Sunday 2nd November 2008

“This should be such a beautiful place,” says Alex. “But instead, it’s like a dead body soup.” He’s standing on the edge of a small concrete jetty on the River Yamuna. We’ve been spending the day, myself, Alex who’s an art critic, and artist Nitin, taking photos for a Delhi gallery exhibition piece. It’s called Nature of the City, and, today, involves travelling around the Delhi hinterlands, and finding the places where nature lives alongside the worst of the city’s pollution. Right now, we’re waiting for a boat to take us out onto the river.



Searching for a boat and helmsman, we accidentally wander into one of Delhi’s crematoria. In the city every day, there are between 600 and 900 cremations. Two of the grounds that serve this demand stand here: the ‘electric’ crematorium, and Raj Ghat, which uses wood. Looking for the river, we stumble across its gate, where street wallahs are selling bundles of firewood to the poorer tribute-makers. In a small stone hut resembling an Auschwitz gas chamber, the ordinary people of Delhi bring their dead to be burned using Compressed Natural Gas, or CNG, the fuel that auto-rickshaws are run on. It’s also used to burn stray dogs. For the production of cremains, 500 rupees (£6) changes hands. It’s above the heads of most people. The other option, and a popular one, is just to dump bodies in the river. This must be done under cover of darkness.

Moving swiftly past the CNG chamber, we come to the last destination for Delhi’s well-to-do. In carefully sequenced plots, bonfires in various states of combustion flame and smolder; it takes some ten hours for the average body to burn and some of the fires, if you look closely inside the sticks, are yet to consume the bundles inside. Beside others are the charred remains of marigold garlands. Men stack wood on top of plots, waiting for the next bodies to arrive. We shouldn’t be here. But we are fascinated, floating through the scene, guided by perverse curiosity. We just cannot leave. We walk up and down the concrete ramps between fires, through the stench of burning wood and human flesh.

Behind us, an ambulance pulls up to the gates and from its back doors. Men hoist up a stretcher, upon which lies a body, swaddled in embroidered linen. It is covered with garlands of bright orange marigolds. The women remain outside the gates as the men begin to chant prayers and follow the procession up the concrete ramp and past the burning bonfires on either side. They pass the three of us as we stand and stare, and for the first time in India I feel invisible, as if I am a ghost at a funeral. They hoist the body up to a chlorinated pool which looks like a kind of morbid water-park feature: a garishly-painted statue of Indra, the manager of heaven, overlooks a platform set on the water. The long bundle is laid on top of it. More prayers are said in Hindi, the body is doused, and brought down to the river. Here, again, are more bonfires, and hundreds of men looking out across them. These bonfires are covered with canopies made of coloured foil and sticks, which partially burn along with the fires. Older boys are hoeing the riverbed, setting up and putting out fires, removing piles of ash. No one has said anything about there being a white woman in the presence of men, because no one has noticed. There is a silence here which is indescribable.



Eventually we feel uncomfortable enough to leave, and persuade a young Indian man to take us out in a boat down the river. Nitin wants to take some pictures of the Yamuna River for his project.



So here we are, on one of the most polluted rivers in the world, a river in which New Delhi dumps 57% of its daily waste. We are rowing through the dead body soup. From the other side of the river, the masses of men are obscured by the smoke, and the place looks like a factory. A couple of hundred yards further down the river, there are people picking among the rubbish dunes. Piles of garbage are everywhere, and birds circle overhead. Somewhere, a group of children are hoeing in the mud near their hut – they’re trying to make some home improvements. In front of them, men are defecating in the water. The air smells of shit and burning human flesh. Above us towers a monstrous concrete flyover. In the water around and on the banks of the river are scattered pieces of Diwali detritus: incense boxes, tinsel, marigolds, cigarette packets, plastic casts of Laskshmi, empty crisp packets. They float on the surface of the water like sparkly algae and cover the ground in a garish, half-rotten carpet. There are literally islands made of the stuff, and we float through them in our smelly lagoon.

“This is religious pollution,” says Alex. And he’s right, there’s sacred tat everywhere, just thrown into the river. And bodies, too are just that: sacred to be used and thrown away, because the party is over, and another one’s about to start.

It’s not that Indians have no respect for human life, as some have said. It’s that they have no fear of the dead. They can be dumped in water, burned by taxi fuel, or charred in open air, in front of all, before being floated out on the river covered in fancy aluminium foil. The party is over, after all. Why mourn it for so long - their next one might be even better.

Tuesday 28th October 2008

The roads are empty tonight: no sound of horns, or chugging of rickshaws. There’s no one out on the streets. Inside houses people gather with their families. Diwali has a distinct Christmas Day feel, though without the mid afternoon Disney and Pixar movies to keep the kids quiet. All around town,people sit around tables, ready to light candles and pray. Diwali is a festival celebrated by Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists: every major religion in India except Christianity and Islam. But today all will drink chai and eat Mithai: Indian sweets of different colours, tooth-acheingly sweet, made of compressed sugar and condensed milk, ground almonds, or coconut, or squishy dates, topped off with silver leaf and more nuts. All around town, people have been walking with foil-wrapped boxes containing presents to exchange. Strings of bulbs hang from every building, lit up after nightfall along with the fireworks that explode in the air. Huge bright anemones, spreading through the sky, are accompanied by the machine gun sputter of Chinese Crackers. The sky is full of an ashy smoke, weighed down by the dusty Delhi air. It’s chokingly thick.

Before any of this takes place, Hindus pray to the goddess Lakshmi, who emerges this day from an ocean of milk, to ensure wealth and prosperity. But this year, those prayers may be even more earnest, and the presents exchanged even smaller. As the economy hits India as hard as any, it’s going to be a tight Diwali for Delhi families.

India suffered a drop in the Sensex (India’s value-weighted index) four days ago – their lowest since 2005. Of course, it hasn’t been hit as hard as some (or had it as easy as others, such as Iraq, the only country whose economy is growing at a pace) Despite this, India is still the world’s second fastest growing economy, which, considering the fact that the UK’s economy is recording minus growth at the moment, is fairly impressive.

But to touch on a recurring theme, India’s economy still represents a polarisation of the richest and the poorest. This year, India had the highest contribution of entrepreneurs to the Forbes Global 2000 – mostly in the software business - while 60% of the country still live off the land. It's a precarious situation given the increase in floods and drought. An estimated 69% percent of Indian entrepreneurs use personal savings for start-up capital and 18% are funded by family. It’s hardly a figure that indicates the country’s richest starting from the bottom in life. There are no tales of the village-boy-made-good.

The Times of India reported the success story of one entrepreneur who has opened up a chain of paint-your-own pottery cafes in Delhi. They are wildly successful. The idea of opening up a venue for Indians – well known for their traditional crafts and artisan culture – to paint terracotta ashtrays and teapot stands in ludicrous designs in itself characterises how distant the middle class of India are from the poorest, in terms of their culture as well as their wealth.

So while the stock market crashes around the world, and the Sensex continues to fall, 60% of Indians will remain unbothered, and uninhibited. They are more concerned with the next flash flood and the worry that the government, distracted by nuclear deals to ensure the energy to power the new economy, will not be there to bail them out. It’s already failed in Bihar, as my colleagues Michelle and Divya reported for the Hindustan Times:



On this holiday afternoon, Michelle and I head out for a traditional stroll in Lodi Gardens, a local park of magnificent temples, and dotted with palm trees. A child reaches up to us at the stoplight, grabbing Michelle’s arm and asking for rupees. He is covered in sores.

Delhiite breadwinners may be concerned this Diwali that they cannot buy the washing machine their family expected them to provide. Or the car that screamed at them from the advertising pages of the newspaper, alongside a happy, healthy family celebrating Diwali together. The huge poverty problem in India is not one that entrepreneurs alone can solve, and of course they are not to blame for its perpetuity. But each are uncertain about their future. And as one has a voice, ricocheting around the world’s media, the other doesn’t. And it certainly won’t be heard above the explosion of fireworks.

Tuesday 14th October 2008

The aesthetic of India Fashion Week is much as you would expect from any other world city: marble floors, chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, wire-thin women prancing through the entrance with their certification hanging around their necks, tangling with their Louis Vuitton handbags. There are the flashes of cameras, the pouting of faces covered with outsize, bug-like sunglasses, even though it is shady enough inside.



Emporio Vasant Kunj is on the outskirts of Delhi, and the venue for half the shows in this year’s fashion week. It is a brand new building, purpose-built for the upper-middle class of Delhi: nothing but the highest end, biggest names of fashion couture: Dior, Chanel, DKNY. Here, the young and fabulously rich (and often fashionably-challenged) drop their Lexus off for valet parking and return a couple of hours later with their hatboxes and be-ribboned Gucci carrier bags. Less than five minutes’ drive down the road, we pass children returning from school with tattered backpacks, and women bent over with the weight of firewood to sell, and mouldy vegetables to buy.



We walk through the barriers, flashing our media passes with superior pride. The buyer’s entrance is bustling with the Eddies and Patsies of the Delhi glitterati, clutching glasses of Stoli Vodka and soda, and grabbing each others’ arms, whispering.

In the corridor outside, there is an art exhibition. It’s called ‘Wander Lust’, and devised by an unnamed artist. Each picture, blown up to a length of six feet or so, depicts an Indian villager – herd boys, women with wrinkled, careworn faces, girls with little flesh on their bones, men who stare, eye sockets protruding, into the camera. Each of them is depicted in India chic: expensive diamond rings through their noses, linen shirts, saris shining without a crease, in the finest of silk. A new trend is creeping into the nascent Indian fashion scene: peasant chic. India Vogue has just celebrated it’s first anniversary. In August, it published a controversial spread, styled to the nines, in which Indian peasants and beggar children were dressed in designer fashions. Small malnourished boys wore striped designer-kiddie striped jumpers. Young, tired mothers were smothered in angora. Women hanging off the back of motorcycles clutched VL-logoed handbags, while their husbands, at the front, were wearing tailored blazers. And on each of their faces, that familiar, haunting, hollow look that is so often the central appeal of charity leaflets. Instead of making poverty history, Delhi Fashion Week was making poverty sexy.



In a society where two thirds of the population are illiterate, and around 40% live below the poverty line, it’s a situation that’s easy to condemn and difficult to really understand. No matter how clean and fragrant their life lived in India, affluent Delhi-ites come face to face with the smell and grit of poverty every day. Children selling magazines at stoplights, weaving in and out of cars that narrowly scrape past them. Hunchbacked men, holding their bent arms out for a handful of rupees. Toddlers sitting in gutters that stink of sulfur and human excrement. And here we are, slipping on marble floors and gasping for a cappuccino.



In London, we are shielded from poverty. The beggars we do see are bums, we reassure ourselves. They are drunkards, or layabouts, who could get shelter and sign up for the dole if they want to. Real, dire, inescapable poverty is something we rarely, if ever, have to see firsthand. And so we fear it, and fetishize it. We leave it to Bono and Bob Geldof and Africa. We give to charities and cry out whenever human rights are broken but most of us don’t do anything useful about it anyway. We are scared of what we can’t see.

But every Indian knows what poverty looks like. It’s a way of life, even if it’s not their way of life. It’s not something to be afraid of, and it’s not something to be tiptoed around. The photoshoot might be tasteless, and it might never have run in American Vogue, but it’s not as stupid an editorial decision as it might first appear.



On the way back from our first experience of fashion week, we drop into a hotel to make a film for the newspaper. We’re videoing India’s most famous drummer, at a concert he’s giving as part of a hospitality event hosted by India’s largest telecommunications company. Somehow, we manage to impress said drummer, who invites us backstage to eat and drink and watch his show. We meet one of the most famous Bollywood composers and singers. We meet diplomats from various foreign consulates, who distribute their business cards and demand ours, inviting us to travel and drink wine and come to parties in five star hotels. Barely is our back turned before our large tulip-shaped wine glasses are refilled with the finest Shiraz and Chardonnay by waiters with scarlet turbans, wearing impeccable white suits. Driving back in the dark, more than a little tipsy, it is impossible to see, in the shadows, the camps of children living under tarpaulin, and fathers crouched by the roadside on thin moth-eaten mattresses, waiting for the night to come. They aren’t dressed in Prada polo necks today.

The gap between the most wealthy and the poorest of Indian society is gargantuan. Women get a french polish in a five-star spa, where barely a hop, skip and jump away, kids sell coconut segments to tuk tuk drivers and their passengers, before settling down for the night on an ancient blanket. But what to do is another question. The answer is not to drip them in diamonds, but it’s also not to take out a 100 rupee standing order to a charity that will probably never deliver your money to the right place. There’s no point in covering guilt with an ineffectual contribution.

As the sun sets over the stage of the hotel, we swat the flies from our bowls of chocolate mousse and think back to the photos in the Emporio Mall. What next for the anonymous faces of suffering, now such a worn-out phrase that they are considered iconic enough for the fashion industry? Whatever the answer, it probably won’t be found in the Stoli Vodka tent.

Monday 13th October

“The thing about India is…” It was about the fourth time in the last two minutes our host had said it. We are sitting in a restaurant in Connaught Place, a plaza area which can best be described as the Oxford Circus of New Delhi, but with better food. Some family friends of a friend had taken us out for a sumptuous dinner. When you are ex-pats, the most tenuous of links become your comrades, such is the common bond of alienness shared, and the pool of likely acquaintances shrunk. And now we were the honoured recipients of one of the best meals we’d ever had: lamb, tandoori chicken, spicy paneer, perfectly cooked lentils, naan glazed with creamy butter, parathas sprinkled with gentle spices. A restaurant, I find, can always be rated by the standards of its toilet facilities. Here, before you can reach the top of the stairs, an old man smiles and greets you, before dashing into the cubicle before you with a handful of paper towels to wipe down every possible surface.

Back at the table, I sit across from our host again. He begins, “the thing about India is…” and launches into a conversation about India’s pre-colonial history. He regales us with tales of pre-colonial kings and queens and princes, of the triumphs of Jawaharlal Nehru, and the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Indian national pride is one of the country’s strongest assets. It comes partly from an economic rivalry with China, and partly from a deservedly-held self-congratulation in being an emerging, billion-strong democracy despite it’s size, poverty, and the fact that it has only had 50 years to do so.

“Look outside at the people here begging,” our host says, pointing to the door. On our way in, one of the beggars who swarm Connaught Place in the evening had crept around the group, before being severely scolded by our host and sent away. He continues, “no one out there is insane, though. They are poor, but they are not insane like back in your country.”

The average beggar on the street may not be as crazy as most New York bums, or soaked in Special Brew like the bearded men living below Waterloo Bridge. But mental illness as a whole is a big problem in India. And the country is struggling to keep up with demand. A recent report by the National Human Rights Commission of India found that around 3 million people suffered from some kind of mental illness nationwide. By 2010, it is set to overtake heart disease as the biggest killer in the country. Every day the Times of India reports details of at least two or three suicides in Delhi. This is a city obsessed. In India, if it can be proven that someone drove the deceased to their death, the charge is murder.

The same report also found that there were only 29,000 beds nationally to treat mental illness, meaning that roughly 90% of people are not getting the medical attention they need. The fallout between people needing, and people receiving treatment, especially for disorders such as depression and schizophrenia, was seriously lacking; that is, among the poorest classes that is, and not the wealthier who could afford their own personal shrink.

There is a view in the West that Indians are spiritual, centred beings who do yoga every morning, ayurveda in the afternoons, and visit their guru’s ashrams regularly for guidance. In fact, Indians are the same as any of us. They suffer from the same biological imbalances, the same reactions to trauma, and the same work and family pressures. And there is an increasing interest in mental health too. In the city, people attribute disorders to the breakdown of traditional family ties, to the increasing speed of life, and to the pressures of work, not least in the current economic climate. But these are common scapegoats. Doctors are taking mental illness increasingly seriously, not just for the average commuter but for the poorest, most downtrodden village people.

Back at our table in Connaught Place, we are far from any village, and cordoned off from the threat of any beggars, mentally stable or otherwise. We drain our wine glasses and shift our full bellies to the waiting cars, and roll into the back seat. I sit next to our host’s wife, who engages me in conversation about her recently-started career: turns out she is a hypnotherapist.

Saturday 11th October 2008

There’s a giant laminated five hundred rupee note sitting on my desk. It’s not mine, and I am pretty sure even the most oblivious of market vendors would consider it legal tender, but nonetheless it irks me that it has appeared. Even in their small valuable form, they are the most useless of notes, since you can only really use them in expensive bars and restaurants without raising eyebrows.

In any case, shortly afterwards a broad middle-aged Indian walks in, and grabs the note, clearly expressing delight about having found it. This is Chanchal, the man who shares my office cabin. He’s the man in charge of designing the graphics for the newspaper. Like all graphics guys (and techies), his office is strewn with bits of miscellany, and scraps of old versions of the paper pasted together that clearly represent some kind of private joke. There are outsize pictures of rifle shooter Abhinav Bindra, Indian’s only gold medallist from the previous summer, a bunch of snooker balls, various pictures of Bollywood actresses, and a diagram of how to find your G-spot (which he designed). Now, he is folding up the rupee note into some kind of origami object.

“It’s a rupee boat,” he says, nodding enthusiastically. There are three classes of people in the world I consider the most difficult to communicate with: Physicists, 11 year-old children, and guys who are really into graphic design. Chanchal sees the confused look on my face. “You see,” he says, in the slow loud voice he reserves for young foreign interns, “it’s going to be a rupee boat, and we’re going to have it sailing on a sea of Indian stock market.” This is where he chuckles in self-appreciation. “It’s like, ‘is it going to sink, or are we going to float?'”

Downstairs, at the newspaper’s sister economic journal, people are running around and throwing papers. It’s pretty unusual in this office for anyone to put so much as a hop in their step on the way to the coffee machine. The stock markets are crashing, everything is red, or preceded by a downward arrow or a minus sign. Apocalypse is nigh. The Guardian today reported that the stock market had dropped 800 points and the rupee had slumped to a record low. When the US bailout happened a few days ago, the Times of India wrote a slightly smug piece the capitalist giant softening along the socialist path. Now, everyone is asking themselves whether India could afford to do the same thing. But with a tax system that is dubious at the best of times, the idea of such funds looks fairly unlikely.

Most Indians (like myself and most of the people I know) really have no idea what this means for us. With barely three figures in our bank accounts at the moment, Malena and I quipped, we really have nothing to lose. But someone’s worried, and the word ‘recession’ was something I grew up with and was always accompanied by worry lines on my parents’ foreheads.

In the marketplaces, there are no crashing red charts, or talk of the depreciation of the rupee. There are two more immediate things to worry about: terrorism, and flooding. Chanchal, as he is folding a sail into his paper boat, warns me that I should stay far away from the markets on a Saturday. He says that most of the terrorist attacks have happened on Saturdays. “We call them Black Saturdays now,” he says. And then there are festivals, which he also says we should avoid. Delhi got away lightly at Dussehra (security checks being a pat on the pocket and a push into the crowd and still no one with a incendiary device got through. Sri Lanka didn’t get away so easily). India won’t get away as lightly again. What seems to us a bustling, jerking crowd, is a huge depreciation on the weekend market scrum that was common a few months ago.

And what the food market still sells is rocketing in price. Not because of the value of currency or the price of oil, but because floods in the north of the country have meant widespread crop damage. The price of tomatoes has risen to over three times as much. The price of potatoes – so beloved of Indian cooks – has more than doubled. The same goes for okra, cauliflower, capiscum: almost everything you could name that makes up a traditional Indian meal. And so the women who take their weekly budget to market, waiting on the needs of their husbands and children, are forced to become resourceful, or else eat less.

So, the besuited journalists and speculators stare at the markets. But it is another kind of market that frightens a billion Indians. An economic downturn doesn’t mean buying economy brand microwave lasagne, taking one less beach holiday a year or spending less at Topshop. The ordinary Indian wouldn’t even be touched by the Dow Jones, or the FTSE index. They face the same economic crises several times a year, every time there is flood or storm and the crop fails. And it directly effects what, if anything goes on the table.

Meanwhile, Chanchal is still folding his giant 500 rupee note, and chuckling to himself as he tries to devise the perfect stock market sea on which to sail it.

Sunday 5th October 2008

“Shuutiyaa,” Rubin shouts above the cacophany of laughter, “means to have a thousand vaginas.” It was 4 a.m. and we are sitting in the foyer of the Taj Mahal Hotel. Rubin is leaning back in a red antique chair, while beside him three girls recline on a sofa, bursting with giggles. Above our heads are several domes, adorned with gold, and a fountain tinkles in the centre of the marble hall. There are fresh flowers on the receptionist’s desk and around the room; not the lurid orange marigolds that women on the street sew into garlands, but lilies and orchids, and shiny green foliage.

We’ve just come from a sweaty four hours in the hotel bar, ordering mojitos and dancing to everything from ABBA to the Chemical brothers. Not a hint of a raga. Among the white faces, young and hip Delhiites clinked glasses, dressed in tight T-shirts, designer jeans and heels. Some leaned up against corners with each other, kissing: unimaginable in any other public place. Here, a double whiskey costs 6,000 rupees. Neilesh winced at the idea of paying $12 a pop as he pocketed his reciept.

Now, we are exhausted, though our local found companions are still more than merry. Ruben is still regaling his companions with blasphemy. He explains that he’s just come back from doing a PhD at Columbia University in New York, which he said was basically “time wasting for a year.”

I excuse myself and visit the ladies’. There, a small, dark-faced Indian women bows to greet me. She touched my arm to stop me reaching for a paper hand towel and bends forward to place a large basket of freshly laundered towels. When I’m finished I have nothing more to do than to throw it in the bin in front of me. Somehow it feels different from the black women who sit in the toilets of bars and clubs in London, amongst an array of perfume bottles and face creams. Inevitably they are slumped in their chairs and they don’t really care who enters or leaves and by the end of the night, they have stopped their lacklustre distribution of ragged hand towels. In the marble bathroom, I turn around to the uniformed woman who is wiping the handtowel and think of the man who brings us steaming hot chai every time we return to the house, and cooks our meals on demand. Indian politician Pherozeshah Mehta once said that in India “your sahib [master] remains your sahib whether in office or not.”

Ruben is still creating screeches of laughter across the inebriated group. “How do you know that Jesus was Bengali?” he asks, choking with laughter at his own joke. “He lived at home until he was thirty, he believed his mother was a virgin, and she believed he was God.” More laughter. Neilesh explains to him that in New York that’s a Jewish joke. It doesn’t matter to Ruben, who proceeds to explain that in his teaching days, he’d gather his students around, open a bottle of tequila, and interpret the Koran. Together, he said, they even started the Wikipedia entry for the Indian head wobble (it doesn’t exist).

I go outside for a cigarette. There, three young men who were also in the bar stand and smoke on the steps, even though it has been illegal to smoke in public for 3 days now – since Gandhi’s birthday. The doormen don’t bat an eyelid. They come and ask for a light, and invite me to a polo match. “It’s on us,” one of them says, flicking back his coiffed fringe as he places his sunglasses on his head. “You’re our guests.” He winks, and climbs into the BMW that has just been driven onto the red carpet by the valet boy.

There are more millionaires in Delhi than there are in New York, whilst over one third of the country - 350 million people – live below the poverty line. Thirty five to forty per cent of the population live on less than 45 rupees ($1) a day. The glass of wine I drank tonight would be around two weeks’ wages. Delhi’s middle classes are rising in population, but not as fast as the rural poor, who are growing at a rate far exceeding the rate of economic growth. Delhi is both surrounded by, and dotted with hopelessly crowded urban slums. At night, the smell of burning dung rises from them, though they are hidden from our house. Similarly, there is no sign of a beggar here in the hotel forecourt. Here, even every car is searched upon entry, James Bond-style, as gatekeepers open the boot and checked underneath with mirrors. With security like this for the guests, unwelcome ones don’t have a chance.

Begging is a daily occurrence in Delhi At traffic lights, outside shops: anywhere in the streets. Many will walk beside you to wherever you are going, imploring. Often, mothers gesture to their children who reach out with dirty, chapped hands. A few have amputated their own limbs in the hope that they might raise a few extra pity-rupees. Some are under the influence of mafia groups. Some are simply starving.

Back in the hotel, Ruben is sharing his tequila-inspired interpretation of the Koran. When it is time to go, and the sun is beginning to rise, he calls for his silver Saab and we all bundle in, giggling and sitting on each others’ laps. Ruben at the wheel sways the car from side to side on the empty road. One of our friends has already lost his license for drunk driving, he laughs, but his driver at home will take him anywhere. Besides, Ruben laughs, in Bangalore at least, the breath test for drivers consists of breathing into the policeman’s face as they sniff your breath. He’s passed that one many a time.

There are plans made for dim sum tomorrow; for cricket some time this week. We drive past one of the settlements from where the burning dung smell is rising. It’s at the end of our road. We fall out of the car into the semi-darkness, still giggling, and roll towards the gate. The watchman, who has already been working for the majority of the day, is ready with smiles to open it for us, before we can even touch the latch.