds of yellow-brown dust that settle roughly in the same as before. And these efforts pale in comparison to nature’s. When it rains, as it did recently to the surprise of everyone in the city because the Monsoon is not due until the end of June at least, all the accumulated dust is washed away. The roads and pavements are visible as intended and, washed clean, look sharper at the edges but more dilapidated, as potholes, cracks and the effects of slow erosion are revealed as if magic.

Lunch at the Pratham office

Lunch is usually at 1:30 or 2:00 depending on how people feel and on whether one of the office staff, either Bhavnaben or Dakshaben (ben meaning sister in Gujarati and a commonly used addition to first names to show respect), come down to the first floor and say ‘lunch’ and gesture towards the stairs. It is also usually a communal affair; as we make our way up to the third floor we stop at the second and see if everyone there is coming up too. On the top floor there is a medium sized room and a covered terrace, both with enough space for ten or so people to sit in a rough circle on the tiled floor. And this is what we do, sometimes with reed mats covering the floor. Many people bring food from home, either cooked by themselves or by their family’s cook. The office will also order in 30 rupee tiffin, a runner being sent out to collect the metal cylinder with its four compartments filled with rice, dal, folded roti and one or two spicy subji.

The lovely thing about this process is that all the food is placed in the middle of the circle of cross-legged people and everyone just helps themselves. On the whole you eat what you’ve brought, but are also more than welcome to take from others and dig into their container with a spoon. Everyone eats from the wide, flat metal plates with high sides that are common in India while some people will share one plate with their neighbour. I love this sharing and communal attitude. Since we’ve been able to cook at home I have purposefully made extra to share at lunch time, taking apart my small, neat steel tiffin and pushing each section in amongst the others in front of me when I sit down to eat. Amusingly there have been exclamations at mine and Dani’s ability to make rotis.

Eating in this way gives me an opportunity to try lots of different food and styles of cooking. On most days I am given something fragrant and delicious to eat and can then press the ‘owner’ for details on how to go about reproducing it. It also gives me the opportunity to eat without cutlery. A staple is dal and rice, the thin sauce being poured onto the rice and mashed into a sticky mixture that can be easily scooped up using the three or four fingers of the right hand, the thumb being used to lever the food into the mouth. When mixing dal and rice it is important that no white grains be left. Curd (yoghurt) is also often added to the mix and soft roti can be dexterously ripped into small sections with just the right hand and pressed down into the dal and rice, folded and popped into the mouth. Licking your fingers and wiping the sauce from your plate is no social taboo and is done with gusto, at least in my case. I regularly come away from lunch, hobbling slightly from sitting cross-legged for thirty minutes, feeling very full and completely satisfied.

Events of unknown significance

One of the fascinating things about living in India is the variety of festivities, events and rituals that are played out in public for all to see. Some can be observed on a daily basis and their meaning is often at least relatively transparent. Take for example the women who, early in the morning and singly, methodically walk in a circle around one of the trees that line our road. On several occasions I have walked past as a woman has been engaged in this quiet ritual, or puja, an earthenware pot (presumably filled with water or ghee) clasped in front of her with both hands. There is clearly some offering or supplication being made, perhaps to the tree as a symbol or representation of God.

But the meaning of other events can be opaque. Several months ago, I was in an auto heading towards my colleague’s house at the Western end of Anandnagar road when we slowed down at an intersection and I spotted a procession going in the direction we were to take. On the opposite side of the road to me were seven or eight vehicles in a convoy decked out to look like chariots, of the kind heroes of the Hindu epics are popularly shown to ride. I couldn’t see every chariot in detail, but as we turned onto Anandnagar and alongside the convoy, I stuck my head out of the auto to get a better look. In the nearest vehicle three women sat in a row on a high-backed seat, surrounded by an elaborate structure painted to look silver. In another of the chariots, perched on top of the body of a car, a white statue was sat alone on a similar seat, a white robed and middle-aged attendant kneeling in front. In yet another two women sat either side of a large framed portrait of a shaven-headed man dressed in Gandhian white robes and carrying a black staff. As we drove past I could see that at the very front of the procession there were two elephants, seating boxes strapped into place on their round backs. Several passengers sat in these boxes, holding onto the sides and peering about them. Each elephant had had its face painted in bright red and blue patches, out of which their small eyes twinkled.

Was this a religious event? A celebration of an auspicious occasion? Perhaps a show of respect to some departed Guruji, his portrait carried reverently in the front chariot. The outsized carriages were similar to those sometimes used at weddings, where the groom’s pre-wedding bharat procession involves him sitting on a horse, in a chariot or just riding in a car. But this lacked the loud exuberance of a wedding procession. I described the scene to my colleague when I finally arrived at his house, but he was unable to enlighten me and the event remains a mystery.

The road to Anand

One afternoon recently two colleagues and I set off for Anand, a town some 70 miles South East from Ahmedabad. My colleagues were due to speak at the Institute for Rural Development Anand, India’s top rural management and development institution. A driver had been hired and we set off in a small car, one of the ubiquitous Tata or Maruti Suzuki hatchbacks, and out through Ahmedabad’s teeming suburbs. After thirty minutes of close traffic and the bustle of brightly painted goods carriages pulling onto and off the road, their requests for ‘Horn Please OK’ picked out in a multitude of colours on rear paneling, we were onto the national highway. A toll-road, this part of the BJP government’s ‘Golden Quadrilateral’ was impressive. The road was very straight, perfectly tarmaced and with clear markings. There were even shrubs separating the opposing lanes. And every mile or so blue signs hoved into view and declared ‘National Highway A-1: A Dream Ticket’, or ‘National Highway A-1: A Real Joyride’, as well as the less optimistic ‘Speed Thrills but Kills’. The two lane road was mostly empty and the closest we came to other drivers was at the industrial looking toll booths. The best thing about the road was the embankment it had been built upon, which allowed for commanding views of the surrounding countryside.

This land was largely flat and divided into acre sized fields by lines of shrubs and trees. The fields were separated into different crops, four or five visible within 5-10 acres. One of my colleagues pointed out fields of tobacco to me and plots with castor. Every so often there was the glint of sunlight on water from a rice paddy. In between the fields there were sometimes snaking, dusty paths, but there were few people to be seen. Only occasionally a thatched hut or concrete house could be made out, standing in a beaten mud clearing or overhung with trees, and nearby would be men and women, the women in saris and men in shirts and dark trousers. There were often small, squat temples near each house, the domed roofs and square bases either cement gray or a stark white. One house had two of the distinctively shaped structures immediately opposite the front door, the backs of the mandirs to the road. Other temples were isolated, set between fields and away from any houses, perhaps as guardians of the harvest or perhaps for several families to share.

We arrived in Anand and headed for the well-maintained grounds of IRMA as dusk was falling. The campus was like a retreat; the buildings surrounded by trees and the silence of the town’s outskirts. Although nowhere as visually pleasing as Le Corbusier’s fort-like Indian Institute for Management building in Ahmedabad, IRMA has its own charm. The presentations were uneventful and we ate in the student’s canteen afterwards. On the way back to Ahmedabad, I noticed a sign lit up by the car’s headlights in the dark that read ‘Your family is waiting at home. Drive with care’.

Jodhpur Gam Road on a very quiet Sunday morning.







Tulsi Row.










Tulsi Flats....ours is the lowest level.










The entrance to C block.

Non-veg

Last night we headed across the river for dinner for the first time, an auto taking us across the wide black space of the Sabarmarti at night and into the bustle and noise of the old city. We were dropped on Relief Road and headed right at the cinema, onto a narrower street lined with shops. The smells of the old city are familiar to me from when I was last in India: feet, effluent, moped fumes and incense. At the end of the street was an open space filled with stalls. Many of these were kitchens on wheels selling what passes for Chinese food in India, their clientele sat in the open on plastic chairs, the smoke from the brightly painted stalls rising in thin clouds above them. On one side of the square stood a low-rise, white-painted mosque, on our left as we stepped up into Nishat Restaurant ready to revel in non-veg curry. I had mutton, Dani had chicken and we washed down both with thick, sweet lassis.

Today we started with a cooked breakfast. Jains don’t eat eggs and this makes them hard to find. Although a minority in Ahmedabad, adherents to this branch of Hinduism are a major influence on social mores. They also own many of the flats and frown on other people flouting their rules. The bright new supermarkets launched by India’s leading corporate houses don’t infringe on this sensibility and the small retailers keep such controversial wares well hidden. But I have managed to establish a supplier, the owner of a bakery on Jodhpur Gam Road (I daren’t reveal his name) who will sneak out to the back of his shop to bag up some of the perfectly white ovals and allow us to cook up scrambled eggs to accompany our buttered toast. We sat on our bedroom balcony and enjoyed the warmth with breakfast. I have been able to have tea at home since I bought a small kettle and sieve, and am having sweet, milky chai in the mornings. In the afternoon we picked up two cookery books from the bookshop, Crossword, and ate cake and ice cream in the air conditioned coffee shop there. After a big shop at the Star Bazaar supermarket I washed some clothes and cooked dinner: parsley mash with sweet potato and carrots, and hot chocolate for dessert.

Law Garden

We woke up late this morning and it took us a while to make it out of the flat and into the sun. Once out of the building and at the entrance to our ‘society’, where there is a sentry post and old men in off-white clothes sit during the day and ruminate, we headed right onto Jodhpur Gam road towards Anandnagar road. Having got out some cash from the ATM there we headed back and picked up a teenage girl who was begging. She was dressed in a dirty sari and repeatedly made a feeding motion with her hand to her mouth and stomach. She stayed with us for about five minutes, showing us the money she had already and occasionally bending down to show supplication or, oddly, grasp the back of my calf. We said ‘bus’ repeatedly, which means ‘stop’ or ‘enough’ in Hindi but she persisted until we ignored her, at which point she delivered an unintelligible but unmistakable curse on us for our refusal to cave into her demands.

After a trip to D-Mart for cleaning supplies and a Mars bar, we caught an auto to Law Garden and got out at Swati for lunch. This is one of our favorite restaurants. We sat outside and enjoyed our food with a delicious Kesar lassi and an equally good sugarcane juice. Having paid the bill, cheap at a little over ₤3, we wondered over to Law Garden itself. The park reminded me of those in Valencia in Spain: landscaped and hot, with dusty paths and shaded seating. There were several canoodling couples in amongst the trees and on stone benches, so obviously public shows of affection between the sexes are ok in certain circumstances. As well as being pestered by another beggar and befriended by two sets of eager-to-introduce-themselves boys (the first older than the second and less annoying), we saw a variety of wildlife. The local stripy-backed squirrels were in abundance and joined in the trees by green lorikeets with yellow beaks. I was reading the botanical information about one tree when above me appeared the head of one of these parrot-like birds. In a hole in the hollow trunk of the tree the bird could be hidden and would occasionally pop its head out as if shy. Elsewhere the birds were high up in the branches of trees. Passing a bird poo spattered area I looked up and saw the underside of one of Ahmedabad’s kites. I’d seen a pair of these birds of prey from the rooftop of Pratham’s office the week before: they had wheeled and swooped over the rooftops, heads regularly down looking for prey and their shadows frightening the pigeons.

The Whitaker-Hancock Residence

We moved into our flat in the last days of January and spent the first few weeks snatching opportunities to scrub and clean. When we took the flat it had just been renovated and a powdery paint and mortar dust lay everywhere, making it a grim environment to live in at first. The apartment is what's called a 2BHK (two bedroom, hall and kitchen), a standard middle class design. The bedrooms are good sized and ours has an ensuite bathroom and a small balcony. The living room, which the front door opens onto, is even bigger, with a larger balcony overlooking the low Tulsi bungalows that line the road to the flats. You might think that a third balcony is excessive, but the one that opens off the kitchen serves an important function as a clothes washing and drying area and seems to allow the local pigeons the privacy they need to shit on our drying washing. The kitchen has a long black stone work surface, much too low for someone my height, which forms an L-shape with the even lower sink positioned in the foot of the L. After more than a month without one, we now have a squat blue fridge that sits at the top of the L, next to three stone shelves set into the concrete wall.

The windows of the flat are thin but tall, with oddly frosted panes spattered with watery mortar drops that won’t come off however much you scrub at them. Fitted to all of the windows are horizontal rows of black bars, also splashed here and there with paint and mortar. The floors are marble: big rectangular slabs in the living room and small, vaguely glittering rectangles in the kitchen and bedrooms. The walls have been re-plastered well but enthusiastically, the workmen apparently having little regard for natural borders like door frames and window ledges. Most striking of the flats features is the 2-D front door, which presents the image of a carved wooden door to the first floor landing. At head height is the meditative image of Ganesha, the elephant god, and below him, the Hindi symbol for ‘Om’. Also worth noting is the hook in the ceiling of the main balcony, from which can be hung a formal swing to allow us to repose in the manner of proper middle class Gujus. We can’t really make a claim to that class though as we haven’t employed a cook, cleaner or washerwomen. This sets us apart from pretty much everyone else in Ahmedabad with a regular income and means we spend a lot of time cooking, cleaning and washing clothes.

The Project

Since January I have been working on a project called Indian School of Education. That’s a holding name more than anything else; the project has been evolving for the last two years and has yet to have its exact parameters drawn. The gist of what we want to do is there in the title though: the area of concern is education and our intervention will involve teaching.

The project is a reaction to the parlous state of education in India. Although the government has had success in improving children’s physical access to primary and secondary schools, especially in rural India, the quality of education delivered remains poor. A key indicator of that quality is literacy levels amongst school-aged children. Recent data compiled by Pratham India (ISE’s mother organisation) shows that out of a total 140 million rural children, 110 million cannot read a whole paragraph in their mother tongue. While illiteracy is bad enough alone, its knock-on effect is low secondary school completion. Across India kids make it through primary school without grasping basic literacy and then can’t cope at a more advanced level and drop out of school into low paid work.

There have been concerted efforts by non-governmental organisations to tackle this problem for at least the last 15 years. But while efforts to improve curriculum, raise teaching standards and involve communities more in education have made inroads into the problem, there has not been systemic change. And that’s where ISE comes in. Our model of improving education identifies headteachers and local education officials as the key individuals able to transform schools and in turn raise levels of student achievement, enrollment in school and completion of basic schooling. Moreover, our assumption is that this requires headteachers and officials to themselves be transformed. In general neither group is currently able to improve education standards. This is because none of these public servants are given professional training. To make matters worse, within the education system promotion to positions of authority is compulsory and based on seniority rather than merit. In this way a teacher may suddenly find themselves heading a school or a cluster of schools without having had any preparation for the role. Unsurprisingly these supposed positions of authority become largely administrative; incumbents are not equipped to show leadership and are therefore not expected to.

While ISE can’t change the way leaders are appointed in India’s education system, we can improve the capacity of headteachers and local education officials to act as leaders rather than administrators. We intend to do this by providing the first in-service education leadership programme for headteachers and education officials in India. The plan is for a 3-year part-time programme that will combine short training sessions with 3-month in-field projects that trainees will implement in their own schools.

I’ve joined the project at ‘a very existing time’ to quote the Wachowski brothers. We’ve just secured our first major donor and have established a team in Rajasthan to market the training programme to potential trainees and build relationships with higher levels of government bureaucracy. We’ve also run a recruitment and selection process for recent graduates from India’s best universities and chosen 17 people for a 2-year placement scheme we’re calling ‘Gandhi Fellowship’. Each fellow will be sent into rural Rajasthan to support several of the leadership trainees in implementing their projects.

My role in all this has been somewhat varied over the last 9 weeks. I’ve worked on a donor proposal, sat in on meetings with officials in rural Rajasthan and participated in the selection process for the Gandhi Fellowship in Delhi. My longer term role has become clearer in the last few days though and most of my time is likely to be spent working as part of a ‘new ventures’ team that will conceptualize and produce proposals on new elements of the project as it unfolds. For example there are plans for creating ISE as a private university and running masters programmes for education leadership, and an idea for setting up an education research centre.

Ahmedabad

We first arrived in the city at night, picking our way between sleeping bodies on the station platform, women and men with bundles of luggage moving past under the strip lighting and auto drivers quietly hassling us to ride with them. We didn’t accept any such entreaties until clear of the station and its surrounding road, also ringed with prostrate bodies wrapped head to toe with blankets to keep out the relative chill at 7:00 in the morning. Heaving our bags into the narrow space behind the back seat of our chosen auto, we clambered onto the padded bench and the vehicle eased into the road, the driver hunched forward to peer out under the swinging mirror emblazoned with red Gujarati lettering that hung from the top of the windscreen…

Ahmedabad is really two cities, separated by the wide Sabarmati River flowing North East to South West, the banks of which form grubby beaches largely devoid of human activity. On the Eastern side, the old city seems ragged and dilapidated despite the existence of modern hotels nestling in amongst the crumbling, stained apartment blocks and tenement-like residences. The side streets are narrow, with tall and unevenly built terraces leaning out over the bustling traffic below. Here and there remnants of Mughal monuments and the old city walls stand out from their surroundings, looking forlorn and out of place. The appearance of Navi Ahmedabad, on Sabarmati’s Western bank, is very different. Here there are high rise flats, flyovers and big brash shopping malls that reflect the sun during the day and shout ‘progress’ at night in neon lettering. There are modern, detached villas behind high walls or fences, whose owners display their social standing with expensive looking plaques that give details like ‘A.G. Patel, Civil Engineer’ or V.P. Rao, Advocate’. In the same way the ‘Mayor’s Bungalow’ makes no bones about its role in society. But it’s not that the new city is necessarily wealthier than the old. There is plenty of poverty to be found here. But the roads are wider and straighter, the infrastructure newer and showing less wear, and the buildings more modern. Some of the tower blocks appear to get bigger and bolder in design the higher they are; fortress-like cladding adorning what look to be penthouse apartments on the top two or three floors. The tallest towers almost touch the outer limits of the smog layer that lies upon the horizon, dimming the sky below 45 degrees. To appreciate the beauty of a sunny day you have to look right up and see the sky un-shrouded and seemingly pollution free.