Basti

A few of us headed to an area called Nizamuddin today, having been researched by our invaluable organiser team-mate beforehand. There’s an organisation called the Hope Project there who do 90-minute walks around the basti – they tell you about life in the slum, and show you what the Hope Project does to feed, clothe and educate the children there. It was a fantastic tour and the area amazed me.

We got a metro there, then a couple of autos, who had no idea where they were taking us – what should have been a five-minute journey ended up taking us about half an hour. Then we were dropped in Nizamuddin and suddenly we were surrounded by goats and running kids and we had no idea where to go. Our guide eventually came out to meet us and took us to the Hope Project Centre. Our guide was maybe 25, very friendly, calm, smart, well-educated and just generally nice. He’s a business student with a flair for languages it seems, which is fairly apparent from his excellent English. He showed us around the area and gave us some explanations.

It’s very evident from the beginning that there’s extreme poverty in the area and the guidebook warns you to wear modest clothing – about 78% of the people there are Muslims and I don’t think they’d take too kindly to us decked out in our best gear from V3S. Still, that said… I don’t know. Walking around in it, the word ”slum” doesn’t exactly spring to mind. It just seems to be a very different kind of place from many that we’ve been to so far. The streets are very tight and crowded and overrun with goats, cows, chickens, dogs and cats and of course people. When we went today, it was almost all men, wearing long white tunics and white caps. The women are covered so modestly that not an inch of their skin shows; they wear veils that cover even around their eyes and I know we were sweating like pigs, so I can’t imagine how they were feeling.

The stalls and shops are incredibly bright and colourful – they sell fabric and shoes and special perfumes that don’t contain an alcoholic solvent because they’re Muslims. There’s stalls full of food I’ve never seen before – I want to try it all! A lot of it was meat though – they’re pretty blunt with the whole “circle of life” sort of thing; they have cages of white chickens who they take out one at a time, behead right before the rest of the brood on block of wood with a knife and pluck and cook. It’s pretty much as fresh as it gets.

Also, around every corner is another mosque and everywhere you go, people are selling these pink flowers that you buy and then offer up in the mosques. These are they:

The smell of incense is everywhere; so too is the smell of shit. Mostly animal shit. Most of the places we went had a slightly uncomfortable smell to them – it’s not that it smelled terrible; I just constantly had the feeling that we were about to. There’s a lot of rubbish around the place – I guess it’s my upbringing but I’m always a little taken aback when people just drop their wrappers and rubbish on the ground when they’re finished with it. It’s shocking sometimes to see the amount of it that accumulates. And the skinny goats feeding off whatever’s left.

The other thing that struck me was how much all the people seem to cram into such little space. In the shops people have barely more than a dinner-table-sized space and they can fit a whole Tesco Extra’s worth of stuff in there. It’s incredible. And it’s all intense colours and salesmen smiling gap-toothed smiles at you and extending friendly arms inviting you in and there’s so many of them.

We met this one guy along the way who has become acquainted wit hour tour guide it seems – he is a sort of witch doctor, unsurprisingly pretty common here, who specialises in sexology, we were told. One of our number is afflicted by a shoulder injury and the Doc said if he came back tomorrow he’d have medicine for him. Apparently if our friend had any problems to do with his specialty area he’d be able to give him something out of his back pocket. He claimed to be 105. I think he said that to sell more than it was true; he looked a good seventy maybe – although our guide said he would have put him at eighty or ninety, which I guess just goes to show. He looked pretty damn spry to me. And our guide mentioned that his great grandmother is something like 102 – bearing in mind, this guy is in his mid-twenties.

We visited a few tombs – one of which belonged to a guy who saved the life of the second mughal emperor of India apparently, so this man would have lived before Shah Jehan, who reigned during the construction of the Taj Mahal. There were three bodies in there – the man, his wife and his brother, according to historians. The male sarcophagi have a symbol on them which represents a pen, to show his direction in the family. The wife’s symbol was flatter and broader to symbolise chalk – apparently it meant that as a woman she wasn’t meant to have the same lasting impression as the men. While our guide told us all this, kids yelled into us from outside the tomb and our guide attempted to brush them off, a little unsuccessfully.

As we left we saw these stalls with people selling sticks of wood called miswak that they use instead of toothpaste and apparently cure seventy diseases. They’ve got a sort of soft bark on the outside and are hard on the inside. Apparently you chew the bark to a pulp, then rub it around with the stick. Our guide told us he had a friend who was well-educated but couldn’t get a job because he was very traditional and had a long beard and carried a stick of miswak in his breast pocket. Then during one interview the employer asked him what it was, and when he heard it cured seventy diseases he asked him to name them all. He did it, and was hired on the spot. So I guess miswak i stood for employment prospects, even if not for cleaning your teeth. This is miswak:

What else…? Oh yeah, I saw my first cat in Delhi so far. I saw a couple of them actually. They’re very scrawny and weak-looking. The other day on the metro we saw a guard with a dog on a leash in the women’s carriage. the dog was a black labrador – his hair was shiny and thick and black and the dog was fat. That’s the first dog I’ve seen that looks anything like a dog back at home. All the others are scavengers that don’t belong to anybody and survive off the waste of people. I guess pets aren’t a terribly big thing here.

I think that’s all I can remember… It was a very interesting tour and we have been invited back on a Friday evening sometime to listen to Sufi music – it’s the chanting in the mosques on Fridays, which is the holy day. Kita has told us before that the latest music trends in Delhi are mixes of Sufi music and techno. I’ve yet to listen to it, but I’m intrigued.

Home again now, ready for teaching tomorrow again – the beginning of our third week! Bizarre.

Teachers by week, tourists by weekend. the life of a volunteer!