Touring as Hell, Part I: The Tourist at Home

I have seen India with fresh eyes. Udaipur, my tranquil home away from home, the placid city of placid lakes, a place whose hazy hills inspire soft reverie and gentle existence, is no more representative of the country than Bucharest. Though Udaipur may claim its share of chaos—that born of traffic and unrestrained commerce and a crush of humanity—it is a chaos within bounds. India, taken as a whole, is chaos without bounds—without check, bridle, or regulation.

To be fair, Old City, the feverish omphalos of Udaipur’s tourist trade (and therefore, in many ways, the palpitating heart of its economy) does conjure the rest of the country in all of its bumptious and disorienting intensity. It is a dense cluster of shops, cafés, and small hotels carved from havelis—majestic mansions of a bygone era—arrayed along the narrowest of possible streets, which have been thrust down in a tangle on the shores of Lake Pichola. It is populated by a teeming, grubbing, hectoring mass of hawkers, touts, beggars, legitimate businessmen, and holy fools (or foolish holy men, rather) who afford visitors not a moment of peace. Forget my first impressions recorded in this very blog—the “evident” charms of Old City are vitiated after even a few moments of lingering within its confines.

On their first night in Udaipur, my sister and brother-in-law and I hazarded an early evening stroll along Old City’s choked and claustrophobic roadways; after perhaps fifteen minutes, weary of dodging traffic, weary of the come-ons from avaricious shopkeepers, weary of the cacophony of motor vehicle horns echoing from the close walls, our noses and eyes piqued by the creeping fingers of incense smoke, we turned back for their hotel room. Little then did I know—though I would learn it too well over the succeeding two-and-a-half weeks—that the misery of our ill-advised jaunt through Old City was, in fact, a pure expression of the tourist experience in India. Eschewing euphemism, life as a tourist in those places of this country created or adapted to “serve” visitors with money is one very convincing version of the Christian hell—that is, provocation, agitation, and torment without cease. (And I believe I truly glimpsed Hades risen to earth while threading the road between Noida and Ghaziabad outside of Delhi last Thursday—but more on that later.)

Thankfully, an Udaipur exists beyond the bounds of Old City’s walls; the city is far more than the life-sucking maelstrom churning and blowing like the breath of some infernal bellows through Old City’s oppressively narrow streets, though most tourists wouldn’t know it. When I arrived in Udaipur, I asked Arun, my roommate, whether he liked the city. “Yes, it is nice place,” he responded (with the characteristic Indian omission of an article), and at the time I didn’t know whether he said this merely out of politeness or whether he had meant it—in any event, it seemed a lukewarm endorsement. But having since come to know Arun better, and having recently come to know some of India outside of Udaipur, I now realize that he spoke with sincerity: through Indian eyes at the very least, Udaipur is a pleasant place.

And on the morning following our walk, my sister and brother-in-law took an auto-rickshaw north through Udaipur to Seva Mandir’s offices and pronounced the city lovely and charming; later in their visit, after traversing a gauntlet of other tourist spots, they would declare it their favorite stop in the trip—and that in spite of the fact that my brother-in-law spent three nights in the hospital here recovering from a nasty case of gastroenteritis (Delhi Belly) brought on by contaminated food or water.

Perhaps, then, if Udaipur cannot be judged by the face it chooses to reveal to tourists, the rest of India is capable of redemption as well—perhaps. I cannot judge with any particular confidence; after all, I’ve only seen a comparatively small swath of the country, and every inch of it was cheaply adorned and then exposed for the distraction and delectation of its moneyed visitors, like the made up Mardi Gras reveler lifting her top with one hand while extending the other in anticipation of beads. I am not, then, inclined to be entirely charitable in my estimation of that which I’ve seen.