Chris Mooney-Singh

The two-stroke auto-rickshaw engine belches oil and smoke and adds its quota to the pall of Delhi smog. I am sitting in the back as if in the shadow of a giant cobra’s protective hood. My driver weaves between carts of pomegranates, bananas, apples, mangoes, papaya and guava. All are ready to be served with a piquant sprinkling of pink masala-salt. I have lost my westerner-fear of street germs and gained immunity from the local water, but I cannot stop to taste anything. I am heading for a railway platform where the station clocks are wound to any hour and trains are full of overdue relatives.

Late is also early and yesterday means tomorrow. I am more out of time than on time, as I fight my way into 2nd class Unreserved Carriage Number C3 of Sher-i-Punjab, the “Lion of Punjab”. Soon we will be shunting north out of Delhi. The red-coated coolies tried their best to get my business earlier, but I managed my own two bags and a guitar in a soft shoulder-case and slung them up onto the luggage rack.

This is not a please-and-thank-you country. It is a place of push and shove where the strong bluffs the small to get the lower berth. Mostly, greetings are done with the wobble of heads, the folding and namaste of hands. Words are reserved for the somewhat ritualistic gestures from an ancient culture that acknowledges caste, rank and position. Hello brother, hello sister, hello Sahib, hello vegetable wallah. Words greet you with one of the 33 million names of God at one moment and cheat you the next. Words are not to be taken seriously or at face value. One must train oneself to be less gullible and to read the sub-text of hand-gestures and the subtle mudras of eye-muscles telling the opposite of the words. Smiles may be hooks or hidden agendas.

Living on and off for the last decade and a half in India has taught me valuable survival skills and re-geared my poetry to accommodate the tragic-comic nature of the sub-continent shaped like a tear or a sacred cow’s udder. As the train picks up momentum, I look out the window and as always, I am struck by a culture in transition:

A bag of Surf on a washerman’s rock,
a cocoa cola stand near the coconut stall,
low-flying jets, vultures in a flock,
political anger written on a wall.

Over the years, I have noticed the creeping Western influence, particularly since the advent of satellite dishes on the temple skyline which is radically altering the billion-plus minds of this place with western beats, fashion and re-runs of “The Bold and the Beautiful,” glib postures for a globalised world. Yet, India’s a computer wobbling on a rickshaw desperately trying to upgrade itself from developing country status. To do so, every day, it willingly sacrifices many of the old values and traditions that give this culture distinction and uniqueness. Education is not about culture and learning, but about economic opportunities abroad. The dream of vast numbers of Indians is to leave. Most cannot understand why westerners like me spend years tracking through Indian streets in search of history, music and poetry and old spice and perhaps the sense of easy community that my own western background lacks for me.

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My naïve childhood visions of the gentle East were rudely shattered years ago. The ancient texts and poems still evoke an idyllic world of forests, yogis in relaxed hermitages, mango-breasted maidens, nightingale sunsets, elegant temples and palaces, but that world is a fairy-tale of princes and princesses who exist only in the winter season wedding pavilions, gaudily lit up with electric lights and doorways of marigold garland-strings: the princes are bound for pavilions at dusk, decked out like courts of royal blood. Their ranis wait on rented lotus thrones while a thousand guests mill and gossip. That glorious fairy-tale existence is still a talisman for every Indian. It drives them on toward the desire for material wealth at any ethical cost. It puts Western clothes on the men, makes English part of the masala of language spoken here: kitcherie basha “mixed up language”. I am speaking to everyone in simple grains of rice and pulse made from Hindi noun and Punjabi slang in a soup of English.

One of India’s great talents is its ability to take on influences and transform them into their own version of reality as if they invented it. Of course, the world knows that it is one of the official state languages of the nation and now many of its major writers win Booker prizes with it and international poetry awards.

Ironically, as English makes more in-roads, Indians begin to lead a kind of double life. English denotes the modern and progressive and is fiercely encouraged amongst the striving middle-classes who equate English, the lingua franca of the world and commerce with personal progress. They are not wrong. However, traditional language and customs are increasingly being down-played. Less are studying original literatures, Indian classical music and other art-forms. They seem to hark back nostalgically to them after they have migrated elsewhere to the western world.

Such trends are very evident in Punjab, an economically-progressive State, driven by its hard work-ethic rural economy and where at least one member of every family has someone settled abroad and most likely sending money back. This is where I am heading once again on the clacketing wheels of the Sher-i-Punjab roaring down the track to the land of bearded Singhs, meaning “lions”, who fought off Moghul emperors and then the colonizing Britons who tamed them eventually. Now the lions, tigers and jungles only exist in old photographs of the old Maharaja shooting parties. But still I look out the window, and follow the fields of mustard flowers that ripple forward to an unwavering sun, hoping to see what doors my eyes might open in the sugar-cane fields.