Westerners in India
Chapter 5
I arrived back in Pahar Ganj at 3pm, six hours after I’d left to go to the jail that morning. The street was already crammed with traffic and so I abandoned my rickshaw and walked back to the hotel. Cars, trucks, rickshaws, mopeds and animals weaved in every conceivable direction to the effect that I had to walk like a puppet on strings; jerking, twisting and hopping my way in an overall forwards direction.
The smoke and the sweat and the stench deluged the air and made it seem as though I was walking underwater. As a Westerner you’re an automatic target on this street and no one ever gives up on selling you anything. Even when they’ve seen you walk down the street 1000 times before. Often it’s only to wind the foreigner up and get a reaction. If it’s a man they’ll try to sell him something; if a woman then they’ll smack their lips and say ‘hey, baby, you like good time?’ Just like in the movies.
Friends of mine who first journeyed to the East the 60’s told me that we were often held in high regard by the Indians. Like Buddha we’d left behind our lives of luxury in the First World to come to India in search of truth. They called us maharaj, great king. However after years of seeing us crazy, stoned and lost they eventually saw us for what we were. The real Westerners they saw on TV with sports cars and swimming pools; with our cheap clothes, hashish habits and dreadlocks we were clearly the unwanted scum of our own societies.
In theory a foreigner from across the ‘black oceans’ is considered an Untouchable, below even the most menial of castes who clean the latrines. By the letter of the law an Indian should not accept food or drink from someone as dirty as us and we’re not allowed into some temples in case we might pollute them with our presence. You can’t help noticing, however, that the caste system seems to be the usual whiteys-are-better-than-darkeys social order that is found worldwide. The rag pickers and road builders are almost always coal black and the upper castes always sty out of sun for fear of catching a tan. A typical matrimonial ad will run:
Foreign-educated Brahmin girl of wheatish complexion seeks match of similar caste and background.
Thus the white skin of a European throws the Indians into a dilemma – how can we be out-castes if we have skin they’d die for and money to boot? Add to the equation that their former rulers were British and you have a most Indian social paradox. They solve the conundrum with a waggle of the head that forever oscillates between a yes and a no. The ultimate gesture of non-committal and a tribute to India maybe-ism.
Despise, envy or just laugh at us, the Indians certainly don’t understand us. One day I was chatting to a shopkeeper on Pahar Ganj when an Israeli girl walked past with her friend, chatting to him in Hebrew. The shopkeeper shook his head ruefully.
“She is a bad woman.”
“How do you know that?”
“I have seen her with three different men.” He told me sternly, as though that said everything.
“Well, where did you see them?”
“In the street!” He puffed.
I tried in vain to explain that for Westerners, for a woman to be seen in the street with someone didn’t mean she was necessarily sleeping with him. He listened politely but the look in his eyes suggested that he considered me rather naïve.
When someone first goes to India they usually have all kinds of notions about ‘talking with the people’ and ‘immersing in another culture’ and so on. All but the most sanguine quickly understand that they will never integrate with Indian society. No matter how good their Hindi gets or what religious vows they take they will always be aliens from outer non-India. In India you are who you were born as. You cannot become a Hindu and no amount of eating raw green chillis will change that.
As such it’s hard to make real friends in India. Many find that their ‘friends’ end up making a play for their bank account and they end up hating the country. Indians aren’t any more treacherous than any other nationality but as Richard Burton observed, ‘people in the East feel they have a right to your surplus wealth’. The cultural divide meant that I could only every click with the wealthier, Westernised Indians and they were generally so ostentatiously wealthy and superior that their company was swiftly insufferable.
So in the end even though Pahar Ganj was hell I hung out there for my time in Delhi as at least I could find conversation with other Westerners who could relate to where I was coming from. Hell, I might even get some Israeli girl to walk in the street with me.
Having already passed a couple of years in India I could easily recognise the trips people were on; there were bearded Italians who thought they were holy men because they smoked charas in mountain caves – true to form many of them used designer chillums made back in Italy that cost up to 500 dollars a piece; there were lost skinny hippies in search of enlightenment, a guru or perhaps just clothes that actually fit them; there were tourists in jeeps coming back from the Taj Mahal in shell shock, techno warriors in fluorescent garb and other travellers and freaks who couldn’t be as free elsewhere as they were in India.
The longer you stay in India the more you see and it’s kind of sad because it’s better not to perceive some things. The more you understand the less magical it all seems. Explanations give texture and depth but they steal away the awe. As such it’s easy to recognize the newly-arrived – they wander around in a nervous state of wonder and apprehension. The locals see them coming from a mile away and they pay three times the price for everything for the first few days where it’s all they can do to stay afloat in a sea of chaos and noise and curious brown faces.
So traveller-India I knew. Graduated with honours. Now though, I had to deal with the country itself: lawyer-judge-corruption-baksheesh-India. I wrote confident emails to Clive, discussed legal procedures with the lawyer as though it were my daily business and went to bed each night thinking ‘well, this is another fine mess you’ve got yourself into’. I was tragically out of my depth.
Clive was ready to send money for the baksheesh whenever I gave him the word but just who do you give the money to? ‘I have 5000 dollars for whoever can help me’ and every hand in the room goes up. Lawyers have a reputation for being thieves all over the world and in India it was as true as anywhere else. A licence to practice law here was simply a licence to steal. How was I going to negotiate our way through this nest of cobras?
The alternative that Clive and I were discussing was to bust Natasha free, perhaps when she went for some test at the hospital. I couldn’t really see myself taking out any guards with a chop on the back of the neck but there had to be hired who would if the price were right. However, the Indian underworld wasn’t somewhere I cared to enter – I might not come out again.
For now though, I had to meet the lawyer, Sethi, in his office at 7pm. I put on a shirt and a tie and squeezed into a rickshaw. We rattled around the dark, sinister streets of Delhi for twenty minutes until we reached the given address. Even though it turned out that three office blocks on different streets all shared the same name I still managed to arrive on time.
The adjoining street was full of hardware and motor parts shops that had all been stolen from cars parked in the street. I headed down an alley that would get you mugged in most parts of the world and climbed the steps of an grey, dusty building. Florescent tubes lit the stairway and the walls stank of urine. I wondered if I had the right place.
I found Sethi’s name plaque on a door and a mousy underling let me into a tidy office without a word. He took his seat back down behind his desk where he and another trainee lawyer shuffled papers and tapped out letters on old typewriters. Behind them the wall was stacked to the ceiling with volumes of law and I was certain no one had ever read them.
Sethi’s compartment was sectioned off by a glass front and he motioned for me to step through to his air-conditioned lair. He was a short, pudgy man with no emotion on his businesslike face. As he invited me to sit down I could almost hear him counting under his breath how much he might be able to extract from us. The clock on the wall announced that it was now 7:35. The bastard had his clock running fast so that his clients would feel embarrassed about arriving late.
I explained that I was representing an anonymous party interested in Natasha’s welfare and that I had no personal interest in the affair. He listened to me with brief nods of the head and looked bored. When I asked him what our options were he proposed that we concoct a case that Natasha was suffering from chronic hepatitis and epilepsy. He knew a doctor who could be bought to furnish the necessary papers. It would take time and money.
I tried to appear as shrewd and resourceful as possible. I withheld information. I wore a poker face as we discussed intrigue. I mentioned our international network. Despite this, however, I’m certain that Sethi saw me from what I was – hippy wearing a shirt and tie.
“Mr Sethi, when could you begin working on the case?”
He leaned forwards as though he were issuing a threat and hissed:
“From when I receive the first instalment.”
