The Lord's Bike
Yesterday my friend Doug went down to Dehra Dun with something like 40,000 rupees in his pocket and came back on a new Bajaj Wind 125, a small motorbike with a Kawasaki engine. Doug came to Woodstock with me last month to teach Religion classes at the high school, specifically "worldview" classes. It's tough to come out of Calvin and not be cynical about the word worldview, but Doug's helping me out. Today he handed me the extra key to his bike and said, "It's the Lord's bike, use it while I'm at work."
I'm not sure if I'll use it, though. The roads around here still terrify me, and also, despite the daily rain, I still like the idea of walking a lot, of having exercise be an integral part of my day, not an intense, isolated workout tacked on before or after work, and of being forced to do fewer errands in a day and taking longer to do them. Anyway, here's a stab at describing the town I live in.
From my apartment, it's half an hour to the first shops. After a steep ten-minute climp to Tehri road, the winding road is uncharacteristically flat, running across the winding hillside towards town. The only obstacles are speeding motorcycles, jeeps overloaded with passengers, cows, and goats. (The cows and goats aren't speeding, just the bikes and jeeps.)
At Mullingar hill the shops begin, tiny concrete boxes with homes above them. Lots of shoe-makers, produce vendors, tea shops, sweets shops, fabric stores, electronic stores--just lots of stuff, really. Last Tuesday I planned to stop at my tailor (he won my loyalty by offering me chai the first two times I came into his shop) to see if he'd finished my traditional Indian shirt in time for Independance Day. He's well known for doing good, cheap work, and also for taking his sweet time to get it done, so I wanted to remind him that I needed it soon.
Before Hannah and I reached him, though, a pack of men came down the street, instructing all shops to close for the afternoon. Apparently a bandh was called, a state-wide cessation of business, because an activist protesting the placement of the state capital (Uttaranchal only became a state in 2000) had died from a hunger strike. No one was visibly upset, about the man's death or about the bandh, but all shopkeepers promptly closed their gates.
But we were already down there, and we'd been itching to explore the other end of town, so we kept walking. Soon we reached Picture Palace Bazaar, where things start getting touristy. From here, a couple kilometers of Indian, Chinese, and Tibetan restaurants, and lots of vacationers from Delhi, most of the men in western clothing, most of the women in saris.
Picture Palace is a former cinema, now shuttered and dilapidated. The town isn't run down, really, and it still gets lots of weekend-trippers from Delhi and the plains, but its glory days as a vacation spot were for the British Raj. Still, there's some good restaurants here, a bank, two bookstores, and Cafe Coffee Day, an Indian chain that's been the only place in town I've found that serves real, non-Nescafe coffee. Most days it takes quite a while to get anywhere down here, navigating cars, packs of men walking together, and, you'll be glad to know, the occasional cow sleeping on the road. My friend said he saw a monkey climb down a fence to steal a banana from a fruit vendor down here, and it's good to know that sometimes things happen exactly as they should.
Normally we don't get any further than this district, but with the bandh the street was less crowded, and we'd been itching to explore the rest of town, so we walked on. The mall is a 3 km-long road that connects the bizaar on our end to the one on the other end. Today the side of the road, behind the junk vendors, was a wall of clouds, and you couldn't see ten feet off the cliff, where Dehra Dun lies below. But the road is wider here, lined with large trees and garish old hotels, a "Kwality Restuarant," and a revolving restuarant. It feels like a different town, like an Indian Gatlinburg or Wisconsin Dells. Hannah and I walked to the end, decling offers for rides from rickshaw drivers--even after you refuse the nine in a row, the tenth is sure you'll want to ride his. It felt oddly empty with all the shops closed, so we turned back, returning to our "home" neighborhood, where I was amazed at how quickly a place can feel familiar.
I'm not sure if I'll use it, though. The roads around here still terrify me, and also, despite the daily rain, I still like the idea of walking a lot, of having exercise be an integral part of my day, not an intense, isolated workout tacked on before or after work, and of being forced to do fewer errands in a day and taking longer to do them. Anyway, here's a stab at describing the town I live in.
From my apartment, it's half an hour to the first shops. After a steep ten-minute climp to Tehri road, the winding road is uncharacteristically flat, running across the winding hillside towards town. The only obstacles are speeding motorcycles, jeeps overloaded with passengers, cows, and goats. (The cows and goats aren't speeding, just the bikes and jeeps.)
At Mullingar hill the shops begin, tiny concrete boxes with homes above them. Lots of shoe-makers, produce vendors, tea shops, sweets shops, fabric stores, electronic stores--just lots of stuff, really. Last Tuesday I planned to stop at my tailor (he won my loyalty by offering me chai the first two times I came into his shop) to see if he'd finished my traditional Indian shirt in time for Independance Day. He's well known for doing good, cheap work, and also for taking his sweet time to get it done, so I wanted to remind him that I needed it soon.
Before Hannah and I reached him, though, a pack of men came down the street, instructing all shops to close for the afternoon. Apparently a bandh was called, a state-wide cessation of business, because an activist protesting the placement of the state capital (Uttaranchal only became a state in 2000) had died from a hunger strike. No one was visibly upset, about the man's death or about the bandh, but all shopkeepers promptly closed their gates.
But we were already down there, and we'd been itching to explore the other end of town, so we kept walking. Soon we reached Picture Palace Bazaar, where things start getting touristy. From here, a couple kilometers of Indian, Chinese, and Tibetan restaurants, and lots of vacationers from Delhi, most of the men in western clothing, most of the women in saris.
Picture Palace is a former cinema, now shuttered and dilapidated. The town isn't run down, really, and it still gets lots of weekend-trippers from Delhi and the plains, but its glory days as a vacation spot were for the British Raj. Still, there's some good restaurants here, a bank, two bookstores, and Cafe Coffee Day, an Indian chain that's been the only place in town I've found that serves real, non-Nescafe coffee. Most days it takes quite a while to get anywhere down here, navigating cars, packs of men walking together, and, you'll be glad to know, the occasional cow sleeping on the road. My friend said he saw a monkey climb down a fence to steal a banana from a fruit vendor down here, and it's good to know that sometimes things happen exactly as they should.
Normally we don't get any further than this district, but with the bandh the street was less crowded, and we'd been itching to explore the rest of town, so we walked on. The mall is a 3 km-long road that connects the bizaar on our end to the one on the other end. Today the side of the road, behind the junk vendors, was a wall of clouds, and you couldn't see ten feet off the cliff, where Dehra Dun lies below. But the road is wider here, lined with large trees and garish old hotels, a "Kwality Restuarant," and a revolving restuarant. It feels like a different town, like an Indian Gatlinburg or Wisconsin Dells. Hannah and I walked to the end, decling offers for rides from rickshaw drivers--even after you refuse the nine in a row, the tenth is sure you'll want to ride his. It felt oddly empty with all the shops closed, so we turned back, returning to our "home" neighborhood, where I was amazed at how quickly a place can feel familiar.
posted by Jonathan Hiskes at 11:08 PM
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