Delhi

Delhi is where we got our best look at modern India. That's the India of about 200 million people whose incomes and educational levels place them in the middle class or above. India's other billion or so people still live in poverty, many in isolated rural villages where life has not changed for 2000 years. It's the India Mahatma Gandhi believed to be pure and sacred, and where he spent his days at a spinning wheel when he wasn't busy throwing out the British.

It was unnerving to read that an emerging problem in India is obesity. A lot of the new high-tech jobs are sedantary, and the 200 million eat well. In the Connaught Circle area of central Delhi, where we stayed in another good-enough hotel, the streets are alive at night with shoppers and diners at the almost uniformly excellent restaurants. The garb is mostly Western. We witnessed a mob scene at the Benetton store, which was having a winter sale. (Delhi is chilly this time of year, 60s daytime, 40s at night.)

The best thing we did in Delhi was have lunch with Bela Singh. She's the India director of Cross Cultural Solutions. CCS is an admirable American organization that sends curious and adaptable tourists to countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America to do low-level volunteer work for three weeks. These travelers enjoy a cultural immersion denied tourists who just do the Varanasi-Agra-Jaipur circuit (like us). The volunteers pay $2,800 each, plus airfare, a deal. My daughter Sydney was a CCS volunteer in India before working at the organization's headquarters for several years in New Rochelle, and later Hedy, her mom, did CCS/India, too. Both are big boosters of CCS, and when we met Bela we saw why.

An attractive 40-something psychologist, Bela is a modern Indian woman who loves traditional India. Her husband and son live in New Jersey. They visit one another, but she chooses to live in the India she finds deeply, endlessly fascinating. She likes Indians' comfort with their own karma and believes people here are essentially more contented than in many places. She has no illusions about India's harsher realities. It was Bela, in fact, who told us not to give money to beggars in Delhi---they are members of criminal gangs! She knows the ropes, and as we grilled her somewhat relentlessly she laughed and said she was giving us a lot of her standard cultural orientation pitch. Not only were we freeloaders---no $2,800 fee for us---but Bela paid for lunch. We hope to return her hospitality when Bela and her husband travel in the U.S. in August.

Talking with Bela, and by just keeping our eyes open in Delhi, we began to get a better feel for Hinduism. Its idea of many gods is strange to us. One really elusive one seems like plenty. Though as we saw people praying to different gods in a variety of settings---temples, street shrines, the stairwell in our hotel---a kind of prayer-answering division of labor began to make sense.

As we came down for breakfast one morning, the doorman in our hotel, the Jukaso Inn, was chanting and offering garlands of jasmine to a small statue of Ganesh. I don't know what the doorman was praying for, but this elephant-headed figure is the god of good fortune. He is also the patron of scribes---I had a picture of a smiling Ganesh, elephant-tusk pen in hand, over my computer last year when I wrote Death Vows (MLR Press, September 2008) in three and a half months. Go figure.

Hinduism is comfortable with ambiguity, even contradiction. Its multiplicity of deities reflects the complexity of lfe as people actually experience it. These gods make sense as connecters between the multifarious lived-in world and an equally varigated spirit world. As with Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism, behaving decently is what Hindus are supposed to try to do, and for which they will be rewarded later on. Dharma is the righteous pattern of conduct that will lead a Hindu to good karma. But in Hinduism there is no single revealed truth, deviating from which might lead to some zealot shoving a stone wall over on you.

Another nice feature of Delhi was this: we insinuated our way (i.e., walked) into the Imperial Hotel, a five-star neo-Raj gem we could not afford to stay in, and used their business center to upload photos onto the blog. The staff were sweet as could be, even after they asked for our room number. Then we went downstairs and paid New York prices for a tandoori mixed grill (we'd been eating mostly veggie and liking it) that was probably one of the ten tastiest meals either of us has ever eaten. Fitting right in with the 200 million, we're not so svelte ourselves these days.