Customer Service With a Nice, Warm Glass of ShutTheHellUp

This was written on January 7, for what it’s worth:

We are now tens of thousands of feet in the air, 4 AM India time, flying over central Asia. Getting to this point involved an absurd process. We didn't realize, when we separated from Dave's family briefly to check in to our flight that the attendant put us in non-sequential seats. Dave has 19J and I have 19K. Saumya had 19E. Even though we bought the tickets together and paid for A, B, and C. And the person at the gate had zero tolerance to even the idea of trying to be useful or at least sympathetic. She was rude and abrupt, saying no change is possible (even though it is the airline's fault, not ours). She said it was our fault (excellent move!) for not catching their mistake earlier. Not that that would have made any much difference, I don't think. We sit at the gate and stew and go over our options. Quietly we load our rifles of anger with the ammunition of injustice. Peeved, we rehearse our lines: We paid all this money to go all this way and we wanted to sit together and they changed it and it's their fault and someone needs to fix this and why is “customer service” so bad in India and why is it not even customer service, but “annoyance management,” for the employees here, since a problem is something they have to “deal with” instead of fix? And so on and so on.

At Saumya's insistence, we board the plane as quickly as possible and take the two seats we know we've got, and the seat we think we should have, 19H. Saumya thinks squatters rights may have some currency in the battle ahead. She explains to the flight attendant the situation, that we were misbooked, that we paid to sit together, that she is (is) going to sit here, and it's their fault and they need to fix it. Voices are raised, tensions are high. Dave and I chip in what meager support we can give. We say the error was made by the woman who checked us in at the check-in desk. The flight attendant pulls an awesome card none of us were expecting. “That person who checked you in at the Air India desk – with the orange vest (Air India's colors)? That person does not work for Air India.”

Wha-hut? Classic. Excellent move, sir. This is the “There is no Cherai Beach” move. Deny the customer an ability to exist in the same plane of reality as the rest of humanity. Warp the dimensions of space and time based on a perspectivity of chaos and uncertainty. It's Kafka-esque. The airline that checked you in, the airline you got your tickets from and whose plane you are sitting on now – that is not the airline that we are. We? Who is 'we' anymore? The non-check-in part of Air India? Is he saying that they have outsourced their check-in process to a subcontractor not formally associated with their airline and thus abdicate any and all responsibility for the process where by their passengers will check their luggage and board their plane? On what space-time continuum do you exist, dude?

As these shockwaves blast through our three collective minds and we reel in existential doubt about the reliability of reality as we have so far perceived it, the flight attendant leaves us. The departing jinn offers one kernel of hope: if the person whose (aisle) seat we are taking is willing to switch, then we can do that. Saumya says that this point is irrelevant. She paid for three seats together and is taking three seats together. She is staying put and they will have to deal with it. Such sheer willpower and unflinching assertiveness, I am learning, is what it takes to get things done in this country. Dave warns against being physically removed from the flight by security (a dramatic end to this escalating arms race between Air India and Team Roedl-Verma-Orvin) while I quietly bet that the person who has that aisle seat will be much more reasonable that the stubborn bureaucracy of this airline.

The unlucky winner does eventually find us, this well-dressed young Indian man with speaks with almost no trace of any accent other than American English. He listens to Saumya's genuine plea but does ask incredulously, “You want to trade me my aisle seat for your middle seat?” He shrugs and is a good guy who takes one for the team, and goes to the middle seat. We celebrate by planning to buy him a drink once we get in the air.

Since his row (across the aisle from us) is not fully yet, he sits on the aisle until the person in that aisle seat comes. I think we're in the clear, as it passes 2 AM and no one has taken that seat. We all win: he gets the aisle seat he wanted and we get to sit together.

But then there are some late boarders, who had delayed connections and trouble at immigration, who board and sure enough that aisle seat he wanted is actually taken by a man who is boarding with his wife who is in a green and blue sari. Reluctantly our friend is bumped to the middle seat. The man takes the aisle, and the woman takes the aisle seat in front of him.

It could not have been five minutes later that the woman stands up and politely asks our savior to switch seats with her. She would like the middle seat to sit next to her husband. Looks like Air India is in the habit of splitting up more couples than a divorce attorney. He more than happily obliges, and so balance, order and harmony is restored in the universe, like a Shakespearean comedy: our three-person party has their consecutive seats, the stylish Indian American has his aisle seat and the late-boarding couple has their consecutive seats. Let's all celebrate with a six-person wedding? All in spite of the best efforts of Air India to fuck up everything, somehow, It All Worked Out in the End.

Which gets to a larger point about how things are “difficult” in India. That is the word Saumya's Dad used (who is from here), and which we saw in full focus on our three week trip. There is just a great deal of hassle. Things change and people don't take responsibility and there is no sense of customer service, and the terms of any agreement seem to always be in flux. There have been at least four or five occasions on this trip where that has happened. Screaming matches about who is the most right. You said one thing, now you're saying another thing. You said we would have the use of the van the whole time, now you're saying you clock out at 5 pm. You said breakfast was complimentary, now you're saying we have to pay 350 rupees per person (That's a $7 breakfast in a country where we had a sit-down dinner for a group of 12 for less than $90.) You said we had this block of these three seats and now we don't? And on and on. Everyone has to be challenged. Everything becomes a confrontation, a match of wills, an argument. And it's kind of exhausting. You agree to certain things, those things change without reason or notification and then you have to fight and yell for them to go back to the terms we originally agreed upon.

This is certainly an issue in the US (I am thinking: cell phone companies, airlines, internet providers), but I don't think it's on such a scale and over such trivial things as in the US. I think there is a stronger sense of customer service in the US. We've gotten some pretty atrocious service in India. For example, one evening at a nice restaurant in a fancy hotel, our meal took over an hour to come out. We asked several servers what was going on and by the third or fourth time we asked, the waiter simply silently gave Saumya a “stop” sign with his hand and walked away. Unbelievable. That about set me through the roof (as a former waiter). Even when we talked to the manager, he never apologized for the rudeness of his staff or the lateness of our food. He only listened and seemed embarrassed, but he didn't do anything to make it better. He didn't comp us dessert or take 10% off the bill, even though Saumya dropped the name of a powerful uncle or two who were shuttling us around to his favorite hotels and restaurants in southern India (including this one).

Is this a cultural thing? Am I just missing something entirely? Part of me really dislikes the “Oh it's a cultural thing” argument because it seems cheap and simplistic. But maybe it really is. Different cultures approach life differently, and maybe this scrappy aggressiveness is inherently more useful than a passive acquiescence in a crowded, busy country. Or maybe we Americans are too thin-skinned when it comes to this stuff: if we were raised to expect conflict and to thrive on it, it would not be nearly as uncomfortable as we often find it. So maybe Indians see no problem with this kind of habitual confrontation. I approached India with American assumptions about being served as a customer and was showed a different perspective. I think that challenge to my assumptions will be ultimately beneficial, and may even help me appreciate what we have here.

Or maybe these are the dejected musings of a burned-out traveler, through this flight of sixteen hours of darkness, this one slowly rolling night, with one destination in mind – home.

Putting the Krishna back in Merry Krishmas

(Written January 2)

I thought I’d find India to be a very spiritual place. From the vibrant, colorful pictures in my “Discovering Hinduism” textbook from Hinduism 210 at Northwestern, I thought India would just glow with devotion, spirituality and wisdom. By my count, four major world religions got started here (Hinduism of course, along with Buddhism (many forget this), Jainism and Sikhism (much smaller by comparison)).

So there must be something about this place. It’s incredibly vibrant, as it has, as far as I can tell, representation of basically all major world religions. The vast majority are Hindu and Buddhism has a small following as well, but there is a substantial population from the Abrahamic religions as well: Islam is the second largest religion, and Christianity has a small, but in pockets appreciable, presence (schools and hospitals built by missionaries, etc. Surprisingly to me, there are almost three times as many Christians here as Buddhists). Even Judaism has a few adherents here and there. We were in Fort Kochi, a city used by the Portuguese (or Dutch?) to trade with India. After the fall of Jerusalem and the sacking of the Temple in 70 CE by the Romans, a population of Jews fled here. Amazing. Jews have been living in this part of India for about two thousand years. We visited the synagogue in the old Fort Kochi, in the “Jew Town” neighborhood. And we have felt this diversity of religions the whole trip: when we visited a cathedral in Patna, we did so as the call to afternoon prayers was being sung from the mosque across the street.


In Kochi (Southern India) – Jew Town

Dave and Saumya stroll through quaint, colonial Jew Town in Fort Kochi.

What has really surprised me is how much people get into Christmas here. While we were touring in southern India, we saw Santa Claus, Christmas trees, reindeer, fake snow, Christmas Lights, snowflakes, huge lit paper stars, etc. It seems Christmas just becomes part of the national calendar, even though 2.3% of the population is Christian. This may come from the fact that Christmas has such a strong commercial component in the West.


Scary, red-faced (boozy?) Santa Claus in the Kochi airport. You see this same Santa mask all over the place. I found it creepy.

We’re certainly on the tourist route, and that may explain a lot why the bustling consumerism of Indian cities has drowned out the quiet, spiritual places. The India we have seen so far is loud and crowded and pushy and dirty. Hinduism is everywhere, but in a diffuse way. Every home has an altar, and there are altars on street corners, and embedded into recesses into walls you’ll find a little Ganesha or Vishnu with some flowers, fruit and a dull incandescent bulb. Mandirs, or temples, of various sizes and sophistication pop up all over the place. I guess I imagined that I’d have to push sramanas and yogis and gurus out of my way just to get a decent cup of chai. I suppose I naively expected to see the wise masters of Hinduism and Buddhism venerated under the trees where they would meditate and levitate and exhort the people on matters of the soul.

When I got my boarding pass in Kochi to fly to Patna, the printer cuts off at the sixth letter of the first name. My full name was thus shortened to “Christ Orvin.” I appreciated the compliment (?). Later, in Patna, Saumya’s grandmother, Dadi, had trouble with my first name and sanctified my English first name further: she called me “Krish,” short for Krishna. Let’s put the Krishna back in “Merry Krishmas!”


Oh, Jet Airways, you flatter me (?)!


India has been, of course, a mixing of the spiritual and the material, as the whole world is. I thought to myself on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and High Holy Day of capitalism, that early Christians took a pagan holiday (winter solstice) and decked it out with Christian imagery and called it our own (Christmas trees come directly from pagan practices). We also did this with Easter (I think eggs, bunnies, etc. are pagan signs of fertility). I realized that our modern paganism of capitalism has taken the holiday back.

On Christmas Day I tried to find a church with English services in Patna. I couldn’t find one, although I did find a closed church, with a courtyard swimming with people. A large statue of Mary was being venerated with candles, fire and garlands of flowers. People just seemed to be chilling out on the steps of the church; kids were playing games and the teenage boys were either trying to look cool or flirt with the girls. The door was locked, but the church was decorated for the season. Long strands of blinking colored Christmas lights were draped from the roof and down the walls. The statue of Christ with arms raised was surrounded with by blinking lights and an LED sign wishing everyone a merry Christmas. Viraj, Saumya’s irreverent brother, who was tasked with finding a church for the Christian, said it looked like a casino. Maybe this is the complete union of the material and the spiritual, when our churches look like casinos.

I’ll Get My Own Spoon, Thank You: Labor, Population and Employment in India

(Written January 2)

I was sitting in Dadi and Dadaji’s front lawn, drinking tea and reading the Atlantic under the coconut palms, when I wondered what made this place, Saumya’s grandparents’ house, so incredibly relaxing. It felt like an all-inclusive resort. Our daily pattern was: get up – early morning chai – breakfast – do whatever – noon chai – 2 pm lunch – nap – do whatever – 4 pm chai – do whatever – 6 pm snack/dinner – 8 pm chai (?) – 10 pm dinner. A pretty packed schedule. And soon enough a pretty packed waistline as well, with sugary, milky chai four times a day that came with “biscuits” (cookies).

And If I Don’t See You – Good Afternoon, Good Evening and Good night! – Chai is a 24 hour affair. Dadaji: “If there is nothing to do – have tea.”

Dadaji chillin’ in the front yard – where we’d spend most of our time in Patna.

And it was clear enough: servants. There were probably half a dozen people gainfully employed under Dadi’s (grandmother’s) roof: a cook, a driver, a go-to-guy for anything, a handyman, an old man who raised Saumya and her father who had basically retired from doing much but stayed on the payroll, and an additional cook hired to feed the fat raging hordes of Americans that had descended, locus-like upon this place.

DadI: “Eat something!” (continual exhortation, even when eating)

I was sitting at the table once, doing something, and felt like I could really use some chai (it must have been around 8am, noon, 4pm or 8pm). And literally the next thing that happened was Ramu, one of the servants, walked in with a  tray of tea. Is he telepathic?

There are a lot of people in India. About a billion, give or take a couple tens of millions. A lot of those people live in big cities, and more come each year. The rural population is experiencing a drain on their youth, as they give up farming and move to the cities to find jobs. And a lot of those people end up working as servants in middle-class and upper-class homes, doing odd jobs or trying to sell things. (On a side-note, the door-to-door market here is huge: door-to-door cotton candy salesman, door-to-door carpet salesman, door-to-door kitchen pot salesman, door-to-door masseuse, door-to-door purchaser of old newspaper for recycling, door-to-door guy who irons your clothes for you). Labor is so cheap here because of the tremendous population looking for work, that even middle class families can afford a couple servants to help out around the house.

It’s a really complicated thing, this system. The initial reaction by most Americans is one of resistance to being served. As a nation we have a strong independent streak, so we are afraid of dependency. Someone clearing your plate from the table instead of taking it to the sink yourself seems awkward. Having someone walking behind you carrying your shopping bags seems shameful. Waiting for a servant to bring a spoon from the next room instead of just getting it yourself seems silly. But it’s how things are done here. Americans would probably bristle at this idea of someone serving you like that; they’d probably make quick and thoughtless comparisons to slavery, that shameful scar on our collective past. To those who had not really experienced the relationship between servants and their employers here, that may seem like what’s going on, but there is much more to it.

The important thing to think about is the alternative for these people. If they lived in these rural villages they’d have little (or no) electricity or water. We drove by some of these small towns and their grinding poverty. Rickety shelters made of torn-open rice sacks, or palms, or dried bamboo, with of a roof of a tarp or plastic sheeting. The measly fire in the dirt in front of the house and the steaming pot with hopefully something for breakfast. Barefoot children in the road chasing goats with sticks. Men idly talking in small circles, smoking cigarettes. Defecating in the creek. Malnutrition. Limited schooling. Spending afternoons plastering wet cow dung onto sunny walls to dry it for fuel to cook dinner. And I’m making no attempt here to tug at the heart strings – this is much the reality, as I have seen it and as I’ve been told.

Working as servants they get out of rural poverty and have a chance to make a better life for their children, who can often get to school more easily in towns than in the countryside. Better access to medical care, employment, etc.

And the servants become a quasi-extension of the family. The old man who shuffled around the house, doing no appreciable work still had a “job” that paid him something in a country with a limited safety net for retirees. While not entirely charity, his continued employment speaks to that fact that there is real gratitude for the work he did over fifty years ago to raise Saumya’s dad and later Saumya herself. Saumya’s family is also helping to pay for the education of some of their servants’ children. Members of her family are pitching in to make sure the next generation would have more opportunity to improve themselves. Her family may be a huge anomaly, but I would not be surprised if it indicates a larger trend.

This positive feedback loop is literally transforming the world. The story of the last forty years (and the next forty, at least), will be the dramatic alleviation of poverty for hundreds of millions of people. This is happening most dramatically in India and China, but in other parts of the developing world as well. The hungry and destitute are becoming poor but not hungry, the poor are becoming working class, the working class are becoming middle class, etc. And this huge sucking sound, that inexorable demand for Earth’s resources, is attributable to this increasing living standard as well. Steel, coal, rubber, water: pump it, smelt it, ship it, burn it. The resources and energy required to lift a third of the planet’s population out of poverty. And meet their new demands for more consumer goods.

Going from under a dollar a day to a dollar a day, or going from a dollar a day to two dollars a day may not seem like much to us. But that increase doubles their income. And counts for something. A long way to go, of course, but it is a major advancement.

I’m still thinking a lot about this system and the people here, about the economy and about the population and labor and what it all means. I haven’t come to any grand conclusions yet. I think it’s complicated. I think the general trend is positive, in the alleviation of poverty, despite the intimidating urban, environmental and social challenges it brings. I think this dynamic, the alleviation of extreme poverty and the slow expansion of a global middle class, will be the driving force in the world for this century. Let’s hope we have the collective courage to meet the new challenges that it brings.

“I Choo-Choo-Choose You”–Train Travel in India (long post)

(Written January 2)

We’ve taken a couple of pretty epic train rides here in India, that are experiences probably worthy of a post. Our first was in southern India, from Chennai to Alleppey, where we would enjoy lounging around on a houseboat in the backwaters of the state of Kerala. Our second train ride was from Patna, where we stayed with Saumya’s grandparents for a week, to Delhi.

When we got out of the cab at the train station at Chennai, my Developing World Safety Alarms kicked up to about Defcon 2. The jostling crush of people (Brain: PICKPOCKETS!), the groups of men lazily leaning against the wall, eyeing the people passing by (Brain: LOOKING FOR TARGETS - TARGETS!), the child beggars (Brain: DISTRACTIONS FOR TO MORE EASILY ROB YOU WITH, MY DEAR!). From inside the protective walls of our cab, I nerdily recalled Alec Guinness’s classic dry delivery of Obi Wan Kenobi: “Mos Eisley Space Port – you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” I shoved all my money and my passport and credit cards into my under-the-clothes money belt (Saumya calls it my “Mormon underwear”). I probably would have put my laptop and iphone in there too if they would have fit. I carried my bag in front of me and tried to open up my peripheral vision to 270 degrees. Which, it turns out, did not help me read the departure board written in Tamil.

We found our car and our berth. The car’s long main corridor had a series of two berths along the long side and more communal areas (“coupes”) with four berths, setup with a lower and upper berth. We had an unconfirmed reservation that got bumped to a waitlist, so our three berths (for Saumya & Dave and I) got downgraded to two. A college-age Indian woman and her mother joined us sitting on the two lower berths waiting for the TT (Ticket Taker). A silent, heavily mustachioed Indian man in cheap polyester brown pants and a tan button-up shirt sat across from me and tried to hide his curiosity (alternatively, boredom).

The TT came by and looked at our tickets. He may be my favorite stranger on the trip so far. A thin man, he was dressed in a blue blazer, white pants (white!), a red tie and white dress shirt whose cuffs extended well beyond his coat. He had thin hair, carefully parted and greased down, and a pair of spectacles that through some miracle or magic balanced ever so carefully from the end of his nose. He had the air of an experienced (but unpretentious) butler whose radical economy of speech and motion had been pared down to the absolute functional minimum. Like some very stoic and quiet Saint Peter, in his arms he carried an enormous ledger that held a thick stack of sheets printed on dot-matrix paper (dot matrix!). He looked at our tickets, flipped through the tome, found us and carefully noted our attendance. A bureaucrat to the n-th degree, he took his job tremendously seriously. Saumya politely asked if we could extend our ticket from Kochi to Alleppey (some part of the downgrade process also changed our final destination, so we would only go most of the way. Fascinating.) He said “I will return.” Regally he rose from our bunk and glided silently through the curtains. We giggled and giggled about how cool this guy was. Having completed his circuit down the train, he returned the way he came. As he passed by, Saumya said “Sir?” He turned, peeking his head in between the curtains, and said “Madam, I will return.” He did, too, this miraculous piece of work of a man, this wondrously efficient cog of the bureaucracy! He came back with the Eternal Ledger and consulted a long table of destinations, times and prices. He flipped to the back of his book and made a series of handwritten calculations, amid his other calculations for different customers. “Madam, the additional fare to Alleppey will be two hundred and fifty six rupees per head.” Saumya: “Per head?” TT: “Yes, ma’am, per head.” After a pause he clarified, “Per person.”

He also was on the case so we could get another berth, so Dave and Saumya could have separate bunks. Around midnight I got woken up and found the TT with Saumya in the hallways, trying to get a separate berth along the side, apart from Saumya and Dave, for me. He explained that the pair of pushy, nosy British women who interacted with us while boarding kindly requested that we surrender our berth to them (they were waitlisted and did not have a seat and were not supposed to even have boarded the train). I’ve never seen someone so politely say in between the lines that “Ma’am, please tell me ‘no.’” This TT was a Jedi, a ninja. “It is not required, madam,” he tells Saumya. “It is their request. But you have your berth.” This guy was a master. We kept our berth. His subtly was so nuanced Saumya didn’t even catch it until I mentioned it later.

Our car was class “Second AC,” which is one down from first class. In Third AC you had six people in the coupe with you, with the berths stacked three deep. But you still had AC. In the standard sleeper you had six people and no AC. In the final car I think it was mostly fend for yourself (ie, stand, sit, lie down as you can).

The bathroom was another experience entirely. I had gotten used to “hole in the ground” latrines in Panama. I have never experienced a “hole in the floor” bathroom on a moving train. That was literally all there was. You could look down and see the tracks racing by under you. (I was later told that people who live by railroads generally relieve themselves on the railroad tracks, probably because the trains are already indiscriminately discharging their waste there). Beside the hole there were two small elevated platforms for your feet, a water sprayer and a cup (this is the standard Indian-style (vs. Western Style) toilet in India). There was a sink and mirror with soap. I am not sure of the mechanics of how Indian-style toilets work (with just water how do you dry off? Do you walk around with wet undies?). And I can’t imagine the physics of trying to do this on a swaying, starting and stopping train. As Nick, Dave’s brother, later would wax philosophical, “I was trying to figure out how the physics of that transaction would be possible.”

I couldn’t resist – it’s an innate Peace Corps Volunteer response: “Take me to your toilet!” What you can’t see are the railroad ties whipping by through the hole…

Once I got my shoulder-width wide upper berth to myself, separated from the incessant fluorescent hallway lighting by a thin blue curtain, I managed to get a decent amount of sleep. I would sleep in approximately two-hour increments, roll over and doze back off again. The berth was beyond time. I had no idea what time it was because I left my iPhone in my bag and there was no window. I would occasionally peak my head out the curtains and look to see if other people were waking up. If not, back to sleep.

Saumya came by around 6 AM (becoming quickly our standard wake-up time). I was sitting up and writing in my journal, fresh as a daisy (short lived! such a short-lived daisy!). We all got back together in our shared coupe and watched the tropical landscape go by as the sun came up. Vendors went up and down the train cars hawking their breakfast food. We had some terrible idly and sambar (the soupy sambar came tepid in a plastic bag) and a couple of fried vadas (deep fried, dense chickpea-based savory donuts) that had been fried hours ago. A man walked down the car carrying a silver coffee urn saying “koppee, koppee, koppee.” We got a Doctors’ Office Pee Cup sized-cup of super-sugary, super-milky coffee made, I think, with Nescafe instant. He walked by at least seven times. Saumya’s second cup, on his eighth circuit, was attributed to his perseverance.

The Land Beyond Time: Second AC berth - More comfortable than you’d expect!

Our second train trip, post-Patna, with Dave and Saumya’s combined families, was quite different because we were rolling in First Class. The “kids” quickly seceded from the parents to found an independent a “Kids Coupe” (Dave, Nick, Saumya and I). A magical transformation had occurred between Second AC and First Class. The thin curtain that separated us from the main hallway had been transformed into a thin wall with a sliding door (with lock!) and curtain. There was about an extra eight inches on each side of the berths, which made a big difference. Over the speakers we were feted with horrendous music of such poor sound quality that it sounded like a bleating/dying/birthing goat (the volume was quickly dropped to zero). Our fresh sheets were delivered in a brown paper bag to ensure their freshness (because they’re in a bag – come on!). We were served chai immediately after boarding, on a small collapsible table (this is new). We had a full dinner (six options?!?) that included a butterscotch ice cream cup as dessert. The food was a big step-up from the airplane food that I had expected: spicy, flavorful and filling. And on a whole different level from fend-for-yourself/maybe-there’s-a-dude-selling-cold-sambar mentality of Second AC. After the dinner an attendant cleaned the floor with a rag and a spraybottle. A different attendant came in to make our beds. What luxury!

Traveling in First AC is just like the sugar they give you – Superfine!

Hot and Sour Soup on First AC comes with crackers: Or, Bake and Cake (we didn’t have to do either)

Having boarded the overnight train on the evening of December 31, we rang in 2012 with our First Class snores on a train in India bound for Delhi.

The Road: A Space Between Spaces

(Written January 2, 2012)

Written while sitting on a six-hour bus ride from Delhi to Jaipur. Expect to write a number of posts here and then spam them when I find wi-fi. Saumya is in the backseat explaining the intricacies of Indian familial naming conventions. Auntie is reading a novel in the front seat. Everyone else is basically watching the foggy world of Delhi in winter whip by.

We’re “back", in a sense. We landed in Delhi two weeks ago and flew out the next morning to Chennai, in southern India. We spent a week touring in the south and then took a flight up to northeastern India to Saumya’s grandparents house in Patna, the capital of the state of Bihar. We spent a week there with her family and then took a fourteen hour overnight train ride to Delhi over new years (we left in the evening on Dec. 31, slept through the new year and arrived yesterday in Delhi). We did some touristy stuff in Delhi yesterday (Red Fort, Gate of India, Parliament, President’s house, Humayun’s Tomb, etc). We had a delightfully carnivorous meal last night at a place called Kharim’s, a middle eastern tandoori place in a crowded and dirty but somehow quaint Muslim neighborhood in Delhi. After a week of mostly vegetable dishes (of unbelievable quality and quantity) at Dadi and Dadaji’s house (Saumya’s grandparents), the transition to so much meat has our collective stomachs doing the mambo.

I think it was appropriate that I was traveling in India during Advent, the season of waiting (not just “for Christmas” as most believe, but also for the eschaton, the end of time, the second coming of Christ). I have spent a lot of time waiting. I thought the other day that we have become so used to long times traveling and waiting that now most any other travel we could eat for breakfast. Fourteen hour flight. Six hour bus ride. Fifteen hour train ride. The concept of time almost changes. I have realized how much I really enjoy when the passage of time is synced to the passage of space. Our flight was fourteen hours long, but we went 8,000 miles. It was a long flight. But we were going a long way. In the States, a two hour flight to Chicago takes five hours with getting to the airport, security, waiting, delays, arrival, deplaning, baggage claim, etc. The travel doesn’t seem slow enough. You’re always moving, except for those two brief (relaxing?) hours in the air. Here these long journeys give you time to really mentally settle into the waiting. To the passage of time. And look out the window: the passage of space. There is a more serious contact with reality on the ground instead of in the air. Cars. People. Men peeing by the side of the road (O, if I had a nickel!). Hotels. Road signs. Power lines. Motorcycles.

But mostly I’m enjoying the time required in travel. Touring can be an intense experience. So much to see and to do in so little time. To “take advantage of being here.” And then we make choices to get to the next place as fast as possible. The flight instead of the train, train instead of the bus, etc. Then the time “between places,” on the road, between spaces, in itself becomes a new space. The space of the road.