Holy Cow! an Indian Adventure

by Sarah Macdonald

‘Are you getting it, madam? Don’t be shy, laugh your cares away and wake the gods with your noise.’

  I take a deep breath and mime like a Bollywood movie star. Jonathan lets rip a huge laugh that collapses into a fit of giggles. The group looks at him oddly – as if by showing true mirth he’s breaking the rules of forced laughter.

  We head home light-headed and loving our new suburb.

  By June it’s getting too hot to laugh, in fact it’s getting too hot to do anything. Temperatures are hovering between forty-five and forty-eight degrees and I can’t even leave the house. Jonathan travels to Afghanistan where he will require a cool head to secretly film in a land where cameras are illegal. While he’s out of touch for two weeks, I shut myself inside. But there is no escape. The power cuts increase and the airconditioning breaks down. My head feels like it’s full of cottonwool soaked in oil, and I am as weak as Superman struggling with a necklace of Kryptonite. I drag myself around the house and flop onto the couch in a semi-coma. Thoughts drift like light cloud – the moment I try to catch one it dissipates. I adopt the Indian blank-faced straight-ahead stare, as I can’t be bothered to shut my eyes or to focus them. At times it feels like my pupils have been sucked dry and collapsed into withered raisins. Arms too heavy to move, head to heavy to lift, I lie and watch the fan like a placid infant transfixed by a mobile. At times I’m so hot I cry, but the tears evaporate before they reach the corners of my eyes. My Sikh-inspired spiritual strength is melting away and my brain is too fried to meditate. I begin to worship the airconditioner and pray for less power cuts. Outside the Biosphere, those not wealthy enough for coolers, fans or airconditioning are asleep in hot heaps under snatches of shade. The city cooks us slowly.

  At the end of June the rains don’t come. Delhi and Rajasthan are drying up under a crippling drought; the trees are drooping, leaves are shrivelling, and the grass is dying. Everything is coated with a thick layer of desert dust. Tables and chairs, bookcases and floors, carpets and doors, beds and lamps, fridges and stoves, paintings and lamps are all brown. And so am I. At night I wash a putrid paste out of my ears, nose, hair and mouth; it’s a cocktail of dust and chemical residue mixed with a dash of Indian sweat. I now smell like a local as the spices from Rachel’s cooking seep from my skin. Indian sweat has an aroma like nothing else in the world – it’s a sickly sweet mix of onions, turmeric, chilli and chutney. A cloud of thick, tangy perspiration hangs over Delhi, pulled down by the stench of boiling diesel, rotting garbage and fetid drains.

  Then we run out of water. Moolchand may now be able to iron but he cannot wash my cruddy clothes. The water pump screeches in rage as the supply dries up, and a tanker comes to dribble a brown murky stream of ground water into the tank. The shortages are already bringing disease; the papers are reporting more than seventy percent of children have chronic diarrhoea, and there’s a new health hazard on the roads – streams of vomit cascade from bus windows as commuters overheat in their honking saunas.

  At night I turn my face to the east, waiting for that Sydney southerly that smells of salt and freedom; I’m blasted with desert dust and flies. Sometimes after ten p.m., Abe drives me around roundabouts splattered with spread-eagled sleepers and floppy children to take in the Delhi summer show. On a stadium of car roofs, families stand and watch planes land, while small, sweaty, skinny men push carts of melting ice-cream along the strand of spectators.

  The only people immune to the power cuts are the diplomats. I attend some dinner parties in High Commission homes of esky opulence to skol VB and pig out on seafood bought from a special commissary shop. It’s a bizarre scene – full of foreigners attempting to figure out India. I’m beginning to think it’s pointless to try. India is beyond statement, for anything you say, the opposite is also true. It’s rich and poor, spiritual and material, cruel and kind, angry but peaceful, ugly and beautiful, and smart but stupid. It’s all the extremes. India defies understanding, and for once, for me, that’s okay. In Australia, in my small pocket of my own isolated country, I felt like I understood my world and myself, but now, I’m actually embracing not knowing and I’m questioning much of what I thought I did know. I kind of like being confused, wrestling with contradictions, and not having to wrap up issues in a minute before a newsbreak. While the journalist in me is still curious about the world, I’m still not really missing the way my old job confined my perceptions of life. My confinement here is different – I’m trapped by heat and by a never-ending series of juxtapositions. India is in some ways like a fun hall of mirrors where I can see both sides of each contradiction sharply and there’s no easy escape to understanding.

  What’s more, India’s extremes are endlessly confronting.

  Jonathan returns from Afghanistan and we’ve missed each other madly. While we may be living together he’s proving to be away a lot more than I expected. He suggests a weekend in Kesroli in the countryside away from the constantly ringing phone, fax and telex machine. Driving in a heat haze through fields as dry as a cracked heel, we pant and bake, too listless to scream at the near-miss head-on collisions with huge trucks, buses and farting jeeps bursting with a cargo of cooked country folk. The roadside is littered with plastic, dead dogs, stiff cows and the twisted corpses of smashed up metal. The relics of dead trees stand mutilated by villagers’ long blades. Their branches have been hacked for firewood and their knobbly limbs look like the truncated stumps of lepers. At the construction site for a giant concrete Krishna, sweating swamis jump in front of our car, forcing us to stop and take offerings of sugar. Highwaymen who call themselves ‘officials’ hold a rope across the road and demand a ‘safety tax’ or ‘land tax’ or ‘road tax’. We give enough to buy us a blessing and permission to close the window. Our tempers are frayed and our faces bloated and blotched.

  Heat shimmers off a town whose major industry is as a waste dump for shattered enamel basins and toilets. We stay at Kesroli’s four-star hotel set above fields of limp yellow mustard, where women move slowly collecting cow dung and patting it into round, flat cakes they’ll dry in the scorching sun. On the edge of each field are stacks of cow pats modelled into little store-houses for hay. The dried chalets of shit are beautifully carved with patterns of swirling loops and flowers.

  From a turret of the small hotel, which was once a fort palace, we watch the town prepare for dark. In courtyards below, men lie on charpoys chatting and playing cards. The women are herding goats, feeding cows, brushing buffaloes, stacking cow pats, bringing in washing, sweeping, cleaning, lighting fires and cooking meals. The acidic, slightly sweet aroma of a hundred cow poo fires wafts up, intertwined with snatches of sound. Religious music, the laughter of children, the pings of bike bells, the braying of buffaloes, the snarls of mad dogs and some soft singing rise to our ears.

  In the early morning I awake to the throb of a smoking generator. Below our hotel a black pump spurts two jets of water into a square concrete public well with three levels. The men make the top their open-aired change room; they strip down to their undies and disappear behind a frothy lather, then re-emerge bared brown again by the strong jet of cold on their backs. Below them, small nude boys play bombings; hugging their knees to their chests, they leap into the deepest pool, scoring splashes and screaming with joy. They then jump out and run up shivering to bomb again. They soak a young girl on the lowest level; she ignores them as she concentrates on washing her baby brother. She soaps him up, pulls his hands above his head and dunks him; he comes up spluttering but never screaming. Around her, women lather, pummel and slap saris, shirts and suits against the concrete. They carry sodden heavy loads on their heads, hang the clothes on the nearest tree and return to fill the buckets with water. They’ll wash at home, hidden. In many parts of rural India women are forbidden to even shit in daylight let alone wash in public.

  A small boy calls me down from my turret. I’m hardly Rapunzel and he’s no prince but I succumb to his performance. Indians are incredibly friendly to strangers, and it seems it starts you
ng. Down at the well the boy and his friends surround me chatting like chicks – confident and spirited and charmingly candid. The lead ruffian struts like a rooster and brags in Rajasthani Hindi that I find hard to understand but I think he’s telling me about his family, his farm and his friends. As a school bell jingles, he stops suddenly, cocks his head, pulls his uniform over his glistening body and announces boastfully that he and his boys must go now.

  ‘We are going to school, it’s only for boys, no girls like you can come.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘School costs money. Girls can’t be costing for study, they must work.’

  I bury a snarl, shrug and stay with the women.

  A girl aged about ten laughs as I try to help her lift her huge bucket of water onto her head. She then saunters off unbowed with a baby on her hip. She turns, sinewy, strong and divinely gorgeous, and motions me home to meet her mum. I follow.

  It’s only seven o’clock and I’m sweating and slick, panting and putrid. My host looks like she should be in a Vogue model shoot, as long-limbed, dark and beautiful as her daughter. In a concrete bunker of a home decorated with tin cigarette posters we sit on the baked courtyard floor and compare my tiny rings to her huge silver anklets and the bone bracelets that adorn her arms up to her shoulders. She giggles and offers me chai. Her name is Suntre and she’s in constant motion, swinging a tiny baby as she chats, makes tea and rolls roti bread. The courtyard fills with neighbours who pinch my skin, laugh at my Hindi and look sadly at my spiky hair. We compare our days. I’m planning on breakfast and being driven back to Delhi. They will clean their huts, sweep the yards, tend the fields, make lunch, wash down the buffalo, go back to the fields and then return to cook dinner for their husbands.

  ‘Every day is the same, I make chai, I make roti, I work. Our lives are not easy like yours.’

  I nod. ‘What’s your favourite time of the day?’

  Her mother-in-law answers for her: ‘In bed when we’re asleep.’

  ‘Ha,’ the women chorus. ‘Yes.’

  The crowd in the courtyard builds, the heat is stifling, but the conversation becomes more intimate. Suntre tells me she came to Kesroli to be married when she was nine, and now, at the age of twenty-three, she’s the proud mother of four children and two buffaloes.

  ‘And two girls,’ she adds as an aside.

  ‘In Australia, girls are counted as children, too,’ I stammer.

  The women laugh. Then the crowd parts as a neighbour rushes up and thrusts a tiny package into my hands. I’m sweating so much it slips and I nearly drop it. It squeaks. A tiny baby screws its face to mine; it’s an eight-week-old girl, and I’m asked to name her. I choose Priya, after the current pin-up woman of the Indian modelling scene, and because it’s a name I can pronounce. The mother pulls a face, shrugs and Priya is christened. Born in the shadow of a motel that charges one hundred dollars a night, Priya won’t be able to go to a school that costs eight cents a day. I consider taking her home. But she will be happy here. Suntre insists I don’t worry: ‘We are all very happy, we have no other choice.’

  A man appears and breaks up the fun. He speaks in English.

  ‘Of course she is happy.’

  The women scatter.

  ‘And I’ll be telling you why you white people are not happy.’

  He adjusts his penis.

  ‘We Indian people, we look at the people more poor, more low, more hard than us and we be thanking God we are not them. So we are happy. But you white peoples, you are looking at the peoples above you all of the times and you are thinking, why aren’t I be them? Why am I not having that moneys and things? And so you are unhappy all of the time.’

  I think of the times I’ve walked around my Sydney suburb wishing I could buy a house or a flat near the beach; I think of the magazines of envy I’ve drooled and dreamed over and I nod my head.

  He spits and walks off.

  The women go back to work.

  How I miss Australia where destitution comes via television images, and I can press the off button. India makes me feel anything but lucky and happy. As the Vipassana high wears even thinner and my Sikh strength further fades, I feel increasingly dismayed and guilty. I feel guilty for not giving these women money and guilty for knowing it wouldn’t be enough. I feel guilty for being in a position where I’m privileged enough to be a giver rather than a taker and I feel guilty for wanting more than I have and taking what I do have for granted. At times I feel angry at the injustice. But most of all I feel confused and confronted. Why was I born in my safe, secure, sunny Sydney sanctuary and not in Kesroli? India accepts that I deserved it, but I can’t.

  I wait for understanding and for the monsoon.

  By July the rain still hasn’t come. Hot winds make us paper-skinned and full of red rage. The city’s sanity snaps and Delhi descends into mass madness. A beast is on the loose, leaping from roof to roof, attacking people sleeping above their hot homes. The stories begin with a small monkey and, as the heat and humidity builds, he transforms from monkey to ape-man to monster, from one foot to ten, from having brown eyes to boiling red, and from having hairy hands to wielding clubs with long sharp spikes. A pregnant woman trying to escape his clutches falls down the stairs to her death. Two others die of fright while jumping from a roof. The authorities investigate and put it down to the ‘usual summer-induced mass hysteria’. But the beast within continues to grow and the bile rises in the most mannered of throats. A model is shot in an illegal bar, a movie star gets drunk and violent with his girlfriend, and there’s a coup for the leadership of the Australian High Commission Women’s Committee. I don’t understand the politics but the women now in charge have heard I know how to use a microphone. They give me my first Indian gig, as the host of a women’s fashion show.

  Looking ridiculous in a designer Indian salwar set, I use a lot of words like ‘elegant, stunning, gorgeous, delicious and exquisite’, while commenting on clothes I know nothing about. Pink flesh is on display – shoulders, knees and calves and in the finale out pops a western nipple. It’s all too much for my Indian assistants – the cameraman trips over the catwalk and the man meant to be fading the music is too transfixed to do his job on cue. My new career is a failure and I decide it’s really time I did some freelance writing – if I could only make my brain think of a story …

  The only time I feel human is when Jonathan and I leave our still house to climb the ancient tombs of Muslim Delhi. In this ugly city the past provides rare grandeur and beauty. Our favourite spot becomes the shady crumbling Madrassa of Haus Kaus village, a long high-domed hall with numerous small round balconies that project out over a dried up lake. In the fourteenth century, medical students would sit here on lush carpets to discuss the philosophy of medicine. Patients would be prescribed good food and music, poetry and dance; their medics viewed them as complete physical, mental and spiritual beings that could heal themselves by diet and lifestyle. Somehow the place still soothes despite the fact the tombs smell of urine and are full of men holding hands and grunting in shadows. It’s said the descendants of the fakir healers still see patients in some Muslim-dominated areas of Old Delhi, but it would be hard for them to prescribe the tender treatments of old in the dried dust bowl of modern day Delhi.

  Yet it’s a member of the Islamic community who offers me a respite from the heat and insanity. Javed is a tailor recommended by a friend at the Australian High Commission. At twelve percent of the population, there are more Muslims in India than there are in Pakistan. While relations between them and the majority Hindus are presently peaceful, Javed is from a state racked by violence. Large, strong and with a slow forming sweet smile, he fits Jonathan for a denim safari suit with red buttons, and strokes his wispy hennaed beard as he weaves a passionate tale of his home and India’s most dangerous state.

  ‘My beloved Kashmir, you must go, it’s the most beautiful place on earth and we have twenty-one types of mutton. It’s as cool as dew on the grass and we have twenty-on
e types of mutton. The snow-capped mountains kiss the indigo sky and we have twenty-one types of mutton. Kashmir people are the best people in the world …’

  ‘And you have twenty-one types of mutton,’ Jonathan and I chorus.

  Javed stares unsmiling as he checks the flair of the suit pants. Then, with his hand on his heart and his eyes elsewhere, he promises us heaven.

  ‘It is paradise. It will touch your soul and bring you to God.’

  We look sheepish. He smiles sweetly and adds a rare joke.

  ‘Providing you eat the mutton.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Heaven in Hell

  My first glimpse of paradise is five coffins.

  At the airport at Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian Kashmir, heat shimmers off badly camouflaged hangars and the tarmac is white hot. The only shadows creep from the five oblong boxes of death. Inside are the bloodied corpses of Hindus gunned down while on pilgrimage to Amarnath, a cave containing an ice lingam (a penis-shaped stalactite) worshipped as the all-important Hindu god Shiva. More coffins wait in the terminal, which is a low room ringed with soldiers standing at stiff attention. They carry massive machine guns and sport major moustaches and bizarrely big smiles. They salute and shout out to us, the only foreigners.

  ‘Welcome to Kashmir!’

  Military formation and formality breaks as the men surround us, jostling to shake Jonathan’s hand. We escape to the car park; there’s a yelp of joy as a man jumps, punches the air, runs towards Jonathan and struggles to pick him up in a bear hug. It’s Mukhtar, the ABC ‘fixer’ who organises interviews, translates and helps Jonathan film his stories in this region. Mukhtar has a handsome, full face with liquid brown eyes, sparkling teeth and dimpled cheeks. He wells up with tears as he shakes my hand and flings his arms out wide.

  ‘My brother Jonathan, my sister Sarah, welcome to Kashmir, welcome to heaven on earth.’