Popagandhi

My clandestine affair with India began, if I remember quite precisely, in a lift. I was six. A strikingly handsome man of Indian descent stepped in, with his similarly striking wife. My mother and I couldn’t help but stare. After he stepped out at the sixth floor, my mother said to me: “Girl, if you marry an Indian man, you can give me very good-looking grandchildren.”

I still don’t have the heart to tell her I wasn’t looking at the man. I was thinking, in fact, of India, and how the word rolled off my tongue with such mystery and aplomb.

Cut to present day, modern Singapore, a pappadum addiction and many eyebrow threadings later. I’m sitting in a morning class listening to my lecturer drone on about resumes and other ridiculous stuff tailored for the future accountant/ banker this school is so good at producing. I’m suddenly seized with the brilliant idea… I HAVE to be in India this December. I have to, I want to, I’d love to; I’m going to be thinking about it until I do, and even then I wouldn’t be able to get enough of it.

I get asked a lot: Why India? Why not? Why? Because I love India. Why do you love India? Because I do, and why don’t you? But where do I begin?

I’ve constantly said that falling in love with India is a little like falling in love with the ugliest girl in class. You want to scream your love from the mountains but you can’t — people might laugh at you. You never thought you’d fall for her, it was such a remote possibility in the first place. But you did, and now you can’t expect anyone to understand, unless they’ve fallen for someone like her before.

To say India is an assault on the senses is putting it very lightly. To be sure, if you wanted to, you could visit her and insulate yourself perfectly from her — hire a driver, never walk on the streets, stay in the Oberoi, never break into a sweat despite the heat. But what’s the fun in that? It would be comfortable, insulated, clean, everything India isn’t. It takes a kind of madness to love cities where the PSI is constantly 300-400, there’s a dalit shooting himself up with heroin under the bridge, traffic is chaos and but then so is everything else.

But you can’t explain away an emotional attachment. Or maybe I suffer from some distant variant of Stockholm Syndrome.

I like sticking out like a sore thumb. It allows me to heighten the sense of consciousness, to be aware, to be conscious and aware of the fact you’re here and deal with it. And I can’t stick out more sorely than in India. In Phnom Penh the barangs stick out more than I do, and I masquerade perfectly as a local of Chinese descent; that my first words in Phnom Penh were in Teochew, only made me feel even more like… I’m not really that far from home. In Thailand I skip effortlessly to the local queue for the boats (missing the 10x more expensive foreigner tickets), navigate back alleys to find my way from one soi into the other by bumboat, fifteen baht a ride. Nobody looks until I start to speak. Anywhere else — Sydney, Brisbane, New York, London — nobody really cares, in these cities. There’re too many of my kind in these places anyway. Eat at a local deli near a university and someone struts in wearing a Raffles Junior College shirt complete with FBT shorts. India, is a different matter. I don’t know if I’m sticking out because of my skin colour, my gender, my dressing, my funny language, or all of the above. But people stare, and you learn to meet that stare.

Born and raised in Singapore, I strangely never got used to order. But here everything makes sense. It makes sense that to wait for a bus you join the largest congregation of people by the side of the road (provided they are not washing, bathing, peeing). It makes sense that to figure out what bus to take, whether or not you speak the language, you stand there listening to the two bus boys (one at the front door the other at the rear) shouting out the list of destinations in a tongue too quick for you to catch. Should you have hesitated for a second you still have the chance to sprint after it and grab the window grilles or the side of the bus.

If Bangkok traffic is chaos; Phnom Penh traffic is chaos without rule of law. But I still feel safe crossing a road in India by throwing myself headlong into the maddening traffic. knowing the taxi stops for me as I pass, because I’m there, and because the taxi stops the truck has to stop, and because the truck stops the cart behind him stops, too. I don’t know if I feel safe crossing a road in Singapore when the red man suddenly comes on as I’m in the midst of it; I know it doesn’t matter to the motorist that I’m there, it only matters that he’s right, especially if he’s a taxi driver (or a university student). Traffic in India, being part of it, and living to tell the tale, reinforces your belief in divine forces. To romanticize chaos and traffic, the sort of interaction, compromise, understanding and communication taking place every moment in the midst of traffic in any Indian city is incomprehensible but endlessly fascinating. It’s not like here where you sit in an air-conditioned car and wait for the traffic lights, or wait out a traffic jam. To move at all, you understand, is a miracle, to move without ever hitting anything even more of one. And in order to move, the driver of your vehicle, whether car or taxi or bus or auto-rickshaw, needs to constantly negotiate with those to his sides, rear and still keep his eyes on the front.

So I write, occasionally. It follows then that one of my favourite pastimes is to watch. There’s plenty to watch in India, you don’t get to stop watching. At every moment there is something happening, at every happening there is something else going on. I like how people congregate in front of a TV in the display of a shop when a cricket match comes on. How they follow the boombox a man is carrying, broadcasting a cricket match, and stick closely to him in order to listen. I like how it takes four people to make a chicken roll, one to flatten the dough, one to add the fillings, and another to put it in a bag, and the last to collect 15 rupees (S$0.50) from you. I like how there is someone manning every single phone booth in this country, how there is a man holding a weighing machine out of nowhere in the street, and if you were suddenly seized with the idea you want to weigh yourself, you can, for one rupee. I like how people actually understand my Bengali, or pretend to, then switch to perfect English right after. I like how when they write India versus Pakistan on the walls, I’m never sure if they mean cricket, or political tension.

Every second in India there is at least one person getting a haircut or a beard shaved, in public.

I like to think I have a wonderful sense of direction and navigation, I don’t usually get lost, and that takes out all the fun of travelling for me. I inherited my mother’s ability to just “get” a place even if I’ve only been there an hour. But you could spend forty years in India and never really “get” it, and I think the people I’ve met who live there have never really tried to, knowing they can’t. If we can’t even make sense of their trains, it would be presumptuous to try to “get” anything else. Every morning on the bus out of Narendrapur into central Kolkata, I saw the same sights but always saw something new every morning. I could walk around Gariahat or Park Street a dozen times and still feel like I’d never been there before. I don’t like the word tourist, much. Touring a place is not engaged travel. Travelling could be, though not necessarily. But there isn’t really a word that explains the kind of travel in which you try to be one with a place, is there? If there was, India might be the first to which you could apply this new term.

The first time I was there, I couldn’t stop thinking: I am really happy in this place, happy in a manner I’ve never known before, in a way I can’t make sense of. Nothing else really matters as long as I’m alive. And even if I were to drop dead in the midst of Sudder Street I might draw a crowd only because of my foreign skin, then the dogs might come lap me up, the dust settles and nothing about India, nothing about Sudder Street, changes one bit.

At a prata store in Tanjong Pagar, I asked a man if they had any masala tea.
This is always a cue for everyone I ask this to ask in return, if I’ve been to India before.
I always say I have, then volunteer the information that I too, think India is great.
He said, “See you back home in Kerala this December!”

This is the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that I really want to see come true, and perhaps it just might.

A Pump, Tollygunge, Calcutta