Shinin’ down like water

I woke up twice last night, it was raining that heavily.

With a month delay, winning once again against global warming, the monsoon is back in town. Exotic, wonderful. And discomforting.

When I woke up this morning, late because of the dark sky outside, it was raining inside my bathroom too. The ceiling failed once again.

It happened last year as well, and although I paid for it to be fixed, six months ago, I wasn’t really expecting the ceiling were going to make it through the monsoon. It’s one of the first things I learned here: you must try to get things fixed – because you must – but you also must not expect that they will be – fixed.

A year ago the first sight of a ceiling shower in my bathroom caused me a mix of distress, anger, sense of impotence and a tiny bit of incredulous amusement.

Today I emptied the bathroom, locked the door, and almost seamlessly proceeded to my morning tea routine.

Roads in Delhi become rivers after fifteen minutes of regular rain. Monsoon showers are just too much for the city’s poor drainage system.

For days, after the rain you’ll see papers, chairs, tables, computers covered in mud and water emerging from flooded basements, carried in the sun by people who don’t really hope to save anything, but are simply following the rule: you must try to get things fixed, because you must, but you also must not expect that they will be – fixed.

Walking out of your home is out of question. Well, unless someone you know and trust talks you into a walk in the rain in shorts and slippers, but that is a whole different story (and one whose memory will have the power to disgust you for years to come).

Anyway today was no day for adventures, nor for auto-rickshaw rides. So I called the taxi stand to learn that “Today is very jam day, sorry”.

No taxis. Again, what would have made me angry and restless a few moths ago didn’t really hit me much. I hung out in my living room, enjoying the unusual fresh air that was coming in from the balcony.

When I finally – not too long later – got into a cab,  it wasn’t for a smooth ride. Traffic was blocked. Broken cars would jam the roads.

Broken, yes. Cars, even expensive imported German cars, break here, when it rains. That is a mystery I will never be able to solve, and a reality I will never believe.

Slowly, I made it to the office. Past pools of mud and rain in which half naked children were -my goodness- playing. Past goats, and cows and calves (cows always seem to multiply, during the monsoon). Past the stray dogs. Past crowds of people seeking shelter under bus stops. And past all the street people that were, instead, just staying there, under the rain that no longer that heavy. Getting wet. With their polyester pants. And their polyester bright saaris.

My drive was like a slow-motion tour of the chaos. Dreadful but somewhat wonderful.

It made me remember something I was told about India, way before I moved here: “There’s so much life, there. So much. Most of times, there isn’t much more than that – a lot of life. And it’s beautiful”.

And it is – beautiful. In the only way I have ever experienced in which beautiful has nothing – nothing at all – to do with pretty.

Of animals that believe to be other animals (and of people who find it normal)

Picture by someone else

I was in Ladakh a few weeks ago. It’s the most incredible place I have ever seen in my life. I reached it by jeep from Manali, driving over the highest (and scariest) motorable road in the world. My car crossed streams on the edge of the mountains, climbed up above 5000 meters and jumped and bumped on roads that you can’t really call such, while the landscape around became progressively deserted. Ladakh is a high altitude desert.

At a point my car drove up and up along the side of a mountain, and when it reached the peak I was naturally expecting a descent. Instead, it was like the entire valley had come up: on the other side of the peak there was a huge flat desert, and while the altitude sickness made my head lighter, I felt like I was on the moon, for I had never imagined a place like that could exist on Planet Earth.

This just to give you a vague idea.

Anyway, while in Ladakh I visited the Nubra Valley, which is a desert. Above 3000 meters. A real desert, with sand dunes.

On that desert it rained, while I was there. I saw one rainbow, two rainbows, two rainbows and a half. It felt unreal, as if something – someone – was looking over my life and nodding at the perfection of that very moment.

But back to the real desert. There are real camels there, too. Bactrians not dromedaries, silk road leftovers with two humps, a furry head and a funky smell. They hang out in a group, right at the beginning of the sand dunes, and wait for tourist to go ride them.

Funny animals, those camels. Lazy. When they’re not carrying anyone they lay down and roll on the ground until, with their belly up, they release the biggest farts. Loud, hilarious camel farts.

It’s funny and almost cute (if you can say cute of something that involves a fart). A group of camels lazying about, chewing on grass, rolling around. Some twenty camels, small, big, and very big.

Twenty camels, and a donkey.

A donkey, yes. He hangs out with the camels, shares the slow life of the group, only he doesn’t carry tourists around because they don’t find it interesting enough (their bad, I say, because donkeys are very cute creatures, with those eyes).

And – this is the story I heard – he believes he’s a camel. Same laziness, same rolling around, (almost) same farts. The camel owners don’t seem bothered by the stranger: if the donkey feels like a camel, he has the right to live as one.

This reminded me of a similar story, which is the first funny Indian story I heard when I moved here.

As everyone knows, there’s no better place in the world than India, if you’re a cow. You’re respected, somewhat worshiped, and people really do take care of you. So much that there is a thing called Gaushala, which is a home for “retired” cows, that are old and no longer make milk.

One of this Gaushala is right outside Delhi, and I had just landed in India when a friend told me about it. I must say the thought of a shelter exclusively for cows amused me quite a bit back then, whereas now it feels like another of those Indian things that are just normal, even if maybe they aren’t.

Anyway, I asked whether the shelter seriously only admitted cows. My friend confirmed that yes, only cows were allowed. Well, with one exception.

In the shelter, together with all those cows, lived a deer. Just one.

Because the deer believed he’s a cow.

And the people at the shelter respected that. If you feel like you’re cow you should be free to behave like a cow, live with cows, and be treated like a cow even if you don’t look like one.

It’s not bad, is it, for a conservative country?

Slippers in Delhi

Black, cheap, dusty summer footwear. In this city, it has a life of its own.

I see a slipper, alone in the middle of the busy street. It’s melted by the sun and flattened by hundreds of cars, bikes, autos, cows, eventually elephants running over it.

And I see a slipper, alone, hanging from auto-rickshaws or trucks’ bumpers. A lace around its tip, it swings back and forth, it jumps up and down, exhausted and weak in the noisy traffic.

I wonder. Are they two heart-broken half-apples? Did they use to match, were they walking side by side, until one disappeared, leaving a naked foot and an inconsolable partner behind? Which destiny happened first, if ever the two were connected, the hanged’s or the run-over’s?

Look in the middle of the road, for a wandering slipper. And under the bumper of the truck you’re stuck behind, for a hanging one. A trivial Romeo and Juliet that Shakespeare’s feet will never care about.

Where have you been all this time?

Behind this.

The India Tube

Part magazine, part community, part media gallery, The India Tube is a space for everything that’s incredible about India. With its daily updates, it’s the directory for the inspiring and the unbelievable, the cutting edge and the bizarre. We have new stories and pictures every day, go check it out!

Holi hai.

And then, it was Holi.

Holi is the festival of colors, which of course is way too innocuous as a definition.

Sure, colors, how sweet. To celebrate the arrival of the spring, how cute. Except there is nothing cute, or sweet, about Holi.

Holi is primitive, animal. But purely, supremely, insanely fun.

Holi is wild. It’s a huge street-fight in which colors are the weapons. People throw colored powders and liquids, made of god-knows-what, at each other. Buckets filled with yellow, red, blue, green (often mixed together in a nice brown)  liquids become the shower, of the day. A shower everyone ends up taking way too often.

Better be prepared. You don’t want to be covered in blue and have nothing to fight back with, because nothing more than that would make you feel a loser. You’ll regret, I know I did, not to have invested in that water gun connected to a backpack/tank.

Most people add insanity to Holi by drinking bhang lassi, a milk based drink thickened with fruits and enriched with cannabis. Yes, laves and flowers from female cannabis plant. Which here is sold as a mouth freshener. That makes people high. And Shiva happy (people drink it to honor him).

In Indian families, even grannies drink bhang. And they play holi. Dancing in their perfectly plited saris, high, even old ladies throw colors at each other. Old ladies play, in a restrictive, male centered, judgemental society. Which of course is one of those “in India only”inconsistend and truly wonderful things.

So what happens on holi is you cover youself in oil (colors stain the skin), put on your clean and hopefully disposable clothes, and get out. And a few hours later, you, and all the people around you, look like this:

(Thanks Emilia for the picture)

Which, of course, doesn’t mean it’s over.

This picture has actually been taken quite early in the day. After that there have been baths in a swimming pool in which every swimmer had discarded a bit of color (you don’t want to see that). Mud fights (thank-god-not-me). A few kilometers walk to hop on a rickshaw at the end of a congested road. An expedition to a neighboring state because Delhi is dry on Holi. And more, more, more colors. More dancing. More screaming. More running. More laughing. Did I say more colors?

And then, finally, there has been the longest shower I’ve ever had. After which, thanks to the riddiculous amount of Vaseline that was covering my hair since the morning, I had only a few red and green wisps. Being blond on Holi is no easy business.

Now, a week later, even the last fuchsia stain is gone from my back. And even the green that was contouring my nails has disappeared.

My whole body is back to white. Ready to be stared at for the next twelve months.

It’s funny, isn’t it, the the only day I haven’t caught anyone’s attention has been the one I was going around with my face and hair covered in blue and red color?

Z for /zɛd/

India, English is British English.

Colour. Analyse. Fulfil. Centre. Catalogue. Mediaeval. Cheque. Licence. Judgement. Excelling. Pyjamas. Spoilt. Aubergines.

It’s not weird, it’s refreshing. For 1.2 billion people, American spelling, and words, and -in the end- language count nothing. And the language has a nice vintage and classy feel. Just like vests. Or polo. Or a gentleman (he’s not a man, nor a guy).

British English – of fifty years ago- just makes people sound nice, and polite. Just like /zɛd/ sounds so much better than /ziː/. It’s more proper, in a way.

Of course, the truth behind this /zɛd/thing is that I have nothing to say about Z.

Z for nothing. No ending. No closure. Call it imperfection. I call it potential.

It took me almost one year, and the whole alphabet, to walk my way to a scary, wonderful love for India.  A love that’s lucid and fool at the same time.

I should have known better. Yet here I am, thinking this place is just beautiful, in a way that has nothing to do with pretty.

And I am glad, oh so glad, that there’s no Z. That my India is still open ended.

Just like this:

Y for the five Y

I wish I had something interesting to say about the Y. I really wish, and I say it with all the guilt of a western girl in India who is too lazy to do Yoga for more than a couple of weeks in a row. Give me one more year, and I might provide a serious Y for Yoga for the pleasure f all of you, my friends who come here and to go A for Ashram-ing.

Meanwhile, I’ll dedicate this post to something that any tourist knows very well. But something that never ceases to amaze me, and I will never stop to find irresistibly cute.

As journalism has the five 5, India has -at least- five Y. They are questions that your daily life must answer to make any sense.

1. Yes madam/sir? – Yes is not an answer. It’s a question. This question: “How can I sell you something you don’t want nor need and possibly ask you for twice the right price?” (Actually, despite what I said a few lines above, this question isn’t cute, nor amazing. Just annoying, but in a funny sort of way).

2. You from? or, extended version, You from which country? –  Any answer will lead to a smile and an appreciative “Oooh”, followed by a repetition of the name of your country. If you come from Italy, as I do, most time the “Ooooh” will  be followed by a “Sonia Gandhi also”.

3. Your good name? – No, this question doesn’t mean: choose the good one of all the names you have. And it is not an advanced compliment to your name. Good name just means name, and if someone knows where this expression comes from, I’d be happy to know.

4. You are husband/wife? – The question is not if you are a husband or a wife, it’s if you have one. Needless to say, the right answer is “Yes”. But feel free to be as honest as you want.

5. You’re having how many children? – Pretty straightforward, but the question doesn’t refer to future offspring. It’s about how many children you have. At the moment. And again, it’s up to you how honest you want to be.

So prepare answers for question 2 to 5, and a lot of patience to deal with question number 1 and you’ll be set to have many interesting conversations. Of course, the interesting part comes when you ask the questions back: the interviewer is most of the times much more interesting than yourself. No offence, it might just be exhotic charme.

X for X-ray, twopassportpicturesplease, and a lot of attempts at security

Maintaining security in a country of over a billion people is obviously no piece of cake. And the way India deals with it reflects two of the strongest forces in this country: boureaucracy and individualism.

I’ll begin with individualism, which here is much different from our western faber-est-quisque. It is not about concentrating all the energies on yourself to achieve some goal, it’s about taking the uttermost care of your family, your friends, your stuff without paying any attention to whoever and whatever is out of your own business.

I am not talking about egoism, but of a very complicate balance of love and egoism, that Indians master to perfection. Because, actually, Indians love to love. So they will ignore you, try and get your place in a line, scam you in a shop and so on, if they don’t know you. No courtesy rule applies. But if they make a minimal connection with you, if they get to know your “good name”, then you become, right away, their good friend.  And they would be ready to starve themselves to make sure you get a proper meal. It’s a paradoxical, but I guess it’s the result of the struggle for survival amongst millions.

The way this applies to security is: everyone thinks for himself. Roads are insane, checking in train stations are almost nonexistent, because they technically belong to none. But in front of every mall, theater, hotel there is a metal detector, a few (unarmed) security guards, and sometimes a x-ray machine. Do you want to bring your helmet inside a cinema? Forget that. Keeping your laptop case with you in the supermarket? No way. Sorry sir, sorry madam, it’s the rule.

Of course there is a metal detector at the entrance of every market. But it doesn’t really work. Because the market, really, belongs to none. But, inside that same market, most of the stores will ask you to deposit your shopping bags at the entrance, ad after a purchase you will get up to three receipts: one for yourself, one for the guy who hands you the purchases, and one for the security guard at the exit.

Try and enter the airport without a printed copy of your ticket. Just try. Tell the guard at the entrance everything about paper waste, and confirmation numbers, and passengers lists. Seriously, try. If you’re lucky, the guard will go through the passengers lists of all the flights taking off from the airport, and you can just hope that he will find your name, and that it will be correctly spelled. It might take a while. You might miss your flight.

Now, this request for printed stuff leads to point number two: bureaucracy. No, it deserves a capital, Bureaucracy. From getting a simcard replaced to making a wire transfer from your bank account, everything requires an insane amount of paperwork. In at least three copies. Passport pictures are needed continuously in the most improbable situations, and in multiple copies. Just venture inside any government building: you’ll find rooms, walls, columns of papers.

To give an example, if you loose your phone and want your number back, you need to present a police report. You lost it abroad? No problem, just present an Indian Police report. But you lost it abroad, what has Indian Police to do with it? No problem, go to the police station. Ask for a report. Then come back. With passport. And passport pictures. Multiple.

Another example. The way wire transfers work in most of the countries is: you enter your online bank account, and make the transfer. Sometimes, you need to confirm the transaction online.

Here, you fill four forms. In three copies: one for you, one for the bank, the other for who-knows-who. They will ask you to write the same information (stuff such as account number, reason of the transfer) up to four times. Then, a smiling clerk will hand you a list. A list of documents you have to provide to make the transfer: three salary slips, a letter in which you write that you can support yourself without the money you are transferring out, and a letter from your company saying you work for them and make this much every month. Try and tell them you already deposited the same letter, and the contract, when you opened the account. No, really try. Maybe I’m just being unlucky, here.

Once I asked where all that paperwork goes, when it leaves the bank. Because it obviously can’t fit in the branch. Answer? They end up in a town, not too far away, which is full of warehouse, existing with the only purpose of containing paperwork. A whole town. It sounds so surreal that, of course, I fully expect it to be true.

Can you imagine that place? Something inside me really wants to see it. And something else is just terryfied by the very thought of it. And, I would say, rightfully so.

W for Wedding

And here I am, finally, talking about big-fat-incredible Indian weddings.

Ever since I moved here, I have been desperate for an invitation to a Indian wedding. It hasn’t happened yet.

During wedding season, Delhi roads were constantly congested with cars driving to wedding venues, party marquees popped up everywhere just like mushrooms, and music and fireworks went on till late at night. Yet, I somehow managed to knew only the few people in town who were NOT going to get married this season.

Having no other choice, I crashed a couple wedding.

Fully equipped with saari, camera and smile, I went to one of those huge party hoping none would have found the presence of a blond-fair-foreigner girl too weird. Luckily enough, none did.

Indian wedding are exactly as huge as you would imagine. No, they actually manage to be bigger.

In one I’ve been to there were – I am not exaggerating –  at least fifty different dishes of Indian (North, South, Veg, Non-veg), Chinese, Continental and Asian cuisine, not to speak about the desserts. There must have been three, maybe four hundreds people there, and everyone kept saying that it was not a big wedding. Flowers were in such insane quantities that I have seen guests walking away with full bouquet in their hands (they’d wither, such a waste!).

Women were wearing insane jewelery, so beautiful and precious that I couldn’t stop staring at them and thinking, more than a little shocked, that those stones were all real.

And in all this circus of colors, silks, flowers, diamonds, gold, henna tattoos, music, lights, fireworks and riding horses, what’s surprising is that during an Indian wedding none really pays attention to the bride and the groom.

They stand almost by themselves, under some canopy, taking care of the myriads of different rites they are supposed to go through before they can call teach other husband a wives. Everybody else somewhere else, too busy chatting, eating, mingling, drinking, gossiping to pay attention to the rituals. Seriously.

At one of the weddings I ended up being the only person (aside from the happy mothers-in-law) standing in front of the groom-and-bride to-be while they were performing the knotting ceremony (please don’t ask me what it is). I watched them for quite a while, and of course they both knew I was not invited to their wedding and they had never seen my face before, but they didn’t ask me to leave. And I took the risk of being kicked out because I felt a bit sorry for them: you should be the attraction on your wedding day, and you deserve at least a complete stranger standing in front of you while you perform the mysterious rituals.

So yeah, what I discovered about Indian weddings is that they really are not about the couple. Which coming to think of it makes sense, because to begin with they are not supposed to be about love, or romance, or passion. Marriages here should be about joining two families, and that’s absolutely reflected in the (several) receptions. A weddings is an occasion, THE occasion for families to show off, and you can be sure they’ll do it as best they can. They will happily spend every rupee they can on the party (or rather parties), which will be huge, and last much beyond exhaustion.

So my suggestion is: if you are in India during wedding season, wrap all your good wishes and crash a reception (possibly one where people dance a lot!). Everybody is welcome to an Indian wedding. Everybody, including blond Italian girls, clumsily wrapped in silk saaris, who end up spending all their time right next to the buffet table, when they are not staring at the newlyweds.

V for Visa

The Visa chapter of my personal alphabet is a tough one. It is taking me months (months after arriving here) to be completed, and if at the beginning I thought I’d wait for the end of my adventures in the immigrationland before writing about them, but seems like the end has no end.

It all begins when you are in your own country and you apply for an employee visa. If you are lucky, your documents are fine and you’ll get a one-year multiple-entry visa. But if you are from Italy you have no such luck, and even if your documents are fine you’re given a three-month single-entry visa. Which means, they tell you, you have three months time, once in India, to get the immigration office in India to give you a one year visa, and until you make it you can’t leave the country.

You’d better leave soon, your three months started two weeks before, when your visa was issued.

So that stick on your passport means you’ll be stuck in India fighting with beaurocrats for the following three months.

Step 1 – FRRO

The FRRO of Delhi (F for Foreigner, R for Registration, O for Office and the extra R for whatever you can think) is where you register. It’s a crowded place full of immigrants who stay in line and wait for hours until you can give all the right papers and get registered as a resident in India. The first time you get there you normally find out you have only half of the mountain of documents they need, but normally when you go back everything is quite smooth and you get registered.

Step 2 – MHA

Then you have to apply for a visa extention, because you need to be in the country for one year, not three months. For that you have to go to the Minister of Home Affairs. This is how it works: you enter and line up in a small quite crowded office where they give pass to enter the office you actually need to go. With that paper you get to the appication office, feel a form that they give to you, you stand because you are scared by the dirth accumulated on the chairs covered with thick once-pink fabric, and you wait.

After a while a guy calls your name and you have an interview with him. He checks what you want, asks you questions such as “Why didn’t you apply for a one-year visa and only for a three monts one?”. And when you show him the recepit of your application and tell him that is exactly what you applied to but they only give three months visa in Italy he replies “You shouldn’t have come to India then”. After saying so he writes down something on a paper and tells you to come back at 4.30 in the afternoon.

You wish you could ask why, or what’s going to happen, but as everything else you’ll have to guess your way through it because, as one big sign says “It’s forbidden to ask the officials for information”.

So you go back at 4:30 pm imagining of meeting the guy, instead there’s just a big crow around a desk. Following your instinct, you get closer. A lady asks what is your name and handles you a sealed envelope that you will have to give to the FRRO (see step 1). You walk out and are about to open the envelope when a guy stops you telling that NO, you can’t open it, you have to keep the envelope closed and bring it to the FRRO where they will open it.

The content of the envelope says if you win – got your visa – or not.

You feel like in a TV show and wonder if you picked the right envelope. But you’ll have to wait till the following episode to know.

So Step 3 – FRRO

The following fine morning, you get in line at the FRRO again, and give your precious envelope to the guy who’s in charge of opening it. He opens and, WRONG ANSWER. The envelope contains a mysterious extention of your visa of another month.

And for an extra month you can’t leave the country.

Guess where you have to go to ask that at least they change your visa so that you can leave the country?

Step 4 – MHA

I won’t continue. But two months after getting back I am still playing the envelope game, and my visa still says that I’ll have to leave in one month.

Fun, isn’t it?