Saturday 29th November 2008

We're heading out of the office with our cameras, tripod and notebook. Our editor catches us on the way out.

"You'd better be back by sundown," he says in a motherly tone, "or it'll get dangerous." For once this week, he's not talking about the terrorist threat, but the riots that traditionally break out the evening polling booths close.

Today is election day in Delhi. The BJP, the Hindu national party, headed in the city by the aptly-named Vijay Jolly, is challenging the government's Congress party, led by an iron Chief Minister with the more unfortunate title of Sheila Dikshit.

Before the terror attacks, the papers were packed with concerns over the pollution at the Yamuna River, the state of public transport, and the skyrocketing price of tomatoes. But the events in Bombay have muted the pre-election buzz.

The usual election precautions are in place: a police presence on every corner, army lorries in the streets, and three 'dry days' in which alcohol sale is banned across the city. But these scenes are small beer compared to the carnage 700 miles away.

Michelle and I drag our equipment into rickshaws, zipping across the city to interview voters as they hit the polls. Except that they don't seem to be hitting the polls at all.

We step out in the middle of the market and ask for directions to the local polling station. A street wallah shrugs and returns to his job of squeezing fruit. A man buying cigarettes flicks his hand in a general direction. We hail a cycle rickshaw. Our wallah, who must be at least sixty years old, huffs and puffs and every two minutes is forced to get out and push. We ask a young girl where she is going to vote. She says that the voting here has been postponed until next month. After circling another market for fifteen minutes we still haven't found anything, and are beginning to think our rickshaw wallah will not survive another ten yards. We dismount and catch a businessman on his way to work. "I'm sorry," he says, "But no election today. Our candidate has expired." This is not bureaucratic lingo. It turns out he really is dead.

After a while we find a bona fide operational polling station at a school in the bustling bazaar area of Karol Bargh. Children run about, set loose for the day. They mob our legs and jump up at our camera, waving, trying to get on film. We try to look for voters, but are shooed away by stern looking policemen. They tell us we don't have official electoral commission press passes and can't stay. But the cops seem unruffled when we set up ten metres away on the other side of the road. Some of them even pose for the camera.

We park our tripod and get out our notebooks, poised for interview. And wait. And wait some more. The trickle of voters is slow. A man hobbles out on a walking stick, aided by his daughter. Time passes. We look around at the shuttered shops. Only the man selling paan and sweets is open for business. He grins as he takes advantage of other people's discarded business.

A few men venture out of their houses, asking us questions in Hindi. Why are we here? Why aren't we in Mumbai? Surely that's where all the journalists are...

India is the largest democracy in the world. I point this out to a young man in a yellow fleece, who seems to be the only person in the area to speak English.

"All the rich people have left the city," he says. "It's a holiday, after all. Why not go on holiday?" And why are all these people standing around? Why aren't they voting? He simply shrugs.

India is not an apathetic nation, at least not by Western nations' standards. On local election days in Britain, most potential voters barely shake the dust off their shoes, whereas turnouts in India are consistently between 50 and 60 per cent, even at the worst of times. And where middle classes in the UK are more likely to tick the ballot, in India it's often the dalits and lower castes who are particularly active.

But today terror is the buzzword. Democracy is on the back burner. The streets are strangely empty as people remain glued to their televisions and radios, venturing out only to buy some overpriced tomatoes. The only excitement for a truckload of policemen in Central Delhi this afternoon is the sight of two foreign, female reporters, standing beside a video camera and tripod, looking completely lost.

Friday 28th November 2008

The siege continues. Back home, newspapers report as if it's all over. But this is a terrorist attack that goes on, and on, and on. Gunshots are still fired and people are still trapped in Nariman House. Like the men and women who dropped from the Twin Towers, bodies are slowly discovered, people in the Taj Hotel slowly crawl from under their beds and call home. Some are safe, some never were. Some are still trapped, trying to make their way out, climbing down bedsheets and ripped hotel curtains.

The Western newspapers proclaim another attack on the West. The British, American and Australian Foreign Offices call their people out of Mumbai. But there is no whisking away or warning for the vulnerable Indians, even though a hundred of their nationals are dead, compared to a handful of Westerners.

America and Britain are calling this battle their own. It must be Al-Quaeda, they say, because Westerners were rounded up and targeted. There is little mention of the fact that terrorist messages also voiced anger over the Muslims in Kashmir,

We have been voicing our fears about our own status here in the house in the last 48 hours. Our people have been targeted on the same soil on which we stand. But in the newsroom here today in Delhi, we realise that it's not our battle at all. We wonder why the newspaper isn't employing our services instead, since it's our countrymen who are dying. Until we realise that the story is not ours to own. The bodies being dragged out of hotels are Indian. The police who have dies in shoot outs are Indian. The troopers keeping seige are Indian; the people climbing out of the windows are mostly Indian, the people on the streets, cheering soldiers and voicing their disgust and anger, are Indian. The reporters here in the office, glued to the television screens, tapping away madly, anxiously speaking on their mobile phones which ring constantly, are Indian.

A senior reporter for our newspaper is somewhere in the Taj Hotel. No one has heard from her since she spoke to her husband, over 24 hours ago, telling him she was hiding under her bed, listening to a man, carrying a gun, creeping around her bathroom. Whether or not she is still there, nobody knows. Western reporters are standing outside, or are being flown in, staying at a safe distance.

The Taj Hotel has been painted as the playground for Western millionaires, a symbolic target for the Islamic Mujahedeen. But what has never been mentioned in the press is that the building was, in fact, built by an Indian entrepreneur, JN Tata, after he was thrown out of another five star hotel for being too 'native'. It was a monument to Indian pride and industry, not to Western affluence. A couple were celebrating their wedding with 200 guests, and two days ago found themselves, instead, cowering in their bathtub. There were far more Mumbaikers going ahead with their everyday lives on Wednesday than there were Westerners on holiday.

This is not a war on the West. It's too easy to forget that the 'West', in a geographical sense, doesn't exist anymore. The world economy exists as much in Bombay, in Dubai, in Beijing, as it does in London or New York. India is as much a target of hatred as downtown Manhattan. Bombay is not the stage for a battle between the West and the terrorists. It is the battle.

A CNN report today showed an American reporter, standing outside the Taj Hotel, amidst a group of angry, drunken Bombay men. They asked why she was here. They asked with hostility what others in India, watching their battle unfold, are asking with genuine curiosity.

Thursday 27th November 2008

Two weeks ago, I sat in the lobby of the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay. Elsa and I had spent the day wondering around the hotel and around nearby India Gateway, talking to foreigners about their reasons for coming to the city. Weary backpackers, their faces pasty with sunblock, walked in and out; a German man who who had just arrived in India told us about that morning's sightseeing tour, sporting his socks, sandals and ill-fitting khaki shorts, a tilak pasted on his perspiring forehead. We were out on the terrace observing the middle-aged couples fighting over the breadbasket, and single travellers nosing through novels, when a few members of the England Cricket Team, here for a press conference, giggled and waved at us. When we went over to wish them the best of luck they became coy, turning towards their tikka hamburgers.

Back in the lobby that evening, I waited for a friend to pick me up for a party. Perching on the edge of a couch, and trying to remain inconspicuous, I was joined by a gentle Arab-looking man who struck up conversation. He was originally from Baghdad, he said, from a fairly humble family, but had lived in India for decades before making some lucky investments in property. Now, he lives in Holland Park, his two sons American college-educated. He was staring around the lobby of the Taj concernedly, craning to look behind the huge display of oriental lilies that scraped the gold mosaic-ed ceiling. He was looking for a man, he said, that he hadn't seen for forty years; his old housekeeper when he lived in India. His earnest eyes opened wide. He was rich now, he said, and laughed. After he'd left his service, he studied for an engineering degree and now had a business of his own, a family, and two grown up children. His life had completely changed! And now, they were both in Bombay on the same day, the master and his former-servant-made-good. They were going to meet, in the lobby of the Taj Mahal Hotel, at 6 o'clock. They had their whole lives to catch up on. My ride came, I wished him the best, and waved goodbye.

As I write, the Indian Army are in the last stages of a siege in the very same lobby. Less than 24 hours ago, armed gunmen burst in, looking for Americans, English, Jews and failing that, any foreigners, shooting indiscriminately and throwing grenades. Screams filled the air, and the smell of dust and burning, the sight of falling golden plaster, the sound of smashed glass. People hung out of upper windows, frantically calling on their mobile phones to relatives and other people. Scores of people were trapped by gunmen, some of them allowed to escape when they could prove they were not British or American. Guests hid under the beds in their hotel rooms as gunmen lurked in their bathrooms. Some of these are still missing, including prominent Times of India journalist who called her husband several hours ago and has been silent since. Downstairs in the cellar, a 73 year-old British businessmen cowered in the cellar, on the telephone to the BBC, before being shot and killed. Up in the lobby, Indian staff were picked off arbitrarily. Blood covered stairs and hallways that for years had been polished to perfection.

A few hundred metres away on the bustling main bazaar, Leopold’s Café, a traveller’s haunt for decades, is pockmarked with bulletholes. Two weeks ago, we had sat in here, talking to giggling British backpackers about their days as extras on Bollywood sets, watching Italian women drinking their afternoons away with a yard of beer, ordering Indian, or Chinese food from the grumpy waiter. Today, it is empty, shattered, silent, shaken.

The terrorist attacks in Bombay today have shocked the world. But they have shocked India more. And a country that is struggling, and failing, to contain its own internal terrorist threat is powerless against an international one. It has not the capacities in security, nor intelligence.

Before we’d learned of today's recent attacks, we left the house early for a day trip to the Taj Mahal – the original one this time. The road to Agra is precarious – and not only for the upturned lorries shedding their loads. Roadside cafes are set up to overcharge tourists for weak coffee and rubbery toast, men at stoplights peddle miniature Taj Mahal snow domes, and every other car passenger rubbernecks to smile and wave at the foreigners in the back of the taxi. When we arrive, we are surprised to walk straight up to the designated tourist ticket desk, when all the guide books had told us we were bound to wait in line for hours. We pay our fee (at a 750-rupee premium for foreigners) and go to the security desk. A man there empties out of the contents of my bag and makes two piles, “allowed,” he said to my purse, “allowed,” to my sunglasses, “allowed, allowed, allowed” (novel, SLR camera, notepad) “not allowed” (novel number two, for some reason) “not allowed” (iPod earphones). The fact that a bomb is much more easily disguised as a five year old clunky camera than a tiny pair of earphones does not seem to cross his mind.

India has too nascent a security culture to deal with the burden of terrorism. Bombay is incredibly vulnerable: the perfect, if unexpected, target. A ship docking in the harbour, whether full of terrorists or fishermen, goes undetected and unnoticed, and a step onto the shore brings its passengers right into the heart of the city, its tourists and its bustle. A couple of hundred metres away is the Taj Palace Hotel, looming up to face the dock, guarded by two smiling footmen in turbans who point the way through the same wooden ‘metal detectors’ in place in every public building checkpoint, which beep no matter what the entrants are carrying. They're shuffled through regardless. At the entrance to the Bombay Taj Hotel, the guards even hold your handbag as you go through, not opening it to look, and passing it back to you with a bow. When confronted with armed terrorists, they would have been thrown down like ninepins. At the train station the same applies. Terrorists would not be noticed until blood smeared the entire floor. At Leopold’s customers were sitting targets through open windows, and police, if called, would have to shake the dust off their shoes before leaving the station, if they even answered the phone in the first place. Today, at the Taj Mahal in Agra, less than a day after tourists were targeted 1000 kilometres away, guards are just as nonchalant. If terrorists had come here instead, none of us would have stood a chance.

And so, today, as we walk through the‘metal detector’, we are lightly patted down by a female guard, and pushed out to view the giant white mausoleum. Wandering around the fountains, we take pictures for Indian couples on honeymoon. A gang of boys want their photos with us, and a gaggle of young women in saris laugh and wink at Karsten. The strange lack of white Westerners still hasn’t occurred to us. We walk around, squinting in the sunlight reflected from all angles off the white stone. A gang of Muslim schoolkids surround us “Handsome! Handsome!” they shout at Eva. “Pretty! Pretty!” they chirrup at me. Eva looks put out. “Howayu? Howayu?” waves a toddler, prompted by her father. The reception we get as Western Tourists is, as usual, a mixture of curiousity and ridicule, treatment that’s both offputting and enjoyable at the same time.

Then, the moment comes: a call from home, and we realise what has happened. Bombay is in tatters, people are dead, terrorists are involved. And Westerners are the targets. We are practically the only white faces, and every face, Indian, Muslim, for a moment, becomes a menace. The innocent attention we arouse becomes something frightening, and the lack of security is no longer a joke. Our vulnerability is exposed.

Only a handful of Westerners were killed in the attacks in Bombay, compared to a hundred Indians. We are no less objects of hatred to terrorist groups here than we are at home. But India has not the means to deal with the threat, or the actualisation, of terror.

And no one is more afraid in this instance than Indians, who over the last five years have suffered bombings and shootings that have killed hundreds, if not thousands of people. Overtures to the West have resulted in no assistance at all.

Today, we feel that fear for the first time. Suddenly, we are the targets, and we understand what it is like to feel vulnerable with no one to come to our aid. Ordinary people, meeting long-lost friends, swimming in the pool, arguing over dinner, backpacking on their gap years are objects of hatred. Ordinary Indians have lived with this same threat for years. Now that perhaps Westerners as well as Indians have become casualties, the West may offer intelligence, training and technology. Doormen in turbans may be replaced by trained officers, and makeshift wooden arches by something more technologically sensible. Perhaps the international community, finally understanding India’s terror, will listen to its plea.

Sunday 23d November 2008

We’ve come to Chennai to catch the train back up north, and in the meantime to experience something of one of India’s biggest cities. Eva asks the Chennai hotel travel desk what we should do here. The man behind the counter frowns and replies, “Mamallapuram.”

We arrive in a monsoon downpour, brown rain leaking through the rattling window frames as we pass the scattered random dwellings of the city. Dogs who have given up on trying to swim their way across the road lie limply on corrugated iron roofs, while men take shelter below them, hanging around tea stalls, elbows leaning on the counter. Even my camera gives up the ghost in this town – hence the lack of photos on this post – sighing its last muggy breath.

All work and no pay makes Chennai a dull town. Chennai’s financial district, one of the largest in India, looms tall across the horizon, its office highrises topped with the banners of Standard Chartered, PriceWaterhouseCoopers and HSBC. Traffic labours down the main streets, mired in the small lakes that spread apace where basic drainage lacks.

The search for entertainment is disappointingly fruitless. The city’s small multiplex cinema, our only real hope, is sold out. We visit the ‘government museum’, enthusiastically recommended in the Rough Guide as the city’s best attractions. Of the four ornate buildings that make up the museums and galleries, three are barred by rusty padlocks. The woman behind the ticket desk sighs, rips a couple of chits in half, and throws them at us, as she gabbles on her mobile phone and nods in the direction of the one building that seems to still be open. Inside, there are two floors of ‘art’ and ‘Indian heritage’. The former, on the upper level, consists largely of art shop prints of Van Gogh and Renoir in gold-ish frames. The latter resembles nothing more than some of the pots, drums and incense holders culled from the markets outside and placed in glass cases with labels. The security guard nods in our direction and then settles back down to his lethargy. Having used up ten minutes of the eight hours left to waste until dinner, we stare at each other vacantly.

It seems there are two things to do in Chennai: work, and nothing.

This is not entirely true, of course: alternative entertainment of the less cultured, more alcoholic kind is aplenty for the blue-collar workers coming down from their ivory towers. Where bars and nightclubs seem to be lacking, their potential customers crippled by the 58% tax imposed upon them, hotels make a roaring trade on clientele who pick up the drinks tab on the company credit card. In the evening, flashing neon signs indicate these ‘permit rooms’, small lounges with black walls and sports screens. They normally play some form of seventies disco, which thumps from behind smoked-out windows. In front of them, the men who have only just been able to loosen their ties and undo their top buttons are smoking cigars.

Chennai is the fourth biggest town in India, and brings in a large chunk of its revenue. After finance, Chennai is Kollywood, the largest Indian film-producing area outside Bombay.

Sitting on the local bus to our hotel, passengers are squeezed in tight around us. With my backpack on one side, and an old lady’s protruding stomach on the other, I couldn’t stand up to offer my seat, even if such a gallant sentiment should overtake me. But twenty minutes into our journey, there is a loud elephant call, and two policemen leap on board from the centre of the market, and haul off four boys, holding by the ears like a bunch of naughty Victorian chimney sweeps. They are dragged off, half-grinning, into a nearby police station. This whole incident leaves the bus in a state of chaos as a virtual stampede begins and everyone jostles and gabbles madly, people holding on to the passenger handles for dear life. Instead of an incident of teenage light-fingered behaviour, it seems an act of terrorism has been committed. Stories are swapped, ‘did you see that?’ ‘perhaps it is the beginning of the end for our city.’ After all, in every town, there are always those who’ll make their own entertainment.

Saturday 22nd November 2008

Mamallapuram, long before it was a town drowned by the sea, was a town hewn out of rock. Famous for its ancient religious monuments and cave temples, almost every corner heralds a new shrine: elephants, reclining Vishnus, temples to the elephant god Ganesh; even a large Indiana Jones-style boulder perched precariously on top of a craggy mount and known as ‘Krishna’s Butter Ball.’

We get up early, and rent a couple of rusty chopper bikes, negotiating morning rickshaw traffic and arriving at the famous Shore Temple just in time for the day’s drizzle to begin. Immediately we park our cycles, there is a man with an ‘official tour guide’ badge waiting for us to pay him a hundred rupees to talk us around the shrine. Trying to explain (in all honesty) that we just wanted to look and we weren’t really interested in the history (such philistines!) he tries to encourage us to buy a set of postcards from a pushy dwarf, before giving up altogether. When we arrive, the shrine is magnificent: standing atop the cliff since 700 AD, but, we are warned, being slowly eroded by the sea air.

This morning, it is also being gently eroded by an old woman in a headscarf, who is bending over among the ruins, sloshing water over them from a bucket. Chipmunks dance around her. On the other side of the temple, a family of Italian tourists have clambered upon one of the more intricate carvings, smiling as one of the guides takes their picture. The youngest daughter jumps off and stamps up and down some of the hewn steps.

A few metres away from this spot, a sign proudly pronounces Shore Temple a National Heritage Site.

Outside the next temple, people weaving in and out selling pendants and bracelets are more than happy to kick us off our bikes. As coachloads of tourists snap away the the rock, climbing in and out of the temples, an Indian man holding a small broom climbs up to the head of an elephant. He proceeds to sweep vigorously, as below him, a team of 'litter-pickers' kick pebbles off the top of a statue. A guard walks down the steps, hooking a bottle into the bushes with his left foot. A handful of monkeys sit atop a temple roof, and swing off the columns. It is World Heritage Week, and a banner being tied to nails on the rock face reminds Mamallapuram of this fact. The town is choosing to celebrate with it’s own preservation initiatives.

There are signs all over the town pronouncing littering a sin, and rubbish bins are scattered about the place, labelled with instructions to keep Mamallapuram tidy. There must be some logic behind the fact that they are all blue and shaped like penguins.

Meanwhile, the monkeys watch tourists stepping in and out. A fenced off area is broken through, and since the only guards are the government tourist touts bartering for guided tours and pointing backpackers in the direction of the best knick-knack shops, kids are hanging out beyond the mangled chicken wire, listening to mp3s on their mobile phones.

It’s an old adage often asked in the West: ‘Why spend so much money on heritage when there are people starving in the world?’ But when a centuries-old monument crumbles before your eyes, there is some instinct within that compels you to jump and save it. No one wants to be reminded that any mark we may leave on the world may one day also crumble and be swept over by women with straw brooms.

Here in Mamallapuram, workshops line the sites of almost every shrine, men outside, chiselling away at lumps of basalt with sharp tools and plenty of elbow grease, throwing dust into their eyes as, at the end of their fingers, effigies of Ganesh, or the laughing Buddha, or a sitting monkey, appear. As each new tourist arrives, by foot or by car or by cycle, they stop and call out, inviting them to come over and bring home a carving, even before they have set eyes on the original works they came here for. And they do a roaring trade. If the temples and shrines were to crumble away, it is still possible to imagine these men here, the clink of metal on stone ricocheting from hill to hill, and across the empty bay.

Ayurveda

“You change your clothes,” says a solid, grumpy woman in a dirty red sari. What do I change into? I ask, miming the question. She shuffles off into a dark corner and comes back holding up piece of string.

Mamallapuram has almost as many Ayurvedic massage parlours as it has houses. Each has its touts which line the streets waiting to pounce on any tourist who, for even a second, might look as though he or she is lost. Big boards outside explain in misspelled English all the things Ayurvedic massage can help with – back pain, stress, weight loss, marriage problems. And they always feature a soft-focus picture of a blissful, stress-free man or woman, stretched out upon a table, being kneaded to wholeness by a smiling woman in a flowing sari.

Ayurveda, at 5,000 years old, is believed by some to be the most ancient method of medical treatment in practice. Though I doubt the woman offering me the string has ever taken the Hippocratic Oath, some medicines have been examined and patented in the West. Not that the average punter is bothered with the details of the five elements. Or the balance of air, phlegm and bile. Here in the South, training as a practitioner is less a higher calling, more a lucrative way of earning bucks off the biggest beneficiaries: tourists.

I think of the word ‘benefit’ as I climb, naked except for said piece of string, onto a slippery plastic green mattress. Behind the grimy screen, I imagine that Eva is going through the same thing, though her woman is younger, more timid, and I would guess, possesses softer hands. I think about this with envious malice as my stern-faced masseuse stares at me, hair pulled tightly back from her face like an Indian Brunhilda. ‘White girls eat too much cake’ I imagine her thinking, or at least something like that. From over the curtain, a click, and the trill and durge of ‘om,’ ‘om shanti om’ and something about Krishna.

Take it from me, there is nothing in the least bit erotic about this. Not even when she pours what seems like bucketfuls of hot oil over me and starts digging her chubby fingers into me like she’s making the dough for a steak and kidney pie. I think about Eva. There has not been so much as a squeak from her.

The two women speak in Tamil to each other. I wonder if they are comparing patients, tutting to each other. Look at those thighs, mine is probably saying to Eva’s. You can tell she needs to cut down on the chapattis. They’re probably laughing about my silly tan marks, too.

Suddenly the dynamic changes, and she’s hammering me with the rough sides of her hands. Now she’s pressing heavily against the back of my head and chanting something – what is she chanting? Will it hurt? – now telling me to turn over and I’m totally lost as all I can do is concentrate on is clamping my eyes shut. I recall somewhere in the dim recesses of my memory that this is supposed to last an hour. How long has it been? It must be half way through? I think of Eva, silent behind the screen, and imagine she is lost in some ecstatic meditative realm. Either that or she’s been clubbed and dragged away while I’ve had my eyes shut.

After a while of being rubbed, manipulated and prodded, I can sense my masseuse stepping back. I can feel steam in the air and suddenly the smell of warm fat reaches my blind nostrils. I realise that she is sponging the oil off me with a hot cloth. She doesn’t make much of a gesture towards finishing the job, however, and instead slaps me on the shoulder and says, ‘change clothes’ which means I can take the string off now.

I slide off the mattress, stunned and more than a little embarrassed. A small squelch from next door suggests that Eva is doing the same. I stand, shiny with grease and completely unclothed, in front of my stocky masseuse. We face each other for a moment, two women completely bewildered. I look into the eyes that have seen more of my skin than I probably have. Then, suddenly, she grabs my shoulders with two firm hands, and, grinning like a spinster aunt, gives me a big kiss on the cheek, before skipping out the door. Forget the oils and the om shantis, I think, smiling to myself: that’s all she really needed to do.