PTI Global

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PTIGlobal President, Mollie Peters, Makes Trek to India

I recently returned from a trip to India, and when I say India, I mean primarily the state of Rajasthan in northwest India. It was an amazing, frustrating, colorful, rich, and enlightening trip, in which EVERYTHING was new! The best way to describe India is to relay some of the experiences, which had that “only in India” stamp on them.

Street View For instance, we stayed overnight in a tiny village outside of Bharatpur, with only a single dirt crossroads. At dawn I was awakened by a strange faraway sound. At first I thought it was a vehicle or machine of some sort. It kept coming closer and getting louder, I realized it was someone walking through the street, chanting and clanging on something metallic. It was musical and rhythmic and quite lovely. As the singer passed the haveli (hotel) and walked on out the road, the lovely sound grew gradually fainter again. Then the roosters began to crow. It was a moving Indian moment as I lay quietly in the dark in my bed, imagining the opening of the day as a spiritual beginning.

Toward the end of the trip, we trained east to Bodhgaya, a small town in Uttar Pradesh with an intense collection of Buddhist temples, each built and supported by one of the world’s Asian governments, such as Thailand, Korea, Bangladesh, and so on. One of the maddening things about India is that foreigners cannot drive there. There are no traditional road rules-- only secret Indian ones that evolved from bike riding—which means you are about to die every few seconds, or have your fingers amputated. So, professional drivers are a must between towns. When we were leaving Bodhgaya, we needed transportation to the train station and hailed a pedicab (tuk-tuk) outside our hotel. An hour or so later we were well on our way back to Delhi, when, at one of the many stops, a man got on, who looked familiar to me and I wondered where I might have met him. I gave a vague sign of recognition, thinking that might elicit a revealing response. It elicited a response, alright, and I realized it was our sweet driver from a couple of days ago. But his look was one of intense anxiety. He had a motorcycle helmet propped under his arm and was sweating profusely in his shirt and tie. I was quickly lambasted with a round of hysterical indictments. Turns out he was supposed to pick us up from our hotel and drive us to the train station. How could we have forgotten! “You go find where they are,” said his angry boss, “and don’t think you can use the car!” So our driver had jumped on his scooter and somehow followed our train out of town and caught up with us. Poor guy, misplacing your foreign patrons is a huge no-no, about which his boss was duly horrified. I had to write out an explanation (confession) to prove to his boss that losing us was “Not His Fault”. I wrote a sincere apology, but added that I didn’t appreciate being yelled at.

Perhaps my most memorable experience was in the Great Thar desert. From a tiny village, we picked up our camels and rode 4 loping hours into this scrub desert, arriving in the early evening. The sky was soft with haze and the sun was soon setting in a pink ball. After a typical supper of the rice, Dahl, and curried vegetables, in addition to a couple of bottles of whiskey provided by our host, who had ridden out in his jeep, we chatted by the light of lanterns. A couple of the young men, who had accompanied our camels and cooked our meals, put out small rugs on the sand, set out a lantern, sat down cross-legged, and, without a word, began to play and sing on the tabla and harmonium. What made this interlude so special? It was what I can only describe as sincerity—the innocence with which these simple, soulful Rajasthani ballads were delivered, the marble-blue eyes of the dark haired singer, his completely unself-conscious manner, the lack of acknowledgment that he was doing anything special. Neither a smile nor a word passed his lips. These qualities to the performance left me melancholy and thrilled at the same time. When we went to bed in our open tents, he continued singing as we drifted off to sleep under the dark desert sky.

Posted: March 31, 2010