As much as I feel like I’m adapting to my new environment (both culturally and biologically), there are still moments when I find India to be just as raw and shocking as it seemed when I arrived here for the first time three years ago. Now, on my second trip, blinders obscure my vision more than ever, and I normally walk by the disfigured beggars and the open sewers without skipping a beat. I no longer pay very much attention to such mundane sights as the hunched-over sweeper women ineffectively cleaning the streets with cheap, ineffective brooms; the men urinating or defecating on the side of the road in full view of passing traffic; the people dumping piles of trash wherever they please, and then, the scavengers who come afterwards to sift through the waste; the numerous stray dogs in varying states of decline and affliction; the transvestite population who begs with a special sort of aggressiveness; the beggar woman who clutches a baby in one hand as she thrusts her other hand in your face (whose baby is it actually and why does it never cry? is it drugged?); the trash burners and the crazies and the drunks. Though I really shouldn’t get used to all this, I suppose it is for the best because otherwise I would always be too overwhelmed to function.
Even with this defense mechanism, there is much that I cannot get used to, especially the Indian attitude to death. It’s hard to describe this attitude because it seems so contradictory: the concept of death is at once central to India’s cultural identity with Hinduism’s focus on the cycle of reincarnation, and at the same time, death, as a state of being and not as a religious idea, feels peripheral, eliciting indifference and nonchalance. It is this nonchalance that I find so strange. In general, my experience has been that death in India is either simply ignored or not spoken about because it’s taboo, which as a culturally ignorant foreigner, I interpret as a form of “ignoring.” Considering it as a reflection of the value of the individual, the indifference is more than strange – it is disturbing.
I’m not trying to say that there is no reaction to death whatsoever in India; I’ve seen relatives mourning a death in the family with great passion. Additionally, I find it hard to explain how exactly the Indian attitude towards death differs from the Western attitude towards death. Death (and rebirth) is just as central a concept in Christianity as it is in Hinduism, and similarly, death is easily ignored as well. I mean, if we paid more attention to death, there might be some outcry over our continued involvement in two bloody, prolonged wars. Maybe, the distinction is that death in India isn’t peripheral, but it’s treated as if it is.
Almost everyday I encounter something that makes me think about this morbid topic. Walking to work the other morning I was faced with an especially gruesome sight: the pathetic, tattered corpse of a kitten lying in rigor mortis on the sidewalk. I nearly vomited as I stepped over the body and continued on my way, not knowing quite how to process it. It’s not as if the kitten was road-kill, which is something I’d find more dismissable. No, it looked like the poor creature had died of starvation as there appeared to be no external injury though it seems unlikely that a starving kitten would choose to die right in the middle of a sidewalk. I heard another story about how residents of a quiet Bangalore neighborhood woke up one morning to discover ten dead dogs splayed out in the middle of the road. Evidently, someone had fed them some poisoned meat, which I suppose is one way to deal with the stray dog population.
These anecdotes are not just limited to animals (really, what are a few canines when thousands and thousands of people are barely surviving?). Walking around Bangalore, I frequently see people lying on the sidewalk who don’t exhibit any signs of life. I don’t stop to take a pulse. In the newspaper, you can find stories daily about some completely preventable tragedy. A typical article tells about the five-year-old who was out playing in the street, then fell into one of the deep, open drainage ditches, and drowned in the standing water. (If only India had the U.S.’s legal system, lawyers would have a field day with law-suits.)
During my first week at work, an employee committed suicide by hanging himself from an electrical wire. This occurred on the company’s campus, and the way I learned about what had happened was through rumor and hearsay. The company didn’t give everyone a day off to conduct an investigation, didn’t send out a company-wide email to discuss the incident and their response to it, never made an official announcement of any form, and of course, nothing appeared in the newspapers. The police didn’t show up until the following day when the deceased’s relatives arrived at the gate to demand an inquiry into the death to determine whether it might be murder. The police didn’t assent to the request; rather they guarded the campus, preventing the upset family members from entering.
As someone brand new to the company, I was surprised by the suicide and the company’s way of handling it, but now that I’ve been here about a month, I don’t think that this reaction is particularly unusual for India. Although my colleagues talked about the suicide, they never demanded any action or expressed any surprise over the way the company handled it. A few days later, it wasn’t mentioned, and taking my cue, I too put it out of my mind.
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