The Final Flurry of India

Although two months in India sounded like it would be a long time, we were soon facing the fact that we had only about two weeks left before our flight out of Delhi. That made us think: what more was on our bucket list for North India? First, we wanted to get a taste of Rajasthan, one of the most popular states for tourism because of its elaborate forts and palaces. Next, we figured we had to visit the Taj Mahal because, well... because. Finally, we made a jaunt up to Punjab to learn about its unique Sikh-influenced culture.

Bundi from above

We spent our four nights in Rajasthan in the town of Bundi. The first challenge was getting there. Since the train tickets were long ago sold out, we had to try our luck at “taktal,” a special last minute clump released online at 10 am the day before the train. It was quite a scramble involving lots of adrenaline, the available seats remaining ticking down the single digits, two failed credit cards, a forgotten and almost misplaced Verified by Visa password for the one credit card that did work, and then…processing... success! We had gotten the very last 2 taktal tickets for the whole train. We let out an elated whoop and a big high five. Plan A had worked out! 

Bundi Palace at Night

Although Bundi is listed in Lonely Planet, we appreciated that it is not on the main Rajasthan tour circuit. Nevertheless it features a magnificent fort and palace up on the hillside. It definitely had tourism infrastructure, with lots of family run guesthouses and rooftop cafes, but it was remarkably uncrowded and had a very funky character. In fact, the vibes at our first guesthouse were a little too funky despite many great reviews online. There was nothing wrong with the place, but Julia felt anxious and uneasy and woke up at 3 am and couldn’t fall back asleep, so we switched hotels after one night. But not before we heard a loud POP as a power surge fried Colby’s computer charger. You could both see and smell the scorch. At least it served to make us grateful that nothing worse had gone wrong so far in India. 

The Palace by day

We began our first full day in Bundi by packing our bags and escaping to different lodging, a nearby heritage hotel called Dev Niwas. Dev Niwas was a gorgeous haveli (mansion) built in the 1680s and at one point was home to royalty. Indeed, it was probably the most royal we will ever feel for only $25 per night. India has definitely given us a taste of what it is like to be more wealthy than most people around us, with all its pluses and minuses. Our haveli hotel had a beautiful interior courtyard decorated with graceful archways and wall paintings, with gleaming marble floors. Equally wonderful was their rooftop restaurant with perfect mango lassis. From the restaurant we also had a great view of dozens and dozens of kites soaring high in the sky. Kite flying is a major pastime of kids in Bundi and around North India, and wow do they have skill! Anyway after the overnight train ride, the half sleepless night, and the stressful uprooting we were feeling nauseatedly wiped out and inclined to hide in our windowless room to sleep. This would be the point to mention that it was Christmas Day... Merry Christmas! 

Home sweet home, Dev Niwas

We were both feeling a little homesick, especially after we made the mistake of looking at other people’s Facebook posts of family gatherings. We were tired of our stomachs feeling subpar after all the rich restaurant food. We were bothered by the computer charger situation and the disappointment of our first guesthouse. We dreamed about having our own kitchen and our own home to nest in, and a daily routine where not every decision feels like a shot in the dark. This inspired us to have a nice long conversation dreaming about our plans and goals for after the trip. 

Our outing for the day was trying to track down a new Apple laptop charger in the bazaar and streets of Bundi, which is like finding a needle in a haystack, as Apple is not very common in India. We would approach one bazaar shop, which would usually have the slight feel of an overstock room or hobbyist’s basement, show them the fried charger, and they would shake their head and point us to some other shop down the street. It felt like a modern reincarnation of the “no room at the inn” Christmas story. 

Although our quest was unsuccessful as predicted, it did spur us on a great walk around town. The bazaar was wild - dusty, colorful, swirling with motion. Shops and stalls offered everything from backpacks to medical supplies to enormous piles of red chilis (but not Apple chargers). Produce sellers attended their beautiful streetside spreads of fruits and vegetables, surrounded with dozens of competitors. We continue to marvel at how many people can spend their days waiting for the occasional small purchase, especially with umpteen others right next to them selling almost the exact same things. There was one zone of roadside open-air blacksmiths, people hanging around little open fires and swinging heavy mallets to pound metal tools into shape, for sale on a cloth spread on the ground. Little tables displayed false teeth for sale. Cows and pigs ambled down the streets, meaning there were consequently many splotches of poo to dodge with our feet. The cherry on top was a monkey making a dash for it across the street. 

Eventually we left the bazaar and passed back into the tighter streets of central Bundi, a maze of narrow winding lanes lined with one tiny open-air shop after another. It almost felt like we were at the Renaissance Festival, except that everyone was walking around with smartphones - a mashup between the medieval and the modern. The shops were a mishmash of slightly decrepit nooks in the wall with their shopkeepers presiding over them. We passed tailors, jewelers, street food carts, displays of clothing and flower garlands, roasted peanuts, sacks of bulk food, people weighing goods on balances. Open sewer drains lined the edges of the street, emanating gag-inducing odors. Milkmen wove through the streets on their motorbikes with shining milk urns hanging off the sides like bees’ pollen sacks. It was a tight labyrinth, crowded with pedestrians and deafeningly honking motorbikes. We were getting really fed up with the honking, feeling like shouting every time: “OH COME ON BE QUIET!”

As we walked we enjoyed seeing how Bundi was built over time around the remains of the old fort and its walls, whose old painted archways are still incorporated into the streets today. Each layer of history was constructed over the last, resulting in an exciting maze of nooks and passageways and dead ends. Although many of the historic buildings were fading and crumbling, they still displayed marvelous architectural details. 

For Christmas dinner we found a rooftop Italian restaurant and ordered pizza and a chocolate shake - something different! We also had some credit card troubles and power outages to deal with that day. Colby’s long running cold and cough were only slowly starting to abate. And so, the holiday passed in an entertainingly unceremonious manner. 

A classy Christmas 

We spent most of the next day trying to plan the rest of our time in India. We can’t emphasize enough how time consuming and exhausting this is, especially for Julia who obsesses about finding the absolute best option, whereas Colby is happy with “good enough.” The highlight of Julia’s day was a mug of chai from the locally famous Krishna’s Tea Shop. He sat cross legged at his stall and pounded all the spices fresh with a rock, and boiled up the tea right in front of her on his burner. The chai was alive with the fiery bite of black pepper, cloves, and ginger and the intense richness of cinnamon and cardamom. 

Bundi Palace and Fort 

Stepwell tank at the top of the hill!

The next day was our big exploration of Bundi’s star attractions, the hilltop ruins of its palace and fort. Although initially constructed in the 1300s, the majority is from the 1700s; we noticed this in how the walls are constructed for use with guns. We started our morning with a hike up to the fort at the top of the hill. Bundi hasn’t yet been very developed for tourism. It was a steep, crumbling and overgrown cobblestone path, going through grasses at times, with arrows painted onto buildings and walls to tell you where to go. Since it was a fairly long walk up to the fort at the top of the hill, not many other people made the effort and we were among only a handful of people up there exploring. That was just the way we liked it! 

The abandoned fort on top of the hill was a multi-acre compound of different buildings, palace rooms, stepwell tanks, lookout towers, walls, and other buildings scattered around. It was pretty run down and definitely in decay, with graffiti, cow poop, pigeons, monkey poop, and crumbling buildings, but you could still see astonishing glimpses of its former opulence and decadence. We were completely free to walk wherever we want, exploring all the nooks and crannies, climbing around and exploring the labyrinthine rooms and basements and dark corners and climbing onto the roof terraces. Life is so much more fun in a land without potential lawsuits. Colby kept saying “This is so cool!” over and over again. It was like a real life playground that almost never ended, and we had it almost all to ourselves. We couldn’t stop marveling at how absolutely splendid and lavish it must have been in its heyday, from what we could see of the remaining wall paintings and stone carvings. It was so fun to get almost lost in the mazes of courtyards and palace rooms. 

After exploring for hours, we headed back down the hill to the palace. Since the palace is more accessible and in better shape than the fort, there were many other visitors there. But we enjoyed seeing a better-preserved version so that we could imagine what the fort might have been like. The wall paintings were showstoppingly gorgeous. Each one depicted a unique story with mind bogglingly intricate brush work. Every figure was unique; even in armies of hundreds, everyone had their own distinct facial feature. Seeing the paintings made us involuntarily issue echoes of “whoa”... “wow”...  And amazingly, even though they were painted in the 1700s they were still in decent condition. 

We spent most of the next day hanging out in Bundi waiting for our evening train to Agra. We sat in a remarkably wonderful park for a while, reminiscing about our trip. Some kids tried to sell us their kite but we ignored them for long enough that they went away. We were starting to feel a little fatigued with India. Content with what we saw, glad we came, but slightly relieved that our time would be winding soon to a close. We also killed some more hours waiting for breakfast and later lunch at another rooftop cafe. (Cafe meaning two or three tables with the family cooking food in their home kitchen). We tried a local Rajasthani specialty called “dal bati,” which was a thick stewy dish of a particular local green legume partway between a lentil and a bean, mixed with very fine chopped greens and spices. On the side were these little round balls made of legume flour and herbs and baked, like a dense bun. It is always stressful trying to figure out what restaurant to go to and what to order since it is all new.

Agra, home to wonders and stink

Our train ride to Agra wasn’t the greatest, especially for Colby. The next morning he declared “I am so done with overnight train rides.” We were in sleeper class (non AC bunk beds, aka planks covered in the smallest amount of padding). It was noisy and chilly, and the train took, as scheduled, more than 12 hours to go 190 miles. This was compounding on the bad night of sleep Colby had the previous night in our hotel. At about 11 pm some extremely loud music had started to blast on the street for hours, keeping him wide awake with the mounting desire to storm outside and yell at them. It was almost the final straw... “Where in the world is this acceptable?” he kept fuming the next day. Julia had rarely seen him so resentful before. One thing we will never fail to appreciate in our lives hereafter is… silence. We never imagined a place could be as noisy as India. 

Workers replacing a tile

Our train pulled into Agra, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, just before dawn. Right away the visibility was reduced even within the train station from the smog. The air was thick. We took a car to our homestay as opposed to an autorickshaw because all we wanted was to be in a quiet bubble. The homestay was in a nice and relatively quiet residential neighborhood close to the Taj Mahal. Despite its relative prosperity, the neighborhood was nevertheless lined with open sewage ditches running all along the streets. That seemed to be the situation throughout Agra, even more noticeable than in other cities we have visited. Agra was unavoidably smelly, almost gag-inducing. 

The next morning we pulled ourselves out of bed at 5:30 am. We outfitted ourselves with warm coats and N95 respirator facemasks, then walked through the chilly predawn air toward the West Gate of the Taj Mahal. There was a thick fog hanging over everything. We shuffled through the dark mist along with other human silhouettes, hardly able to see where we were going. Everyone recommends coming early to avoid the crowds, and we took it to heart - we were among the first few people in line. By the time we had our tickets and made it through security, the sky had brightened for daytime. We passed through the majestic red sandstone entrance gate and… behold…fog! So dense you could see almost nothing. No Taj. 

We walked through the manicured gardens and past the shallow blue pools of the grounds, but couldn’t see any of the Taj until we were directly underneath it. Even then, we couldn’t see to the top of the minor archways before the fog blotted them out. We took this as an opportunity to observe the detail work right in front of us: the incredible inlays of semi precious stones, elegant white marble, dazzling zigzag stonework, and lovely flower bouquet carvings in the stone. We walked inside and saw the tombs of Shah Jahan and his favorite wife, Mumtaz, in whose memory the Taj was built. But still, we weren’t satisfied: we wanted to see the whole thing after all the effort of getting there! The fog took its sweet time to clear, but after about three hours of waiting it finally lifted and the majestic ivory beauty slowly emerged out of the mist. There she was! The Taj Mahal was a stunning building that you just wanted to keep looking at from all different angles. It was amazing in the “behold!” kind of way. Besides that, we don’t know exactly what to say about it. While it was grand and awe-inspiring, it also made us appreciate the more personal exploratory experience we had in Bundi’s palace and fort, where we were able to explore more nooks and crannies and imagine stories more easily. 

Seeing the crowds continue to pile in through the day made us grateful we had gotten there early, especially since it was a weekend around the holidays. The lines to get in were backed up for what seemed like miles; the Taj sees 80,000 visitors on the average weekend day. Although it is not usually our style to go to the #1 tourist destinations, we were glad we did it … after all, how can you go to India and not see the Taj? Now we can check it off our list. 

The Taj was gorgeous, but exploring Bundi fort was more exciting

To avoid the hassle of negotiating with exorbitantly priced tuk tuk drivers, we decided to walk home instead. We took the winding residential back streets through a very modest and run down but friendly neighborhood. The road was about 8 feet wide, lined with open sewage drains flowing on either side, and behind that a tight wall of homes and shops. We fell in love with this absolutely stunning chicken we saw picking around in a trash pile, perhaps the most beautiful chicken we have ever seen. Pigs rooted around in the sewage drains. Tailors worked at their sewing machines, people ironed clothes with fire-heated metal irons, a man walked by leading a donkey laden with a load of bricks, kids waved hi to us, people worked at a little grain mill machine loading the flour into big sacks, motorbikes buzzed down the narrow lanes. Little schools were tucked into buildings. The call to prayer emanated from a mosque. We glanced in the open doorways of homes in passing. One area was a sort of recycling zone where bags of garbage were piled around and people were picking the electronics into pieces, sorting plastics and other materials. Wafting around everywhere was this awful sewage smell which is ubiquitous around Agra. But nevertheless, our walks along a street of normal life always end up being equivalently interesting to all the “must-see” attractions. 

The next day was New Years Eve. We were wiped out from the past couple days and spent most of the morning snuggling under the soft warm blankets and doing massages. It gets chilly in North India in the winter, making it extra cozy to hide under the covers. We also continued to do a lot of stressful research about plane tickets for our next big jump from Thailand to Argentina in early February. 

In the afternoon we took a cycle rickshaw to the Taj Nature Walk, a large park that is part of an inner city forest reserve. We were so excited to have some nature time away from the honking and sewage smell! Anyway we enjoyed our walk through the park, lots of hummocks of fine sand covered in bushes and trees that kept wanting to snag our clothes with their thorns. In the haze we could overlook the silhouette of the Taj. It was really smoggy and the face masks saved us; we wore them all day again. Although we ourselves were fortunate not to spend much time in Agra, we were upset at how unfair it is that many people have no option but to live here subjected to the pollution. 

We walked back home again, taking a slightly different route through the same neighborhood: through its maze of lanes and alleys, with horses and goats and pigs (all in the center of a 1.5 million person city!), the narrow bazaar streets buzzing with people, the packs of little kids excitedly waving and shouting “hello!”, people gathering around fires to warm their hands as the sun went down, the whole seen overlayed with a choking haze. One thing we have loved about India is how, even in these more poverty stricken neighborhoods, we don’t feel unsafe as there are literally people everywhere, women and families and kids playing, and nobody gives any menacing vibes. Although India was even more overstimulating than we expected, it was not nearly as threatening as we expected. 

In Agra we ended up eating most of our meals at two South Indian restaurants near our homestay. We both realized we have a fond nostalgia for South India, maybe since that is where we began our travels when we were fresh and impressionable. Of course, now that we were in North India, Julia was feeling more excited about South Indian food. The thali platter was excellent: with dosa (crispy crepe), idli (steamed fermented rice cake), vada (savory doughnut), with many chutneys and sauces and curry potatoes to go with. 

We celebrated New Year’s Eve by sitting in our bed, Colby eating some cheap and bad chocolate ice cream, Julia eating some 85% Lindt chocolate we jubilantly discovered in a store, and both of us stressing about our train connection the next day. Delhi had been having smog problems resulting in many delays; all of a sudden our 4 hour layover before our next train to Amritsar was looking too short. 

On to Amritsar - Easier said than done 

Sadly, our concerns were justified. We woke up early the next morning and checked our app; our train was already more than 4 hours late. Okay. We took a tuk tuk to the station, through a chilly fog so dense you could hardly see 20 feet before it turned to whiteness, and tried to figure out what to do. First we attempted to buy second class unreserved tickets for the first train passing through towards Delhi. Unfortunately the ticket counter staff were disengaged and not very interested in selling tickets. Ok helpful. Since the fine for riding without tickets is only 250 rupees, we figured that would be preferable to having all our travel plans botched. So we walked around the station and got on the first train we found that was heading towards Delhi. This particular train was actually running 7 hours behind schedule. We even went to the right car and seat numbers of the actual train we had reserved so we could play dumb if anyone checked tickets. It all went off without a hitch and we arrived in New Delhi in plenty of time. The streets of New Delhi had a New York or London vibe, that familiar frenzy of a big world city, cosmopolitan and modern, but with an intensely Indian character. 

Streets of Amritsar 

Although we were relieved we had made our connection to Amritsar, the fun did not end there. Our train was scheduled to arrive in Amritsar at 10:30 pm, but went slowly the whole time because of fog so we didn’t pull into the station until 4:30 am. We walked outside, bleary eyed and disoriented  in the darkness and damp fog. We couldn’t find our Airbnb host who was going to be waiting for us, and after calling him discerned that that he wanted us to take a tuk tuk to the house. Whaaaaaat? It was 4:45 am and we did not know where the house was, only where Google thought the “Garden Enclave” colony was generally located. It was not so fun to be alone and disoriented in an unfamiliar city. We were feeling dismayed and abandoned; everyone else on Airbnb had written how he picked them up in the middle of the night when their train was late! Why not us? 

Amritsar fog was even worse than at the Taj

Thank goodness there just happened to be one Ola car in the area which we snapped up. After we started riding we understood why our host didn’t want to come pick us up. The fog thickened into a wall so dense you could see almost nothing. We inched along at a snail’s pace on the deserted highway, scanning for the stripes marking the edge of the road. The most “fun” part was actually trying to find the house itself. The first challenge was even turning onto the correct side road as there was road construction and we ended up looping around lost with our stress levels rising. We had no idea where the house was, except that we were (presumably) approaching the right neighborhood. The fog was so dense that it was white out conditions. It is hard to find an unfamiliar place when you are enveloped in nothingness and can’t actually see anything except a couple orbs of streetlights amidst the cloud. The driver repeatedly had to get out of the car to look for where the roads turned off. After passing the phone to the driver several times so that our host could talk with the driver, and feeling totally stressed out, totally forever done with traveling, we circled closer and had our Airbnb host listen for the honk of the car. When we heard our honk echo back in our host’s phone we knew we were close! And finally with utter relief we arrived. 

Needless to say, this wasn’t the most wonderful start to our stay in Amritsar. We finally crashed into bed at 6:15 am and slept in a coma for 5 hours. Then we woke up and met our hosts for real, Jagdev and Jagjeet Singh, over some masala chai and homemade brownies. We had been feeling kind of betrayed and grouchy about the pickup, but after meeting them harbored no more resentments. They were really welcoming, gentle, kind people. Throughout our stay they treated us with utmost warmth and hospitality. Jagdev is an engineer, we presume retired, and they recently built this beautiful new house, big and snazzy with all sorts of cool architectural details they designed themselves. The neighborhood was an upper class one on the outskirts of Amritsar. We went for a walk in the afternoon to orient ourselves, passing by lots of other snazzy houses surrounded with scrappy lots awaiting more houses. It was so… quiet! There were almost no cars around, and hence no honking, and hardly any people on the streets even. It was so chill! It had a suburban feel, but not the oppressive manicured cookie-cutter sterility of US suburbs. 

In the afternoon we joined the family on the roof terrace to soak up some winter sun. Our hosts’ daughter in law and their 7 year old granddaughter Yatti were here for a while on winter holiday. We sat on the cot and chatted with them all while the daughter in law sawed and sliced sugarcane to gnaw the sweet juices out of. She and Yatti spoke perfect English so that made for even easier chatting. The maid sat with the family as well, chopping saag (mustard greens) and palak (spinach) on a traditional elevated blade. We have really enjoyed all the homestays we have done in India, just getting a glimpse into family life and having a more personal experience. Our hosts decided to do Airbnb because they like meeting new people from around the world.

We learned that Punjab is about 70% Sikh (hence, a large percentage of the population shares the last name Singh). Besides the most noticeable turban, the other Sikh customs are that both men and women always carry a small symbolic sword or knife called a kirpan with them at all times, and wear underwear that goes down to the knee. We had noticed the many different colors of turbans around and asked if the colors had any significance, but we learned it is just personal preference. Sikhism is actually a pretty new religion, beginning in the 15th century, and it is centered in Punjab. 

Golden Temple

The next day we did almost nothing. The train and taxi fiasco had really taken it out of us and we were still in kind of a woozy dazed lethargy. But the following day, we summoned our energy for our big sightseeing outing into central Amritsar. Our first stop was the Golden Temple, the holiest pilgrimage site for Sikhs and the most famous destination in Amritsar. The temple is golden, glitzy, elaborate and glittering on the inside, with beautiful stone inlays in the marble. The live music played inside the temple is projected around the compound. Although it was crowded, it was a pleasant atmosphere, with people being quiet and respectful. Jagdev told us that 90% of the work at the Golden Temple is done by volunteers: cleaning, cooking in the free community kitchen, etc. Around the temple we enjoyed seeing the expressions of faith: people bathing in the holy lake, or sitting cross legged in contemplation at the central temple. We were by no means the only tourists there; there were tons of mostly Indian tourists but almost no westerners. 

Hindu temple mirror mosaic ceiling

Next we walked over to a nearby memorial garden and park called Jallianwala Bagh, which is a memorial to a 1919 massacre of an unarmed gathering of Indians by a British colonel, killing officially 350 but probably many more people. It was eerie to see the preserved wall with the bullet holes and the well people jumped into trying to escape this British show of force. It made an extra emotional impact on us; the death of soldiers in battle is terrible enough, but closing the exits and killing peaceful civilians is another level of cruelty. 

Next we learned about more bloody history at the nearby Partition Museum. Punjab has seen a lot of these troubles over time. After India and Pakistan were created in 1947, there were many migrations and displacements of Hindus and Muslims along with lots of violence. Because of its location, Punjab saw a lot of these problems (we were located only 30 miles from Lahore, Pakistan). It was sad to learn about the nasty history of British colonialism as well. The 20th century sure saw a lot of upheaval all around the world. 

Hindu "Golden Temple"

En route to our next stop, Jagdev pulled over for us to get lassis. What looked like a random hole in the wall shop was in fact a locally famous lassi place. The lassis were super good and super rich, made of pure water buffalo milk, almost like drinking butter but in a delicious way! After this refreshment, we continued on to the temple. This time, it was a Hindu temple which bizarrely looked almost exactly like the Golden Temple: similar building architecture, similar decorations, similar rectangular lake, similar musicians playing inside the temple. However, Hindu gods were depicted rather than Sikh designs, it lacked the grand buildings surrounding the lake and the promenade around the lake. It also had none of the crowds or tourists. It had a much more laid back vibe, with local families coming to worship. We love places like these: 90% as cool with 10% of the crowds. 

Statue of the Guru

Next stop was another Hindu temple, one of the MOST bizarre places we have been in India. It was inspired by a particular woman guru. It started off fairly normal, a big room shrine after shrine of sparkly colorful decorated statues and displays of gods and demigods and other creatures. People circulated around the displays performing their prayers and respects to each elaborate shrine figure. A group of traditional musicians played in the big central hall. But then, the path took us upstairs (it’s a multi-story temple) and it got more and more bizarre. Rather than feeling like a place for religious worship, the words “fun house” or “theme park” started to dominate our minds. There was a circuit that you follow, the path winding up, down and around through all sorts of funky passageways, obviously completely eccentrically cobbled together from random buildings. We wound our way through this inscrutable labyrinth, trying not to knock our head on the low ceilings, crawling through some tunnels of fake textured rocks like a water park, no going back without going through the whole thing. Meanwhile we passed room after room of glittering shrines, walls and ceilings decorated in elaborate mirror mosaics, life size dioramas of some Hindu story scenes, and a passageway that was a big sculpted creepy monkey mouth.  It was definitely not wheelchair accessible, and definitely not up to fire code! It made us a little claustrophobic. But for as bizarred out as we were by it, it is actually a place that people earnestly go to worship. It was fascinating, but was just too over-the top and kind of rubbed us the wrong way. 

Navigating the bizarre multistory temple

After that wild experience, we had another wild experience coming: A visit to the mall! The Mall of Amritsar has an Apple store, where we finally concluded our search for a new computer charger. When we entered the mall we couldn’t stop saying whoa. It looked exactly like a brand new fancy version of a US mall with all the known brands. We could literally be in the US. We hadn’t seen anything like it in India so far! We both felt this big wave of happy, comfortable familiarity. This baffled us because normally we are both really turned off by shopping malls and consumerism. Perhaps just being in such a known and familiar environment resonated with us in a funky way. 

This big day was our major outing in Amritsar; the rest of our four days we mostly relaxed with our hosts around their house. One of our favorite parts of homestays is feasting on home cooked food. Our hosts were superb cooks and always urged us to pile more and more onto our plates. Punjab is an agricultural region known far and wide for its excellent food, and our host’s cooking was no exception. As happens at all the homestays, the hosts serve the guests their meal and wait for them to finish eating before having their own meal. We always feel a bit bad for this, but we do not protest as it is the custom with which people are comfortable. We enjoyed learning about all the Punjabi specialties. A common breakfast was paranthas (a fried pan bread stuffed with a filling). Our hosts use a mixture of wheat and chickpea flour for their paranthas, and cook with pure canola and olive oil as opposed to cheaper and less healthy oils. One morning, the parantha filling was grated radish and cilantro. Another it was super garlicky potatoes. And another it was cauliflower and cilantro. The one morning we didn’t have paranthas, they made the classic Indian breakfast dish poha: a curry of flaked rice and potatoes with peanuts, herbs, and spices. 

Lunches and dinners were even more elaborate. They must have read our minds about our favorite meal and prepared muttar paneer, dal, rice, and chapatis for us for our first lunch. Dal remained a common accompaniment to the other dishes they cooked during our stay: a hard boiled egg curry, tikka masala vegetables, mushroom curry, cabbage-pea curry. One of our favorites was the Punjabi specialty dal makhani, a smooth mix of black dal and kidney beans cooked with onion, garlic, tomato, spices and cream. Shahi paneer was another regional specialty: paneer cubes in a particular masala blend sauce. Of course, all our dinners were accompanied with ever-increasing piles of piping hot fresh chapatis drizzled in ghee. Another meal that Julia loved was saag (a dish of creamy puréed mustard greens) served by tradition with chapatis made of corn meal, rather than the usual wheat/chickpea flour blend. Our hosts said they eat a lot of saag in the winter, as it is a warming food for the body. They also emphasized the benefits of the spices in masala tea for keeping the body warm and healthy in the winter. And finally, after each meal they insisted we take a little hunk of jaggery, which is an unrefined cane sugar that promotes digestion. 

One of India's many facets

As we saw all the care and effort they devoted to their cooking and savored their creations, it made us excited to have our own kitchen where we can put into practice all these new tastes, ideas, and observations we have made in India… guess that will have to wait for a few months until we get home! Despite eating Indian food for almost two months, Julia’s love of the cuisine is undiminished. It made us wish that the US had a similarly rich culture and tradition surrounding food and cooking. Unfortunately, Jagdev said that young people here are increasingly attracted toward fast food. And here as everywhere, farmers don’t get paid enough. Jagdev talked about the increasing farm debt in Punjab; there was also an article in the Hindustan Times about these troubles.

Our time in Amritsar whizzed by and soon it was time to head back to Delhi. After a hugs and good wishes, we plunked down for a entire day on the train. We rolled past vast flat plains of farmland made of small bright green patches, past cities and towns that were almost disconcertingly deja vu from one to the next. They all looked the same: brick and concrete homes piled atop each other like a child’s wooden toy block set. There were many nicer houses too, some having the decoration and look of layer cakes, one with a big sculpture of an airplane on top. Huh. The vast majority of homes looked habitable and comfortable enough despite being a little rough around the edges, although there were also some small fields of tent camps. All the clusters of buildings were bordered with big stagnant ponds reeking of sewage, fields of bright plastic trash all over the place, dust, dirt. People sprayed chemicals in the farm fields with bare legs. The passing scenes had kind of a dismal look, and made Julia wonder: did modernization really make quality of life any better or actually worse as opposed to living as nomads or in tribal or farming villages? Rather than spending their days living from local plants and animals, people now spend their time in dreadfully repetitive and damaging jobs in service to the global industrial economy. 

We watched people going about their lives from the train window. Endless groups of kids gathered in open patches to play cricket or fly kites from rooftops. Many groups of people hung out in fields or walked along the roads and train tracks. Loads of people sat outside their homes on chairs or cots. One thing we have noticed is how many people just hang out, sitting or standing with family or friends or alone and watching the world go by. Big spreads of cow pies were laid out to dry in the sun. Endless people worked in the fields, endless people tended endless shops. There were so many people everywhere! 

Walking around the tracks and train stations were skinny scavengers in grubby clothes carrying plastic sacks to collect any trash of value. It also bothered us that the young people sitting by us in the train kept throwing all their trash out the window. There doesn’t seem to be a strong civic sense. Everyone keeps their own home very clean, mopping and sweeping every day, but even in the wealthy neighborhoods there is trash everywhere surrounding it. We wore our N95 masks for the whole train ride for the air pollution and smell. It seems it will take a massive effort of working together and a whole culture shift to start tackling these problems. Another disconcerting thing were all the beggars moving through the train aisles. In Kerala we had seen the different types before: sari-clad transgender people walk around offering blessings for a few rupees. People holding babies walk the aisles singing or playing an instrument. A new one was a woman playing a rat tat tat rhythm on a tin pan while her kids did some sort of routine crawling around on the aisle. That one actually got a lot of the passengers to look.

Besides being a 10 hour train ride squished on a hard bench, this train ride gave us an increasingly darker vibe and was more oppressive on our spirits. We were reaching our limit of India’s overwhelmingness. Coming into Delhi in the dark, the train tracks passed long stretches of crowded residential neighborhoods, decrepit homes of bricks and tin roofs piled on to each other with the narrowest of walking paths weaving among them, loaded with people, stacked to about 10 feet within the tracks. Then outside the train station there was a crowded traffic jam, ratty bicycles pulling towering carts of sacks of luggage, tuktuks, honking cars. Nobody operates under even the theoretical premise that one is supposed to stay in one’s own lane. 

After dinner we took the metro to our Airbnb near the airport for a two night stay before our flight to Thailand. Stepping into the metro station felt like were entering an entirely different world. It looked like it could be a brand new glamorous wing of a world class airport. The stylish new train was perfectly quiet, smooth, and impeccably clean. We can’t get over all the dichotomies of India. The slums, the chaos, the tangles of cables, the construction sites where skinny women carry loads of concrete in pans on their heads while their kids play around in the dirt piles; but then, things like the metro station that was nicer than any one we saw in Europe. 

Looking Back and Forward

We spent our last day and a half resting in our room, reflecting on our time in India, and transitioning our mental energies toward the next phase of our journey. Although we were absolutely glad we came to India, we were both ready to move on. It was eye opening but not usually pleasant. The surroundings were intensely energy sapping; every little outing left us wiped out for hours or days. Throughout our time in India, we had trouble overcoming the desire to hide in our room in order to seize the day. As the weeks passed, we learned how to manage but were never able to flourish. 

Nevertheless, there were many things we appreciated about India. First, it was not nearly as threatening as we imagined. It felt very safe and not at all scary. Although we were always aware, we never felt nervous or threatened. Even walking down a dark random street going to the train station, there were swarms of kids playing and women and families out and about. People mostly just left us alone, except when they wanted to take selfies with us. Also before coming, we had the vague impression that we would constantly be swarmed with scams and ripoffs and pickpockets. However, acting with basic sense eliminates almost all possibility for trouble. It was helpful to learn the “no” gesture (a horizontal swipe of the palm-down hand) as well as the invaluable tactic of completely ignoring anyone trying to sell you stuff. Easy does it. In these respects, India impressed us in a good way. Although the environment was unpleasant, the people were nice and generally quite chill. We also loved how public smoking is banned, so we almost never had to smell cigarette smoke. And despite the apparent chaos, most things had a way of magically working themselves out. We noticed that things don’t have to be fancy in order to function well enough. 

Throughout our time in India we gained increasing confidence in our ability to navigate the country and take care of ourselves. After feeling totally helpless and lost upon our arrival in Chennai, and being grateful to have friends to help us, we gradually learned how things work. The fact that English is so widely spoken was quite a boon. And just as important, having smartphones with a data plan was essential for helping us manage most things without too much trouble. 

In India we also got really good at going with the flow. We were never more than 80% sure what was going on. Was that supposed to be breakfast or lunch that our hosts just served us? When are we getting ready to go? What are we doing? Where are we going? What’s going on? Both the language and cultural barrier contributed to this. We both found that laughing helped us not go totally bonkers with always being confused. 

One of our biggest dislikes of India was the pollution. When we took off our N95 masks in Agra we could feel our throats burn, so we put them right back on. In Delhi our snot turned black. Air pollution is not only unpleasant, but is also recognized as a top contributor to death and disease in India. Besides the air pollution, the sewage and trash was almost unavoidable. Spending time here made us so grateful that we do not have to live here. The quality of life for a good percentage of the population looked depressingly low. It also made us very sad that the people who call these places home have no other options and can’t just “escape” like we can. Fortunately it seems like pollution is gaining increasing public attention in India. Seeing India was a reminder how essential it is to work for a clean environment, and what happens without regulations and a culture to support it. Visiting India also made us appreciate the extra privilege and opportunities we have in our lives, based on the sheer chance of where and to whom we were born. As the months and years pass, we will gain more and more perspective on how our travels in India have touched our hearts and impacted the choices we make in our own lives. 

Coming to India, it felt like a huge blank slate. We had little concept for what it would look or feel like. Throughout our two months, we filled in this blank slate with an almost indigestible amount of experiences. Sights ranging from beautiful vegetable and fruit stalls to cement factories. Smells ranging from a steaming mug of spicy chai to the reek of raw sewage. Sounds ranging from live classical South Indian music to high decibel traffic jams. Everyone we talked with beforehand was right: it was overstimulating. Most people also said we would fall in love with it. Did we? We loved our homestays and nature time and learning about the culture. But we didn’t love everything. We can’t see ourselves coming back without a particular compelling reason. Still, visiting India was a fascinating and valuable experience, sometimes enjoyable, and most definitely memorable.