Photographs: Paharganj early morning Delhi, Women of Ghanerao, all copyright Jean-Pierre Henfrey 2008. www.mwpics.com.au

Time wasting, should be working, no-one on facebook, twittering twats boring… Double click on my guilty pleasure, looking again and again at the 700 odd photos from our trip to India.

Time wasting becomes ‘time-pass’, work fades into the distance .. I find myself leaning towards the screen breathing in deeply through my nose, as if the smell that permeates and characterises India was somehow captured by the digital chip along with the acid colours, brown faces, mangy dogs, cows, teeming streets, glorious buildings: temples, mosques, shanties and beautiful countryside. I can recall it if I concentrate, how is it that those ads describe perfume? Bottom notes of curry leaves, cumin, cardamom and cooking with a burning acrid dash of chilli.. a smoky sweet overlay of sandalwood incense from the nearby temple or puja.. earthy drifts of cow dung, sweat, urine.. and yes.. shit mingle with car fumes and smoke from wood fires.

The smell was the first thing I noticed even before I left the airport at Mumbai, and it was overwhelming as we drove to Colaba the first night. Huddled in the back seat of a taxi, my son, my partner and I.. crawling slowly through late night streets alive with children, people, animals, small fires.. faces pressed against the windows.. fireworks exploding.. horns blasting.. music shrieking.. past shanties and tarpaulin homes and straggly apartment blocks… Like a journey into some kind of surrealist horror movie. The three of us wondering through a haze of tiredness what we were doing there, what were we thinking, what type of mother brings their child to such a place?

After the smell – its the sounds of India that creep into your consciousness, becoming so much a part of your life that the absence of sound back home, rather than being peaceful, is more like a sterile aural vacuum waiting for some life to fill it. The birds that fill the Indian skies, making our skies seem so empty in comparison, the endless traffic & car horns, the chatter of voices – laughing children, hawkers, gossip, chai wallahs, vendors, temple bells, Muslim calls to prayer – a dawn wakeup call I came to love. In some places the chatter of monkeys dominates. In others the quiet lowing of cattle, the rhythmic sounds of workers picking weeds from crops or drawing water from a well and the snoring of men dozing in the sun on charpoys outside the chai stall are all you hear. Until of course the omnipresent cassette player or transistor radio bursts forth with another round of the latest Bollywood hit songs, prompting a few dance moves and a singalong and the appearance from god knows where of a group of noisy children.

Indians abhor a vacuum of any kind it seems, life without noise, smells, colour and decoration is simply not to be tolerated. For westerners, this can be an onslaught your battered senses get no rest even in the ‘privacy’ of your hotel room – for privacy is a concept that if grasped at all, is treated with amusement and bemusement as a luxury that we in uncrowded western countries demand. Why? Who knows.  But (and this was to become our mantra) don’t fight it – go with it and the onslaught becomes a presence that brings every fibre of your being and every sense to life.

Just go with it, don’t fight it – the smell, the noise, the lack of privacy. Answer a thousand personal & intimate questions in the street from a stranger and make a new friend or twenty, go with them to the chai stall, follow them to the best bangle shop & let then haggle for you. Laugh through your agony along with the delighted crowd of spectators as you try your first delicious oily street snack and the green chilli brings tears to your eyes and snot pouring out of your nose ‘take out the chilli before you eat’ the children shriek – doubled over with laughter, as the stallholder – with a flourish of his filthy cloth over a plate – presses another free pakora on you, anxious that you should enjoy his cooking.

As you spend days in each new place, the rhythm of daily life, with different spikes of activity for each village town or city yet reassuringly the same everywhere, becomes soothing. The same woman performing her puja at the temple outside your door each day, the same dog sleeping in the same spot on the street, the cow who visits for a bowl of milk each morning, the same children pouring out of or into the school in their pressed and starched uniforms, tight pigtails and thick glasses. After a day or two, the boy at the chai stand is making your morning cuppa as he sees you pass the women washing at the lakeside -slap slap slap amongst the laughter and talk. You take your place on the stools at the stall amongst your new best friends.

What’s the daily gossip? They’ll tell you where you were the day before, what you ate – news travels fast – everyone knows everything. Its as if you’ve lived there for years – but in a day or so, you move on, and you know they don’t remember you. the Indian grasp of going with the flow of life and fate is too strong, connections made are as easily broken, what each day brings is accepted and then let go of with equanimity… go with it.. it begins to make sense, to bring calm.

Along with the demands of religious observation.. routine comes in the most part, especially in rural areas, from the tasks that an un-mechanised, un-modernised life demands; shopping, preparing and cooking meals, manual labour, hand making objects, working in the fields. Life is hard, no doubt, lets not romanticise it – a trap that westerners too often fall into, and one that I am guilty of. I couldn’t live that life, I wouldn’t live that life, but briefly being alongside, observing & meeting those who live this way changed us.

You adapt or run home, hide or end up like my son – dressed in a kurta and cotton pants, living on street food, chai and homemade treats forced upon him by plump sari-clad women, playing street cricket and with an impressive grasp of Hindi phrases to flirt with giggling girls and bargain with shopkeepers & a tough demeanour to ward off touts & rickshaw drivers.

And what of the shock of death, disease, poverty. What are the right words? Did we cease to care? Did we become hardened? How could we travel for 5 weeks and not be torn apart by what we saw, how does anyone?

Even now 18 months later I find it hard to analyse and properly express my feelings about the inescapable side of India. People ask when you return – ‘how did you handle it?’, ‘I wouldn’t be able to deal with the poverty’ they say. I have no answer, other than to say – ‘you don’t have to deal with it, you’re not the one living on the median strip, it isn’t really about you and those people’s lives won’t be made any better by your hand-wringing and western guilt’.

Its not that you don’t care, or that an individual child or woman can’t reach into your soul and make your heart bleed, or that you don’t shed tears of anger and frustration at the indifference of the Government and the wealthy, at the injustice, the garbage, the dead and dying. Its more that as the life force of India flows around you and sweeps you along you (rightly or wrongly) begin to let go of things. Its just how it is, move on, go with it, focus on the immediate, the routine, the daily tasks. What will happen will happen, don’t fight it.

The beauty and colour becomes distancing and distracting like the flashing eyes and beautiful smile of the little dancing girl twirling and clapping in her pink pink sari and flashing sequins and bangles, her tiny bare feet a blur in the dust.How easy it is to forget she doesn’t go to school – to not notice how thin she is, or how her father grimly supervises her dance, is that a bruise on her arm? She is the breadwinner after all, she must work hard late into the night dancing for us. I put money in the box and I try to give her a childish toy, a little koala, a cheap nothing.. her father sends her back to return the toy and ask for more money. Another awkward tourist moment among many.

That little girl, and the thousands of people we met, the Taj Mahal, Humayan’s tomb, the Golden Temple or the Jama Masjid, the incredible food, the music, laughter and beautiful gardens, the long hours of conversation with elderly intellectuals about politics and philosophy, or with studious teenagers about physics and English grammar and always the cricket, the bloody bloody cricket. All these things, but especially the people, are the glorious, beautiful, incomparable, beating heart of India. Sights and experiences that make your soul sing, that make you glad to be alive in that moment, glad to be fortunate enough to experience such incredible things. The things that make you begin planning to return almost as soon as you land back in Sydney. The things that make you overlook the corruption and injustice while vowing to do something to help end it.

Don’t try and understand it, don’t bother trying to explain it, just go with it – or don’t, India probably won’t care either way