An Indian Holiday

My post last week was written as an observer of sociopolitical scene, not as a person returning to visit his family. This piece is a personal documentation of the trip and may be of some interest in a personal way.

I have two brothers, three nephews, one niece, innumerable cousins and their progeny living there. By and large, they are all doing well financially and belong to what is termed upper middle class. They all have cars, some with drivers; own their comfortable homes and no credit card debts. Older relatives are retired with good pensions and/or substantial investment incomes; younger ones in good jobs in industry. Money is not the issue with any of them, except a nephew and his wife who deliberately chose to be a political and social activists living frugally on contributions of supporters to their cause. I don’t believe any of them feel they have done worse financially than yours truly. They have servants for housework and don’t use washing machines for clothes and dishes even when they own them.

Delhi was hectic, partly because going anywhere is time-consuming. It takes an hour or more to go to my brother’s home in Noida from Delhi airport a distance of 15 kilometers. During a stay of four days there we saw my other brother for half an hour, visited a cousin for the afternoon, attended a wedding and visited the village of Sarurpur. The village is located 35 kilometers from Noida, it took almost three hours to get there in a private car. A Calgary family has raised funds to build a maternity clinic in the village. The clinic was officially opened in last October. Although equipped with beds in several rooms on two floors and accommodation for the medical personnel on the third floor, the hospital is working as a day clinic because it is unable to attract qualified staff. The village has electricity for eight hours a day at unpredictable times. Thus, the medical equipment is inoperable and the hesitation of professionals to live and work in the village is understandable. Two doctors and a nurse currently operate the clinic and plans to operate it as a hospital are on hold. My wife Evelyn is a doctor and has an international reputation as a human lactation expert. She was welcomed at the hospital with great fanfare and spent seven hours attending to about fifty patients with a variety of ailments, only a few related to lactation. Still, she had always wanted to work with the poor and this was one of the many high points in her career.

We attended a wedding reception for the brother of the wife of my nephew. In middle class business communities grooms are bought in something like a silent auction. Parents of eligible girls bid for the grooms euphemistically stating what they will ‘spend on the wedding’. Since most of the money is spent on the dowry, a price is being set for the groom. In this wedding, bride’s father gifted the family a home in Delhi, a car and unstated amount of gold and diamond jewellery. Most of the relatives of the groom received the gift of a package of expensive candy and an envelope with five hundred rupees (ten dollars). Total money spent on the wedding was estimated by my sister-in-law at five hundred thousand dollars, a huge sum in India where a cup of tea costs five cents. Traditionally, daughters do not share in the inheritance; the wedding expense is usually much more than their share would be. It is not unusual for a bride’s family to take on huge debts to place her in a ‘good’ home.

The weddings in other communities are simpler. We attended another wedding in Dehradun. The marriage was arranged in two families of prosperous ‘warrior’ community. The dowry was not a consideration. Ceremony was much simple and the reception was elegant but not pretentious. Total expense on the wedding was a few thousand dollars. Father of the groom was gracious and thanked the family of bride for the gift of their daughter, a gesture unthinkable in most Indian weddings.

We travelled in Kerala for a week. Flight from Delhi to Kochi was cheap and comfortable. However, the flight of nephew and his wife from Bombay was delayed and we waited for four hours at the airport for them. We drove to a resort located on the inlet of Arabian Sea. We got up early to visit a bird sanctuary, heard many bird songs but saw none. We did see the village life on the other bank of the inlet with women washing clothes, pots and pans and men themselves and getting ready to face the world. The homes were small but looked neat. Later in the day, on a three hour boat trip we saw a number of kingfishers, egrets, snakebirds and millions – yes millions- of ducks in the inlet, rice fields and coconut groves. The musicians of considerable talent performed to an audience of four to six in the evenings. The swimming pool was not heated but it was warm and the view of the sunset while floating in it is an unforgettable experience.

Train ride to Trivendrum was followed by a car ride to the southern tip of India called Kanyakumari. There were almost as many churches and mission schools as the temples and quite a few mosques. The hotel room had a view of the temple of Swami Vivekanand, an Indian sage of late nineteenth century who preached Hindu philosophy in California. There was also a magnificent towering statue of Tamil poet Periyar. Both are located a few hundred meters from the coast and small boats ferry visitors to them all day. However, unseasonal monsoon rains cancelled all boat trips and we could not visit either. We did have a pleasant walk down and up the crowded market with stalls on both sides of narrow streets. We spent a couple of nights in a beach resort but couldn’t do much due to downpours. We had dinner in a restaurant with thatched roof and makeshift appearance where one course of a ‘catch of the day’ cost more than all restaurant meals on the whole trip.

We returned to Delhi by air and took a train the next day for Dehradun, the capital of a new province Uttarakhand. Main reason for the visit was the wedding of the granddaughter of a very close family friend since the days of our childhood. We were treated royally by the hosts and the wedding was a grand affair without being showy. The day before the wedding, four artists spent several hours decorating bride’s arms and legs with green henna paste which left red designs after it dried and peeled off. The artists hid the name of the groom in the design and he was expected to find it when they met. Evelyn also had her arms and hands decorated and the colour lasted a week. There was no mention of the dowry but the groom’s party did arrive with the usual pomp, groom on a horse surrounded by a band and followed by about two hundred guests. The bride came an hour later looking like a princess dressed in a gorgeous red sari and jewels from head to toe. She was conveyed on a palaki carried by her brothers on their shoulders to the groom waiting patiently for her on a divan. The cameramen, amateurs and professionals hired for the occasion, got busy snapping all possible combinations of the families. Soon it was almost midnight and the groom was having a hard time staying awake. The word spread that the ‘phera’ ceremony in which couples go round the holy fire seven times while the priest chants Sanskrit mantras praying for the couple’s happiness and advising them on how to cope with whatever the future brings, was to be delayed till several hours after midnight. The guests who had eaten a sumptuous meal long ago now started to take their leave. The members of close family rested for a few hours before the final public ceremony in the midmorning when the bride leaves her home to become a member of her new family. Plenty of tears were shed by every one present and after the bride had departed with the groom. It was at this moment when the father of the groom thanked bride’s family for the gift of their daughter.

One of the highlights of our trip was the visit to the home where I was born and lived till I was eight. Once an elegant home, it was now dilapidated but almost as I remember it in general appearance. It has been divided into three apartments and is habited by families in difficult circumstances. We were invited in by the elderly lady owner and treated to tea and snacks. She told us all the hoops she was going through to make one of the tenants leave and of the plans to renovate the house after the tenants had left. The city as a whole, just like most buildings in the country, has a worn out look.

We spent a few days in Nainital, a popular summer resort since the glory days of British Raj. Again, the streets are crowded with vehicles, even on the mall which used to be an avenue for pedestrians only and where the families strolled around the lake admiring the beauty of the turquoise water reflecting the surrounding peaks and enjoying the cool fragrant air. The distant Himalayan peaks are visible only rarely now. Still, the views of lakes and surrounding peaks are wonderful and visitors return home to their humdrum life refreshed.

Day after returning by train from Nainital, we flew to Calgary with a five hour stopover in Frankfurt. It took more than two weeks to get over twelve hour jet lag. The trip was tiring but refreshing too.