🗓(I think it will be fun to release these one at a time; since we’re at the 20th anniversary of her adventures, I’ll try to post them as they were first sent — from early September through mid-December, 2002)
I’m very pleased to have this picture to start things off with — Helen has always had a very relaxed “when in Rome” attitude towards culture and language, always sort of fitting in despite being in unexpected places, and yet never really sacrificing her own unique identity.
In addition to her salwar kameez, the camera case she’s holding is a reminder that this all happened before digital cameras or smartphones (and you’ll hear a lot more about bananas as her adventure unfolds 😛).
Email Index:
Subject: Bangkok
Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2002
Dad, Ana, Cathleen, Ashu --Hola muchachos! I'm chilling in Bangkok. I've been chillling for five hours. The airport is nice but not exotic or anything. Full of Indians and Pakistanis and a tribe of short Mexican guys all speaking Spanish as fast as they can. Everybody is waiting around. This seems like a waiting sort of airport. But in two hours I leave for India! I just changed four dollars into bagh? --whatever it is, it's bought me a bag of "mixed nuts" that look like an Asian snack mix. It was the only thing that didn't have something to do with squid or dried jack fruit or other things a little too adventurous to be my lunch-dinner in the Flower and Fruit store. That was eighty bagh. The rest of my bagh are paying for fifteen minutes of internet. And I'm using the rest to check my mail. I'll try to write again from Delhi tonight, but if not I should at least manage tomorrow morning--afternoon. I'm going to sleep in as long as I can. It's all very exciting, but in a very sleepless sort of way. :)
I love you guys!
Helen
Subject: Delhi!
Date: Sat, 7 Sep 2002
You guys really should have taught me how to make a sending group or whatever it's called before I left. All this time typing in e-mail addresses!
So fun to be in the middle of India, and go over to a computer and have e-mails waiting for me, with fresh news about pergo flooring and dance apprec. classes, and computer techie interviews. Everything is really, really nice here. I figured when everything was so easy getting to Bangkok, that I was probably worrying more than I needed to about arriving in Delhi.
I didn't give you guys any details of the trip to Bangkok really, and I feel like I should go in chronological order. But at the same time, everything since then is so fresh. And chronology itself seems very fragile right now. All these different time zones and my horrible sense of time (witness my inability to foresee microwave buzzers and boarding calls) leave me unsure of whether it was only yesterday that I left Turlock, or a week ago. Is time still going at the same pace there as it is here?
Here it is Saturday, 11:20 pm and I'm sitting in the internet cafe in my hotel (wearing the pink salwaar kameez with white scarf but otherwise standing out very much from all these Indians). I got up at seven this morning, and took a bucket shower--carefully following Ashu's instructions, except that there were only two buckets instead of seven, and just one spout--more like the normal bathtub faucet, aside from it going right onto the bathroom floor. I wonder how many rupees I'm spending to describe my room's bathroom? And I still haven't even told you about the flight to Delhi, or anything!
Okay. I'll start where I'm supposed to, as soon as I've given you one other random bit of news. When I went to buy my train ticket from the hotel travel agency this morning, it turned out that the guy knew John Mock. They were colleagues, or something, and his younger brother was a colleague of David Mock, John's brother? The guy grew up in Mussoorie, but hadn't even been back for six years. And didn't seem to think it was a big coincidence at all that he would also know someone I knew.
Like the Nepali taxi driver last night who expected me to know his tourist friend from San Jose, since we were both from California.
After I e-mailed you from Bangkok, I was hailed over by an Indian looking woman who had a giant diamond in her nose and was about to explode with conversation. She'd pulled me over because of my clothes--was horrified that I might be a foreigner marrying into Pakistan and all it's evils. It turned out she was from Fiji, and married a Pakistani five years ago. She had just left him, and was on her way from Pakistan back to Fiji. It was the first time she'd had her head uncovered since she married him and converted to Islam. She had left her children from her previous marriage, left her country, left everything to go live with his relatively impoverished family. Her husband wanted her to do everything exactly like his parents and his sisters and all the women in his family had "for centuries"--everything from the way she wrapped the saran wrap to walking six steps behind him in public to taking beatings at home and meekly listening while he joined his relatives in calling her a prostitute, other terrible names. She wasn't at all happy about my dating an Indian, though her reasons didn't seem to have much to do with the Pakistani. She was half Indian, but had all sorts of prejudices against them. I think Indians must have low status in Fiji. I showed her a picture of Ashu, and she agreed that he was cute, though she still didn't completely approve of my dating him-- even as non-Pakistani as he seemed, the name Shah made her suspicious. She was still telling me more stories of her evil mother in law when I looked down at my watch and saw it was ten minutes till my flight!
I ran through that hot humid airport like you would not believe. (Ashu, I would have left you in the dust, easily!)
Then, after getting through security and feeling absolutely sure that my lungs were going to implode and my heart explode, leaving a very big mess outside gate fifteen. . . I found out the door to the gate was locked. I was ready to panick, but I calmly walked over to one of the petite thai women in her security uniform, and asked her why the door was locked. She explained that it was because boarding didn't even start for another half hour. I'd set my watch wrong for Thailand time. I leaned against a wall and commenced dying, much to the curiosity of a tall man in a turban and his elderly punjabi wife. More and more Indians showed up as boarding time approached, but even once they opened the door, there weren't more than twenty of us. As people kept trickling in after boarding should have begun, and after boarding should have ended, and as our flight should have already taken off, I began to wonder if flights to India go by Standard Indian Time. Pretty soon the room was crowded with Indians, and there was still no sign of an airplane outside.
I played with a little girl who sat next to me in the waiting room, though in my exhaustion I wasn't completely entertaining, and she would often ramble around, to the opposite end of the room from her parents and me, and then return. A two year old, and completely independent in the crowds. Finally the plane arrived, though very delayed and we took our seats. The man next to me seemed embarassed to be sitting next to me, some strange woman, and he nicely explained that he would go sit in the center isle so that I could have more room to sleep. I didn't need room to sleep, though it did feel more comfortable having that little extra bit of space. There were so many men on the plane and so few women. I think a lot of the people were travelling on business. I slept, so I don't really remember the flight over the Bay of Bengal, etc.. In the night, you really couldn't see much anyhow. Everyonce in a while I would open my eyes and there would be half naked Indian superheroes and heroines running around across the screen, brandishing swords and running through curtains of flames. Finally I opened my eyes again and the movie had been replaced by a monitor tracking our flight to Delhi. Only twenty miles left!
Landing was normal, except that none of the Indians even made a show of waiting till the end of the taxi to take off their seatbelts and start crowding for the exits. The airport was normal too--airconditioned, and extremely straightforward. As soon as we got through the little tunnel to the terminal from the airplane, we were at the luggage place, and there was my suitcase, already unloaded and waiting for me. It all was almost too smooth and fast, because I already had all my things before anyone else was ready to lead the way to customs, etc. I waited. Then followed them to immigration, which was very fast. They had almost ten desks open and working, with little boquets of flowers as decorations. Once I'd had my passport stamped, I was in another hall, where I found a Thomas Cook exchange and traded sixty dollars for rupees. There was a British guy and a couple young girls there as well. He was travelling alone and would have shared a taxi with me if I hadn't had someone waiting. His hotel had offered pickup, but when he heard the difference in price of getting picked up versus grabbing a cab himself, he thought he'd just do it. Then he saw the exchange rate and realized he was just saving himself about a pound, and he should have called. He was in his early thirties, and seemed like he could deal for himself, so I left him arguing with the exchange desk about some bureaucratic problem, and went through customs. That really just means I handed a security officer a piece of paper as I walked through the door. No one really even looked at me. The area on the other side of the doorway was strange--sort of like the celebrity paths outside movie premieres or something. Everyone on the other side of the rope was completely quiet, and completely squished in. Some of the faces came with big signs, and there, on one towards the middle right, had my name and Hotel Ajanta and the magic passcode all printed in big letters on it.
The sign was attached to a short little guy in a blue shirt, with a friendly looking face. I motioned to him and we met at the end of the roped off area. He welcomed me to India, and we then hiked out into the wilds of India. I don't really know if it was exciting of not, since I was just focused on following him and not losing him in the crowd of Indian men, and tourists, and baggage carts. It was dark and misty, and felt a lot like the outside of the Morelia airport. My driver and I talked about the weather and about how many people he'd picked up that day, and whether or not I'd been to India before, and how long I had been in airplanes and airports since I left home. We had a lot of time to talk. We must have walked a mile, and all along I rolled my little trusty little suitcase. We passed fewer and fewer people, went through a tunnel, went past one fenced in parking lot, went along another muddy paved road with stray dogs and past a few more men in Indian clothes and then into another parking lot--sort of like fairground parking--that had a big sandwich board type sign saying staff only. I didn't point out that neither of us really qualified as staff.
Then he loaded my suitcase into the front seat, opened the back door for me, and we were off. Getting out of the parking lots was bumper to bumper gridlock. I admired the grapes he had hanging from the rear view mirror, asked him about his religion, practiced my Hindi on him, learned about his family, his job, his experiences in Delhi. . . He was very nice, and even being tired, it was interesting to learn about his life and Delhi and his mini-version of India. He has a three year old and a six year old and a wife to go with them on a farm with his family in Nepal. He talks to his wife two or three times a week. He thought it was funny that I wasn't married, though he apologized for his astonishment, remembering that we were from different cultures, and that in my culture it isn't as common to marry at fifteen or sixteen. He showed me his travel journal, with entries from different tourists he had driven with to Rajasthan and other parts of India. All of them wrote very nice things about his cautious driving, and his calm, pleasant demeanor, and his amazing ability at aiming them towards good restaraunts and away from touts and other unwelcome aspects of travel in India.
His driving seemed safe enough, though we were using the line in the middle of our one way traffic lanes as a sort of third lane. Outside the car were lots of Morelia type businesses and other rather worn sorts of buildings, and all sorts of people, except for women. Things seemed to move twenty four hours here.
Everyone was awake at the hotel when I got there. My driver handed me and my luggage over to the eight different men still working at the front desk of the hotel. A manager sort of person took me over to a little side desk with comfortable seats and a quiet, dark bearded fellow brought me tea while they first took down my passport information, filed the information for the tourist police sort of office, and asked me about my flight and where I'd learned my Hindi and how long I would be staying in Mussoorie. I didn't drink the tea, but took the passport cover they gave me to make it "safe" and paid for the two nights and the airport pick up with rupees. It turned out that it cost half what I thought--only eleven dollars or so with tax per night. The bearded guy led me to my room (in complete silence) and left, after I had had him show me how the fan and things worked.
The room was really nice. Three good locks on the door, one a churchkey style. The bed was king sized--maybe from twins pushed together. The bed was just made with a tightly fitted bottom sheet (starched, I think) and two folded blankets, plus pillows. The fan hung from a very high ceiling. There is a window above my bed, but it leads into a space, not a real courtyard or anything. There's a nice carpet, a sofa, a television, and then the bathroom--with western toilet and twenty four hour hot water.
I had an Indian style breakfast in the restaraunt downstairs this morning. You look right out onto the street, and everyone on the street looks back at you. When I first came in, there were only men in the restaraunt, and they all stared at me sort of curiously. Later on, more tourists came. I stayed at the table long after I'd finished my potato pancake thing, and banana and yoghurt and glass of water. The street was so crazy. It's small, the size of our alleyway, and has people just flowing through it. Little boys in school uniforms, their arms around each other’s shoulders. Women in white veils riding behind men on motor scooters. Women in saris, women in Salwaar Kameezes, men in suits, men in work clothes, men sharing scooters and wearing funny toy looking helmets, women riding in the back of cycle rikshaws, pregnant dogs, tiny children running around and throwing pieces of ice, honking jeeps, honking taxis, but mostly pedestrians. There's a little shop across the street too, selling film and things, which makes it all even more interesting.
But I haven't actually walked outside of the hotel yet. It is an intimidating sort of street, with the mud, and the wide eyed men, and the sniffing little dogs. A man walked by with a puppy under his arm, as if it were just a briefcase. And later a man walked by with three small children in tow, clinging to his suit--one sitting in his arms. I think it would be different if I had a place to go. For now it's enough just to sit and watch, and there are two meals left to go. That should be a lot of excitement.
I booked my train to Dehra Dunn this morning after I had eaten. I'll take the express at seven in the morning tomorrow. The manager is sending someone with me to help me find my seat and get me settled. The people at the hotel are all very serious and respectful and make life far easier than it ought to be. It can't really count as an adventure while there are all these people around taking care of me!
So, what shall I have for lunch?
I think I'll go scope out the menu. Funny that I can do so much without ever leaving this safe little oasis. Afterwards, maybe I'll watch some TV. They shoved the Indian Express newspaper under my door this morning. Looks like the Indian cricket team is doing alright.
I'll keep you up to date.
I send much much love!
Cathleen has to take lots of notes in her dance apprec. class for me. . . I'm so excited for her!
Gigantic hugs,
Helen
Mussoorie
Date: Sun, Sept 8, 2002
I'm in the most beautiful place on earth. It feels like the highest place on earth too. Looking out in either direction I have to almost catch my breath, it feels as if the mountain sides just slope down and down forever. They're bright green now too, because of the monsoon, with all sorts of flowering bushes and plants. It's well forested--somehow the trees manage to hang on to the sides of the mountain, and there are two different types of monkeys that. . . well, I feel as if they ought to be springing from tree to tree, but all the monkeys I've seen have been loping along the ground. The silver ones are langurs or something. I saw them for the first time as we were driving up in the taxi. There were at least twelve of them, some just babies, all casually picnicing on some sort of seeds that had fallen in the road. They showed absolutely no fear at all of the taxi driver, which, considering the width of the road and the speed that he was driving, was remarkable.
Yesterday was so intense. I know I should write all the details of my trip from the hotel to the station and from there to Dehra Dunn, and then the taxi ride, but I don't know how. I spent an hour writing in my journal last night and never even got to the part where I got on the train, and my train left at seven in the morning. Describing the day feels like writing a novel to rival Vikram Seth's in length, and meanwhile, all I want to do right now is tell you about my room and my breakfast and the birds that were calling at dawn outside my windows.
I know if I'm not careful, I'll spend my entire day in this internet cafe, and completely miss all my Hindi lessons. But my first one doesn't start until afternoon, and I'm not guarding my rupees so carefully that I can't at least spend some time describing yesterday's journey and the guest house and the amazing luck I've had ever since I left the Hotel Ajanta in Delhi.
I woke up at three in the morning in the hotel. There was so much going on all night. I have the feeling sometimes that Indians don't sleep. Not that this is an entirely new or original suspicion. There were a zillion employees in the hotel, and since most flights into India arrive in the middle of the night, all the different facilities of the hotel are twenty four hours too. So many people talking and people walking around the outside of my room, and glasses breaking, and toilets flushing. . . I didn't let myself get out of bed until four thirty, but I really hardly slept at all. By the time I got my wake up call at six, I was already completely packed, and comfortably curled up with the newspaper (more cricket scores). One of the zillion identical looking employees (same blue shirts, same exact mustache and hair cut, same aloof and professional manner) noticed me coming out of my room and helped me with my luggage. Then I found someone, there were zillions of employees just waiting to be found--one of them was deeply sleeping behind the money exchange counter--and explained that I'd like someone to go with me to the train station and set me up. The guy who'd been asked to the night before wasn't there--or maybe he was and I just lost him among the other blue shirts and mustaches.
After some discussion, and my changing a little bit more money with one of the consious employees, me and my luggage and an old man with a black shirt and no mustache (!) were loaded into the back of a little green rickshaw, in the middle of all the early morning chaos of my street. The rickshaw drove us through alleys, along big streets and small streets, through crazy intersections, past extreme poverty, cows, lumber shops, chai wallas, resting employees. It's funny how scared I was before I got onto the airplane when I wasn't experiencing anything at all to be frightened of, and how actually being in India, propelling through early morning Delhi at rediculous speeds on the back of the least stabil vehicle I've been on in my life, didn't seem like anything frightening at all. Maybe my senses were too full of all these other new sights, the craziness of this new place, to have room for fear. Instead, I enjoyed the ride, and happily chatted away in Hindi with the guy who'd been sent with me. We didn't have a complicated conversation, since my Hindi isn't that proficient, but we talked about my stay in India and my return to Delhi and studying Hindi in the mountains. I didn't really believe we'd reached the station when we got there.
We were still in the sort of underworld, or land of limbo that we had been driving through. Everything was still washed of any color but brown, and covered in dirt. People were still lying face down in the dust. Such hopeless people wandering around. It felt a little like I imagine Egypt must have felt like during its terrible famine, when parents had to protect their children, because there were people desperate enough to capture them and eat them. We parked outside a motorcycle (also dust covered) rental place, and walked through the brown muddy pavement across puddles and between walking corpses, to a platform where we stood in line while my companion got a platform pass and I watched the suitcase. It was all so surreal. But nothing terrible happened, and I didn't feel like a different person having been so close to poverty in real life. Such poverty isn't really easier to believe in person than it is on television or in movies. For our sanity, I think even our imagination sets limits. So I stood and stared at my suitcase, next to a pile of human feces, and waited for the guy to push his way through the crowd until his wrist slid through the little hole at the bottom of the glass window, and came back out with the pass. He had to struggle to get his hand back, there were so many other hands trying to push their way towards that glass.
Then my suitcase was on his shoulders and we were walking past that building to the relatively empty, but equally dirty platform, and walking and walking to find my car, and then my seat in the old train. I gave the guy some money after he put down my suitcase. I think I gave him about fifty cents. Then he cheerfully explained that it had cost sixty cents to get the pass, so I gave him another twenty ruppees (forty more cents) and he smiled very big, and talked about my coming back to Delhi, and seeing him again. Then he pointed to my baggage and said "baggage", nodding and smiling over and over again. And then he left.
The train was old, and worn, and the seats were narrow with three on the left and two on the right. More and more people came on and took their seats. Snack guys walked through passing out their goods. A man in kurta pajamas, with ret betel nut stained teeth came and quietly sat next to me. He took out a cell phone to check the time. I asked him if he was going to Dehra Dunn. He said yes. He asked where I was from. I asked him about the sociology of modern India book he was reading. Then another man came and sat down. We talked about my Hindi (in Hindi, the nice slow kind) and about Mussoorie, and about the best ways to learn. The train kept filling up. I kept looking up to see that my baggage was still there, though I couldn't imagine how anyone could manage to sneak it away.
He insisted that I get a hindi newspaper, instead of the Times that I was reading. So he and the other gentleman and I all got separate newspapers from the boy passing them out. The kurta pajama guy was very short, and played with his feet, just like Dr. Lutke, so that he reminded me very much of an oompa loompa. He turned out to be a lot more like Marieke's Dad though. He even had the same greying beard. The other man, the one seated on his other side, next to the window, was more of a mix between Grandpa Norm and Mr. Ozga. The paan addict turned out to be an anthropologist from Delhi university. The Ozga type fellow was an oil businessman, who had travelled in Russia, and kept the Hanumman Chalissa in his front coat pocket. The train employees kept on bringing more complementary chai trays, and my new aquaintances drank it non stop the whole time we were travelling. They also insisted that I follow their example and take one of the bottle of purified water the boys were handing out, though neither of the other men actually neglected their chai long enough to even sip water.
We were on the train six hours together, and my kurta pajama guy was extremely outgoing. I found about the NGO he was going to meet with in Dehra Dunn, and his family, and his kids. All this was in English. The oil businessman also spoke English, though not as well, and he also was very happy to practice it with me. I got lectures on life, long discussions on Hinduism and caste, advice on the best way to get to Mussoorie, how to make friends in life and be successful, interrogations on my hobbies, my past travel experiences, my family. Six hours, non stop talking. I showed them the Lonely Planet book , which they perused carefully and finally approved. I showed them the pictures of you all, which they also inspected carefully.
They were incredibly friendly, and very interested in my welfare and my safe arrival in Mussoorie. I really felt as if I had ended up with two new grandparents. They got along with each other well too, though the anthropologist, who had studied five years with tribes on the Nepalese border, and should have been more patient, could hardly bear to wait for the other man's English. So the anthropologist spoke a lot more. He exchanged e-mails with me, and gave me his cell number, and made me promise to call him when I got to Mussoorie, and to look up him and his wife when I return to Delhi.
And the whole way we were passing exceptionally interesting things, so that I didn't feel bored for a second. The train seemed so distant from the women sitting down to relieve themselves next to the tracks, and the pigs, and the trash, and the crumbling brick buildings where so many people were living. There were little kids playing in drecky water, there were white egrets in green fields, there was a wild peacock. It was very flat outside. Then, after hours and hours, and many cups of chai (I held off, thinking of my bladder and the prospect of the train toilet) and a meal of peas and four stale french fries with ketchup covered vegetable cutlets, we reached the hills. The rivers were flowing more, the villages looked better cared for, there were blackberry bushes, sawmills, men out of fairytales walking through forests with giant sacks over their shoulders.
My elderly gentlemen asked the family in front of me if they could fit me into a share taxi with them, and the family aquiesced. But then the pajama guy decided he wanted to introduce me to his NGO director friend, who might know of other NGOs in Mussoorie. He was also hoping to introduce me to paan and chai wallas and all the other mandatory (in his mind) experiences of a trip to India.Which wouldn't have worked with my sharing a taxi and leaving at once with the family. So instead I met the NGO director, though it turned out they had an appointment, and then followed them and the director's son, who carried my bag despite my protests ( so sexist!) to the taxi station across the street. Dehra Dunn reminded me of Morelia or at least, Patzcuaro. Nothing too intimidating, but it was still nice to have people watching out for me. And then, in the midst of their discussions with the taxi driver, who didn't know my hotel in Landour, but could get me at least to Mussoorie (drivers don't like driving up to Landour, because the road grows even narrower, and is very very steep). Then a guy in his twenties with an Australia t-shirt asked if I was going to Landour. He and his friend were as well, and they knew of my hotel, though they lived nearby. Would I like to share a taxi? We could all split the cost.
I left my anthropologist and the NGO people with warm goodbyes and then set off with Clint, the Texan (despite the shirt, I know), and his wife, an Anglo-Indian girl from Pune. Clint is a little older than me, and has lived in Mussoorie four years. Stephanie, his wife, moved here a year ago when they married. We got along really well. Stephanie was impressed by my knowlege of India (I asked her if she spoke Marathi) and I was impressed at her knowlege of everything else. You should have seen her buy vegetables when we stopped at the stand in Mussoorie. She is maybe my age? And teaches at English lit and geography at the Woodstock boarding school to ninth and tenth graders. I found out way more than that about them. . . I think we already really count as friends. The road up to Mussoorie was very narrow, and windy, but perfectly maintained. There was even a little stone wall the entire hour and a half up the mountain. Lots of scooters passed us, women in saris sitting side saddle on the back, without helmets. Maybe because of all the other cars we encountered, and scooters, who seemed far more exposed than we did, I wasn't frightened by the straight drop off on the edge of the road, or the incredible speed with which we took turns. Our taxi driver did a good job of honking as we passed turns, so that whoever we ran into head on would have at least had a chance to notice us before the accident.
It was so unbelievably beautiful. I almost wanted to cry--the mountains, the waterfalls, the stone walls above the road to keep back mud slides. The mountains were partly veiled in mist.
There's so much more to tell you. But for now, know that I am safely here, and meeting very friendly people, and settled in a quaint rustic room with beautiful windows out onto the mountain, and my own western style bathroom (though I still haven't gotten the shower to work). It's so quiet and peaceful here. I can walk up to the language school or the hotel, and not see a single person on my way, or even a car or scooter. Just the forest, and the monkeys, and the himalayas in the background when the sun burns off the mist.