Cyberabad, Asbestos Centre, packs of dogs

The inflight magazine of Spice Jet, one of the many domestic airlines to spring up in India in the past four years, tells me more about Christmas than I’d ever known. The article explains that what we now call Christmas used to be a Roman pagan holiday celebrating victory of light over darkness; it moved to Dec 25th about 336 AD. India is more multi-religious than secular, and the author goes on to explain how Christians have been celebrating for over 300 years. In Kerala, mango and banana trees are decorated with Christmas ornaments. In the North-East, it’s a month-long affair, and their choruses are famous. In the magazine ads families of no more than four are enjoying water filters and resort weekends and cholesterol monitors.

Flying in India is an immersion in the frantic fervent explosion of the consuming classes. India is not catching up with alacrity somewhere on the historical course of Western nations. The domestic airport is a taxidermist’s creation of animals extinct, powerful and imagined. The check-in is computer-scanned, and at least one fleet of planes say ‘turn off electronic devices’ instead of ‘no smoking’. The men crouched on the airplane body giving it a wash are wearing shoes, which have become less of a rarity on construction sites since the Delhi Metro set a prestigious standard. Outside the arrivals terminal, a man working away on piping holds a welding mask, definitely still a rarity. On second look, the piping is being braced by the flip-flopped foot of another man who looks away as the blue-white flame fires up again.

When the pilot comes on the intercom, North America all of a sudden feels very far away. He’s clearly from somewhere in the Caribbean, his voice low and precise as he tells of temperatures and which runway we’ll be using. I wonder if anyone from his family was originally from ‘the Indes’, brought by the British the replace the first Indians and work on the cane plantations. Now he’s back, flying into Cyberabad, Coimbatore. Maybe the forced flows between colonies and colonials are being replaced. People and ideas again follow the rivers and oceans and plains of Asia to more natural trading partners, enemies and religious converts.

Street Food for dinner

picture: India, I for Irony
Songs: Ella Fitzgerald, First Lady of Song CDs

Someone gave the homeless dogs clothes. They got them stitched out of sacks of flour or rice, something hard to make out. The dogs sat by the stinky nala, rather proud of themselves for once. They walk around a bit, sit down, look at each other sideways.

The dogs and the village across the street, and the seemingly infinite methods of tying scarves around rickshaw-wallas, are all part of the flowering of Delhi winter. The street sellers have carts of roasted peanuts and sweet puffed rice, and best of all, popcorn roasted fresh and hot on the fire at the end of the handtruck.

Three nights this week I’ve had street food for dinner. The first night, I was feeling disappointed in myself. I can’t speak Hindi, and I was getting anxious about getting anything done at work. So I came home, put down my stuff, and walked back across the road past the plywood and nutritional supplement stores. The initial darkness quickly gave way to a whole lane of excitement. Piles of puffy jackets for Rs 250, shiny shoes, orange and pink sparkly sweaters, watches in water buckets to demonstrate their water-proofness. Shirts five for Rs. 100, socks, and some pots and buckets and kitchen things. All lit by a single bulb fitted to the top of a butane canister. Looking at these silent burning orbs, I felt like I should know how they worked, and that it had something to do with the camping lanterns we thought were so exotic. Most exciting for me was the food. More popcorn, and roasted sweet potato that would be served with salt and chaat masala, and finally at the end a stand set up selling the largest parantha I have ever seen. They gave me two in a bag, and I rushed home happy.

The next day I found myself stuck. I knew where I was, but it wasn’t an area were people were rich enough to take rickshaws; consequently I had no way to go but to keep walking. Soon enough I came upon a lighted strip with promising traffic. In front of a shop that advertised improbable Chinese Food a man was putting the finishing touches on an aloo tikki. This one was covered with not just chutneys and dahi, as the ones we get at work, but fresh ginger and pomegranate seeds. It was steaming hot and smelled divine.

He was handing it to a young woman and an older woman, and I figured there are worse ways to wait for a rickshaw than eating Indian poutine with some ladies. We spoke in Hindi about how they never listen when you tell them about ingredients, and how nice ginger was in the winter. Many many people in India speak some English, and the ones I work with speak it as a mother tongue. There has been public education in English in India for longer than in Britain. Still, I find I use English like rope bridges through the jungle. It is direct, and available, and gives its residents a way around the morass of hundreds of languages in a country of billions. But sometimes, when you’ve got nowhere to be and the food smells good, you can step off the bridge and hang out in the intimate, dark mysteries of the trees.

The village across the street

When I first moved onto this lane there were two holes. One across the street, and one at the corner. The one at the corner first became a forest, as bamboo poles sprouted thicker and thicker. One night floodlights appeared, and thirty men worked pouring concrete floors. Now it’s back to a few skinny men, carrying loads of bricks, working in clean sweaters and flip flops.

The house on the other side of the road will have much more stories to tell. At first it was an undifferentiated hole in the ground. Then the walls of became straight, the hole wide and deep. Dirt piled up in the day, carried out by men gliding up a steep path in the far side. One morning, they started mixing concrete out front. They make a pile, dig a depression, and pour water into the middle, mixing more material in from the sides with a shovel until it’s the right consistency. Soon after, metal lengths sprouted from the basement floor at irregular heights into the sky, looking like frayed electrical cords. A first floor skeleton appeared on top of another forest of bamboo, none of which were straight, but nonetheless seemed to add up to horizontalness.

In the beginning, the men had slept by the road on metal blanks or boards. Once it was finally cool enough to sleep with sheets, I would come home silently past the sleeping row, willing them to stay in their cocoons. The scary nights were when they were sitting up, men laughing from behind the tarp that blocked the site from the road. By November, three women and a chai-walla had joined the men. The women wore saris, a circle of cloth on top their heads, and bricks on top of this. They looked at me and chatted, as they piled bricks six, eight, ten high and set off down the path.

The women brought some civilization to the growing village. The neighbourhood security guards set up their fires beside the bamboo forest, and didn’t seem to mind the noxious fumes coming off the paint chips and debris. Now they were up playing cards at night, not so interested when I passed; most comforting, they’d taken down the tarp. The first floor had joined with the concrete pillars, hiding the steel spindles, making the inside dark and casting an appropriate house-like shadow onto the street.

This week, walking out to catch an auto rickshaw to work, I noticed the children. The piles of bricks had turned into proper shacks, with poured concrete floors, even and solid, and electricity, and plastic bags of worldly possessions. The kids sat around a fire set up between three sides of stone and a pot. They pointed at each other and yelled, generally amusing themselves. I wondered where they pee, how the families knew to come at this time, how many babies and stories it took for my house to be built. As I walked to dinner last night, one solemn little one, wearing no pants, sat cross-legged on top of a pile of wooden crates. In the taxonomy of VS Naipaul, he was a country child, as country children cover their tops and expose their bottoms, while poor city kids do the reverse. I turned around every few steps to make sure he was still there. I thought of baby gates, and lawsuits, and outrage over lead in paint in children’s toys. Three feet off the ground, watching dinner cook, and I wondered what we are really entitled to.