Here and There

In a dry, claustrophobic street in Old Delhi, a compact white car blocks the road as it tries in vain to squeeze past a cow. The dense monsoon rains that flooded the train tracks between Goa and Mumbai are yet to manifest themselves this far north, and the dust beneath our feet is kicked into the air, mingling with the acrid fumes of sandalwood and burning litter. A Sikh man, perspiring slightly in an orange turban, appears beside me. He observes the scene with a languid smile, says “Welcome to Delhi,” and goes on to extol the virtues of the fertile Punjab, and of Amritsar. It is not a region that features on my second whistle-stop tour of the Indian subcontinent, but I assure him that I will visit in the future. I thank him for his conversation, and we both drift away into the humming crowds of pale-off-the-plane students and bronzed, middle-aged New-Agers. The cow bats away flies with its thick eyelashes, and its purpling tongue hangs between its teeth.
India has long been one of the most familiar of cultures “unknown” to the West, and to the British in particular, due in large part to the intimate- if not always amicable- relationship that we have shared in recent history. Elements of India and Indian culture are present in our own, and the residue of imperial rule lingers in the whitewashed Iberian architecture of Panaji, and in the reluctance of Mumbai residents to refer to the Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus as anything other than “Victoria Terminus.” It is there in the rigid, splendid hauteur of the horticultural shows of Bangalore’s Lal Bagh botanical gardens, where the city’s residents stroll through mild evenings, awash in the glow of fairy lights strung between the trees.
Often, it is this “Raj hangover” that links the various states and regions of the subcontinent. In southern Tamil Nadu, patriotic politicians don the characteristic combo of white shirt and lungi, and fat, moustachioed film stars stare menacingly from roadside billboards- a rugged kind of everyman style that is a marked deviation from the relative gloss and sheen of Bollywood. The lush mountains, ethereal in morning light, and red soil of South Indian panoramas are, quite literally, a country away from the dust and deserts of the North.
When Berlin, a Tamil friend from the city of Madurai, first met his now-wife Shereen- who is from the North- English was the only language they shared. Their first languages are about as different from one another English is from Russian. They were brought together with the help of a foreign influence, but one that is entirely familiar to them. The imperious gopurams of Madurai’s Sri Meenakshi temple, teeming with hundreds of unpronounceable and dazzlingly painted Hindu gods, may rise above unknown streets, but the personal stories that play out in their shadows are eminently recognisable. The world isn’t getting smaller- we’re just realising that we were never very far apart.