Daniel Parecki

I’ve been in India for almost a month now and have had many experiences.  I feel the need to unwind and let all the experiences out.  This wont be as well written as the last posts, but I need a way to get my thoughts in order.  One of the highlights of the trip are the countless people I meet almost every day.

Let’s start with the shoe repairman I met in McLeod Ganj.  For the sake of privacy I’ll call him Raul.  I first met him when I returned to McLeod Ganj.  While walking through the streets this skinny Indian boy started walking in stride and talking with me.  He asked me where I was from like most Indians do and made small talk.  Soon, he asked me if I could buy him food.  I agreed, preferring to buy food for people than give them money.  He promptly took me to a shop where he pulled out a few bags of powdered milk.  The same thing happened to me two weeks ago.  A women carrying a baby stopped me and said “no money, milk for baby.”  That time I had tried to buy the powdered milk for her, but the shop owner refused, saying it’s a “bad habit.”  He told me that they get foreigners to buy them these packages, the they sell them back to the shop.  These packages are expensive on Indian standards, and I have no doubt that the ladies that pull this scam do quite well for themselves.  So, Raul attempted the same trick, but I knew better and refused.  After a little arguing I brought him to a restaurant and had lunch with him.  We chatted a while and I told him of my research and that I wanted to see the hospitals in the area.  After lunch he showed me to Delek hospital, which was a 20 minute walk down the hill.  After we stopped by the main desk he invited me back to his home.  He called ahead and asked his mother to prepare a meal for me.  Raul lives in the tent houses in Dharamshala, which is the closest the area comes to slums.  The locals build the frames of the houses with thick bamboo poles and drape tarps over the frame.  Combined with the heat of the place, the packed dirt floor, and the wide beds, the inside of the tent houses is surprisingly comfortable.  Raul’s family had two of these houses, one for sleeping, and one for cooking and relaxing, but each one was no more than 20X20 feet.  I think perhaps six people live in those two houses, but other houses are much more crowded.  The first night I went to the tent houses, Raul’s mother prepared mutter paneer (peas and cheese) and served me chai.  It was the best chai I’ve had in all of India.  Since then, I’ve gone back to the tent houses three times, the last two times I’ve conducted short interviews with a few people there.  It is hard to describe, but the tent houses are the place in India I have felt most at home.  Perhaps its in part the number of kids running around.  As soon as you set foot in the perimeter you have kids calling to you saying “hallo!” and “how are you.”  Little toddlers run up next to you, grab your hand and walk with you wherever you go.  If you sit in someone’s house for long enough, inevitably someone will hand you a baby, usually only wearing a shirt.  You just kind of hold the baby, look into its big brown eyes and say “hello baby.”  And then you coddle it and hug it close to you, and it will close its eyes and hold onto your finger like you are the most trustworthy person in all the world.  Life there is slow, and fairly comfortable.  The density of people forces the family to stay close.  While I was interviewing one man, there were probably 12 people within a 15 foot radius of us, most part of the family.  People would lounge on the bed listening, teenagers would hold and play with the babies, and two women would squat next to the wood-burning stoves and make chapattis.  Everyone is there, everyone hears what you are saying, and everyone shows loving interest in you.  You get the sense that there is no fear in the area.  People trust each other and let their 3 year olds run around the village unattended.  And people have enough to eat.  And yet through all of this, Raul’s mother’s warm smile seems to hide a tiredness in her core.  She will stop you in the street, hold your hand and look at you with her warm smile even though she cannot speak your language.  But she works many hours a day picking up plastic bottles from the street that the tourists leave behind.  She bags them up and brings them to a store in Dharamshala who will give her 20 rupees per kilo of plastic she finds.  In one day she might get 100 rupees, the equivalent of two dollars.  Even though she has so little, she still offered a special meal of cheese and peas while the rest of the family had a simpler meal of rice and curry.

Conducting interviews is proving to be harder than I thought.  The language barrier is worse than I had expected.  Lots of people speak English here, but usually only enough to get by on the street.  Academic English is hard to come by.  Even some of the college students didn’t feel comfortable speaking English.  I found a translators, on of Raul’s friends, and so far we have had three interviews.  One interview was productive, I learned of a man’s broken arm and his need to sell his wife’s and daughter’s gold earrings and took out a loan to pay for the surgery.  Later though, Raul told me that he thought the man was lying about the price in the hopes that I would feel sorry for them and help pay off the loan.  I don’t know what story to believe.  The other two interviews were not as productive.  It is difficult to get people to open up and share their stories.  Going through a translator, I sometimes feel like I am missing part of the story.  The translator and the interviewee will discuss my question and then the translator will give me only a few words in English.  One lady asked me how answering my questions would help her, and I struggled to find a polite way of saying, ‘it wont help you at all.’  I feel like I need to develop more thorough interview questions.  I want open ended questions, but they often do not lead anywhere.  I seem to only be able to get responses when the questions are very specific.  The problem is that specific questions often lead to uninteresting answers.  Its like when a professor asks the class a questions and it is clear he is fishing for the right answer.

Well, we ended up in Kashmir after all. I don’t really know how that happened, but Casey had been pushing to go here months. Given that Kashmir is a conflict zone, its not the best place for a week adventure. Milli, our host in Delhi, warned us not to go to Srinagar unless we had someone we could trust, but Casey’s wish to see Kashmir overwhelmed her warning. We checked the news for current conflicts, but no violence had occurred in the past year, and there were no cases of westerners getting harmed. Even though there were some things that speak danger, I still felt at ease. The Indian government had Military personnel stationed at every rest stop, and huge army bases rested against the road to Srinagar. I sat in a house boat on Dal Lake and just paid for a week stay. On the road entering Srinagar an army tank proudly pointed its nuzzle toward incoming traffic. The Indian government is used primarily to keep the Kashmiri people under India reign. Many people we talked to said that they wanted to be their own country, and due to the violence they have suffered from the Indian military, I don’t blame them. Currently, there is not open conflict, but last summer over 100 students were killed by the military after protests brought thousands of locals to the streets. Pakistan also wants control of Kashmir, but the violence that ensues from that desire occurs only near the ever-changing border.

Casey and I got quite the tourist adventure in Srinagar. The twenty year old local that sold us the package was quite the salesman. He met us on the cab ride in to town and told us that he had a house boat for not too expensive, only 500 rs ($12) a night per person (I had heard estimates of house boats costing up to 3000 rs a night). After he brought us into his home (his family lives on the house boat as well) he served us tea and chatted for a while. Once we started talking business I saw that salesman in him shine. He immediately complemented us and formed a bond with us saying that he prefers to rent his home to non-indians since they are usually cleaner. And he said that he would work out a good price for us since we were students like him and have a low budget. He told us “honesty is the best policy,” as they say in Kashmir (no joke), and quickly began to up sell us on a four day hiking trip through the Himalayas. Now even though I saw his wiles at work I was still helpless to fight them.  Casey and I did manage to step aside for a quick private chat, but at that point we were both already sold. We ended up agreeing on a price of $355 each, which included a four day, three night hiking trip through the mountains, and four nights on the houseboat meals included. I heard later that that was a very good price in relation to the going rate.

The hiking was beautiful. We spent 5 hours the first day hiking uphill to get to the open plains. Fortunately, our guide, Sajad, hired local porters from the mountains who put our bags and tent on horses. Even with no backpacks the climb was incredibly exhausting. But once we got to the top, it was all worth it. Kashmiri nomads still live on the plains as they have lived for ages. They herd sheep and sleep in packed one room houses made from stones and sticks. At the end of our trek, we came upon a lake resting at a height of 12000 ft. Rich grass plains surrounded the lake on two sides and a glacier on the abutting mountain fed the lake. We stayed three nights up in the mountains, and both got sun burned despite wearing rain jackets and sun screen. One of the local boys took us to his home and introduced us to his family. They were incredibly excited to see westerners and offered us tea and flat bread. They became ecstatic when we offered to take pictures. They loved seeing themselves on our little digital screens. That seems to be one of the little peculiarities of Indians and Kashmiri all over. Even in Jammu, when people saw that we carried cameras they would beckon us over and ask to have their picture taken. They would look and themselves and their friends on the screen and yelp with laughter.