City is the key word

3/9/08
Day 4…
Our day in the city. We spent four hours riding on a bus for 5 hours of time in Jodhpur. I think it may on be 50 kilometers to Jodhpur but the many stops and poor roads make it a long and bumpy trip, though the ticket is only about 25 cents. And it was worth it; I got my fill of food that is neither cabbage nor potato and internet and bought fruit enough to make it through the week.
Snapshot: the rural bus
Riding the bus is in itself a fascinating experience. In this rural setting it felt like the bus was the bloodline of people’s lives. A single bus goes each direction out from the city and bounces its way down rougher and rougher roads as it goes out to all the tiny villages where the people depend on its arrival. One or two people stand along the side of the road, raise their hand and the bus stops. On the way out I sat next to a woman with a baby that could not have been older than 9 months. (I thought it was cute until I had to smell baby poo for a couple hours.) Virtually all the women travel with one if not two or five of their children. On the way back it was clearly mostly men returning home from work in the city. Among the interactions involved were various plastic bags of vegetables and fruit being passed in the window without other discussion or interaction involved. Its clear this happened every day, or at least at a set time with pre-arranged agreements for place, time and price. In another little village the driver simply threw out a bag of medicine and tobacco to an old man by the side of the road. They didn’t even stop the bus.
Out the window we saw sandstone mines, hard ground cut down brick by brick, fields of pepper plants, roaming goats, and isolated buildings made of sandstone and dung and dried grass. The area seems so barren and remote that’s its strange to see so many people emerging from its sandy reaches. But the Thar is the most populated desert in the world, and the people their lives here happily or not by the grace of single bus arriving daily.

It feels strange going to the city for the same reasons as the locals. We didn’t go sightsee anything. We took the long trek into town for errands. This commonality made me feel even more divided from these people. I am trying to live here for 6 weeks, always with expectation of getting back to civilization at the end. Yet, 80% of Indians live this way. A majority of the people in the world live more like this than any urban lifestyle I have ever experienced. It’s a different world really.
We came back to hang out with the children, basically about 4 girls, Lela, Puja, Umcha, ? and one boy, Rao, who follow us about alternatively speaking to us freeheartedly or patiently teaching us words in Hindi or Marabati. Then, as is now our routine we sat in our whicker changes in the common room’ listening to Dillan mandolin away or talking on random subjects, most often of all the ridiculous things we plan to do while here or when we get home. When the power randomly goes out, throwing us into the darkness ( a regular occurrence) we listen to the wind whistling through the seed pods and comprehending really being here.

written by

Drie on March 9, 2008 from Jodhpur, India

from the travel blog: Adventures in Hindustan

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