Never get too romantic about this place, I am told as I get here. I try to obey and keep my disenchant about this reality. It’s so true: even to my ever-so-cynical eyes India has its charm, and sometimes I really feel on the edge of romance.
But I have a trick that really keeps me from falling down the this-place-is-magic hill . Anytime I am feeling too comfortable I open my eyes and, anywhere I look, I can see it.
The one unbearable thing -worse even than dust – that makes this place just so hard for me to live in: filth.
It takes a very short time in India to understand – very, very clearly – that no animal as the human being can make such a nasty mess of the world around. Filth is so overwhelming that often just makes me want to scream and cry.
The open gutters, the garbage that blocks the sewers and floats around when it rains, the men peeing anywhere, the people squatting on the side of the street, the increasing level of stench to which you have to get used (traffic, human wastes and, if it wasn’t enough animals’ ones): it’s just too much, it surprises me and shocks me every day.
There’s so much trash in the streets that cows, who often hang in the garbage bin and eat straight from there, were found to have up to 50kg of plastic bags in their belly, last year.
But dirt is even more disturbing inside: it’s the protagonist where you work, shop, eat, travel. And what, above that all, is so hard to understand is the way most people deal (or don’t) with it. As if it was normal, natural. It doesn’t seem to bother most of them. They walk barefoot on the dirtiest floor, if it’s inside a temple, they let their kids playing on the road, sit next to the garbage and even – for the poorest of the poor – play in the giant mud puddles that invade the city roads during the rains.
They are immune, or probably just used to it: they simply wash themselves a lot, they are able to wash the filth away. It’s a mental condition: if you feel clean after a bath or a shower, no matter how nasty is the bathroom where you took it, you are safe.
Otherwise, like me, you keep struggling, you keep getting mad at the reality around you, at the way the people seem careless, or naturally adapted.
And feeling a little dirty after every shower here, no matter how clean is the bathroom you took it in.
