NORTH INDIA - Tulin's travel impressions can only start with India, can't they ? So I will start with my first trip to India in 1994. This has been followed by many others in later years.

One should never generalize about India. India is not a country but a continent. The Golden Triangle is very different from South India which itself has nothing to do with Himalayan India or the small provinces to the North of Bengladesh such as Nagaland. Delhi , Mumbai and Kolkota are all very big, crowded cities but with quite different characteristics. Some places are Hindu, some Buddhist and some Muslim. And that makes for different life styles leaving their print on  the place itself and  on the architecture. A northern Hindu temple  is definitely not a southern Hindu temple, and a Sikh Gurdwara is still another thing, let alone a Buddhist site. And not far from those, the minarets of a mosque shoot to the sky. As regions, Rajasthan and Ladak are two different worlds as are Tamil Nadu and Orissa. Every time you go to India, you  have a totally new experience.

  

Since I fell in love with İndia on my first trip to this country, I should start there. My first trip to India  was to  the very classical ‘’Golden Triangle’’(Delhi, Agra, Jaipur ) supplemented by Khajuraho, Varanasi and the inevitable Kathmandu which seems to always be the last leg of an introduction to India lesson even though Nepal is a different country. At least it is so when you go from Turkey.

You hear a lot of things about India before you go there : it is very dirty, you can get sick, you have to have a million vaccins if you want to stay alive and the like. And  when you have never seen the country, you believe what they tell you. So the beginning point was to be vaccinated but against what? İf you  listen to all, you should get at least 10 vaccins and I was not sure if at the end it was India that would kill me or the vaccins. So I chose to be vaccinated against one disease only : Yellow Fever. Why yellow fever ? Because I had read that if you get this disease there is no escape. You die in 3-4 days. Not to be a burden to my friends who then would have to carry my body back home, I decided this was the best choice. Things like colera could, in my opinion , be avoided by being careful about the water you drink, not eating raw vegetables or ice-cream, not using ice in your drinks, i.e. the usual precautions you would find in any guidebook for  almost any country outside the western world. And that makes a great number of countries , believe me. This has been the first and last time I chose to be vaccinated against anything but I have used preventive malaria pills in malaria zones if necessary. The logic there is that I can control what I eat and drink, but I cannot control mosquitoes. And I have even gone further in later years, eating from street stands as long as the food is fried. What bug is going to live after having been subjected to  almost burning oil ?

Let me come back to my first visit to İndia. My first contact with that beautiful country was Delhi. And my first contact with Delhi was Chandi Chowk. Chandy Chowk is Delhi’s old market. İt is a labyrinth of small streets full of shops and people supplemented by motorcycles, bicycles, camels (at the time – they have disappeared later on),rickshaws, and an unending flow of people. There is no place to walk on the streets due to this continuous movement, to which one has to add the road side food stand, some with small stools to sit on, turning it into a miniature size restaurant or the ‘’holy cow’’ which decided it was more confortable to lie in the middle of the street. All this on a bed of  garbage littering the streets accompanied by the  ‘’holy cow''  excrement on which you would prefer not to step. All this does not make a visit to Chandy Chowk easy, especially if you have just come down from a plane and your whole experience of India is only of an hour or two.  I was a bit surprised, a bit anxious, a bit excited, a bit breathless but most of all dazed by all this movement. Some hate it. I loved it.

But this not really the place where my love of India took roots. That happened a few days later, in Varanasi. We reached Varanasi in the  late afternoon. The next morning, at sunrise,  we would do the usual boat trip on the Ganges to watch people taking their ablutions with the rising sun as any self-respecting tourist would. Then we would visit the area around the Ghats and that is it. Just one day and two nights in this holy town. So there was no time to waste. In the evening we decided with a few friends to go to the banks of the Ganges and discover what is happening there. We took a taxi from the hotel, asked him to take us to the Ganges, to wait for us there and take us back to the hotel. So far so good. When we arrived it was pitch dark and  the first thing I saw was a great number of people sleeping in the streets. And extreme darkness. The river is dark, the streets are unlit, you do not see much and as we did not know the town, where were we supposed to walk? Go right or left? We were almost giving up to go back to the hotel  when a helpful man, speaking very acceptable English, offered to be our guide. Trust him or not ? We prefered to trust him instead of going back to our beds. And we made the right decision since I had one of the most incredible experiences of my life.  We started walking in very narrow dark streets with the help of a flashlight and our guide was showing the way by warning us ‘’there is a cow on the right’’ which made us swerve left, or ‘’there is cow excrement on the left’’ which made us swerve right. At one place we heard ‘’there is a cow on the right and cow excrement on the left’’. We almost had to jump over the cow to pass. Little by little the streets became even narrower but less dark. Some light bulbs appeared. There were  tiny shrines everywhere, overflowing with ‘'gifts'' for the god to whom the shrine was dedicated. That means lots of flowers and rice. And there were lepers at each and every corner , some without a nose, others with atrophied fingers , hands or legs eaten by the illness, all begging for a few ruppees. Varanasi is THE place to die for a Hindu. So you come here to die and as before dying you should help others, that explains the great number of beggars. The sight was somehow frightening but at the same time very mystical.

After walking through quite a few streets we reached Manikandika, the holliest burning place for a Hindu after death. And that I cannot forget. It was totally dark, the only light coming from the pyres where bodies were being burnt. There was the smell of burning flesh of course but I was so mesmerized by the whole scene that I did not smell anything. There were occasional popping noises and that is the skull that breaks since it seems first the skull bones would separate from each other when subjected to heat. And there was ‘’music’’. Not instruments of course, but the religious chants hummed  during funerals. All this is horrifying when we look at it through our culture’s eyes. But it was also a magical sight to which I was glued. And that is exactly where and when  I fell in love with India, a love that still lasts after quite a few trips to that country that has so much to offer. İf I had been sixteen with no resposibilities at home,I would have stayed in India for a long time. (I have to add that my mother was very happy I was not sixteen).

Varanasi was my first encounter with mystical  India. There have been more such encounters of course, and one that explained a lot to me about the way İndian people think took place a few days later. A friend was taking pictures or tried to since in certain places in India (but definitely not everywhere as people tend to think) you are literally ‘’attacked’’ by children who beg for a few ruppes or want to sell you some trinkets.  So here she was with her camera and quite a few children hanging at her skirts. She finally got tired of this young crowd and told them to disperse in Turkish but with a terse tone. The children got the message. One little boy, about ten years old, looking at her with his big black eyes and long lashes, did not seem offended at all ,  simply shrugged and said : ‘’ Madame, no problem. This life, you tourist. Since I am a good boy, next life me tourist with money and camera.’’ It was a ten years old boy who explained to me why 900 million people (that was the population of India at the time) did not take to the streets protesting against their condition; why nobody ever shouts at each other; why people seem to have a lot of patience; why even people who are born in the street, live in the street and die in the street smile at you and look happy. It is because of their Karma. In their previous life, they might have done bad things. They do not remember. But in their actual life they are good. They might be poor, they might be sick, they might be pennyless but they are good. So when they die and reincarnate, they will definitely live in better conditions. (This a very simplistic explanation of the way a Hindu thinks, but I am not planning here to go into the details of Hinduism). Why complain about living in the street ? Why shout at the bus driver who almost ran you down ? Why fight with a man on the street ? Just let all those things go, live as your karma makes you live this life , do as many good deeds  as you can , and wait to live  in better conditions in your next life. After all the hussle, the pent-up anger, the stress of Western life, India seems like an oasis of calm and peace to me, despite the crowds, the unending movement, the dirt even. And I miss this if I do not go to India at least every other year; in that case my India bug starts to wriggle.  

You cannot talk of the Golden Triangle without mentioning Agra and the Taj Mahal, the world’s biggest monument to love, ‘’ a teardrop on the face of eternity’’ according to Indian poet Tagore, ‘’the embodiment of all things pure’’ according to British writer Rudyard Kipling.  The Mugal Emperor Shah Jihan was in despair when his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal died while giving birth to their fourteenth child in 1631. Shah Jihan was so heartbroken that he  had the Taj Mahal erected to her memory. I have to admit that he managed to always keep her memory alive since the Taj Mahal is one of the world’s best known monuments today and one of those ‘’you have to see before you die’’. I have seen it. And I was awestruck by the Taj Mahal  due to its finesse and elegance. It really is a monument to love.

The story of the emperor himself has an unhappy ending too  – soon after the mausoleum’s construction, Shah Jihan was overthrown by his son  Aurangzeb who imprisoned his father in the Agra Fort on the other side of the Yamuna river from the Taj Mahal where for the rest of his days,  Shah Jihan  could only gaze at his creation through a window. When he died in 1666, he

was buried alongside his beloved wife  in the Taj Mahal.

In Khajuraho I saw temples constructed between 950 and 1050, whose exterior are adorned by Kamasutra reliefs. Apart from being very fine temple art, those  reliefs must be considered as an answer to all  bigots of yesterday and today who are afraid of a little nudity in stone . 1000 years ago, such nudity and the tantric act going with it was simply considered a fact of life. And it was represented on temple walls along with other day-to-day activities. 1000 years later, supposedly more developed people, cannot consider the sexual act as a fact of life, let alone be represented even in stone. Are we going backwards ?

The tantra permeating Khajuraho must have smeared on the sellers there. One of those sellers was trying to sell me some bamboo wall hanger with little windows on it. When you open each window you have drawings of Kamasutra positions. I showed interest since I was sure a friend of mine would have a good laugh with this wall hanger. And when a seller sees you have some interest in his goods, there is no way you can get rid of him, not that I was trying to. We started price negotiations which went on for some time and finally my guy got tired of it and said : ‘’Madame, you buy, you look, you do, good for you’’. That was the best I had heard for a long time and shows a great sense of humor and a clever mind. I stopped the negotiations there and then and bought the wall hanger. The guy deserved it.

During that first trip, I also have to mention a stop in Bharatpur, home to the World Heritage-listed Keoladeo Ghana National Park, one of the world’s prime bird watching grounds. I am not at all interested in birds but you cannot break a group. So here I am at the entrance to the park with the others. Only one narrow road runs through the park and no motorized vehicles are permitted. But a horde of cycle-rickshaws are waiting for us at the entrance. We have to take one of those. You sit at the back in a small cart to which a bicycle is attached and one guy pedals his way through. I had just read a beautiful book called ‘’The City of Joy’’ where a poor man comes to Kolkota with his family since the land in his village has dried up. He has no money, no house, and the only job he finds is that of a cycle-rickshaw driver that allows him to live in the slums of Kolkota and put some food into his children’s mouth.  He pedals the whole day and comes back home at night with legs he cannot feel anymore and which ache so much as to prevent him from sleeping at night. No way I will have myself ‘’pedalled’’ through the park, especially that the driver in question is a small, thin İndian half my size. I refuse to go. It is our local guide who finally convinced me to take the rickshaw since it seems the only way those people earn money is with visitors to the park and  no visitor means no money to take home. Our local guide explained that all the driver’s friends will have earned their day except the guy who was supposed to drive me if I do not join. He would go home empty-handed. That convinced me to join but it was the most uncomfortable bicycle trip I ever made. Why are men still used as if they were horses ? And why accept to be used as a horse for the pleasure of some tourist ? just to be able to put food in your children’s mouth. Who said ‘’men are born equal’’?