II - Trust

 

Our first day out in Delhi is a success. We spend the afternoon at the Red Fort, where there is sufficient space to make the crowds feel dispersed. People always croon about the colours and smells of India. It might just be the diffusion through smog but the light was very pretty on bold colours – the red stone, blueish sky and vibrant greens all around. I had not expected India to be so green, but despite the stony rubbish everywhere, Delhi is a very green city. Driving here is fascinating – Rhiannon admits being in a taxi is her favourite time, watching the city roll past while the driver like James Bond – he liked the comparison – weaves in and out. Lanes are barely even guidelines, cyclists, auto-rickshaws, men with piles of wood on their heads, a horse and cart, compete for space on highways, as well as the occasional car going in the wrong direction. In all the traffic is usually moving so slowly that we have yet to see any bump – though the vehicles tell their stories. But even in an open rickshaw rattling through Old Delhi, children pinned to us, I didn’t feel unsafe. There is something charming about this inter-personal form of driving – where through the noise and smog people make themselves understood and, rather than obeying rules, find a more organic means of getting where they want. There are rules of a sort I’m sure; perhaps like an English bar the system merely looks chaotic and confusing to outsiders. Or perhaps it is just the free-market on wheels.

Our little boy is a little obsessed with Harry Potter. This is coming back to haunt him as with his little round glasses everywhere we go he’s recognised as such. Despite his blonde hair the phones are out taking pictures: “Harry Potter!” Stopping at a bench with the children, a crowd began to gather. It’s confusing coming from a culture on high-safeguarding alert. Turn around and someone is picking up your child or pinching his cheeks or taking a selfie. Had this been the UK I would have already filled an exercise book with reports and made several arrests. After having photos taken with another family, Rhiannon reported later that the mother standing next to her had squeezed her bottom. One is out of joint and often quite helpless out of culture. Having said that the friendliness of people, the genuine curiosity and helpfulness, and evident delight in children has been lovely. 

Trust when it comes to money, though, is difficult. It’s hard to shake the unpleasant feeling that you’re being taken advantage of, and while I keep reminding myself the amounts are often really quite small in relative terms, the sense of being exploited, cheated, or just getting a bad deal is depressing, as is the prospect of always being on guard. This combines uneasily with the reality of privilege and the awareness of the United Kingdom’s past in India. We stayed on for a tremendous sound and light show at the Red Fort, which told the story of India – an unhappy occasion to be British on soil imprinted with a difficult past, in a world heritage site largely destroyed by the country on our passports. Brecht famously quipped “what is robbing a bank next to founding one?”, a reminder not to resent small losses.

However, there is a crooked deviousness that makes you want to scream. Walking up to the international booking centre at New Delhi Railway Station we were turned around by a man who insisted on where we needed to go and appeared to be working there. We were, a few steps down the road, guided on by another man who took us to an agency that wanted a far higher price than we expected. We managed to extricate ourselves but felt fairly glum and ticketless with just a day left before our first journey out of Delhi. We returned the next day and Rhiannon found her way through to where we had been heading to receive prices at one tenth of what the agency had offered – for four train journeys: £45 instead of £400. A favourite army saying is “walk with purpose” – a principle you cannot afford not to adhere to here.

This was New Year’s Eve – not obviously much regarded by India. Midnight struck while I was trying, and seeing the prices quickly refusing, to buy a drink in the bar. This will be, for practical reasons, a vegetarian and fairly teetotal adventure. No one in the bar paid any attention to the clock. From the sixth floor, no fireworks were seen. As a secular feast I have never enjoyed this suited me fine. The babies should not have stayed up so late, but even after two days we’re all still jetlagged and out of sync. Perhaps because of this, the strange food, the growing awareness of difference we had our first acknowledgment of homesickness from the older boy who misses London: “we’re at the bottom of the world!”, he choked between tears. New Year’s Day is the perfect day for melancholy and all of us felt it through a day of small frustrations and not achieving what we needed. So much of travelling is logistics which is exhausting, especially with that tight fear of stupidly giving away your money. Another army expression, liberally used, is “to throw money at a problem”, which in the many tired and confused moments of travelling becomes the ready solution to just getting on, but happily not this time.