This post is part of a month long trip I just took to India. If you’d like to start from the beginning, please click here.
How can you keep a shield up here but still let people in? I haven’t figured it out yet, but it is a question that will recur constantly during this trip.
Dirty little claws grab at our hands, our pockets, pat our butts. Street kids, heartbreakingly young, but also heart-hardening in their persistence and grabbiness and rudeness. Understandable, the street has made them hard, but no kid this age should be like this. They grab our clothing and let themselves be dragged around as we walk, pleading and begging and yelling at us in broken English.
Yves deals with this by pointing to Christine ahead and telling them, “She has money!” They release us and swarm her, she glares back at us while he laughs. Funny not funny. What do you do in these situations? We’ve heard that often street kids have to give the money they make to a parent or pimp figure, so it might not even directly help them to give. In Montreal there’s a guy that I’ll buy soup for on particularly cold days that’s been in the same place saying the same thing for literally 10 years. I don’t think I’m doing him any good either, just perpetuating his situation. India is good at this, calling into question all your ideas of right and wrong, all your morals, lining them up on either side of your head and having them do battle in the middle. Helping a starving kid vs. perpetuating a system that allows for starving kids.
We see monkeys and are told without asking that it will cost 100 rupees for a photo with them. We shake our head and the man sweeps the monkeys under his robe, glaring accusingly at us cheap tourists and our greedy cameras.
We turn off the colorful, sunlit street into the innards of the marketplace. Cages on cages of chickens, piles of raw meat, a freshly beheaded goat. Less tourists here, probably from the smell of old urine and animal shit. Men pee in a line in urinals next to a meat stall, boys empty trash into the alley in piles. I am shy and fascinated all at once, uneasy to fill my role as rich tourist but spellbound by the immediacy of life we’re seeing.
We walk past tangles and tangles of electric wires, each knot and mess more outrageous than the last. There are human rickshaws here too, all clanging bells for our attention when they see our group walk by. Hard to miss us, nine white folks. We are targets here. I want to look and take pictures but it is not easy. I look at a man and he sees my camera, reaches frantically behind him for his little girl who he brandishes up at me. “Sir, take a picture of my daughter!” he implores. Why would he say that, except to get money? I am not comfortable with it.
The driving, however, I love. On this outing Christine is riding shotgun. “It’s crazy here!” she shouts to the driver. He mistakes this for encouragement, or a challenge, or maybe he understands, “Go crazy!” We fly through the night, inches from other cabs, pedestrians, death. Bicycles pass us in the other direction on the highway at night with no lights. Behind us Tristan’s cab has instructions to follow our cab, which the driver agrees to do or die trying, and gives them a heart-stopping ride just inches behind our bumper while our driver drives like a video game with lives to spare.
On our way back to our 4 star hotel provided by Cirque we walk past guest houses and hostels so obviously sleazy that I shiver involuntarily. Tristan and I realize that soon we will be on our own in this jungle for nearly a month. We have signed up for an adventure and we will get it whether we still want it or not. I am excited but nervous. The water always looks colder from the shore.