Srinagar's airport and Jaipur (The Pink City)

One of the differences between Caleb and Juliana is our relationship to airports. We woke up in Srinagar and went out for breakfast (boiled eggs, toast, and juice—of all our meals, breakfast is consistently the least India); our flight was at two o’clock, and we had read that because of the political tensions in Kashmir we had to give ourselves more time than we usually do for a domestic flight. The problem is that while Juliana’s family had her flying alone in Colombia from the age of six, Caleb’s family has never been later than half-an-hour-early for everything. So, what Juliana considers to be the “usual time” before a domestic flight is considerably shorter than what Caleb considers it to be.  Predictably, after breakfast, Juliana wanted to go for a latte and a chocolate cake, while Caleb was ready to hire a helicopter and flight directly to the runway. Also predictably, we found ourselves drinking lattes and eating cake. Also predictably, we found ourselves in a tuktuk, in a traffic jam, two hours before the flight, with Caleb being reduced to shallow gasps of air and evil looks at his fiancé, and Juliana having to make soft apologies, while secretly savouring pieces of chocolate cake that she could still find in her mouth.

We arrived one hour and forty minutes before the flight. This might seem like a lot of time, but there were thousands of Punjabi tourists all trying to push their way through a single door (when it comes to lining up, Indians have a distinctive Hobbesian outlook: “man to man is wolf to wolf ,” and there is no compassion for the one who arrived first; it is one’s natural right to push, shove, elbow, and verbally insult anyone and everyone who stands between one’s self and one’s destination). Caleb was about to cry.

 Amazingly, this system that is the absence of system, ended up working out in our favour. The airline that we providentially selected, Kingfisher, wisely foresaw the potential paralytic confusion that tourists would suffer upon encountering the scene at the airport reminiscent of Michealangelo’s Last Judgment’s hordes trying to escape hell; like the hand of God emerging from the heavens, a short, middle-age, mustached man in a Kingfisher uniform, took our bags, tunneled his way through the crowd, like Moses through the Red Sea, and in what seemed like five minutes passed us through two security gates, check-in counter, and the foreigners registration office. “Cool as a cucumber,” Caleb ordered a Fanta and started joking around with military officers. The man vanished, as miraculously as he appeared, without asking for a tip—presumably off to save some other foreign couple on the verge of a mutual nervous breakdown. Turns out this is a service included in your ticket fare. Thank God we flew with Kingfisher!

Srinagar’s airport was crowded and hot, but definitely more modern and comfortable than any Colombian airport. Their bookstore was great! Finally we found a decent selection of academic works in English about Kashmir (why the only bookstore that carries this politically charged literature about terrorists/freedom fighters would be at the airport is anyone’s guess). Juliana was very interested in a book called The History of Struggle for Freedom in Kashmir by a man she had never heard about before, Prem Nath Bazaz, but Caleb scoffed at its tacky cover a dove flying into the sunset. So Juliana decided to buy another book, two pages into it, she realized that the book with the tacky cover was written by the most influential Hindu political activist in Kashmir, who also started a socialist party and whose scholarship has been very influential on modern historians. So she went back to the bookstore and bought Bazaz’s book (one with a cooler cover though).

Leaving Kashmir we were filled with mixed emotions. Because of Caleb’s sickness, the amount of moneyed domestic tourists, and the lack of non-Punjabi food, Kashmir had been one of the most difficult place we have visited. However, we were saddened by the fact that we had missed out a rare opportunity to meet with and talk to the kind and modest Muslims we had met in the old city about why they feel their community deserves autonomy. Ironically, on the plane that took us away from Kashmir, we were the most engrossed in texts describing Kashmir’s political struggle.

***

The more you travel and talk to other travelers the more you realize how much our conceptions of places and people are influenced by factors that have no connection to these places. In the same way that our impressions of people are often projections of our prejudices and insecurities onto them, so too our impressoins of places are intimately tied up with our emotional, psychological state at the moment we enter them.

                 Imagine a couple arriving in a city; for the past month they have been living with a kind, but socially conservative family. They have been having Masala tea everyday at 5 p.m. and vegetarian meals that seem to taste the same. One of them got sick in a very "unsexy" way, and they both were starting to consider taking a break of the Indian subcontinent with an abortive trip to Russia. This couple arrives to Jaipur, a city with very bad reputation among Western travelers. They say it is dirty, crowded, and frankly, boring. As the capital of Rajasthan, Jaipur is for most tourists just the gateway to get to more exotic places.
                 
                   But for this couple, which is obviously Caleb and Juliana, the sight of familiar, Western franchises--McDonanld's, KFC--made them feel like old dwellers of the city...

Caleb's insight:

"One of the humbling lessons that I have learnt from India is how pretentious I am for considering myself independent from Northamerican culture. In Toronto, it is very easy to participate in a culture that thinks it somehow exists outside of the world of shopping malls and big brand names, and imagines itself capable of living far away and free of such "trappings." India has taught me how arrogant that position is; we all come from a place and the manifestations of that place, whether good or bad, will always carry within them a kind of comforting nostalgia. In other words, India has taught me to admit that I am the most comfortable living within a system that I do not necessarily agree with."

Juliana's insight:

"Yes family, I do enjoy luxury, despite all my socialist airs. And even though such pretentions still remain, Jaipur made me aware of how much I appreciate shopping, wine, and sometimes, why not admit it, air conditioning (ouch!)"

One of the nice things about Jaipur is that it is a relatively new city (Nineteenth century) and it is modelled after Haussmann's Paris. The boulevards are wide, the streets meet at (OMG!) right angles, and it is very hard to--unlike other cities we have visited in India--get lost.

                  Jaipur was fun! Shopping at the Pink City markets was amazing. We spent most of our two days in Jaipur looking for, learning about, and buying Rajput paintings. Juliana got a sari and a bedcover, Caleb had a McChicken with coke, and they both enjoyed a Maharasthran bottle of red wine and an erotic puppet performace.