Arriving in India

I finally made it to India. It's an amazing country. It's everybody's first day at work. Nobody knows anything, what they're doing, or why they're doing it.

Last night I was so tired last night I left my suitcase open. I remembered in the Amazon I came back to my cabin to find a small dog masquerading as a cockroach in my suitcase. I’m in a condo here, what can happen? I wake up this morning and sure enough, sitting on top of my clothes is a giant cockroach. Not the size of the Amazonian, but still impressive. I was trying to figure out what to do with him. Killing him would have resulted in a death match worthy of an HBO special. Enough blood and guts would be spilled, possibly mine as well, that I’d have to wash all my clothes. I flipped him out of the suitcase, but he kind of disappeared. I don’t know where he went. I carry a dagger with me everywhere in the condo now.

I’m staying in Chandigarh with my friend Gopi who is back here working on his company in India. The city I’m staying in, Chandigarh, is unlike any other in India. It is a new planned city, kind of like Brazilia. Wide roads, very modern. None of the sights and sounds I pictured. Well it’s trying to be modern, but it still manages to be dirty and run down.

I should mention the dust. I arrived in Delhi and began to sweat the moment the plane touched down. I stepped outside into the blast furnace of the jet engine. Or so I thought until I realized I was in front of the engine. Hot wind blowing at 20 miles an hour. I lived in Arizona as a kid and it is hot there, but it is that baking hot you see in the Clint Eastwood movies, where nothing stirs. Wind is a welcome respite. In Delhi I marveled that this wind could desiccate me in a few hours if I didn’t drink a gallon of water an hour.

In Delhi there was no sky, nothing to see, the dust/smog was terrible. On the flight out I wanted to see how high it went. Somewhere around 30,000 feet I began to see blue sky. Where do they get all this dust from? Do they import it from the Sahara?

My friends warned me about mosquitos. I got some malaria pills, and bought a year’s supply of deet and a mosquito net. But it seems the mosquitos are all toasted by the heat. They cannot return until the mosoons, which just hit today in the south. So I’ll be out of here before I need to worry about them.

Indians are not friendly. Nobody, but nobody, has said “Namaste” to me yet. I kind of nod and say “Good Morning” when I meet someone’s eyes, the normal response is a blank stare. Gopi opened a door for a young woman leaving a restaurant, not only did she not thank him, she gave no recognition of his existence, she just stared at me while continuing to walk on. Where’s the gentle kindness I was promised in the brochures? Where are the wonderful peaceful people of India I saw in the movie ‘Ghandi’? Everybody’s a New Yorker, but at least New Yorker’s will yell at you.


We stopped at the side of the road to buy some bananas. Gopi told me to stay in the car. He said if they saw me the price would triple. I think he just generally fears something will happen to me. I told him there’s no point in coming to a country if I couldn’t experience it, so I got out with him.

A guy comes up to me and I thought he was begging, but he had two monkeys who had seen better days on rope leashes. He raised one hand to pull the monkey up and show me. I presume he wanted me to pay for a show or to take pictures with them. But in his hand was a big stick. When he raised it, the monkey covered his head with his hands because he thought the guy was going to hit him with the stick. A very human like reaction. It’s obvious how he lives his life.

I just ignored the guy, best not encourage him. My heart went out to the monkeys. I thought of buying the monkeys and freeing them, but the guy would just recapture them and enslave them again.

The whole trip of arriving at Delhi and transferring over to the domestic airport was an amazing welcome to India. It’s hard to believe, but like everywhere else, it was everybody’s first day of work at the airport. Nobody knew anything or what they were doing or why. It took 30 minutes for our luggage to start coming off the carousel. It’s a big new modern airport too. I walked right through customs without so much as a cursory glance from anybody. Now to find the transfer station.

Signs pointed past a guard who was talking to somebody. He didn’t seem to be paying any attention to anybody else. No indication that you had to talk to him or why. An Indian woman was just as confused as me. I finally told her I’m making a break for it and pushed past him, another guy stopped me and asked me for my ticket for the domestic flight (people’s English here isn’t great, but at least it exists). He took it and walked over to the guard. He didn’t send me to the back of the line, tell me off or anything, I got service. No wonder Indians are so pushy, it works.

We boarded the bus and they started loading passengers. Every passenger who walked up had to go through the same mind boggling conversation with the driver. There seemed to be a lot of talking and very slowly loading. What the hell is all the talking about, get on the bus people. They pile up the luggage in a huge pile in the back.

We drive for miles around the airport. The domestic airport is separate from the international airport. I think that’s because it was first designed in the days when India was allied with the Soviet Union and they separated the airports so their people wouldn’t get contaminated by foreign ideas.

We get to the first terminal and some people come back to get their luggage. The driver looks at the piles forlornly. Now he’s going to have to move things to get to luggage that is so buried the owners can’t even see it, they just know it’s back there somewhere.

He dissolutely picks through it slowly as if trying to see if he can get the people to go away if he just doesn’t find it. Jezuz buddy, I’ve got a plane to catch. Did you ever think to ask people what airlines they were on and dividing up the luggage that way so you can get to it? No, this is obviously your first day on the job. In fact even though it is noon, this must be your first trip to this terminal. I’m sure on your next trip you’ll figure out how to board people without all the aggravating drama and arrange the luggage so people can get off the bus without all the aggravating drama. I think India is an old Sanskrit word meaning ‘aggravating drama’.

When we finally get to my terminal I jump up, reach in, grab my own luggage and get off the bus. Assistance is obstruction in this country.

I’m staying in a condo owned by Gopi’s father. He bought it about seven years ago for $20,000. He was getting ready to buy some more when the government announced a high tech center nearby and prices jumped. It is now worth $200,000. The condo is not rented out because it is impossible to throw out tenants and/or raise the rent once someone is in there. So it just sits there decaying and gaining value. I guess that explains a lot here.






A friend of mine has a big house in Mumbai that has many families staying there who moved in after the partition of Pakistan and India in 1947. The rent hasn’t changed a rupee since then. He does not even bother trying to collect rent, collection is more expensive than the rent.

I even read an article about how a building had the same thing, the owner does no repairs and a few floors collapsed killing four people. The people are angry at the owner, but refuse to move out of the death trap because it is free. You get what you pay for.

I was marveling this morning that this place is half what my nice condo costs in the U.S. Yet it looks like a prison complex. Grey cement walls with bars on the windows.





So I asked Gopi for a mop this morning. Why? Because the maid hasn’t cleaned the place in months. Why? Well she was paid, she gets a monthly salary, but really doesn’t clean it. I’m told it’s an ‘Indian cleaning’. Today I opened a window in the bathroom and years worth of pigeon poop fall into the room.

Gopi refuses to give me a mop, he wants the maid to do it. I’m an American, I can mop my own floor. But no, Gopi starts knocking on people’s doors in the building asking where the maid is. Nobody knows. So I have no maid and no mop and the pigeon poop just sits there.

Gopi says the upper classes are totally dependent on the lower classes. In reality the lower classes rule the country. He says his mother wakes up every day and worries if the maid is coming today. If the maid doesn’t come her day is screwed up. People are very lackadaisical about work here. They show up when they want, don’t work much, and leave early.

Indians are used to hiring a maid and then watching her clean and yelling at her when she does something wrong. Americans assume they’re trained after two weeks or get rid of them. But in India they will watch and yell every day for 10 years. It is a way of life.

Gopi was in the office the other day and there were four guys discussing something. They needed some papers from the car. They called the office boy and sent him to the car to get the papers. He comes back with the wrong papers. There’s wailing and gnashing of teeth and they send him out again. He comes back again without the papers. More wailing and they send him out again. He returns once more without the papers. More wailing and gnashing of teeth and he’s out once again. It takes 25 minutes to get the papers.

The car is only 50 feet away. But nobody thought once ‘If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself’ and went to get the papers. No, the thinking is ‘If you want some menial task done it should involve five people, take 25 minutes, and leave everyone exasperated.

Gopi says, ‘If you make money in India, or are successful, you deserve it’.

I have an air conditioner in my room that does a moderately fair job of cooling it in this heat. I woke up around 2 A.M. and it was obvious it had stopped. Gopi warned me that sometimes there were electrical cuts so I paid it no mind, I didn’t think about the fact that the ceiling fan was still running.

So I tell Gopi and he goes to check out the plug. There’s an electrical ‘moderator’, I don’t know what it’s called, but prevents spikes and dips in the electricity. One of the wires had come put of the plug. He pushes it in and it sparks tremendously sending him reeling. Then he goes back, resets the wires and tells me, “Why didn’t you just push the wire back in?”

Why indeed? Whatever could have possessed me from thinking, “Hey, the air conditioner turned off. I know what I’ll do at 2 A.M., I’ll get up in the dark and start fooling around with bare wires sticking our of a plug in the wall, that sounds like a great idea.”