The real India

It is so easy for me to romanticise about India, especially once I have left, so I am writing this on my last day here, before crossing the border into Nepal tomorrow, because I want to remember it as it is.

India is wonderful but it is also awful. I took a journey today from Kushinagar back to Gorakhpur in a shared jeep which had ten passengers! My hips squeezed between the door and the man next to me, I realised that the only way to cope with this situation is to laugh and to watch life happen as we fly past beep beeping the horn. I had an awful day, it started with a local bus ride to Kushinagar where the men stared and stared at me. I've grown quite used to my celebrity status here in India, but I would appreciate it if they would let me know why I'm so well known... The more polite ones ask "Madam, 'scuse me madam, can we have snap? Madam, one snap please..." and the less polite ones just get the mobile phone out and take pictures. Oh, what a picture it must be, tangled hair, filthy glasses covered in dust, sweaty face, it must make an attractive photo to show the folks! But, in all honesty, as a young woman traveling alone in India it can be very intimidating to be stared at by a big group of men as I stand waiting for a bus, or to constantly be shouted at by men who want to take you photo or sell you something, or rickshaw men or touts of all kinds. They all want to know where my husband/boyfriend is, why would I possibly want to travel alone? And why, more importantly, am I not married already? Why don't I have a husband? It seems very hard for them to categorise me when it is not in relation to a man. A friend of mine was asked to sleep with a man she had just met on the sleeper train late at night! She told him off very sternly and he asked he why not!! She gave him the whole story and told it to him straight! Men here don't treat women as equals, we are defined by our relationships to them, and when a woman is independent and not with someone then she is up for grabs, and she must want to be grabbed, right?

One thing, which nobody here seems to notice , are the piles of garbage everywhere. It is filthy, the rubbish piles up anywhere and everywhere. People throw down plastic wrappers wherever they happen to be when they have finished with them. The whole country is treated like one big landfill site, and no-one seems to mind! Plastic bottles and wrappers all over the place, dirtying the whole place and the cows wade through and do a good job disposing of anything that could possibly be edible. The cows, oh how I love the cows. Not confined to any field, they are free to roam as they so please, and so they do. They stand where they want, go where they want, shit where they want. Even if it means the traffic has to go around them for an hour. There is always traffic, and it seems to flow fairly well, and I'm sure there are rules of the road but I still haven't quite caught on... Crossing the road is not really an art, which I stupidly first thought it was, but more just a case of becoming a part of the traffic and assuming that everyone will notice which path you are taking and avoid you. Which seems to be what everyone does, whilst making as much noise as possible so that everyone knows where you are and what you are doing. However, since everyone is making as much noise as they can, it doesn't seem to have an effect, and so, a horn really just means that there is a vehicle somewhere within hearing range, but don't worry about changing you path, they will avoid you. The streets are in poor condition and the cars turn up so much dust that at the end of a journey I am covered in dirt, hot and usually not someone you would want to meet! They pack people into every type of vehicle and usually the car/bus/auto will have been on the road for 20years (or at least it looks like it!). I love watching auto-rickshaws whizz by with 10 people hanging out of them but it's not so much fun being in one...

There is constant noise, even at night it doesn't stop. People hold conversations in the hall of the hotel in the middle of the night or in the temple beside the sign that says "silence please". And there are people everywhere. On a journey of 10 hours in the local bus from one town to the next there will be people around, women with piles of straw on their back, kids in school uniform walking home, cycle-rickshaws... There are just always people and houses. There is no uninhabited space. All space is used for something. And half of the houses look like they are unfinished with bricks uneven at the end of the wall and metal rods sticking up on the top of the house. And no-one has a proper door, they all have garage doors for front doors, whether this opens onto a shop or the front room!

There are people selling things from carts on wheels, they sit on their cart all day next to a woman selling the same thing, next to another guy selling the same thing. Or they sell from a little concrete hut with pepsi painted on the side. There is advertising everywhere, all cement walls have advertising posted on them and there are signs hanging everywhere.

But saying all this, there is something wonderful about watching life happen in India as you fly by on a bus, or in a jeep. It is like it has happened this way for thousands of years and no matter who you are, it isn't going to change. India is as it is. And Indians are as they are.