Besides sharing beds, toothbrushes and wayward looks at camels and the drunken Jaipur boys trying to escort us around the city, Anna and I have spent the better part of the last month sharing hotel rooms, playing chess and discussing endlessly the poverty and misery and shit we see everywhere, no matter where on the Indian subcontinent we go.
I can't decide sometimes whether we discuss these things as a defense mechanism, as sympotom of the books we read and the things we care about or just because of the sheer scope of the suffering that we fly by in buses or struggle to wade through in brief village visits but we do it a lot. Laying on our backs, surrounded by our belongings, staring at the hotel ceiling, endlessly we circle around what actually horrifically exists, what our role in it is, how much to give away, how much to give, how to devote oneself to making it better, the fear of devoting oneself to making it better and getting lost in the mission.
In some ways the poverty in Chennai is more in your face. Its the slum at the end of the road, the dude laying on the street outside the grocery store. Its the crippled old ladies limping along the roads. In Rajasthan it was different. It was the poverty of people who could understand the wealth of white foreigners in a one dimensional way: wealth as unending and undeserved. Gifts and money begged at every stop. Hands reaching into my pockets to make sure they were as empty as I claimed them to be. Everything, from bobby pins to sunglasses to watches was wanted, needed in a way, as payment it seemed. "You have the audacity to come to our village and see our poverty and simply leave" everyones faces said to me "therefore your sunglasses, your only bottle of water, your everything is the least you can give"
They were right in. Yes I needed my water but my guide would never let me die of dehydration. Yes my sunglasses were convenient but not necessary, same with my hairtyes my lip balm, my ten rupee notes. They were so right and yet so wrong all at the same time and it was a misunderstanding that will never be made right and only made worse by the parade of tourists that both sustain and crush these villages.
There is something so perverse about the whole thing that it is almost unbearable and cringy to know that we were made a part of it. So Anna and I lie on our beds, stare at the ceiling and wonder how it is made right, how do we communicate, how do we clear out the rubble, the illiteracy, the pained look of desire on the faces of these villagers as they are shown off to tourists as "authentic India"
I just know we may have no right to feel better to feel less guilty until we can find a way to make it right.
