by Dave Prager
In familiar company, with friends at a bar or family at a restaurant, chalo takes on an even greater depth. That’s when everyone exhorts everyone else at the table with three variations of the command verb form: “chal,” “chalo,” “chaliye.” “Let’s go, dude,” “Come, my friend,” and “Oh, good mister sir, would you be so kind as to commence this journey?” This grab bag of verb forms and respect levels combines familiarity and ironic formality, and those three words echo around the table as everyone meets everyone’s eyes and agrees that it’s indeed time to go. In all our time in the city, no three Delhiites were ever seen to stand up from a table without a rousing chorus of chal-verb variations all around.
I was told by my friend Sandeep that using verb forms to respect status and indicate politeness may only be useful in certain parts of the country. “In Mumbai,” he told me, “we all just say ‘chalo,’ and we indicate politeness by how many curse words we include in the sentence.”
The second critical Hindi phrase for the Delhi traveler is “theek hai.” Pronounced almost with a hard “T” sound as if talking about a lovely teak table, it’s just as easily articulated by a mush-mouthed American as “tee-kay.” And that’s convenient, because it translates almost exactly like “okay” in American English. How are you? Theek hai. It’s the stock answer to any salutation; but it’s also quite useful for concluding transactions, signifying acceptance, and communicating satisfaction. Theek hai, I agree to that price. Theek hai, I’m happy with this mango. Theek hai, I slipped on cow poop and knocked my head on the ground but I’m just fine, thanks for asking. In a country of body language so inscrutable that an affirmative nod can look like a dismissive chin jerk, “theek hai” works as both a question and an answer when body language isn’t clear. “Fifty rupees, theek hai?” “Fifty rupees, theek hai.”
Our third and most indispensable Hindi word is “bhaiya.” While it translates literally into “elder brother,” it’s used to politely hail any strange man as the Hindi equivalent of “Excuse me, sir,” or to address him in mid-conversation.
It’s innocuous piece of vocabulary, in other words. Until it’s wielded by an Indian woman. In their hands, “bhaiya” is a weapon of coercion unparalleled in Western linguistics.
Jenny observed the power of “bhaiya” while watching friends negotiate with autos, seeing housewives beat down a stubborn vegetablewallah, and studying clever co-workers as they convinced recalcitrant art directors to meet impossible deadlines. A woman takes a simple “bhaiya”—“buy-yaa,” as it’s transliterated—and bends it around the fulcrum of the “y,” modulating the final syllable to do her dastardly bidding.
Making it short and sharp expresses contempt. (“Who do you think I am to quote me such a price?”) Adding a long, upward-fluctuating suffix feigns shock. (“You would take such advantage of the sweet, innocent girl standing so humbly before you?”) And when a woman gives it an angry cadenza up and down three different octaves—think John Coltrane at the end of Giant Steps, an animal howl, a fire from a woman’s belly that can singe the quivering beedi right out of the hapless auto driver’s mouth—“bhaiya” chastens even the most determined foe. A well-wielded “bhaiya” convinces a man that this woman’s outrage has reached his mother’s shamed ears back in his village, and that his long-departed ancestors are preparing all the lightning in hell to descend upon his head should he not drop ten rupees off his price.
Even as we practiced our Hindi on others (and even as Jenny learned to wield a passable “bhaiya” of her own), other people practiced their English on us. This included auto drivers shouting conversation from the front seat to office boys shyly relaying messages from the finance department. We were happy to indulge anyone who made the effort—including the cursing boy we met on a walk just beyond the northwest reaches of the Old City. The chaotic lanes had given way to streets at right angles that nevertheless retained the capacity for surprise: an ice factory? a cluster of stores selling supplies for science teachers? a tree draped with movie film that, upon close examination, revealed frame after frame of Shah Rukh Khan? On one of those streets, a boy on a bicycle pedaled furiously towards us, slowing as he came near and whispering as he slipped by: “Fuck!”
He braked after a dozen feet. He put his feet down and turned to gauge our reaction. He was eight years old, his hair neatly combed, riding a new bicycle that still had its factory shine. Jenny and I kept walking; and the boy, emboldened by our lack of anger and the fact that we showed no signs of chasing him, reversed direction and tentatively pedaled by again, still a few deliberate feet beyond arm’s reach. “Fuck you!” he whispered, this time with more confidence.
Laughing out loud, we continued walking. He circled around for another pass.
“I want to fuck you!”
This time we gasped, and our reaction clearly pleased him. He stopped behind us with a smug look on his face.
“Me?” I asked, pointing to my own chest in mock horror.
“Yes!” he hollered. Then he stood on his pedals and launched himself down the street behind us. When we looked after him, he had stopped once more and was clearly deliberating with himself. Finally, his deliberations ended, and we could hear him approaching from behind yet, gravel crunching beneath his tires. This time he was shouting: “I want to fuck you-oooo!”
“Me?” I asked him once more. “Are you sure?”
He skidded to a halt, took a deep breath, and then screamed loud and high and sustained, “Yeeesssssss!!!” His shout trailed off into cackles, and then he rode around a corner and was gone.
Being cursed at on the street didn’t bother us. In fact, it kind of made us homesick for New York.
Just like we closely studied Delhi culture, so too did we mimic the attitudes of the New Yorkers around us when we first moved there. We quickly learned the importance of the “subway stare,” in which we’d keep our eyes focused blankly in front of us no matter what a militant preacher might be screaming nor what a musty hobo is doing in his pants. Above ground, we honed our ability to match surly gum-chewing drugstore cashiers sigh for melodramatic sigh. We came to relish bicycling over the Brooklyn Bridge solely for the opportunity to shout at tourists who strayed into the bike lane. And we exalted in hollering “Exkooze me!” at anyone blocking the subway doors, affecting Brooklyn accents we may or may not have practiced in front of the mirror.
Outsiders generally interpret the New York attitude as offensive. But as we learned to project it, we also came to understand its artificiality. The New York City attitude is a deterrence. It’s a pantomime. It’s adopted simply to encourage muggers and perverts to find other victims. And it’s wholly superficial: once an interaction progresses to the point where a New Yorker understands that you’re not intending to mug or grope, the pantomime ends, the subway stare focuses, and the friendly New Yorker eagerly explains which subways go to 59th Street. There’s nothing a New Yorker loves more than telling a tourist which subway to take.
But even though Delhi is twice as big as New York, we never felt any big city attitude from its residents. Delhiites were overwhelmingly friendly to us. Perhaps that’s because New Yorkers each see themselves as the lead actor in a play with eight million cast members, so every interaction implies commensurate drama. The isolation of Delhi’s neighborhoods, on the other hand, means that people relate to the larger city with a small-town attitude: suspicious of outsiders, but welcoming to foreigners.
Whatever the reason, Delhiites were overwhelmingly polite and engaging with us. They’d smile, they’d say hello as we walked by, and they’d stop us for impromptu conversations. And they were eager to help us whenever they thought we needed assistance. Like when Jenny was waiting for the fruitwallah in the market to attend to her: one lady interpreted Jenny’s patience as paralysis and took it upon herself to negotiate on Jenny’s behalf. She barked a series of rapid and forceful Hindi phrases, gesturing dramatically at Jenny and her pomegranates as if to say, “You dare represent the whole of Mother India to
this innocent tourist by charging fifty rupees for your lousy fruit?” Jenny was embarrassed as passers-by stopped to watch the exchange, but she didn’t protest too much—after a flawlessly executed “bhaiya!” finished off the lady’s harangue, Jenny ended up spending half of what she’d expected to on her produce.
The helpfulness of Delhiites was extremely useful when we were lost or when we were being harassed by a beggar we just couldn’t shake. But there were also times when well-intentioned citizens would step in and accidentally make things worse. They’d appear from nowhere to berate an auto driver for offering what seemed like a perfectly acceptable fare to us, shaming him into a lower price that ensured we’d have an argument at the other side of the journey. Or they’d insist to the driver that the foreigner was obviously confused, and that she surely meant “Hauz Khas Village” every time she said “Hauz Khas Market.” One police officer grew angry that Jenny and I had to negotiate with autos at all. Seeing us bargain with a driver outside Basant Lok market, he dashed over and pointed his beating stick menacingly at the meter. The driver swallowed and nodded, and the cop saluted us with satisfaction as the driver glumly drove us on our way.
But we knew what would happen next: the driver would go the long way to run up the meter. Not keen on visiting both Tughlaqabad Fort and the Delhi Ridge on our way back to Hauz Khas, I waited until we were out of sight to lean forward and suggest a flat rate. The driver brightened, switched off the meter and swung a quick U-turn to head in the actual direction of our destination. All three of us ducked our heads as we passed the indignant officer.
We tried to appreciate everyone who helped us. But there were times when our New York attitudes would reflexively assert themselves before we could stop them. Rudeness wasn’t our intention; it’s just that after eight years in New York City, rudeness was our instinctual response. Sometimes we’d snap at people brushing past us on the sidewalk before recalling the different standards of personal space. Or we’d sigh dramatically at cashiers who didn’t attend to us with a New Yorker’s haste. Or, as happened when one old man slipped past me as we dawdled at the entrance to the India International Trade Fair, my mouth reacted before my brain did, letting loose with an “Exkooze me!” that would inspire Marty Markowitz to name a street in Park Slope after me.
The old man jumped a mile and bowed an apology as deep as the East River, and I was flooded with a sense of shame that I’d never felt after shouting at the elderly back in New York.
We understand that our impression of Delhiites was unique because we are foreign: Indian tourists may have an entirely different sense of the Delhi attitude than we do. Although it can’t be that bad, because we saw plenty of Indian tourists visiting their capital city. There’s a middle-class India that thrives far beyond Saket Select Citywalk Mall, we learned, and many of them are just as interested in their nation’s attractions as we are. And as they’d come to Delhi from around the region, these domestic tourists had the same goals that we foreign tourists did: they wanted to take pictures of things they can’t see at home.
But while our list includes sidewalk tailors and roadside shrines, their list includes Western tourists like us. So as we’d rest in the shade at the Red Fort or Jama Masjid, it wasn’t unusual for a mother to place a baby in our lap and a father to take our picture. Nor was it unusual for mustachioed middle-aged men to start conversations that always culminated in photo requests. (‘From which place?’ they’d ask with a genuine interest never shown by jaded Saket Citywalkers. ‘You like India? Yes? Take picture?’) Gangs of college-age girls would crowd around us, giggling as they’d stroke Jenny’s hair, give us their email addresses and invite us to visit their hometowns. Only teenage boys rarely approached us directly. Instead, they’d walk by while pretending to scrutinize an SMS as pretext for holding their phones at picture-snapping angles.
(Our worst experience with teenage boys was at Jama Masjid, the city’s central mosque. They’d loiter at the top of the forty-meter minaret, watching for female tourists to enter below. Then they’d file down the claustrophobic stairwell as their victim climbed up, their hands held innocently at a level that just happened to be perfect for surreptitious breast-brushing.)
At first we were offended by all this unwanted attention. We wondered how people could be so rude as to take pictures of us as if we had been posed there by the Ministry of Tourism. Jenny initially made sport of teasing the men who approached her, agreeing to “take a picture” and then pulling out her own camera and snapping shot after shot of the baffled men until they left her alone. Sometimes we’d scowl and chastise people who approached us with their cameras at the ready.
But as time went on, and our own photo album swelled with pictures of vegetable vendors, wandering sadhus and streetside omelette makers, we realized how hypocritical we were being. If we found the people around us to be fascinating, beautiful and photo-worthy—subjecting them to the sudden blink of our black lens and then disappearing without so much as a moment of eye contact—it was disingenuous not to accept ourselves as objects of equal interest. We vowed to happily accept photo requests from that moment onward, putting broad grins on our faces while anybody who pleased put their arms around our shoulders and stared into the cameras. We made ourselves equally open to the people who just wanted to shake our hands, even those who seemed more interested in shaking Jenny’s hands than my own.
After some time, we realized that it was much nicer when people asked permission to take our photo as opposed to when they attempted paparazzi-style photos from afar. Which taught us that we owed our own photographic subjects the same consideration. Instead of suddenly stopping, snapping and speeding off, we began requesting permission for pictures and then thanking our subjects and showing them the output on the screen. Not only did that make our interactions with people more satisfying, but our photos got better as well.
Though we knew very little about India before we moved there, we’d always heard that religion was an integral part of the culture. So it was nice that Diwali—which, along with Holi, is one of the most widely celebrated Hindu holidays in north India—came less than a week after we settled in Hauz Khas. My office held a pooja, which gave us our first up-close experience with Hinduism, including getting our foreheads marked with red and orange paste and red threads tied around our wrists. (We proudly wore those threads until they fell off as proof that we were having more authentic experiences than all the other barewristed Western tourists.) We also attended a pooja at my co-worker Shweta’s home, where we learned that the prayers were just prelude to Diwali’s main event: the fireworks.
When we think of fireworks, we picture America’s Fourth of July displays, which are coordinated by cities and overseen by fire departments. But in Delhi, the responsibility for buying and lighting Diwali fireworks fell to the people. In the days before Diwali, the markets had filled up with so many fireworks that anyone could acquire enough firepower to bring down a tank. And in the nights leading up to Diwali, the skies echoed with sleep-shattering explosions as people previewed their caches.
Diwali itself was beyond anything our eardrums were prepared for.
Explosions began shaking the windows the moment the sun set. The twilight cityscape was transformed into Baghdad during the first night of shock-and-awe. Panicked pigeons flew everywhere. Smoke clouds danced pink and green as colored sparks fountained up from between the trees. Professional-caliber shells exploded far too low for safety. Blasts flashed in the distance and rumbled by seconds later. Tremendous detonations responded from right next door. Most of these fireworks seemed intended not for color or light, but for sound alone, without any visual aesthetics to offset the momentary deafness. As we ate our dinner on Shweta’s terrace, our plates bounced in our laps with every bomb the neighbors set off.
After we helped Shweta’s friends and family unleash their arsenal upon the night, our drive home was a tour through an urban war zone. Our taxi crawled slowly through streets as sudden flashes threw fleeting
humanoid shadows onto the trees. A bomb would explode right in front of us, and our driver would then rush forward before someone could light another in our path. On the main road, the smoke was so thick that visibility could be measured in inches. Headlights would suddenly appear far too close for safety, slashing thin slits through the fog before disappearing into the darkness just a few feet away. It took days for the smoke to clear and for our ears to stop ringing.
And we enjoyed every minute of it.
Jenny and I were raised in the stifling formality of synagogue and church. To us, religious ceremonies were somber and rehearsed affairs. My Saturday morning services were spent singing the exact same prayers in the exact same order, standing and sitting at the same points in the service as we did every other week. There were only two variables: the subject of that week’s Torah passage (which was read in Hebrew, though, so I couldn’t distinguish it from any other week, anyway); and the moral of that week’s sermon (which was generally delivered so drearily that my mind drifted within moments). Jenny’s experience was similar, except everything was in English and her congregation would kneel instead of stand.
In both our cases, our parents put us in our nicest clothes and herded us into the pews where, with the stern glares of which only parents in a house of god are capable, we were warned with no uncertainty to keep our damned mouths shut. In the silences between the prayers, even breathing too loud was enough to attract the wrath of Mom. Woe unto him who sneezed in any moment of serenity: the sound of that transgression would echo off the unforgiving walls while every head in the pew turned to deliver the stink eye.1
These dreary experiences defined what we expected from all religion: forced formality and coerced reverence. And we figured that Hinduism, in all its impenetrable mysticism, would be even more so.
But we were wrong. Never mind the fireworks—the poojas we experienced were a vibrating fusion of songs and chants and symbolism that couldn’t be more different from our own religions. At all the poojas we saw—for consecrating new offices, for celebrating weddings, or even for paying tribute to a god from a sidewalk shrine as we walked by—there was none of the regulated veneration so prevalent in the religions in which we were raised. A congregation would gather loosely around idols or pictures while a pandit chanted and sang, often interrupting himself to tell someone to toss flower petals here or throw puffed rice there. People would wander in and out of the ceremony at whim, chatting with their fellow faithful, answering their mobiles, sending SMSes, and breathing as loudly as they pleased. Anyone not directly engaged in reverence simply went about their business. Unlike our childhood services, where the old ladies would tut-tut at trucks passing on the highway three miles away, nobody seemed to have any problem filtering out the background distractions.