9-29-2008 Agra, India
Fighting your way hurriedly through the cacophony and chaos at Delhi's central train station, the sheer mass of humanity astounds. Everyone stares at everyone else. The diversity is impressive. Indians stare at the tourists, at other Indians. Hindus ogle wealthy Sikhs. Sikh stares at Muslim, Muslim at Jain, Jain at Buddhist. Peasants gaze openly at businessmen. Soldiers watch porters c
arry huge wooden boxes of goods through the crowd. Running through the crowd, looking for the sleeper cars near the front of the train takes much more time than expected. The trains are so very long. To get to the more expensive executive
class sleeper cars you have to walk pass seemingly hundreds of unreserved, open-windowed, non-air-conditioned cars as hundreds and hundreds of people run in every direction looking for their place. It's well over 90 degrees. Sweat drenches your shirt, your back, your trousers. You're used to it by now and yet it's still uncomfortable. It would help if you slowed down, but you don't want the train to leave without you. You definitely don't want to be separated from the group. So you jog on like everyone else.
The stink of excrement and urine permeates the
thick, smoky air of the platform since all train toilets empty directly on the tracks. Rolling away from Delhi the buildings begin to thin and fields start to appear. Shanty towns of complex and varied construction line the tracks for miles. The first is a collection of tent homes made largely of plastic sheeting. The next area is mostly mud brick and straw. Another is a mixture of concrete, mud, and plastic. In most of these neighborhoods there is a small depression, full of water from the waning summer monsoon. People and cows rest and bathe, often together, in these sinks. Looking out the train window is peering right into the most intimate details of the lives of some of the world's poorest people. Here a shining man, slick with water, hair jet blag and glistening, is walking back towards his tent with nothing but a small towel around is tiny waist. Next I see a young boy sleeping in the shade of black plastic on a wooden cot, woven with cloth. Over there infants chase each other in the mud as a newborn cries on its back in the tropical red dirt. Everywhere there are men and children shitting by the tracks. A young man rises from a squat and gingerly negotiates his way, barefoot, back to the shanty. Where are the women? They must have somewhere else to
go. The men and children, though, are brazen, thoughtless about it. Eventually rice fields and small farm villages appear and I visibly, audibly relax, "uhhhh." The dwellings and agricultural storage sheds are all made of some kind of reedy plant. These look so much less offensive to my eye. The organic wholeness of them makes some kind of innate sense to me. There's no plastic visible no and the garbage on the ground thins. In places there is no visible garbage at all, a first for me on this visit where garbage has been strewn underfoot at every turn.
My train ticket placed me in a seat apart from the other tourists. Many of the others were frustrated by this. They seemed to want to cling together. I saw it as an opportunity to finally talk to some Indians. A fascinating conversation developed with a middle-aged man, his daughter, and another young, college-bound man who later joined our car. This last hopes to be accepted to study computer networking at Florida State University in Tallahassee. He was thrilled to find I'd visited and that I am a college professor. "Is it a good school? A good place to study? Is it reputable?" he asked. He was even more excited when I told him about U.S. News and World Report's rankings of colleges and graduate schools. He immediately typed the details into his cell phone. The man and his daughter wanted to know all about me. Where was I from? Did I have children? Which parts of India was I going to see? They were full of advice about where to go and what to see. The father in particular wanted to know about my job and the teaching profession. Throughout our conversation he constantly nodded his head from side to side and grinned to show his badly eroded teeth. This was the first time I experienced this quintessentially India custom. Even though I'd read about it, it took me a moment to realize that he was indicating his agreement with me, his pleasure with the conversation.
In Agra, a young boy, maybe six years old and holding a small baby approaches the windows of my air-conditioned tourist bus. He's wearing very dirty clothes, rags really, unlike most Indians who tend to be cleanly and colorfully dressed. His eyes meet mine through the window as I sit in the back of the bus reading. He pleads with me for help, first with his eyes, then with gestures that indicate his baby sister needs food. His look is achingly young and beautiful. His desperation seems complete. His eyes tell me that if I don't give him money, he will surely starve - his sister too. Amazingly, I draw the curtain so that he will no longer see me and I, of course, will no longer have to see him. Then, I cry a bit, alone. Strangely, I do not get off the bus and help him as I surely would at home.
Never before has a place so rattled my nerves and attacked my conscience. Scenes like the one described above are a daily, even hourly, occurrence for the wealthy tourist in public in northern India. It is brutal and dehumanizing for everyone involved. At times I found myself huddling in my hotel room, hiding from the world outside. Why did I not give him a few rupees? To do so would have meant drawing many more beggars to the bus and, yet, so what? This excuse is given so often but it makes little sense. All of us had flown halfway around the world at great expense simply to act as voyeurs of a sort. We had no work to go to, nothing else to do. What is the harm in attracting a small crowd of beggars? The answer I think has to do with fear. It’s necessary to keep them at bay to maintain denial, to make sure there essential humanity doesn’t become apparent.
Here in Agra these needy people are particularly numerous and aggressive. Every manner of cripple, beggar, and street urchin crowd these streets. Few of my fellow tourists ever give. From time to time I do. When a mother holds a clearly malnourished child up to the taxi window and tapped, I wait until the taxi is ready to pull away and then quickly hand her 50 rupees. This amount, about a dollar, is enough for them both to eat well. Her response is to continue to tap on the window with no apparent lessening of her plaintive, baleful stare. Apparently I need to give more.
My fellow travelers are a bit disgusted with me. “I’m going to ruin it for everyone,” said one. It would be better to send money to an aid organization once we returned home than to give anything to a person directly. You’re only raising their expectations. I’m sure that’s true and certainly it would be good to give to aid groups, but how will that help this hungry, bag-of-bones child that stands in front of me now? Moreover, how many of these tourists will actually send that money later, once they are comfortably ensconced in the luxuries and distance of home?
Thus, I find myself giving whenever my resolve, my will, is sufficiently weakened by the misery in front of me. There is no other logic to it. Some of the children begging were well-dressed. These I avoid, but when two dirty children approach in Orcha and demand food by pointing to their mouths, shortly after watching me haggle over the price of two bags of snacks, I simply smile at them and hand over my snacks. Suddenly I realize I’m not all that hungry after all. They pose for a photograph. "Very nice," they say in English. Still, they look weary, almost old, and they can’t really manage much of a smile.
This is clearly the most challenging place I've ever travled. Everyday will feel like work.
eenth child. It took 17 years to complete the main mausoleum and a full 22 years to complete the entire complex. 20,000 laborers worked continuously and 1,000 elephants ferried the translucent white marble from a distance of over 300 kilometers. Shah Jahan was a great lover of architecture and is also responsible for many other buildings, including the largest mosque in India, the Jama Masjid (Friday Mosque) of Delhi. My visit there was my first entrance into a mosque and I found it a calming respite from the urban chaos of Delhi. It had the air of a 
park with families strolling about the grounds and men sleeping in the shade of the bordering archways.
ry to imagine a group of, say, Indian tourists wandering about taking photographs during a Christian church service and you'll get a sense of how it felt. No matter. Our guide assured us that no one would mind. This seems to be another example of very different ideas about privacy and personal space. Even sacred space is largely public in India, despite the ongoing religious tensions throughout India. The bombings make the news, of course, but the daily accommodations of millions of diverse peoples living side-by-side are at least as noteworthy. In fact, in the next building, the congregation runs a continuously operati
ng kitchen that feeds anyone who comes asking for a meal. The labor is done by believers and anyone can partake at any time in a large open room where people sit on the floor in long lines consuming food. A beautiful gesture that exceeds the Christian soup kitchens of which I'm more familiar.
