In the middle of a dense-intense Delhi junction of roughly 6 merging lanes of traffic, the taxi driver stopped. The two swollen, white plastic bags slid off his dashboard and onto his lap. He left the car, taking them with him, leaving us there. Dodging rickshaws, taxis, mopeds, cows, and road-side rubbish mounds, stepping up onto the central reservation. He carefully untied the knots in the plastic bags and emptied the bird-seed contents into the middle of an excited flock of Myna birds.
He did it yesterday and the day before, and he'll do it tomorrow, and the next day, 365 days of the year.
We followed a sign, amongst a thousand others, for our hostel, down a narrow, twisting alleyway. A dragged out, waiting on a sofa with a pug snoring on my lap, opiate-stoned receptionist, check-in. Up 6 flights of stairs to our window-less room and then down again and out into Delhi for the day.
Chipmunks as common and feisty as London squirrels. So many street dogs, (aw, Jella). Flocks of Kites circling in the hundreds. Men in turbans or with shawls wrapped around their heads huddled around pavement fires; little fires that are everywhere, on the side of train tracks, on pavements, on doorsteps. Squatting in warm circles, conversation and laughing. Man is cold, man makes fire, man is warm- we laughed at what was such obvious logic but that which would cause such carnage and police reports if we did the same on a pavement on a January morning in London.
Mounds of things on heads. House-sized craters in the road. Huge cows, with skin tight and silvery to their bones, eating from rubbish piles. Disconcerting puddles the colour of minty black After-Eight. Every nook and cranny stuffed with activity; men welding, bangle selling, sari sewing, white-rats in cages, lotus-legged paan sellers, sacks of vegetables. So much colour.
We shared a tiny internet cafe with 3 fans pushing muggy air around at high-speed, and police men resting their chins on the ends of the barrels of their great long shotguns, while they waited for photocopies of Doctor's reports. Buildings across the street from each other were joined in a twisting, knotted canopy of wires that sagged down walls and into windows. Smiling head wobbles, goats in jackets. Chandni Chowk bazaar. A continuous horn orchestra: 'I am here!' / 'I am overtaking!' / 'I am driving towards you!'. Driving up whichever side of the road gets ya where ya going.
Sitting on a concrete ledge down a side-street, we had a dinner of pea and potato samosas and hot, sticky, flourescent-orange jalebis. Joined by a rat.
When the sun set we found our way back across Old Delhi and up the twisting hostel alley, life moving in the dark corners. We avoided the stream of something dripping from somewhere above us. Fires and glowing hands without faces, running feet, a dog fight, radio songs lost in crackling interference, the smell of piss and spices, laughter, singing, a drum procession somewhere...
We were up at 6am for the train to Agra, faces against the bars on the train windows, in the much-colder-than-we-anticipated January air. Decorated mud homes, brick homes, fabric homes, plastic homes, straw homes, corrugated homes, homes in the middle of the After-Eight water, homes in rubbish, homes on sandbags, homes on stilts. The number of men and children you can spot taking a shit! We wonder where the women are shitting... 'Meals on Wheels' whizzed up down up down the carriages singing 'chaaaaiiieeeeeeeeeeee!' 'vegbirianieggbiranichickenbiriani!' 'samossaaaaaaaaaSAMOOOSAAAAA!'. At Agra train station monkeys swung from bamboo scaffolding, slamming down into the crowds, sauntering between human legs and suitcases, tails high, danger-red arses, eyes on the food prize.
On the way to the Taj Mahal for sunrise, our auto-rickshaw driver Hazim, pulled over at a road-side fire where a chai wallah was stirring cardamom into a steaming cauldron of milk and black tea leaves. Holding the ladle high he let a swirling column of thick chai fall through a sieve and into 3 plastic, shot-sized cups. We stood for a few moments, watching 5am Agra wrapped in blankets, emerging in the fog. The plastic cups softened in the heat of the chai and we swallowed our drinks before they collapsed in our fingers. Dogs and goats were sleeping in the embers of yesterday's fires.
The Taj absolutely lived up to its 'Wonder of the World'ness. A breathtaking love memorial in the early-morning mist. Hazim picked us up some lunch for our train ride to Gwalior- SPICY green chilli and pea curry in a knotted plastic bag, with puri for dunking. We ate it sitting on a big, white postal sack on the platform, shared between us, a toothless lady, a puppy with its tail hanging off and the inevitable monkeys.
Five hours hooked on the continuous reel of 3 second long glimpses into the lives outside the windows; people sleeping up against the train tracks, dogs eating dead dogs, games of cricket, dancing wedding processions, ingenious and spectacular methods of transporting goods...
Hiking up the 700 steps to Gwalior's magnificent fort on the hill, decorated with stone ducks and elephants painted yellow and blue, we met a boys cricket match on a dusty levelled out platform half way up. One of the boys handed Angus the bat. Luckily he hit the ball. We explored up and down the narrow stone stairways and passages between what once were bathing chambers and music rooms, until we stupidly ran out of water (with the 4km walk down the hill and through the hot city via a climb around the 50ft tall carvings in the cliff-face, still to go).
At Gwalior station, waiting for the train to Jhansi, a boy with glistening eyes started talking to us in near perfect English. His name was Aman, he was 12 years old, and his English was good because he 'listens in school and likes reading Shakespeare.' He talked mostly to Angus, (...male to male...), sharing details about each others lives. They were quickly surrounded by a growing group of boys and men, arms around one another, heads titled to the side... Aman translated questions in Hindi and everyone shuffled a little closer, grinning. He said they were curious to see an Indian talking English to a foreigner. Phones were taken out for photos with the foreigners. More joined what was now becoming a large crowd, 'Curious.', Aman said to us with a coy smile, nodding towards the newbies. After an hour on the platform he joined us on the train, and offered to work out translations for us so we knew when we should get off. We didn't yet know that this whole event of kindness from a stranger and attention quite strange to us, would happen at every station platform.
First question, 'Is this your wife?', to which we quickly learned that it was much less complicated to say 'Yes'.
'How many children?'.
Consistently ignored in male conversation and at the receiving end of the unstoppable stare, I sat quiet, entertained by the endlessly interesting stuff happening on the platform. A 'good' 'wife'. ;-)
The train arrived into Jhansi at 10pm, 4 hours late. Most of the journey had been spent moving at 10mph through thick fog, to the sound of the deafening horn that made sure the people/animals that would be sleeping on the tracks got the hell outta the way. We walked up and down the platform looking for Muna, the driver who'd come to meet us from the home-stay. Some shouts and we turned to see a tall Indian man with bright orange hair jumping and flapping his shawl like he was trying to fly, revealing a fluffy, sparkling jumper. He would have fit right in walking around a London Art College and yet couldn't have been further from it. He rushed us to his auto-rickshaw and we offered him some bourbon biscuits which he ate in one smiling mouthful. Cold, dark, and the fog enveloped everything that existed more than a few feet in front of us... But it was late and nothing could deter Muna's determined enthusiasm, so we hurtled into the screen of white, towards Orchha. Navigating decisions could only have come from memory and good guesses (though we drove right off the road a good 4 times avoiding the lorries that suddenly appeared 4 feet in front of us). The single windscreen wiper didn't work so Angus hung out of the side of the rickshaw, one hand wiping the windscreen with newspaper, the other hand shining his supersonic torch ahead in the hope it might help illuminate the thick, white nothingness in front of us. Muna jumped up and down in his seat, giving Angus the thumbs up and letting out high-pitched belly laughs.