Degrees of Homelessness, Belonging and Death

[Bengaluru, 12/17/22]

After 20 days in Bengaluru, I took a train to Chennai. Though I had just a month in India, I felt I should see at least one more city. Just as Philadelphia or Boston is so unlike New York, one’s impressions of any country is bound to be too simplistic, if not distorted, if based on only one place, fleetingly glimpsed.

Of course, two cities can’t begin to spackle the billion holes of my astronomical ignorance, but what can I do? My clock winds down. My synapses flag. No matter how farcical or vague, a virgin’s first brush with sex is also valid.

A person needs several lifetimes to dimly understand any tiny village or just his apartment building, with its infinite mysteries, such as why is that psycho bitch upstairs stomping around or dropping barbells at 3AM, again? Why is such a courteous and well-put-together woman, as seen in the hallway, so enraged?

A million lifetimes aren’t enough to grasp India, but thankfully, there’s reincarnation. We get to become defective meat again! Just don’t let me come back as a cow in any Indian city. If I need to ruminate regurgitated garbage endlessly, I can read the New York Times and watch American television.

Since traveling multiplies life’s uncertainties, one must be prepared for anything. Slash your leg by stepping through a broken grate in a wrecked city, as nearly happened to me in Beirut, and, just like that, you’re a stray dog baying for help.

If I couldn’t get a train ticket five days ago, I would have taken a tuk-tuk to SC Road, by the Majestic Bus Depot. With its sea of humanity, that area is filled with cheap hotels. Having prowled around it a couple times, I also enjoyed its invigorating if at times exasperating pandemonium. We’re here mostly to look, since touching is often too expensive a disappointment or just a no-no. Oooh, it tickles!

At Bangalore Cant’s ticket window, I was served, so to speak, by She Who Is Death, for Kali simply glared at me to command, “You must fill out a form!”

“Where?”

“There!”

There was nothing personal about her fierceness bordering on hostility. She did it to everyone, for we were all so annoying, if not stupid. Dumb peasants and foreigners shouldn’t take trains. Why didn’t I just walk to Chennai, a mere 222 miles away?

As required, I filled in my full name, gender (there were only two boxes, scandalously!), age, full address, train number and name, class, date of journey, then departing and arrival stations. I skipped berth choice and diet requirement since they’re not applicable.

Relieved, I skipped and bounced my way to Kali for her black-faced approval, only to be zapped by another glare, “You go to that window!” Her emotion was so pure, I briefly fell in love.

The second lady didn’t excite me as much. With magnificent magnanimity, if not mercy, this matron requested just 505 rupees [$6.11] for my six-hour trip.

Before my first Indian train ride, I had read this at my blog, from “Ron”:

I remember taking a regular train from Agra to New Delhi. When I boarded the train, all the seats were full so I stood in the aisle. There was a Danish man adjacent so we made conversation; foreigners out of place tend to do this. I learned that this was his first visit to India and that Agra (Taj Mahal) was his first stop in a 3 week solo tour. At one point, his eyes glanced behind me as his face turned a different shade like he was about to puke. I turned around and saw a kid around 4 feet tall with one foot the size of Shaq’s but much thicker. The kid had Elephantiasis. My response was muted as I had been in India for months but the Danish man was still shaken after the boy had passed.

[…]

I haven't been back to India in a long time so can’t comment on how much has changed except via Linh’s pictures. Pictures show me change has been very slow. Compared with China’s development, it’s night and day. Bangalore, one of the wealthier and more developed cities, still has that underlying Indian chaos. Since Western news is filtered, many don’t realize the birth defects are a result of irresponsible toxic waste dumping and malnutrition.

[…]

The one time I did feel like the Danish man, was during a second visit to India. I had at this point over 6 months of India the previous year. I landed in Mumbai and went directly to the Central Train Station to purchase a train ticket south to Goa. It was early morning (~5am) so the Station was still relatively calm. Walking around, I saw a disfigured man, legs bent backwards like a spider crawling in the tracks on hands and knees. This is Indian tracks and NOT Japanese or Swiss tracks... It's littered with garbage and defecation. As a human, all the emotions one feels for another human being surfaced. I looked away. As the Train Station started filling up what surprised me most was how the native people walking by didn’t even notice this man crawling in the tracks below. It’s as if the person was invisible. That is when you realize you are again back in India.

Traveling by train through India half a century ago, Paul Theroux starkly sketches a beggar:

A woman crawled into the rain from the shelter of the platform. She appeared to be injured: she was on all fours, moving slowly toward the train—toward me. Her spine, I saw, was twisted with meningitis; she had rags tied to her knees and woodblocks in her hands. She toiled across the tracks with painful slowness, and when she was near the door she looked up. She had a lovely smile—a girl’s beaming face on that broken body. She propped herself up and lifted her free hand at me, and waited, her face streaming with rain, her clothes soaked.

In December of 2022, I encountered no spider men or women crawling through shit and garbage across tracks. With workers constantly sweeping, Bangalore Cant was very clean. Signs forbade spitting and implored everyone to keep clean. Even tickets had this Gandhi quotation, “CLEANLINESS IS NEXT TO GODLINESS.”

There were dirt cheap concession stands and comfortable waiting rooms. Walls were painted with bright murals of laughing children. Granted, many people, including sanitation workers, ignored the foot bridge to walk across tracks, and some rural folks sat on floor.

Men invaded cars clearly marked “RESERVED FOR LADIES ONLY,” but as the Satanic West never tires of lecturing the world, gender is only subjective, and can even flip flop from moment to moment.

Huffing and flexing, a clitoris can become a prick and grow, with positive thinking and some efforts, hefty balls. Gashing itself bloody, a penis can declare itself a bonafide vagina. Anyone who doubts must be a Fascist, to be canceled, at least.

[Bengaluru, 12/17/22]

Drinking my 12-cent chai, the same price as on the streets, I nearly dozed off on a bench. Finishing a pastry, a man wiped his mouth with the hem of his dhoti.

Twain on the Indian countryside, “All day long one has this monotony of dust-colored dead levels and scattering bunches of trees and mud villages. You soon realize that India is not beautiful; still there is an enchantment about it that is beguiling, and which does not pall.”

Outside, Krishnarajapurm, Bangarapet, Jolarpettai, Ambur, Arakkonam and Perambur briefly appeared, with each station clean and orderly. What’s most surprising, though, was the emptiness of the landscape, with uncultivated patches even, and cows browsing grass, their tails swinging. In South Korea, Japan or even Egypt, each fertile foot must be exploited.

Beautiful it may not have been, but idyllic enough, yet hundreds of millions of Indians must move to cities or even overseas, to seek work. Though forced into slums or onto sidewalks, they don’t just stay, but get used to the worst of urban living, with its congestion, filth and incessant noises.

Much has been written about the smell of Indian cities. It’s easy to decipher if you remember it has unique ingredients in cow shit and piss. These overlay garbage, exhaust, spices and human urine. As for public defecation, I haven’t seen any in nearly a month, only rare evidences the morning after. As for never looking down, it’s not an option, lest you step into a hole in the broken sidewalk.

Engine fumes are almost fragrant here, for they block smells that have exited bodies, with those from humans we find most disgusting, for they hurt our vanity. We need not be Jonathan Swift to find it hard to square shit with our self-images as beauties, Adonises, philosophers and poets, etc. Imagine, though, how huge our heads would swell if we didn’t have this merciful reminder and corrective once, twice or thrice a day? Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!

On my last evening in Bengaluru, a screw in my glasses popped out, dislodging a lens, so I was mostly one-eyed, with half the world blurred, for the train trip.

Though I had no hotel reservation in Chennai, I was sure there were options around the train station, but I had to walk nearly ten minutes to find anything. Hauling myself into a blocky, four-story building called Marbara Palace, I was cheered to hear its daily rate was only 1,300 rupees [$15.71], so I paid for three nights. Later, I would discover there are rooms in Periamet for just 400 rupees, but those most likely don’t have private bathrooms. If somehow they do, they’re grosser than Hunter Biden’s resume, I’m sure.

It turned out my bathroom at Marbara Palace was funky enough, and there was a dirty towel with splotches left behind by the previous tenant. The Wi-Fi was reliable, though, and the padlock on the door was a cute touch. Directly across the street was a large mosque with prayer calls louder than anything I had heard in Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt or Malaysia, but this wasn’t a problem, since I always get up before 5AM anyway.

Still, I have moved to the Sheraton Grande. Tucked into a grungy alley, it’s also in Periamet and has nothing to do with the famous chain. This is obvious from the fact I’m only paying $20.31 a night. All over this hood, there are fleabags with fancy names like Royal Paris, Elite Residency, Central Park and Park Tower, etc. The last is four-story high.

The staff at Sheraton Grande is super courteous, and there’s even a doorman. If my visa wasn’t running out, I could easily stay here for months. Delighted to find someone who looked just like him, an Oriental from Arunachal Pradesh asked me where I was from.

Though I just got here, Periamet has already taught me much. Here, the homeless, slum dwellers and lower middle class are all mixed together. It’s an ecology I haven’t encountered elsewhere.

Take VV Koil Street, which is really an alley suitable only for pedestrians and motorbikes. From the corner of Muthu to Karpura, a distance of 30 yards, there are two hotels, of one and three stars, so too expensive for their immediate neighbors. Half are in makeshift huts of found wood, broken crates, plastic sheets and/or corrugated tin, leaning against grimy brick houses.

On a blue cot with a purple mosquito netting over a turquoise frame, a woman is cocooned in a yellow comforter decorated with burgundy-colored swans and green fish.

Four boys ask me to photograph them. The best looking has a slight smirk, and his confidence is further boosted by his ownership of a cellphone. Two others wear clunky watches.

Looking at young faces, you can speculate who’s going to get laid often, or pregnant out of wedlock, who’s going to make a fine spouse, if routinely cuckolded, who’s going to make lots of money, but enjoy none of it, and who’s going to jump off a bridge between noon and 1PM before his 32nd birthday.

Fixing and selling old shoes, a man with a trim white beard works into the night.

In other countries, no mini Hoovervilles would be found right outside three-star hotels. Stepping from a well-lit lobby, hotel guests in Western dress walk past the homeless or semi-homeless, sitting on the ground to chat, or squatting over a pot placed on a tripod of stacked bricks, with a curving tin sheet to shield the wood-burning flames.

Inside crude homes the size of American closets, there’s often a dim light bulb dangling from a wire. Sometimes there’s even a TV, showing a cricket match or some cheerful singing and dancing, with half a dozen neighbors gathered to watch. At a nearby pump, girls and women do laundry or collect water in bright green plastic jugs.

Each night, those without roofs tend to sleep at exactly the same spots. These coffin wide slots on a sidewalk or in an alley, then, are their homes. In colorful and often clean looking blankets, they are wrapped from head to toes, though sometimes a hand, head or foot may stick out. As if heeding an instinct for self-protection, they are often bunched together. At the Central Railway Station, I saw four male passengers sleeping on the floor in a compact mass, their bodies touching.

Recently, I said “India’s homeless are never bums in the American sense,” but I need to elaborate. Living outside, most must also beg, but at least in 2022, they do it very meekly, with, often, just a right hand to their mouth, the way Indians eat, or they call me “baba” in a small voice. Though some are as filthy as your dirtiest Tenderloin, Skid Row or Kensington “bums,” most Indian homeless do try to stay clean, as best they can, for they haven’t let themselves go or, this is most important, been evicted from the community. Their housed neighbors know them well.

Just off the oddly-named Wall Tax Road, I ran into a young man, with just his shorts on, bathing himself quite thoroughly at a water pump, in front of a mural of Jesus and next to yet another shrine to the Virgin Mary, with a baby Jesus sticking his head out of her sari.

What made this shrine unique was its Mickey Mouse tiles. Twenty American rats orbited around a reproduction of Da Vinci’s Last Supper.

Indian Catholics clearly adore the Virgin Mary, with Jesus often just an appendage, but a crucial one. His existence proves she’s not just a mom, but the greatest ever. She birthed God.

In richer, more Westernized neighborhoods, one does not see homeless shacks, or even cows. There are more cars and fewer tuk-tuks. Sidewalks are much quieter or even dead. Still, better-off Indians can’t avoid seeing or even rubbing against their poorer fellows, for they swarm over these urbanscapes. To escape such embarrassing or annoying hoi polloi, one must move to Fremont, Jersey City or Southall in London, but there, too, the more uncouth and colorful also turn up.

Worse, more local whites are becoming like Indian homeless. In previously pristine neighborhoods, they set up shacks. Fugging up your bougie eyes, they cook, piss and wash right out in the open. Their stinking bodies leave modest gifts for you to discover and sidestep on your way to work, until you, too, are laid off.

You may not know India has a space program. The subways in Bengaluru and Chennai are also cleaner, safer and smell way better than those in New York and Philadelphia. As one society struggles upward, the other jumps off an imploding skyscraper.

As one rejects Pfizer, the other pushes it, still. Leering, it wears a necklace of decapitated fools, with its long addiction to mass death nearing the inevitable conclusion.

[Chennai, 12/18/22]

[tuk-tuk drivers in Chennai, 12/18/22]

[Bengaluru, 12/16/22]

[Bengaluru, 12/16/22]