An end

Fittingly, I just spent my last evening in Bombay at a bad movie. It was Bollywood -- but serious Bollywood, which means there were only three songs, and no dance numbers. The storyline is as follows:

Pooja, a happily married upper-class woman, has just been given an apartment by her husband, and has finally found the stability she's dreamt of since her childhood in an orphanage. Only problem is, her husband has a mistress, and announces that he's leaving Pooja to move in with the other woman. Furthermore, he informs her that the mistress's money has paid for Pooja's beloved home -- at which point Pooja moves out, returns her chequebook, and with only 2000 rupees in her pocket moves into a single women's hostel, where she is clearly out of her element. An attempted rape ensues, and one of the other women tells her that marriage is no different from prostitution.


A subplot involves Pooja's faithful housemaid, whose own husband is a wife-beating alcoholic womanizer, but who dreams of educating her daughter in an English-medium school and having her grow up "as one of you," as she tells Pooja. Unfortunately, her husband steals her daughter's tuition money, and in a quarrel, she knifes him. Her case is hopeless, the lawyer Pooja engages tells her. We never learn the maid's name. We're not sure Pooja ever learns it: she calls her "Maid."

As Pooja slowly puts her life back together, the mistress's life falls apart: she goes insane from guilt and insecurity. Finally, in a dramatic scene, Pooja comes to her house and forgives her, to exorcise her demons. Mistress comes to the conclusion that marrying Pooja's ex-husband won't give her any more security than it gave Pooja, and kicks him out. He goes back to Pooja, who also shows him the door. She adopts her former maid's daughter, and tells her would-be lover, too, that she must ask him to leave, as she needs to be independent. He tells her he won't be so selfish as to try to keep her -- she must look forward.



You now are acquainted with the plot. The acting was suited to said plot. The production values were atrocious. The subtitles were worthy of the finest disposable chopstick wrapper. Ah, Bollywood! It was an art film, by the by -- presented as part of a women's film showcase put on in association with an arts festival in town this week. Also on in town, I hear rumoured, is the Bombay International Film Festival -- but I haven't been able to find any listings for it. Oh well.

I was also solicited, earlier this evening, to be in a Bollywood film. Or so the young man said. He was a former tech support person for Turbo Tax, and knew all sorts of arcane information about the US tax system. Small world.

So what can I say about India now that I'm about to go home (or halfway home, in any event)?

There are many things that are still a mystery to me. Why do the big cities paint the lower 4 feet of the tree trunks lining the roadways (a rust-coloured band at the bottom, then a white one on top)? Is it some kind of fungicide? A warning for traffic? Why, given the climate, do stores and business wait until 10 or 11 a.m. to open? Wouldn't an early start, and then a siesta, make sense? Why, in a country that's the center of the hi-tech explosion, can I not find a decent internet cafe? What, exactly, does a Chicken McAloo Tikka taste like? (Breaking with my usual practice while abroad, I did not eat at McDonald's. I leave that great cultural experiment until next year, when I will take my students there on a field trip).




I tried to come up with some statistics for my trip, but thus far, this is all I've got:
Pictures taken: 2129. Thank god for digital.
Water drunk: an average of 3.5 litres/day, once I hit Varanasi. So that's about 70 litres.
Mini rolls of toilet paper used: 3, plus one full-sized one. Almost all of this was on my nose.
Miles travelled: I'd have to look it up on Mapquest. A lot.
Blisters: 3 per foot, and in some very strange places.



I've had a good time, most of the time -- which seems to me a quite reasonable result. As far as the bad times went, I'm reminded of the conclusion I came to some 13 years ago, on a particularly miserable day I had while backpacking through Europe: I may be sick, and tired, and homeless, and stuck out in the rain, I thought, but I'm sick, and tired, and homeless, and stuck out in the rain in a foreign country, and therefore it's a cultural experience. And I've paid good money for it, and am going to enjoy it.


One way of making troubling experiences enjoyable is by doing just what I have been doing: writing it all down. Writing about bad travel experiences is usually quite therapeutic -- which is probably why the genre of "bizarrely awful trip experiences" is such a large subgenre of travel writing. Of course, since publishing is driven by sales, there must be something therapeutic in reading about disasters as well. Although I'm a spotty journal-keeper most of the time, I'm pretty faithful about keeping a journal while travelling. I also usually send a lot of postcards. This blog was basically a way of combining the two. It's worked for me; I hope it's been entertaining for you, as well.

One thing that still makes me uncomfortable, though, and which I've been thinking about a lot today, is the kind of accomodations I've had to make in order for the trip to be enjoyable. I've taken pictures of cute dogs, but not any of the dogs that are covered with open sores. Ditto for the people. And while it would have been presumptious and oddly exploitative to have done so (of the people, at least, if not of the dogs), travelling in India requires a lot of turning away, stepping aside, and learning to ignore the people who are quite literally at your feet. I've talked about the way the sidewalks are strewn with rubble, and hawkers, and dogs, and even garbage -- but they're also strewn with people.Some of them are just cab dirvers taking a rest, or even semi-middle-class Indians napping in the park (there's a lot of that going around), but an awful lot of them live there. I walk in the street to avoid them, as well as the hawkers and the crowds that slow down passage on the footpaths; I don't make eye contact; I brush away children. I'm not the kind of person who pushes children out of the way -- but in India I am. Needless to say, I'm not crazy about this. I take pictures of the crumbling buildings because they're picturesque, but the people who live there are probably less thrilled about the decay than I am, standing on the outside looking in.

No easy way to resolve this. I'm not Mother Teresa (even Mother Teresa wasn't Mother Teresa, according to many Calcuttans). I'm not going to stop coming to India. If anyone has any good ideas, let me know.

Meanwhile, my internet cafe membership is about to run out, and I'm off home to pack. Tomorrow, London. For now, good night.