Stranger in Chandigarh
Patrick: We've had a slow start in India. With the excuse that we were recuperating from jetlag and a hectic and emotional holiday in the USA, we spent three nights in Delhi without really straying a block away from our guesthouse. We'll be back in that enormous city later to be tourists, but our first visit was purely a stage on or way out into the rest of India. Now we're in Chandigarh, a spread-out, concrete city planned to a T by modernist architect Le Corbusier in 1955. We've also been taking it slow here. Sarah's still in the dumps about her grandmother, who died while we were in the US with her family, and she's also teetering next to some kind of cold or flu, so we've been watching a lot of TV, and we've not gotten out much.
Despite our reclusiveness over the past several days, we've had some great luck meeting people.
Over breakfast on our last morning in Delhi, a retired Dutch gentleman who now divides his time between Canada and India invited us to visit his winter home at a village in northern Punjab. He also mentioned that a visit to Iran, the home of the silent man who was sitting with him, would be very rewarding for people like us, because it is a beautiful country filled with friendly people. We're going to meet him and a couple of his companions for dinner here tonight, and we'll figure out if and when we'll be accepting the invitation to Punjab.
On the way home from breakfast that day, while discussing how Iran might very well be gorgeous and full of hospitable, gracious people but we would never dare terrify our parents by going there, we stopped at a chapati stand and met a woman on her way to do yoga for a few months in Rishikesh, the "Yoga Capital of India." She, too, had just arrived in Delhi, and we had the honor of introducing her to chapati and sambar, having made its acquaintance when we were in Malaysia. Yes, we were having chapati sambar on the way home from breakfast. That's how we do.
On the four-hour train to Chandigarh, we sat next to an Indian guy just slightly older than us who works for Western Union in Nepal, Bhutan, and northern India. It was interesting to talk to him, because the web of remittances between those countries and other places around the world can describe so much about the way people migrate, and the bilateral economic relationships between various countries.
The next day, I went on a long walk through this city. It's not really a great walking city; it's really spread out, and there aren't that many sidewalks. But there are a lot of parks, and I was mostly interested in getting a closer look at how the whole thing worked, and I got that. I ran into an older Hindu guy who invited me to watch him play drums at his temple that night, and then come to his house and look at his album of photos of himself with architects he's met. His first assumption when we ran into each other was that I was an architect. I guess that's why most white guys come to this city. There are hardly any western tourists here. I think it's possible that this is what it'll be like throughout most of India. Maybe India gets four times the number of western tourists that Thailand gets, but since it has about thirty times the land mass, tourists are rare. Unfortunately, when I showed up at the temple to meet this drummer later that day, he was nowhere to be found. I don't really know what happened there, but it's unfortunate that I missed him.
Yesterday, Sarah and I walked through Nek Chand's Fantasy Rock Garden, a mazelike sculpture park constructed of rocks and waste material that would make Philadelphia's Isaiah Zagar drool his tongue off. In there, we met Guvinder, a Sikh fellow a few years younger than us from a village in the neighboring state of Haryana. He's a fascinating guy, great to talk to, and we ended up spending the afternoon talking and then going to a Bollywood movie called DHOOM 2, reminiscent of El Mariachi except with cat burglars and excellent dancing. We may visit him at his family's home in a couple weeks.
This morning, on our way up to our hotel room, where I was going to complete this entry, Narinder Singh, whom we had met outside the building a couple days before, was waiting for us with a gift: a bracelet, a banana, and a rose. While Sarah was burdened with these, I wrote a little hello in a kind of guest register that Narinder carries on his person at all times. I gave him our web address. Hello Narinder!
It seems like India has a magic combination of many english speakers, rare tourism, heavy crowding, and general friendliness that makes it hard, even for rather shy folks like Sarah and me, not to meet a ton of people. I wasn't expecting it at all, but I'm having a lot of fun.