Urban India overwhelms the senses. The
noise, the aromas, the heat, the glare, the press of the crowds day and night –
nowhere else on Earth can compare with it. I once caught a train to Jaipur, the
“pink city” of arid Rajasthan state, that left Delhi at four in the morning. A
deliberate choice, since our train car did not have air conditioning, and we
wanted to arrive before the full heat of the day was upon us (“us” being me and
three colleagues from the High Commission). Despite the early hour, the streets
of old Delhi were bustling. Not as congested as they would become a few hours
later, but nonetheless busier than I could have ever imagined. Where the throngs
of people were coming from or going to I could only guess.
Bread to feed the poor at a Sikh temple in Delhi, 1992
I’ve already gotten ahead of myself. Back
to the beginning: in January 1992 I was preparing to be posted out to Hong Kong
in April. In the meantime, the visa section in New Delhi was shorthanded, so I
was sent to India to help out until March. The work was not especially interesting,
mostly just clearing a backlog of family-sponsored visa applications that had
built up. There were a few moments of excitement – I interviewed one elderly man
for about twenty minutes in my claustrophobic office before a registry clerk
dashed in with a medical report saying the old fellow had a serious case of
tuberculosis. I had a fairly straightforward weekday routine: a High Commission
driver would pick me up at my hotel in the morning, I’d interview visa
applicants all morning, have lunch at poolside, do more interviews in the
afternoon, and then be driven back to the hotel to eat, sleep, and repeat.
The High Commission is an enormous walled
compound, containing not only the chancery and visa offices, but also townhouse-style
accommodations for Canadian staff with children, the aforementioned swimming
pool, tennis courts, a clubhouse, and probably a bunch of other facilities I
never made use of. Things were quiet and peaceful inside the compound. Outside
the walls – especially the one that provides access to the visa section – was
India in all its chaos. Crowds of people would be coming and going, vendors
sold snacks and drinks and all manner of other things, untended cattle browsed
through piles of debris. The hotel where I stayed was like the High Commission
compound in miniature; a quiet, walled-in oasis that seemed to be just barely
keeping the rest of India at bay.
On weekends I went off to explore India,
usually with my friend and colleague Joe, who was also on temporary assignment
there. Our first expedition was the same one millions of tourists do each year
– to see the Taj Mahal. Perhaps the only thing more amazing than the Taj itself
is that across the river is the foundation for a second Taj, intended to be a
mirror image of the first but in black marble. Before it could be built, the
Mughal emperor Shah Jahan who had commissioned it was killed by his son, who
rightly feared the empire would be bankrupted by further construction. While in
Agra I also got to visit nearby Fatehpur Sikri, a gorgeous city built in the 16th
century to be capital of the Mughal empire, only to be soon abandoned due to
lack of water.
I’ve already alluded to another weekend
exploration, to Jaipur, like the Taj an important tourist destination. It’s
famous for its pink sandstone buildings, its hilltop fortress, the Palace of
the Winds, and the Jantar Mantar - an amazing astronomical research complex
built in the early 1700s. While in Jaipur I picked up some nasty variety of
giardia or dysentery, probably at a restaurant. The symptoms started to hit me
Monday morning at work, where my colleagues said, “Uh oh, you look like you
have the amoebas”, a generic slang for any serious gastro-intestinal ailment,
typically treated with a strong dose of amoebicide pills obtained from the High
Commission doctor. I spent the next 72 hours in my hotel room. For the first 24
I felt like I was going to die, and wouldn’t have cared had I done so. The next
48 I mostly just slept. For over a year afterwards I would still get periodic
recurrences. In case you’re wondering how one gets “the amoebas”, they’re
transmitted the fecal-oral route. That is, I ate some food that contained
traces of human feces. Yum!
My next trip once I was back on my feet was
the one I was most looking forward to: a visit to Corbett National Park in the
Himalayan foothills to look for tigers. When I was a kid, I was addicted to
nature documentaries, especially Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Seeing a tiger
in the wild was one of my life’s dreams. It came true, but not on that first
visit to India. Joe and I did manage to see a great deal of other wildlife in
the park, but no stripes. We went out in the jungle in jeeps, on elephant back,
and on foot, but the closest we got was a set of pug marks (tracks) made by a
young tigress a few hours before we came along. The Indian jungle was cool and
quiet, the loudest noise coming from the peacocks that lived near the huts
where we stayed. It was a welcome respite from Delhi.
Pug marks of a young tigress, Corbett National Park, 1992
Three years later I returned to India on
holidays, this time with my wife. Having learned my lesson about the amoebas,
we ate only two meals a day, one in the morning, one at night, mainly piping
hot vegetarian curries, and drank only beer and lemon-line soda. We had no tummy
troubles, and the food was fantastic. Speaking of food, in Delhi we visited the
city’s largest Sikh temple and witnessed an amazing sight. Each day volunteers
from the temple feed thousands of hungry people who appear at the gates. They
were fed at long communal tables in shifts of several hundred, each person receiving
a bowl of dal and some homemade flatbread. Our host explained to us that Sikh
temples are obliged by their scriptures to feed and shelter anyone in need. A
New Zealander friend later told me she had once backpacked alone around India
for several weeks, and any time she found herself in a strange town with
nowhere safe to stay she would find the Sikh temple and ask to set up her
bedroll on the floor. She was never refused and was always treated to a hot
meal.
It was on that second visit that I finally
saw my tiger. We went to Sariska National Park, located along the main highway
between Delhi and Jaipur. We had received mixed reports; some people claimed
there were still tigers in the park, others saying the big cats had all been
poached years earlier. We stayed in a former hunting palace inside the park
boundaries. In the early evening a driver took us in an open jeep along dirt
tracks in search of tigers. On a small ridge we passed three men, poor day
labourers walking home to a nearby village. We had driven no more than a few
hundred meters past them when my wife gasped and pointed. An enormous male
tiger was moving quickly through the bushes alongside the track, away from the
men. We followed the red blur in the jeep and it became evident what had
happened. The men had flushed a large male sambur (a type of deer) as they were
walking along, which the tiger – who had been laying up somewhere nearby – was
now stalking. We drove along to a raised spot from which we were able to watch
the tiger dash across the road and confront the sambur in a clearing below us.
After a brief standoff, the sambur turned and fled into the bush, and with a
roar the tiger disappeared after it. The whole encounter lasted less than a
minute, but it was worth the return visit to India. By the end of the 1990s
there were no more tigers left in Sariska; we had seen one of the last ones.
Amusing sign at entrance to Corbett National Park, 1992
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