Dehli, India and Baksheesh
Chapter 3
You know you’re in the third world the moment you arrive in India. As you walk through the dusty landing tunnel a tedious sweat envelops you and the queues at immigration come as no surprise. The paint peels from the walls and staircases are taped off as the authorities pretend they’re redecorating. Most bus stations look in better condition than Delhi international airport.
A Westerner breezes through the customs channels but the returning Indian families with 27 suitcases have some explaining to do. They bring in tv’s, videos, washing machines, perhaps even small printing presses. One imagines they come to an understanding with the customs officers in the shadow of an opened wallet. Baksheesh, the magic open-sesame in Asia Westerners tend to wince at the thought of bribery but really it’s all so much simpler this way. Once you recognize that self-interest makes much of the world go round then you know where you stand. In Bombay police station it’s possible to buy baksheesh tokens which you can then redeem the next time you’re run in for a traffic offence.
Travelling in India gets a little easier with time. Walking out of the airport I didn’t even bother talking to the taxi-wallahs who were already leaping for my luggage. I headed straight to the pre-paid taxi stand and was on my way in minutes. My conscious brain absorbed itself with all the details whilst my unconscious tripped out in the haze of sensory perception that hit me like a memory. Black exhaust smoke blended with the fumes of trash being burnt somewhere and the cloying sweetness of cheap incense. Everything was dirty in a way that would have required ingenuity to recreate in another country. Prayer paint slowly peeled off people’s foreheads and everywhere men stood around like homeless dogs, talking about cricket and money.
Rolling down the windows the hot afternoon air baked the sweat off my face and we swerved to avoid the pot holes in the road. My driver was an old man with liver spots on his chin and scattered white stubble. A plastic shrine to Lakshmi sat on the dashboard, coins pouring out of her palms. Tinsel surrounded the shrine and seemed to shine on the long brown fingers that grasped the steering wheel.
India seems to have an unofficial government policy to encourage the growth of slums around the airports. Probably a trick to impress visiting foreign dignitaries with India’s urgent need for increased foreign aid. My taxi passed three small children squatting down in the gutter to shit, big grins on their faces. Tin roofs on walls made entirely out of debris provided the fanciest shelters around here for families of brown skeletons. Their one spare set of clothing hung dry on string out front and stones on top of the roofs held them in place. We passed trash heaps where old women rag pickers swarmed over the refuse like rats. Each kilo of cotton they collect brings in a few rupees. Enough for a bag of lentils perhaps.
The slums gave way to larger highways. My driver slowed down as we passed a small crowd surrounding a fallen moped at the edge of an enormous pot hole. A man lay motionless on the ground, blood trickling out of his helmet. My driver yawned. In a country with one billion souls an accident only makes the newspapers if the death toll hits three figures.
As we pulled up outside the Raj Hotel in Pahar Ganj I could see that nothing had changed. This was till the most insane street in the world. I didn’t give the chaos the time of day just yet though and followed the doorman who was already taking my luggage into the hotel.
In the lobby I met the Singh brothers, the owners of the Raj. One was short and smiley, only the white of his moustache betraying his age. His brother was bulky and tall, cheerful yet ill at ease.
“Mr Singh? My name is Mr Tom and I am a friend of Mr Clive. I have come to Delhi to help Natasha who is now in jail.”
“My poor Natasha.” The short Mr Singh sighed. “She was such a good girl, always so happy.” He shook his head and allowed a sad moment to pass before adding. “ Afterwards the police came here too. Mr Clive left some bags with us and the police found opium inside them. We did not know. Mr Tom, I had to pay 1000 dollars baksheesh.”
This wasn’t the welcome I expected. Yet I later realised that it should have told me as much as I needed to know about the whole affair. Each time I seemed to meet with people and places from Clive and Natasha’s past I met with a trail of debris and complaints. It never occurred to me I might one day to be caught up in the debris.
Outside the street was waiting. This was Pahar Ganj, the most insane street in the world. Here the air is so thick with sensory data that your senses overload and send your brain into premature shutdown. No drugs required. Here the best and worst of Delhi funnels itself into 500 metres of urban hell and you can expect to see absolutely anything. A couple of years later I wrote a guide for a Japanese magazine about the place.
Delhi, City of Sin
Delhi is a city steeped in sin, an insult to all who live there. Black smoke mobs the sky line stealing both sunset and dawn. As the smog climbs higher it diffuses into a dirty grey - A thin veil hanging over the city obscuring the attention of the gods.
But as any Indian will tell you, the gods are everywhere and are quite at home amongst the fifteen million souls that eke out a living in Delhi. Which perhaps explains why they too have become corrupted. In the Christian world it is mankind that has traditionally served an alternately benevolent and despotic deity in the heavens above. For the Hindus though the sandal is on the other foot. When a chosen god fails to deliver the expected benefits and rewards, allegiances are discarded and the worshipper may start looking for a god with better connections. And so when the Minister for Natural Disasters returns home at night with a guilty conscience and a full Swiss bank account, he knows what he must do. Invoking the popular elephant deity of Ganesh, whose trunk removes all problems lying in one's way, he fervently prays that he might not be caught. He burns a fifty rupee note in a pious baksheesh, a petty bribe that would have bought three kilos of rice for the starving in Orissa. But what's not here is elsewhere and what's elsewhere is nowhere.
Despite the filth that coats the exterior of every house and building and the legions of street children and deformed, seen wheeling themselves around on improvised skateboards begging change at traffic junctions, yet there is money in Delhi. Multinationals list the city high on their Asian agendas for marketing and production. Executives chattering excitedly about India's IT potential. Cable connections and silicon don’t mean much to someone who doesn’t have enough ride on their plate though. Not that the poor complain too much. After all, it’s their karma.
Karma. An enormous con trick on a par with the Christians who have promised their poor fabulous rewards in heaven, if they'll only agree to be meek in the meantime. India's destitute are not coaxed by this pie-in-the-sky but are instead condemned by a court that held session before their birth - What evil lives they must have led to merit such impoverished incarnations this time around. The low castes shuffle along, dirty by the fact of their existence. They have a closed and boarded shop on all the menial, backbreaking jobs of filth and tedium that must be done by somebody. There's a sucker born every minute.
About a hundred a minute, actually and as the Vedas tell us, a man may aspire to be come a god but he may never rise to the top of the caste structure. But let us be clear here. We are not just seeing a massively depressed underclass exploited by a few cunning entrepreneurs and warlords. The cheating, corruption and sin is endemic throughout the population of Delhi and in one sense a rickshaw wallah is as guilty as the best-dressed executive; not that the former does steal and extort but that he probably would given half the chance. Morality, it would seem, is more a matter of expediency than anything else -Good actions are defined as those that one can getaway with. The only sin is getting caught.
To illustrate, let us take the example of Westerners coming to India for the first time. Already appalled by the slums surrounding the airport, tourists encounter the Third World in person as they take their first walk in the street: A woman approaches them with a docile baby in her arms wrapped up in rags. Motioning her hand to her mouth in a well-rehearsed appeal to their sense of pity, she intones:
"Hallo, baksheesh, baba! Ten rupee, chapatti, baksheesh!" Until they submit to the terrible spectacle of poverty which up till now had been on the other end of a satellite transmission. Thing is, it's not her baby. Her kids are somewhere down the road hustling tourists for money to maintain theirglue habit. The infant in her arms is chattel sedated with opium and rented out in shifts around the clock. On top of that every mendicant must pay a commission to the beggar-king who allots the various pitches. Everything bows before the Rupee. The really poor people are the ones that the traveler rarely sees or, closer to the truth, recognises. They are the peasants attempting to yield onions from an uncompromising soil, hoping to pay off the local money lender the five dollar debt that they've owed for ten years. Poverty is working 15 hours a day as a rag-picker, shoe shiner or toilet cleaner and still not making ends meet.
But perhaps the real sin of Delhi is that no one cares. Maybe they once did but have now abandoned compassion under the sheer weight of numbers. There is more misery than anyone can take on aboard and so they've stopped pretending to. Aside from religious sects who still consider helping people a virtue, almost every philanthropic cause in Delhi is run by foreigners. Generally speaking, no one cares less about the Indians that the Indians. It's a frequent sight in Delhi to see a passenger beating his cycle-rickshaw driver around the head and it's as a matter of course that a worker be treated as a paid slave. I think of Shakespeare who wrote 'All pity choked with custom of foul deeds.'
Almost no one in Delhi could care less about anyone beneath their own social level and cannot imagine why they should. It's not about callousness, simply survival. And conversely, everyone looks up to and cultivates association with anyone better off than themselves. In a society moulded together with religious ritual and superstition, there is always the hope that they may be catapulted into sudden wealth and plenty. Just like in the holy books when the gods pop into the lives of ordinary folk to bestow great favour.
They haven't a chance, of course. For thousands of years holiness has been held ransom buy the Brahmins, the only caste allowed to learn the scared language of Sanskrit. To invoke the presence of the Divine at a birth, marriage or death, even the poorest have to scrape together enough to commission the services of the priests. And now that the laws of Man are taking precedence over those of God, the poor are left in the same position. The language of the courts is an antiquated English spruced with verbose legal jargon. The lawyers take the place of the Brahmin as supplicants to the Powers that be and they bleed their clients dry in the process. The majority of those who live in Delhi are estranged from the laws and statutes meant to protect and serve them.
But no one imagines this was ever meant to be the case. There is not a law in India that does not have its price and when new legislation is introduced the only burning question is 'How much?' Like the indulgences of the Middle Ages when absolution could be bought from the Catholic Church for any transgression, there is no sin in Delhi that is out of the reach of somebody's wallet. Only virtue is priceless – And therefore worthless.
For there is little space in Delhi for noble sentiment, thought or deed. Dignity is a luxury cast aside in the name of making today's bread. The sheer numbers deny anyone the space for self-respect or intimacy. Children sleep in the same bed as the rest of the family until they no longer fit; young men bursting with hormones have no where to release them; even husbands never see their wives naked. The frustration simmers until some power-monger chooses a scapegoat and then the flood gates of unfocused rage open. The powerless get their brief moment of glory in a roaring mob with blood on it's hands whilst behind the scenes someone cashes in on the chaos while no one's looking.
Did India ever have another choice? The population has quadrupled in 35 years to a literally staggering one billion. Every day hundreds more abandon failed farmsteads to set up shack on the outskirts of the city, just to get a little closer to the source of wealth. The streets are full of unrequited hope and unoriginal sin. They will do unto others as has been done unto them. There will never be any escape from the city that has grown on top of the people who lived within it.
In Delhi, the city of sin, it is as Salman Rushdie prophesied in his brilliant novel "Midnight's Children", declaring that it would be their fate of the people 'to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes and be unable to live or die in peace.
