Tempest

Sunday 15 July 2007

Home to you...

I’ve been meaning to write this since my return to Delhi. I have the fondest memories of this dirty, uncivilised, over populated, polluted yet generous, cultured and wise city. I came back from my year as a student in London last month. The Delhi airport with its little neat duty free shops and extremely smart and efficient ground stewardesses is like any other international airport. You don’t quite realise you are in India until you make you make your way out and then it hits you so hard you only have reflexes enough to gasp. The driver greeted me and I settled for a nostalgic drive back home. The area around the airport is covered with slums for at least about five kilometers in places.

Like brown and black dunes, the acres of slums rolled away from the roadside, and met the horizon with dirty heat-haze mirages. It seemed impossible that a modern airport, full of prosperous and purposeful travelers, was only kilometers away from crushed and cindered dreams. Had I been a foreigner, my first impression would have been that some catastrophe had taken place, and that the slums were refugee camps for the shambling survivors. Since I wasn’t a foreigner, I knew that they were survivors. The catastrophes that had driven them to the slums from their villages were poverty, famine and bloodshed. Somewhere in my subconscious I had expected to see it. I knew it. Like every Indian does in every picture of every road and scene etched forever in his mind. But it still hurts. For that moment I blamed London for having spoilt me and made my nerve endings raw. But I do remember bleeding for this sight even then before I left.

As the kilometers wound past, as hundreds of people in those slums became thousands, my spirit writhed. I felt defiled by my own health and the money in my pockets. It’s a lacerating guilt, that first confrontation with the wretched of the earth. I had worked as a labourer in a restaurant in London, I had lived surrounded by this poverty for most of my life. Still, that first encounter with the ragged misery all around cut into my eyes.

That guilt soon flamed into anger and rage at the unfairness of it: What kind of government, I thought, What kind of a system allows suffering like this? In indignant bourgeois thoughts I also wondered what kind of wasteful human attitude allowed the people to let this happen to themselves (I most sincerely apologise for this callous thought).

I looked at the people then and I saw how busy they were. Occasional sudden glimpses inside the huts revealed the astonishing cleanliness of that poverty: the floors were spotless, the utensils all stacked together in little pyramids. And then I saw the women (I admit to always having found all these Indian women extremely gracious in spite of the dirt in their lives and in their surroundings) wrapped in all colours of sarees, dupattas and some in just a meagre imitation of both sweeping the areas around the huts, cooking meals on stoves outside the house, braiding their daughters hair; constantly active. Mostly I saw the affectionate camaraderie of the fine-limbed children, older ones playing with younger ones, many of them supporting baby sisters and brothers on their slender hips. Responsibility at such a young age under such dire circumstances where each one should have been only thinking of himself and how to diminish the pain of his own depravity filled me with a certain pride for this beautiful race.

I thought then that this is the reason for India’s speciality. I also understood in a way that this is the reason for India’s deplorable status as a developing nation. We are special and great for the deep connection between Indian and Indian. We love ours anywhere and however. The camaraderie is strong. But our failure lies in the fact that there is no bond between Indian and India. We love each other, we love our culture but we don’t love the nation enough to do something about anything. The fight, the killer instinct, the possessiveness dies with the people and the culture. It doesn’t reach the land. It doesn’t matter; the poverty, the disabilities, the corruption nothing matters anymore to the educated Indian. He has forgotten ‘India’…he returns/lives only for his ‘Indians’ (by his I mean his immediate friends and family), his ghar ka khana and his language.

Almost reaching home, I saw a few more beggars sitting together sipping cups of chai and talking with smiles on their faces. In a city where there are no rooms for miracles, (I won’t end with the cliché that miracles do happen) the beauty of it all is that these people still believe in miracles.

I love every moment of every breath taken here in this country, on this land. I hope this feeling isn’t romanticism of the youth. I hope I don’t have to come back to this page ever to remind me of it. I hope I can be more sincere than sincere while publishing this. I hope.

Posted by Pavitra :: 11:31 :: 9 comments