Trains, Planes and Phlegm

After much anticipation, I am back to the virtual world. I’ve spent much of the last few weeks being a combination of frantically busy and horribly sick. The Delhi air - cold, foggy, and really really dirty - finally got to me. My lungs remembered they were asthmatic and started to revolt. It all started after I started to get a burning feeling whenever breathing in, and then it just gradually increased until I became a huge walking ball of snot and phlegm. Just before leaving Delhi, I started ejecting some black goo from my lungs, which was a little disconcerting. By the time I got on the night train to Mumbai (Bombay) a few days later my lungs had produced more green stuff than I thought could possibly fit in there. I spent a long night on the train at the grubby sink in between the cars gasping for breath and vomiting gobs of green from my lungs. (This situation was not made any more pleasant by the two railway men a few feet away who were creepily and unabashedly staring at me while stroking each other’s thighs and leaning in to either whisper in one another’s ear or kiss each other softly. I thought at one point they were going to fornicate right there in front of me.) It was like I had to physically expel all the air I had breathed in while in Delhi as I left the city. This continued through a few days in Mumbai and the flight south to Kerala. Now, thanks to a little bit of rest and some entirely unappealing ayurvedic medicine, I am breathing a little better.

On the train, we sat across from a middle aged business man on the night train from Delhi to Mumbai and chatted in between fits of coughing and lung-puking. Let’s call him “Sweater Man” because he was wearing one of those slightly gaudy patterned acrylic sweaters popular with Indian men of a certain age. Sweater Man was basically a nice guy, but also very nosey and slightly irritating in a well-intentioned manner. As are most people who chat up the “foreigners” here, he was quite interested in knowing where we were from, why we were here, and what we thought about his country and particularly its food. He also had an opinion about what we should be doing and where we should go. When I told him I was doing agriculture research, he insisted that I need not got to Kerala, but instead should see Maharashtra (home to Mumbai and Sweater Man). All the places I had been so far were the wrong places if I really wanted to understand agriculture in India. Never mind that he didn’t actually know the focus of my research.

On the topic of food, Sweater Man seemed surprised and a little offended when I didn’t eat the railway meal brought to us – a white (and I do mean white) bread and mayonnaise sandwich and a stale samosa. “Don’t you like Indian food?” he asked incredulously. I said of course I did, but wasn’t so fond of this food that wasn’t fresh, and anyway, the sandwich was very much NOT Indian. A little later they brought out the “tea kit,” a thermos of hot water, a Taj Mahal tea bag (owned by Unliver), some refined white sugar, and non-dairy creamer powder. I used the hot water to make my own tea: organic green tulsi (holy basil) tea made by Organic India. “Did you bring all your food from Canada?” asked Sweater Man. I just kept my mouth shut and started to cough to avoid having to get into it. There is a strange and disturbing trend toward more processed, more western foods that is becoming accepted as “Indian” here. There are deep fried paneer (cheese) sandwiches on the airiest white bread you’ve ever seen, and more packaged sweet biscuits in the shops than you’d find on the shelves of a WalMart in middle America. The saving grace is that these things are so far still made with real sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. It’s similar to what I noticed in South East Asia 5 years back – the worst aspects of western diets are what get picked up first.

I think Sweater Man’s comments were a cultural thing. People here just share their opinions, which are stated as facts, and don’t question whether you want to hear it or not. They just tell you exactly what they think. If you look like crap one day, they will tell you. If they really like you, they’ll tell you that too. It may be alarming at times, but at least you know where you stand. Studying the language back in October helped a lot of these things make more sense. I used to think people were just being bossy because they seemed to be always telling me what to do. “Sit here.” “Come.” “Eat.” Whatever. Turns out that in Hindi, the word please is considered to be part of the verb, so you just speak in the imperative. When you translate this, it sounds rude to us, but if you say please and thank you all the time to a Hindi speaker, they think you are being precious and making a big deal out of nothing. The principal of the Hindi school told us that when his Australian wife used to ask him to please make her a cup of tea, he would refuse because it sounded like she was asking such a huge favour. If she simply says, “Bring me some tea,” he doesn’t hesitate at all to do such a small thing for her. He has picked up some of her habit of saying please and thank you all the time, and now their friends make fun and call him Mr. Please-and-Thank-You.