The good people of Rishikesh

I’d heard horror stories before I left India about how difficult travel here is. Extraordinary, and extraordinarily challenging. People stare, grope, pickpocket, swindle you out of your money, soak up your time touring you around. And I saw a bit of that in Dehli, certainly. Our taxi driver tried to detour us to convince us to stay in a hotel where he’d get a commission for having dropped unwitting tourists off, and a rickshaw driver tried to pass off a 10 rupee bill so tattered it was barely recognizable. So yes, India can cheat you.

On the flight to India, the Indian man next to me saw me reading up on Uttarakhand in my guidebook.

“Are you going to Uttarakhand? I’m from there,” he said. I replied that yes, I was going there. He repeatedly asked if I was meeting with a group, going with a group, had a group of friends. No, no, no, I said. Alone.

“Oh, I would not do that,” he said, a horrified look on his face. He wrote down his cell phone number and his work phone number, saying to contact him if I had any trouble, and told me not to keep anything in my back pockets.

I started to explain that I knew women who have traveled in India alone and been fine. That I’d just traveled all over Thailand alone. He couldn’t hear it, and added his email address to my methods for contacting him.

But, I was sufficiently concerned. Was I crawling into a den of thieves with money dangling from my pockets?

It appears… so far (knock on wood), that this is not the case. The people here are incredibly friendly. I’m alternately greeted with “Hari om” or “Namaste” walking down the street—OK, half the time, that’s the replacement for “Can you spare any change?” but still. Children dance in front of my camera, calling, “Take my picture! Take my picture!”

I do and flip it around to show them. I love that moment of them smiling at their own image. Kids here break all the rules—they play with fire and they stay up late, they swim into foot traffic like sharks to pitch items for sale: “Buy a picture?” and they dance with strangers. They’ve got this remarkable spark to them, like they already know too well what it means to be human, how lucky it is to have a human life and how quickly it will pass.

There’s a certain degree of “Huh. Weird,” to some of this. I’ve had about a dozen people ask to have their picture taken with me, and that’s weird. Half the guys in an eight-man posse hiking a trail to the Shiva Temple had to have their photo taken with me. I was at a ghat, the stairs to the Ganges, writing and a man brought his daughter over to have her picture taken with me.


A man at a chai stall near the Shiva Temple, where we stopped for tea while waiting for the jeep to fill up so we could catch a ride back to town, walked his son over and held his son’s hand out and commanded his son, “Say hello.”

I shook his small, limp fingers and smiled at him while he stared at me. His brother curled into his shoulder and cried when I took their picture and he still looks a bit worried, like he’s not sure what the after effects of having touched a white girl will be. Aw, not so celebrity-esque.

But then there’s the oh, it all works out in the balance attitude. I’d stopped for an after-dinner apple samosa (let’s talk about things that are really going to aid enlightenment…) and chai with Patrick, and went to pay and had nothing but a 500 rupee note for a 30 rupee bill.

“Next time,” the clerk said. “Just pay next time. Maybe next year.”

“Next year? I’ll be back tomorrow,” I said. I’ve seen him do this over and over again (I was back the next day to pay off my tab and then some…). He’s just not concerned about it.

I was sitting by the Ganges at dusk, watching the water turn iridescent as the night came on, and one of the tourist police officers came down to where I was sitting and asked, “Are you OK?”

“I’m fine,” I said. He warned me against staying down there in the dark alone, and walked with me for a while along the bank, until I was near the stairs to the road. He asked where I was from, and if I was doing yoga, and what kind. I said ashtanga, and he replied, “You can do ashtanga? Show me.”

“Right here? Right now?” I asked. We were on a sandy stretch, but it was getting a bit dark and I wasn’t really feeling like playing trick pony.

“You’ll just have to take my word for it that I can do it,” I said.

So yes, there’s a bit of misogyny. A man on the train laughed when I said I’d just finished a master’s degree, and when I got on the bus, the man charged the white man ahead of me double fare and me nothing because he just assumed I was with him.

And OK, so I did have an episode with a particularly persistent Indian man staying in the room across from mine. I don’t think I’d ever literally shut the door in the face of a man who was still talking to me, before that moment, but there it is. And still he pleaded at the door and then came around to the windows, calling “Please miss…” begging me to come outside to talk to him for five minutes. He went so far as to peer in my top shutters (I’d already closed the lower ones—my windows look onto a balcony anyone in my hotel can access). I cried, “No,” and slammed them shut, flipped off the lights, and used my ipod to light my way to the bathroom to brush my teeth.

I swear as I was lying in bed, I heard him say, “Good night, boo” from outside. How he picked up “boo,” I wouldn’t dare ask.