Mirror

About a week ago I saw myself for the first time in over 6-weeks.

I was on a marketing visit in the small desert town of Barbud with my loyal work companion and village chaperone, Deepak. We had walked into an unassuming barber shop for a few minutes to escape the anvil-like sun, and enjoy some freshly pressed sugar cane juice we had purchased from a nearby street vendor. The small parlor was empty, and we took a collective exhale as we stepped in and removed our gumchas, dragging our sandals with fatigued relief across the tiled floor. To our left the entire wall was mirrored, giving the reflection of counter tops littered with silent scissors, three tattered barber chairs, and two exhausted men.

I sat down on the cracked vinyl bench, elbows on knees, and quietly looked at myself. Unlike the port-holed images of hand-held shaving mirrors and blurry reflections I had seen in the milky windows of nighttime buses, I could now observe myself in candid clarity for the first time in almost two months - I had changed.

Though same in shape and proportion, my face was now worn with uneven hues of pink from the constant onslaught of salty sweat and desert dust. My eyes looked sunken and worn, tunneling out of my face with a fraction of the energy, optimism and aggressiveness to which I had grown accustomed over the years. And behind me was the backdrop of my new life in a foreign land - the walls were plastered with the angelic faces of fair-skinned models, and dotted with smooth cartoon images of Ganesh.

So I sat there sipping the murky waters of my sugar cane juice, shamelessly gawking at the foreign figure in the mirror. He was totally unfamiliar to me, and all I wanted to do was stare. I was now starting to see why everyone else did.

General Class

Tightening the endless straps and plastic buckles of my colossal backpack, I looked up at the blue-grey clouds of the evening sky with a fast heart and focused eyes as I stood alone and waited on the platform of the Jaipur train station. The ominous words of GDL’s hardcore Fellows, veterans of India for nearly a year, rang through my head.

“I always wanted to take General Class, but never had the balls to...”
“It’s like a cattle cart...”
”No, you really don’t want to take General Class...”

At the time they were all just interesting anecdotes about India’s rough underbelly told weeks ago over hot chai after a nighttime monsoon. But now that I had a General Class boarding pass in my pocket, and minutes to spare before the train arrived, these same words were eroding my trustworthy conviction layer by layer.

It wasn’t meant to be like this though, my current situation was far from planned. I intended on taking the train with a large group. We had planned to not take the cushier 1st, 2nd or 3rd Class cars, but rather gut it out the non-A/C Sleeper Class to Ahmedabad - a short 11 hour ride. This was, as I had been told, the “real India experience.”

However, after arriving at 2:06 PM to a ticket office that had closed at 2:00 PM, my options were concretely limited. With the entire train booked, my only chance of getting to Ahmedabad was to buy a ticket for the only class that didn’t need reservations - General Class. Accessible to the poorest of the poor train travelers for about $3, General Class was little more than wooden benches, metal-barred windows, and a few rusted fans for its passengers. Because there were no reserved seats nor limit to how many tickets could be sold, the option of sitting and not standing in General Class was a luxury and not a right. I had encountered the same practice countless times on brief New York subways and Boston buses, but transplanting this reality onto an 11-hour train ride across India seemed to color far outside the lines of logic with bright and bold crayons.

I heard the train approaching, and could now see the unblinking white orb on its nose.

The gentleman on my left and the two on my right stared at me for brief moments of interest, wondering why someone like my self was waiting to get onto the General Class car. I simply stared back at them and took a deep breath with pursed lips, conceding the absurdity of my situation. Behind me was a rusted cart on shaky wooden wagon wheels selling samosas, and I cold smell the thick masala. The train had now reached me, and I saw all the other classes slide by in a taunting blur - First Class...Second Class...Third Class....”

I was in my starting blocks and the pistol had been raised. The shuttle countdown had already reached a decisive “two.” The drum roll was reaching a thunderous bedlam.

The train stopped with a decisive howl and I did what my friends had advised me to do, all the I could do - push. In an instant, I was mashed together with all the strangers around me as we nudged and prodded against each other in a solid mass of panic and body odor. People edged in and out of the narrow train door all at the same time, sliding by each other with angled shoulders and furrowed brows. I, with my cumbersome backpack wasn’t so lucky, and had to resort to brut force as I shoved through the the door with unapologetic resolve.

Inside the train was no better as I was greeted with an abundance of stares and not a single vacant seat. Hands selling water and sweets shoved their way through the barred windows and into the compartment- “Pani! Pani!” - bare feet stuck out from second-level benches and into my face, the rusted fans attached to the ceiling blew warm air onto my neck. Standing about a foot taller than all the eyeballs fixed upon me, I felt like a chopstick standing among spoons and grabbed onto the ceiling rail as the train smoothly crept forward towards Ahmedabad.

After about 45 minutes, a nice muslim man ordered his friends to all move aside, allotting me a hospitable 7 inches of seat which I gratefully accepted with the slight nod of my head. I sat upright on the bench with my backpack between my legs and began to doze off as I came to terms with my situation.

I found myself surprisingly comfortable and looking forward to the down time when my phone rang from within my breast pocket. The whole train looked over as I fumbled with the zipper and pulled it out - it was my friend Tushar in the Sleeper Class compartment.

“Dude, we found a seat for you, get over here now.”

The conversation was curt but perfect, and when I felt the train stop a few minutes later I leapt into action and began pushing once again towards the door. I could see out the window that we had not stopped at a station, but rather in an empty field in the middle of nowhere. Seeing the opportunity though, I slid the door open and jumped out of the train. The drop was far and the impact was hard, but I quickly got my footing and ran alongside the train as my feet clawed for grip on the loose gravel ground beside the tracks. For a brief but resounding moment I realized the train could very easily just leave without me, but I quickly put the thought out of my head and continued running until I came to the door of the Sleeper Class and pulled myself aboard.

The sleeper car was dark and quiet, but when I saw my friend’s faces it felt like a ticker tape parade. The train was humid and my blue vinyl sleeper bench was sticky against my skin, but it was the best seven hours of sleep I will perhaps ever get.

Bus-Top Riding

The day had completely gotten the better of me, and I could feel it with every emptying exhale. Though over the past month I was quite proud of how I had taken in stride the gauntlet that is India, sometimes it all just got to me - the heat, the cows, the stares - and this was one of those days. Deepak and I had spent the day in the village of Barbad with a Sarvajal franchisee, and our bus was finally pulling up. Despite its crooked suspension, rusted sores and fractured windshield, it was the most beautiful bus I had seen in years. The day was finally over.

“Go to top?” Deepak managed to say with choppy English and a rising hand gesture.

“Yeah!” I immediately burst out, walking to the rear of the bus with fervent eyes and an awakened bounce in my step. I had always wanted to ride on top of the bus, and the idea of escaping the inevitable stares of the riders inside was welcome.

With my backpack on both shoulders and gumcha wrapped around my head, I made my way up the warm ladder and onto the shallow metal tray atop the crudely painted beast. After only one step forward it leapt to life with the pop of a clutch, causing my arms to shoot out to my sides for balance and my eyes to open wide with the precarious reality of the situation. As the bus climbed to 20, 30, 40 kilometers an hour, Deepak and I quickly made our way to the front and immediately sat down.

The metal roof was hot, hotter than I imagined, and the scalding rail on my right was hard to grasp for more than a few seconds at a time. I could feel the bus continue its romp through the gears - 40, 50, 60 kilometers an hour - and the wind grew exponentially as it washed against my front teeth that were now exposed in a full childlike grin.

Driving past rusted telephone poles, wild brown-green trees and tilled fields, the sky looked bluer as I inhaled gallons of fresh air through my nose. The wind flicked my gumcha onto my shoulders and ran through my hair and down my back replacing warm sweat with a cool blanket. Even though Deepak was sitting a few feet behind me, I felt like the only one atop that bus, or anywhere for that matter. It was just me enjoying something I would have never experienced otherwise.

The wind had washed away the heat, and the cows and the stares, replacing it all with the sense that India was a wonderfully raw place like no other.