My writing...With love from India x

Below is a story I wrote whilst in India a while back now; it was going to be published as a chapter in a book called 'The India Experience', by an Indian travel company called 'Sodha Travels', but very sadly this book has now been indefinitely postponed due to insufficient funds for publishing...Hopefully they will manage to raise the funds in due time, but for the moment, please enjoy!

The Indian Smile

As my plane flew into Mumbai late on a November afternoon last year, I had no real concept or concerns about the country in which I was about to spend the next three months.

I had backpacked around the world before and found my way around the entire of Vietnam, taught underprivileged children in a school in one of Mexico’s largest cities (Guadalajara, incase you’re wondering) and navigated my way across China with an old school-friend. Nothing, however, could have prepared me for the hustle and impression of organised chaos as I moved through the arrivals section of Mumbai airport, nor the sheer number of people, all of whom seemed totally unfazed by the small pandemonium taking place around them. 

During my taxi ride into the island-city of Mumbai from the airport, I realised India was, well, just different. Busier and more crowded than anywhere I had ever visited, it held an allure and fascination that was perfectly foreign to me. I was immediately seduced by the blurring night time cityscape and the winking planes losing themselves in the velvety Indian sky above.

The more the rickety taxi pushed along, sometimes with the traffic flow and other times seemingly against, the more I realised that I had travelled to the country with very little knowledge of Indian culture, its people, or their way of life. I had heard of the infamous slums where the poor resided, but nothing could have prepared me for the reality where the streets stretched out into row after row of slum shelters. The flimsy huts were made from bamboo sticks, scraps of cardboard and plastic with corrugated tin roofs, and seemed to house whole families. My bedroom at home in London is probably bigger than four of those huts put together. I could make out pinpricks of small street fires from outside the shelters and at a closer glance, I noticed people huddled closely around them, sticking their bare hands and feet almost into the flames to seek relief from the cool night air.

I stayed in the southern-most peninsula of Mumbai, Colaba, which was traditionally the city’s hub for wandering travellers. However, I started to dread leaving my hostel each morning where I would be greeted by a plethora of beggars, most of whom were crippled, blind or desperately ill. Dirty-haired street children walked barefoot around the streets in ragged clothes trying to appeal to the compassion of tourists for money with their big round grown-up eyes. I reflected back to my own cushy childhood of bedtime stories and hot meals and felt a warm shame creep into my nourished and healthy body.

After a few days in Mumbai though, I started to see past the caricature of sickness and poverty paraded daily by the pavement dwelling beggars. One sunny morning I was walking back from breakfast through a wide leafy street in Colaba and I noticed some street children contentedly playing a game of cards on someone’s doorstep. Nearby some blind beggars enjoyed a meal of fish and chai together. Nearly everyone I passed, whether they be street children, beggars or street vendors would be smiling – either at me or at each other, and they all wanted to talk to me. These people all had one thing in common I realised – they all had big hearts and happy faces. Their hands and feet may not be warm and their bodies undernourished, but their hearts and souls were full and happy, which is more than I can say for my own country’s state of Prozac-filled minds.

During my second week in Mumbai I befriended the owner of a slum-hut. His name was Geet and he instantly laughed off my concerns about their poor living conditions. Geet felt grateful to be living here – this shabby sanctuary protected him from far worse fates. The slum hut was surprisingly clean inside, and, although sparsely furnished, it was clearly habitable and well-maintained. Geet’s next door neighbour Bhadra, both a wife and mother of five young children, cooked us a simple but tasty meal of rice, spicy dhal and homemade flatbreads in some gleaming tin pots above a little fire, which we all washed down with hot, sweet slum chai. This delightful little concoction was far more spicy and pungent than any of the Indian food I had tentatively tasted in the blander tourist eateries. Afterwards, I tried to give Bhadra money, a huge error which I only realised all too late. Insulted, she told me in broken English that I was a guest and now a part of the community in that slum, they didn’t want my money, they wanted my company.

That’s the thing about the Indian slum community; they are a community of the tightest sort, where they support one another so closely in order to survive. I have never seen such passionate concern and love for one’s neighbours anywhere else except in the inspiring and desolate areas of those tattered shelters.

Little by little, my scepticism and hardened British heart started to slowly thaw during my time in India. Every genuine smile I received - and I received at least fifty a day - was like food to my poor and hungry soul.

Next to Mumbai, Delhi stands strong, tall and towering in my memory. The Aladdin-like bazaars of India’s capital could almost be another country in themselves, a behind-time fabled country where you could imagine all sorts of magical and enchanting adventures and stories taking place. India is of course, thousands of years old, and the sights in Delhi, from the majestic Red Fort, to the vast gardens of the splendid Humayan’s Tomb which demonstrate its crumbling opulence and wealth.

Walking down the Main Bazaar in Paharganj, a seedy area in the north of Delhi, is a memorable assault on all of the human senses. Smoking incense sticks poke out from random cracks in broken drainpipes, while skinny humpy cows wander dozily past zooming motorbikes or auto-rickshaws, their drivers beeping at everything and anything that may cross their path, which in a street as busy as this one, is every two seconds. Stray dogs and cats add to the mayhem and every patch of space on this long street is invaded by some sort of wonderful chaos or Indian market store. Neat lines of pashminas and bright rolls of coloured fabric melt into each other and hippy dippy shops catered to the discerning dread-locked traveller float their wares of fishermen’s trousers and tie-dye kaftans. Hundreds of people hum along their own life stories here - amongst these are beggars, snake charmers, cooks, astrologers, pimps and musicians. If I catch the eyes of any of these men or women, they would return my gaze with that huge Indian smile I had by now grown to look forward to as I woke up every morning.

Rush hour here seems to last throughout the day and camels, hand carts, motorcyclists, pedestrians and animals all clash into each other and miraculously, nobody gets hurt. Sweating men with rake thin legs and buttocks of steel pull the three wheeled rusty rickshaws through the human traffic on their bicycles. They hurtle long red strings of spit onto the uneven road and unfortunate feet of anyone passing by. When I looked closely, I noticed that nearly all of the shopkeepers’ mouths and teeth were stained a maroon red, the same red that darkens the bullets of saliva shooting out of the rickshaw drivers’ mouths. This is the magic of ‘paan’, a fragrant-filled leaf that is consumed as a mouth-freshener and, as far as I was concerned, was popular with Indians all over the north of the country.

The streets of this great dirty Indian city made my return home to England to be an unexpectedly eerie contrast. London, my home city, seemed more like a deserted toy-town where everything ran like ordered clockwork. Dogs on leads padded obediently along the empty pavements and cars seemed to positively glide silently along the smooth even roads as though from some futuristic film set. Once a city I used to describe as fast-paced, hectic and noisy, since my return from India in January, I now see London as a quiet place where order remains paramount and imagination is stifled.

What strikes me as most bizarre, is how, for example, in Mumbai, an overpopulated slogging fervency of sixteen million people, I never saw a street brawl or even a fight break out between two drivers. Angry road rage in London however, a city at least twice the size of Mumbai but with about half the population, is common, as are fights between car drivers and muttered swearwords between hassled pedestrians. India is able to live in its overly populated chaos without landing themselves in World War Three because India is a land where the heart reigns and the smile is queen.

I now want a piece of that Indian heart for myself, and what I have discovered I need since this trip, isn’t the latest iPhone, or a job promotion or a new car, but a contentedness that comes from within, rather than from external sources. And if all those huge families with their tiny shrines in all those tiny slum huts has taught me anything, it’s that you need more than just you to survive in this world. You need a supportive family, a power greater than yourself to have faith in, and of course, you need a great big smile.