Judging India

Travel Stories: In New Delhi, JD Roberto deemed much of what he encountered backward and barbaric. But his moral compass was about to be reset.

09.14.09 | 10:37 AM ET

Delhi rail lines (The Wandering Angel via Flickr, (Creative Commons))

The train platform at New Delhi central station is about as wretched a place as you’d want to find yourself in the wee hours of the morning. It’s nearly 2 a.m. which, here in India, means that the 8 p.m. overnight to Varanasi should depart in about an hour. Karen and I have staked out a small patch of concrete and dirt that is almost entirely free of rotting garbage and human waste. We’ve gone a full three minutes without anyone trying to beg/sell/pilfer anything, but the Shih Tzu-sized rats are getting bolder. One of them is actually leafing through my Lonely Planet book while another is laying waste to a bag of trail mix from our day pack. I am exhausted and sweaty and cultivating a rash of mysterious origins.

Look, I’m not a sissy. I have trudged through more third-world shitholes than most people have ever heard of, and, by and large, I’ve loved every minute of it. I’ve survived Cambodian bedbugs, bowel-trampling food poison in Petra and a 400-pound Bahamian customs officer with a serious crush on me. And I dig it; I like a challenge.

But right now, I’m spent. There are parts of this experience that I just cannot square with my normally forgiving moral compass. Yes, there’s “cultural distinctiveness,” but there’s also “bereft of civilized decency.” Surely there has to be a point where some foreign cultural norm clashes unforgivably with one’s personal core beliefs. I mean, how far can you open your mind before your brain falls out?

How am I supposed to see beauty when I am so continually confronted with the backward and barbaric?

The four guys at the end of the train platform aren’t helping my attitude even a little. They are staring us down and giggling like a gaggle of Japanese schoolgirls. They’ve been studying us and plotting their approach for about 20 minutes now. When they finally make their play, they each shove someone else to the front of the pack as they approach, physically nominating a spokesman.

The skinny one in the middle summons the courage to ask what they’ve clearly been discussing at length:

Skinny Guy: “Are you a love marriage?”

I’ll be honest and say that I was appalled the first time I flipped open an Indian newspaper and found the “Matrimonials,” an entire section of the paper dedicated to families shilling their daughters in hopes of finding a suitable man. It’s a personal ad, of sorts, with height, weight, education and family status included and there are various sub-categories when the family is looking for a groom of a particular social status or occupation.

Families often go into unrecoverable debt to provide a dowry large enough to attract a higher status groom. Assuming a proper dowry and provided the astrologer sees nothing bad in the commingling of signs, the match is made.

Divorce is legal, but rare. A divorced woman is unlikely to find good employment and a family that takes in a divorced female is thought to bring shame into the house.

The truly tragic lot, however, belongs to widows. A widow is an omen of bad fortune—surely anyone whose husband has died must carry terrible karma—and is often not welcome at family functions or celebrations. Many family members will refuse to touch her or take meals in her presence. It’s not uncommon for widowed women to turn to prostitution or begging to survive.

In rare instances, a widow may choose “sati,” the ritual of joining your dead husband’s funeral pyre and burning to death. The practice was banned in 1987 but it still happens, and women who choose sati are, in some circles, glorified and worshiped.

This is what I am thinking as this tittering flock of strangers hovers in my personal space waiting for a reply.

“Yes,” I tell him, “we’re a love marriage.”

And they giggle and nod and whisper something indecipherable to each other.

Hours later, as we settle into our mercifully cool and quiet train compartment, we meet Claire and Megan. They’re British medical students who, like us, are wrapping up a glorious and torturous month of traveling around India.

Next stop for Claire is Washington, D.C., where she’s landed a highly coveted spot training in an American ER. Brimming with excitement, she tells me that there’s nowhere else for a medical student to get such frequent, hands-on experience with gunshot wounds. Apparently, nowhere else in the world do people shoot each other on such a regular basis.

Late that night, crammed into a single berth, Karen and I are drifting off to the rhythmic clatter of the train. I’m staring at the ceiling and wondering what Claire will think of my country once she’s come and gone. It is equal parts amazing and imperfect, visionary and dysfunctional.

I’m hoping Claire will be good at seeing the beauty instead of the backward and barbaric.