After a week in Delhi, Ellie and I set off for Anoopshahr, a village in Uttar Pradesh, on the banks of the river Ganges.
We were going to stay at Pardada Pardadi Educational Society - a school for girls, and a centre for female empowerment. We were going to the school to observe their music lessons, although it didn’t exactly pan out that way.
We set off at 6am on a Monday morning, and although I was dozy eyed, the streets were already buzzing with fruit vendors, auto-wallahs and folks going about their business before the morning sun really got cracking. This would be at around 7am.
Toto made us a lemon/lime juice for the road - lemon/lime, water and equal parts salt and sugar. As well as being generally refreshing and tasting like a warmish margarita, it’s meant to help with any dehydration and nausea. This didn’t work in Ellie’s case as she got quite travel-sick on the way there. I think it was due to a mixture of the incredibly bumpy roads - a combination of minimum 100mph motorways and higgledy-higgeldy-piggeldy dirt roads - and the sight of a scooter crash and a man, who may or may not have been dead, being carried off the road like livestock. He didn’t have any visible injuries but he was very limp. Apparently this is not an uncommon sight on that particular motorway because there aren’t any crossings, but there are fields on both sides, so you often just see farmers chancing it and trying to zip across. But they can’t zip as fast as cars and lorries going at 100mph… Anyway, Ellie was an unhappy bunny and so we stopped off at a cafe for some dusty bottles of pepsi, which proved to be very curative. I hadn’t slept a wink the night before - due to a heady mix of lingering jet-lag, some pretty impressive mosquito bites, and tremendous moon-heat (that’s a more appealing term I’m trying to coin in place of the more accurate ‘night-sweats’). So I thought I would wink a little during the 4 hour car ride, but I just couldn’t close my eyes because there was so much to see at every moment. Every sight was so new to me, and utterly fascinating in its newness.
The first thing was watching the ratio shift from cars and autos (or families of five all jammed onto one scooter - ladies riding side saddle, holding onto nothing and cradling a baby in their arms while flying down the motorway..) to cows, donkeys and carts. But even as the scenes grew more provincial, there was a still strange mixture of old and new ways. I saw a boy riding a rickety cart pulled by a water buffalo, whipping it to go faster, and absolutely dripping with sweat, whilst listening to his iPod.
Most of the buildings had just three walls, so I could see into each house and shop - barber shacks, with men having their faces shaved by teeny tiny boys, and stalls piled to the ceiling with watermelons. Outside almost every building was at least one person dozing on a makeshift bed. While Delhi is full of stray dogs, the villages I saw were more about monkeys, wandering cows and pigs snuffling in the vast piles of rubbish. On the way back we saw a huge cart piled maybe 35/40 feet high with hay, which had toppled over from the excess weight & height, and had been abandoned in the road. Mumraj (the driver from Pardada Pardadi) shrugged and said 'He shouldn’t have been so greedy.'
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