After a couple of days in India, I began to recognise the sideways headwaggle. There must be some specific name for this in all Indian languages - possibly even in Indian English - because it is a very distinctive, well-understood gesture. It’s a bit like nodding the head, but to the side - moving your ear towards your shoulder - instead of to the front.
The meaning of the sideways headwaggle is somewhere in the realm of agreement, humility, thanks and welcoming. It’s very endearing.
Everywhere I went, after Mumbai, I was treated with incredible hospitality. Wherever I went, assorted individuals would greet me with glowing warm smiles: an experience of human immediacy, frankness and sincerity that was totally unfamiliar. This would be all sorts of people, just anybody, people nearby in the street who otherwise had nothing to do with me. India challenged my Western assumption of people having nothing to do with each other.
Travelling alone is always the best mode to discover this sort of connection. Many people are drawn to your vulnerability, your solitary porousness, in a positive way. (And of course some are drawn to it in a negative way - but it’s not so hard to sniff out trouble if you trust your instincts.)
Meanwhile, I had quite a tough time reaching much understanding in spoken conversation. Many people spoke some degree of English, but it was usually just a few words, and always somehow different to what I expected. Even the more proficient English speakers spoke a distinctively Indian flavour of English, and didn’t seem to understand much of what I said. On about my third day, I discovered that I could be better understood if I spoke in a rough satire of Indian English, copying the arpeggios and cadences of the Indian accent, and adding “sir” on the end of most sentences. I felt like I was taking the piss out of people, but nobody seemed to mind. In fact, my jaunty new way of speaking was received as an altogether more comprehensibe, more normal version of English.
The next week was a blur of hazardous buses, hot walks in the dusty midday, searches for hotels, delicious meals, a bottle of beer and a book in my hotel room in the evening. I enjoyed washing myself with the little plastic pourers, standing in front of a cold tap coming out of the bathroom wall. Almost everybody in India smelt good, and seemed particularly clean. On the other hand, I felt depressed by the strong signs of social hierarchy everywhere: the way that menial workers hung their heads and spoke so quietly, while “big-men” everywhere looked self-satisfied, and spoke to everyone, myself included, in the imperative.
In the bus station in Mumbai one evening, with my friend Annabelle, we saw police beat homeless people cruelly with sticks. We felt sad and angry and powerless. We asked some local students what this meant, and they said it was good, the homeless people were robbers and deserved to be beaten. I said, “But how can they be robbers, they were asleep on the floor over there?” But the locals told me that I shouldn’t be deceived - they were robbers and bad people, just pretending to be asleep. The policeman with the big stick strutted around, shimmering with paunchy arrogance.
In a more touristy place called Hampi, I saw the mind-boggling remains of an ancient ruined city, and caught a bumpy local bus with a French girl who was travelling alone. She said she was a communist, and also talked about her love of independence. (In retrospect, I wonder if there’s some tension there?) She was totally beguiling, as fearless women so often are.
In Mysore I bought a range of essential oils from an Arabic fellow named Noor, who wore kohl on his eyes, and was accompanied by American girl who helped him run the stall. It was difficult to choose from his huge selection of smells, but eventually I bought oils of cedar, orange flower, pachouli, lotus flower, lily flower and bergamot.
Then, in a mountainous town called Madikeri, I walked out of town to see coffee plantations, and was offered a lift back to town by a carful of IT workers from Bangalore, who only wanted to brag to me about their jobs, and ask me about mine, then suddenly dropped me off at an intersection, further from town than where I’d started.
I caught a 16-hour train up the coast, from Mangalore back up to Mumbai. The train authorities carefully arrange things according to gender and family relationships, so I shared the somewhat cramped cabin with a group of single young men. All but one were Muslim, so they had to find space to lay out prayer mats at various points on the journey. At dinner time, they all pulled out containers of food from their luggage, and each insisted on me eating some of theirs. It was hard to eat so much, but of course it was delicious. I did not taste a single morsel of bad or even mediocre food in India. The person I talked most with on the trip was the only Hindu in the carriage: it was clear that he felt somewhat apart from the others. His name was Shubbak, and he told me about his arranged marriage, which would happen some time when he had more money. He said he hadn’t met her yet, but when I asked if he liked the idea of marrying someone he hadn’t met, he said yes, he liked the idea.
In short, many things happened in a short series of days, but most of them would not survive the telling. Soon I found myself sitting in a Singapore airport stopover, India behind me, and the cold, consumerist pointlessness of black-label whiskies and designer handbags made me feel like bad acid. I felt that the place I had left behind, though unfamiliar, was real. And this place I had arrived was unreal, irrational, insane.
And then I was back in Adelaide, with the familiar freaked-out feeling of early morning arrival, the fresh salty air blowing in off the sea, the spooky space and emptiness.
Adelaide was more foreign to me than I’d ever found it before. I didn’t feel like I was from there, I didn’t feel like a local. It didn’t feel like an established place of human habitation, but rather a temporary, practical conglomeration, built on expediency and the fortunes of resource extraction. A nowhere: soulless, materialistic, somehow exploitative, though I wasn’t quite sure of what. People were clean and somewhat expressionless, dressed in dull practical clothes. The people also were nowhere. They moved unbounded and relaxed in an uncharted streetscape, which was an optimised and artificial environment. There weren’t many other people, or other objects in general, to move around. Space was the most bountiful resource of all.
In the ignorant, uncritical news media, and in the shouty conversations between males who’d had a couple of beers, I felt some other layer of alienation. One day, talking to my friend Phil, I realised its name: “bogan background music”. It’s an intolerant, anti-intellectual, anti-almost-everything kind of cultural elevator music; a subtle and prevalant idea that nothing can be true unless it is small-minded and cynical. The Copenhagen Climate Summit was going on, and I watched the coverage on the evening news. There was an interview with the Minister for Climate Change, Penny Wong, and she proudly proclaimed her key soundbite: “Australia will match the reductions of other countries, but we won’t surpass them.”
She made it clear that we would be sure not to offer any more than anyone else. We would not lead the progress of reducing pollution, but only follow the minimum requirements of commitments proposed by others. I knew that this was a calculated popular message, that many Australians were comforted to know we wouldn’t give up more than the minimum of our wealth-generating carbon machine. More than anywhere else, we may be overheating and drying up, but as the desert gradually takes over, we will not do more than the minimum.
I had been thinking pretty seriously of moving back to Adelaide, but now I had major doubts. I wasn’t even sure if I could move back to Australia at all, ever, without being overcome by my sense of alienation.
