Ash and Lil do India! - Part 3 - From Delhi to Rishikesh: The Long and Winding Road

We are standing in the street waiting for a driver to take us to Rishikesh, a region of Northern India where we will enter into a spiritual retreat with Thom Knoles, a Master of Vedic Meditation. As we are standing there, Lil sniffs the air and says excitedly, “I smell oud.” At that very moment, a young man with a fine haircut and a clean look uncommon in these backstreets of Delhi walks by and asks if we would like a ride in his rickshaw. Lil asks him to sniff the air and he says, “I smell oud.”

“Good,” says Lil.

The next thing we know, we are following this young rogue—who reminds me of Charley—along the street, watched by hundreds of the envious eyes of other rickshaw and tuk-tuk drivers, disadvantaged by their lack of English, dirty clothes, and bad haircuts. We take our lives in our hands as we go to get oud oil for Nathan, Lil’s son, who is a perfumier when not working in movies. Our driver seems to think he is Possum Bourne driving a car in some mad video game where the aim is to drive as fast as you can without crashing or killing your passengers. There is no insurance, no rules, and no traffic police in India, and if you have an accident, it is up to the two parties to work it out—often ending in violent altercations.

Lil and I are shrieking with a sort of delighted terror, and this only encourages this young rogue who, at his age, no doubt thinks death doesn’t happen to people like him. I, however, am of an age where my demise would simply read: “Pensioner killed in rickshaw in Delhi.”

Lil gets her two bottles of oud from a backstreet spice and perfume dispensary and we go back to our hotel. There is our car with our two bags strapped to the roof and a mean-looking man waiting to drive us. Our friend at the hotel, Ajit, assures us we have been well and truly ripped off with what Lil paid for her oud, but we are getting used to this and it is not a nice feeling. The salespeople are so cunning at sticking to prices that you’re sure are outrageous; you walk out thinking they’ll call you back, but they don’t, so you go back and pay what they asked for. They seem to win every time—well, with me and Lil at least, as we are both Taureans who have a habit of trusting people and wanting them to like us, even if they are backstreet perfume salesmen who we will never see again.

My niece, Max, hates India, as all the silver she bought for her little jewellery business was really just silver-coated iron, and my heart goes out to her. She also got such severe food poisoning she nearly died. She grimaced when I said I was coming to India and said with genuine disbelief, “I hate India.” This is the only country this “child of the universe,” who has wandered the world since she was twenty, has not liked.

Lil checks the silver bracelet she bought with the little Taj Mahal magnet I bought, and it doesn’t stick, so Lil is pleased—though I’m thinking it might not stick to the fridge either, but I don’t tell her.

We arrive back at the hotel and it turns out the mean-looking driver doesn’t speak a word of English, even though we have paid more so we can ask questions about everything we see on the way. This is the other thing about India: they promise you things with no intention whatsoever of delivering on the promise. There is always a middleman who speaks a bit of English, and this man now tells us we won’t need an English-speaking driver—even though we paid for one—as we will be on a highway. But in India, a highway is just a wide road which people and animals cross when they feel like it, and wonderful things happen on it and on the sides of it as people live lives that are as different to ours as the life of an ant is to a butterfly’s.

On one particular stretch of the wide road, we see huge loads of sticks on wagons pulled by buffalo, men on bikes, or even by just one man. Sometimes women carry small bundles of sticks on their heads. These sticks are on their way to very basic chimneys dotted all over the fields, where they will be loaded in to make bricks. I get out of the car to take a photo of one of these loads of sticks, and the man walking beside his cart starts waving his stick at me and shouting. But it’s not me he’s shouting at; it’s a little boy of about eight who is wrestling like mad with a stick, trying to wriggle it free from the vast mound. When he finally pries it off, he runs away with it, jumping for joy. He has such a look of triumph on his face, it is as if he has been given a brand-new PlayStation. I learn later that these particular “sticks” are actually sugar cane.

There is a car accident and we see a dead woman lying on the wide road with a piece of material draped over her head, though Lil thinks she had lost her head. Her brains lie in the dust. There are a few people milling around, but the cars, wagons, bicycles, and cows just plod on by, as there is no stopping here in this, the world’s largest democracy, for no work means no food.

We are running quite late for the retreat and Lil asks the driver to stop for a Coke, of all things. He does so in a surly way, and then just ten minutes later, he stops again and gets out. Lil and I just sit there and sit there until finally I get out; he is just inside having a leisurely lunch at a place where we could have bought our Coke.

It’s all a game here—an uneasy game in this strange country where bricks are made with sticks carried on heads and by slow wagons pulled by people. While they are toiling away, their bodies their only tool for survival, India is becoming very rich. Today, it boasts the third-most billionaires in the world, while its children are still growing up in the slums where the dust will never turn to gold.