Shock of Filth, Shock of Poverty

I kept a journal while we were in India, and I'm copying here in all its emotion and artlessness. This trip had such an impact on us... that I want to share it. Forgive, in advance, moments that may seem melodramatic or sentimental. I just don't have the skill (or the distance) to reproduce my experience in words. I assure you there was nothing melodramatic or sentimental about our trip. It was an experience of life and raw humanity.

We’ve been in India for two days, and my senses have been assaulted, violated, sprung open. As soon as we got off the plane I could smell it. Like an animal exhaling in the night air. Like warm skin sprinkled with cumin and coriander. Like burning excrement.

A man from the hotel was there to meet us at 3 AM in Jaipur, and we rattled off into the night. Some people were still out at that hour, huddled around small fires they had built in the streets.
The first shock is the shock of poverty and the shock of filth. This morning, waiting for the train, my eyes locked---- paralyzed---- on the sight of human feces and urine on the tracks and engorged rats sniffing around and the stench of it was rising up in waves, and I was gagging uncontrollably over and over again. It’s a smell so indescribably putrid that I feel like I never knew the full spectrum of smells before. I suddenly realized that the traintracks are the public bathroom, and the realization made me almost vomit. It’s sickening. It’s nauseating. It’s saddening.

People were spread out everywhere, ragged and dirty and hopeless-looking. Children with mucus-encrusted faces and nappy hair sitting still, quiet, moon-eyed, while their mothers are sleeping on the concrete.

Yesterday I saw a peacock picking its way through a pile of trash. It’s like these sad-eyed women in their butterfly-colored saris. Picking their way through the trash.

Aren’t the people beautiful. Driving by, a whole family of four packed on a scooter, the children giddily waving at us. A leathery old man with glasses propped beneath a crimson turban, squatting on the ground reading the newspaper. A little old lady in a grey sari, asking me to write out the information for her train ticket.

And scary, too. Scary/sad/disturbing. A half-naked man, stork-limbed, who painted himself red, wild-eyed, walking through traffic like he’s in a dream. The eyes staring two ways at once. A leper. A man with a dead foot. The mad. The insane. The touts. The hustlers. The beggar children.

I feel like an intruder sometimes, armed with my camera and shooting mercilessly at their poverty.

And what about those children. Those moon-eyes.

Now we’re on the train from Jaipur to Agra. The country-side is rolling past in green and yellow. Villages flashing by, impossibly decaying. The occasional fantastical sweep of bright paint on a decaying wall, or red, blue, and green flicks of color on a tiny cupola. Monkeys share space with peacocks and humans, always conniving ways to steal and spring away.

Away from the villages, people live in mud huts with thatched roofs. There are round straw huts----granaries. Everywhere are huge piles of cow dung shaped into flat round circles and lined up for drying or stacked ready to use as fuel. No running water, no modernity.
The people stare at us, shocked, as the train slows down. And then we rattle away forever.

India is seeping into me. I’m helpless.