The past day and a half has been an ordeal. I had been knocked out by one of the worst stomach bugs I’ve ever experienced. Spending a period of 36 hours moving solely between a bed and a toilet, at my worst I became dehydrated to the point of extreme weakness, where even the act of moving myself several feet was exhausting. Electrolytes, pills of charcoal, and the care and hospitality of the Call family helped pull me out of it in no time, however. I’m still in the recovery stage as I write this, and I imagine Nathan and Caleb are off zip-lining in the blue city of Jodhpur, while I’m sitting here sipping Gatorade and nibbling on crackers (I elected to pass on our flight to Jodhpur, unsure of how I would manage air travel in such a condition). I’m trying to stay optimistic, thinking that my immune system will now be truly prepared for the worst that India may throw my way.
Moving on; I realize that in my last post, I promised some “first impressions” of India, and then delivered the most vague paragraph ever, so here’s a little more detail on a couple of the initial differences I noticed, between life in Delhi and Des Moines/the US in general:
For some context, Delhi is supposedly the second most populous city in the world, at 29.4 million people (I am very curious as to how one can reach an exact number when looking at cities this massive). This means that the population of Delhi is 45 times that of the entire metropolitan area of my hometown, Des Moines, and 65 times the population of Des Moines proper. As an added fun fact, more people live in the city of Delhi than in the entire country of Australia. Now, on to a couple of things that have been the hardest for me to adjust to.
Pollution.
When we stepped out of the Indira Ghandi terminal after midnight, the first thing I noticed was that the air was very different. All of the street lights appeared to be cutting through to us via a slight atmospheric haze, but the air was too dry for it to be fog. The smell was one half the burning scent accompanied by a massive fireworks display, and the other half some mixture of foul things I couldn’t place. It got worse once we entered the dense bustle of Mehrauli. It’s suffocating at times; in some moments, the involuntary action of drawing a breath doesn’t seem to work, you have to stop and think and struggle to get a good pull of oxygen. You can easily forget all about the air quality as you navigate the streets, finding your step through scattered feces, and piles of discarded trash (sometimes being devoured by both stray dogs and cows). The sewers run uncovered through troughs at the edges of the streets, so you need to be careful not to step right in them when trying to get out of the way of a passing rickshaw or motorcycle. I want to stress that not all of Delhi is as I describe here - these conditions are specific to the neighborhood in Mehrauli in which we were staying (and other old districts we had visited)- most of the areas in New Delhi that we passed through were a lot more modern and clean, as well as most of the monuments and historic sites we visited. After seeing what street life in India looks like, it makes a lot of sense why tradition is to always remove your shoes when entering another’s household.
Transportation.
Indian traffic is this chaotic, yet understood flow, that I will never be able to navigate. With so many millions of people occupying such limited space, the result is an endless jumble of cars, animals, carts, and whatever else you may find. There really is no concept of lanes, or turn signals; drivers just move toward the nearest open space, laying on the horn as they go. Back home, I would interpret the act of honking the horn as a way to draw attention to something specific: being cut off by someone, or when the driver in front of you is not moving after a light changes to green - but in India, with a horn going off literally every second somewhere around you, it’s almost as if it serves the purpose of keeping everyone as uncomfortable and alert as possible at all times. Even behind the walls of our AirBnb, we were only spared from 1 to 5 AM the sounds of the horns in the city below us. In addition to the incessant noise of the street ringing in your ears, you also have the near-traumatic privilege of watching large, moving objects come within inches of colliding with you on a constant basis. Of these objects, cars seem to be in the minority. In a given journey you may cross paths with any of the following: motorcycles, bicycles, mopeds, rickshaws, auto-rickshaws, stray cows, ox-drawn carts, human-drawn carts, and some other oddities. As you squeeze more and more vehicles into a narrow street, the amount of distance between each shrinks, until you are truly mere inches from those with whom you share the road. Most of the time, this means you are moving too slowly to have a violent collision, but at times, a nearby horn blast is followed by a whoosh as a motorcycle flies right by you. Caleb’s advice to us was that “you’ll be fine, as long as you make no sudden movements.”
So far, this experience has been like no other. This trip has been much more challenging than any other I have undertaken to date, but also has been one of the most rewarding so far, and I plan to cover some of the ways this has been true in my next post.
