Confrontation

India is constantly confronting us.

This is not uniformly a bad thing. People are constantly showing us kindness as well as need as well as hassle as well as soothing. And while not always bad, it never stops.

A dirty boy of about eight years is pulling on my elbow and asking "one rupee."

The man sitting on the bench next to me at the train station is playing with a length of string, moving his harms clearly over my airspace, while staring at my face. Burning holes, in fact.

The man at the historical cave site claims to be a farmer and poor, and he is constantly trying to sell us little pieces of quartz that he has found somewhere. We don't want quartz pebbles. He keeps lowering the price. He won't leave us and though we have left him, he seems to always appear where we want to go.

The very friendly local guy on the bus turns out to also be a seller of carvings and quarts pebbles, and he somehow extorts a promise from me to visit his stand at the bus stop. How did this guy pull a fast one on me?

Each auto-rickshaw driver in Arungabad has said "hello" to us and "where are you going" as if to offer a ride. We don't want a ride, we want to walk. But we are also walking dollar signs---they stand to get good money from tourists like us, so they never stop bothering us.

The porter who took us and our bags to our seat on the train is complaining that eleven rupees is not enough payment: he says it is twenty rupees. But I clearly read a sign, in English, instructing me that the going rate for porters was eleven rupees for one parcel, up to 35 kg, carried on the head, and twenty-two rupees for four parcels carried on a cart. We had one light bag, and so I though it totally slimy of him to demand more than the posted rate. I am embarrassed to say that I really fought with him about this. Monica tried to get me to stop. I hated the feeling that I was getting taken for a ride, and I also felt that I had some sort of pride to defend: "I am not that stupid tourist who will pay whatever you say." Thankfully I gained some perspective and yielded. The difference of nine rupees is worth about twenty cents in US currency.

There are many many many confrontational experiences to face in each day traveling. The hotel room becomes our sanctuary.

But I do not regret the choice to come here. There is far too much to be happy about. The people are warm and lovely. Everyone we reach out to feels happy to talk with us. As we visited the historical caves of Ajanta and Ellora we met many many Indian families who just wanted to take our picture and talk with us and thankfully English is spoken widely and well enough to convey nuance and intent. In all of the chaos rides a communal sense of care and purpose. If you place your will into the mix---lovingly---the cacophony will take you where you need to go. The train system, the traffic jams, the food carts on the streets, the wobbly bicycles, the bullock in the middle of the highway: this is the fabric of the Indian experience, and I love it already dearly.