Indian Kaleidoscope
Otherworldly Drama in a Very Foreign Place
Have you ever opened your hotel room door and seen a bunch of wild monkeys in the hallway walk right by you like they’re paying guests in the room down the hall?
Welcome to India. My fiancée Laura and I came here because I’ve never found a place outside my home country that I like more. Laura’s never been here, but she’s a seasoned traveler who cut her teeth backpacking in Africa and loves foreign countries, the more foreign the better.
We’ve just left our hotel and are in a taxi headed to the train station. Our cab is driving down one of the city’s main streets, a pretty normal street, which in India means it’s teeming with people, animals, surreal chaos and a lot of color.
On every block of every city women and girls right down to the youngest toddlers are covered in gorgeous, dramatically colorful flowing robes and saris, embellished in raucous elegant jewelry, decked out way beyond the bounds of acceptable western style. Groups of women of any age are an explosion of color that give any street rich vivid visual flavor.
Cows, oxen and water buffalo wander free, like they do on pretty much every street in this country. Monkeys careen off rooftops, dangle off of electrical wires, amble along the sidewalk, nurse their young, linger and skirmish and frolic and dance just out of arms reach. We pass a camel standing waiting for orders from its owner on a street corner. I catch a glimpse of an elephant cruising down a crowded side street. Herds of hundreds of goats grind traffic to a halt — this happens so often you stop noticing after a while. Dogs chase cats, cats chase dogs, vehicles swerve to avoid the chase, people swerves to avoid the vehicles.
Hindu culture may be famous for its holy cows, but all of these animals are holy here. To live in India is to live among wildlife, not just in farms or villages but in cities of millions of people.
We’ve arrived at the train station and are boarding our train, gearing up for a nine hour ride across the countryside. The dusty rattling train car was probably built in the 1930's or 40's. Locals in our car stare at us unblinking as we settle in, as if we’re beings from another world. We are. I counter their stares with a smile and they grin ear-to-ear. The air is cleared and we’re old friends for the rest of the ride, pantomiming and sharing snacks. This happens over and over.
Train travel is iconic to India — when I was here ten years ago the Indian railway network was the largest employer on earth. It might still be. India is vast, like my home country the United States. There are well over a billion people within its borders, quadruple the population of the US — it’s the second largest country in the world by population, just behind China. Their overstressed railway system carries eighteen million people a day (Amtrak by comparison carries less than 100,000).
Our train leaves the station and we have a look around. Indian trains keep their doors wide open while the train is in motion — sometimes they just don’t have any doors at all. Feel free to stand in the empty shell of a doorway and watch the world go by — the locals do it all the time. It’s exhilarating, just hold on tight.
Scrub brush and endless farmland fly by. Women in bright saris walk gracefully through the fields carrying massive bales of hay on their heads. Gypsy women wearing huge gold nose rings and rich red patchwork robes lead water buffalo tilling cotton fields. A caravan of cattle-drawn carts rolls down a road parallel to the train tracks. Empty desert rolls by for awhile, then I spot a young girl alone in the blazing sun carrying the largest hatchet I’ve ever seen.
We’re stopped at a small train station now — I can see that things are getting chaotic in the train cars with the cheapest seats. Way more people than can fit in any one car are crushing their way through the doorways trying to get on. People trying to get off crush their way right back. Some getting on have tickets, some definitely don’t, some don’t make it on to the train at all — there isn’t nearly enough room for everyone. It’s too crowded for the conductor to check tickets.
Each of those train cars is now overfull in a way we can’t really relate to in our orderly western lives — people are more than willing to endure the throng of humanity inside the train in the crippling heat or dangle out the open doorways for hours just to get where they’re going. I feel a swell of gratitude that we paid a few extra dollars for seats in air-conditioned cars, where every ticket gets checked carefully so the car isn’t subject to the crush.
We arrive in Jodhpur, a six hundred-year-old desert city ruled by maharajas up until mid-last century. We’re here in time for Holi, a holiday where India takes the day off and goes batshit insane.
Locals start playing pounding Bollywood music out of huge speakers around 8am. Today people in every town and every city in this country will run wild and frolic in the streets dousing friends and strangers in powdered paint, every color of the spectrum. Anyone loose on the streets is fair game.
A lot of locals are drunk or high by mid-morning. Men spot me, pull out handfuls of powdered paint and rub it into my bald-shaven head. A few minutes after I step out of my hotel my clothes are covered. Everyone’s clothes are covered. People are dumping buckets of paint off the rooftops.
A guy down the street has just ripped his friend’s shirt right off his back — the topless man is laughing and flailing as his buddy picks him up and tosses him in a pool of water. Around the corner there’s a dance party going off in a town square, people are crowdsurfing right out on the sidewalk.
I pass by a large family — one of them dumps a bucket of water on my head and invites me to dance with them in the streets. I oblige, and in the mayhem I accidentally back up too close to a wandering bull. Damn! He head butts me in the ass. I stumble a few feet forward and catch my breath.
It’s 99 degrees in the sun and two teenagers have filled the neighborhood with a primal drumbeat pounded out on camel skin drums. I’m assaulted by children with water balloons from up above, families are nailing me with them from balconies four stories off the ground. Groups of kids on the street carrying high volume pump-action water guns are attacking me — my sunglasses are covered in water and paint and I can’t see. The glasses are there to protect my eyes from the flying paint and taking them off isn’t an option, so I’m forced to run.
I love every minute of it. This is my kind of party.
Laura and I wind up at a rooftop shindig overlooking the main town square. It’s crowded with people and we’re all dancing up to our ankles in garlands of marigold flowers, wading through tens of thousands of orange flower petals covering the rooftop. Clouds of powered paint explode in the air. Locals are scooping stacks of petals off the roof onto trays and lobbing them at anyone close enough to get covered.
Members of the press and TV camera crews are on the rooftop recording the spectacle. Laura is deep in the fray covered in a rainbow of paint — she gets cornered by reporters and gives an interview: seven news crews train their cameras on her. We never get to see if she made it on TV, but a photo of me dancing on the rooftop winds up in the city’s newspaper the next day.
Cowritten with Laura Wald
While you’re here check out some more of my photos…
