When I moved to Delhi, I bought a beautiful, hardwood bed, with spring mattresses. My roommate asked why I had done such a thing, and I said that it was because I was planning to stay. I wanted to stay for years.
We went to the furniture market in Munirka after dark. Every front shop has its unique specialities, and after winding through crowded alleyways is a cavernous basement of more. There are handpainted side tables with wood-carved panels, rows and rows of mirrors, haphazard desks and chairs. In the world above, light strings hang from the small shops.
I saw a dark-wood dressing table with glass panels of roses. It was the most beautiful piece of furniture I’d ever seen. My roommate advised me against it, because I might only stay for a year. I listened.
At my roommate’s advice, I settled on one cheaper and more practical, plastic painted to look like wood. Later that evening, a man arrived on a bike, having carried it on his back from the furniture market. He was thin, and old.
At first I was shocked. I suppose, I thought, this is how things are done here. I was correct, but that doesn’t absolve me.
In Delhi, as everyone who has visited Delhi knows, there are thousands upon thousands of people without homes, or jobs, or either. There are hundreds of thousands of people without indoor plumbing, millions without reliable healthcare. If you walk down the streets of any central market you’ll see a mother begging for food for her baby, or a man without legs on the blanket where he sits all day and sleeps all night. And that, beneath spotless bakeries and glittering clothing stores.
People who visit Delhi are shocked by the poverty, the inequality, and I tell them it would still be here if you weren’t here: would you rather not know? (I think the answer for many people is yes. I think they’re wrong. I meet people at policy school who think all this can be solved by data. On a large scale, I think data and other sorts of systems change can be helpful, and good government most of all. But on a personal scale, I’m not sure you can do much more than go around Delhi’s streets and pledge half your income to just giving it to people, and quit making excuses that have to do with your day job).
I returned to the richest country in the world after three years and had somehow forgotten that this still exists here, too.
I don’t usually talk about politics because everyone is talking about politics, and more eloquently than I. There are things that need to be said, but I am not the one to say them. No one wants to get their political news from a technocrat who moonlights as a lyric poet.
But living abroad has changed me in many ways. It’s made me harder. I no longer have patience for people who don’t think everyone should have healthcare, or food. I’m too tired to argue these things.
There are people hungry on the streets of Chicago. There are plenty of people in America who believe that not all people should have food, and medicine, and opportunities, and couch it in the language of their day job and the charity that they do not participate in. There are plenty of people who believe that for crimes that harm no one, people should be arrested and labelled a felon and disenfranchised and passed over for jobs for the rest of their lives.
I suppose, I thought my whole young life, that’s how things are done here. I was correct, but that doesn’t absolve me.
Since this isn’t a political blog, I want to end with another story – about the second and last time I went to the furniture market. I had never eaten chhole bhature nor knew what it was, although I had heard many people in Lusaka talk of it. I vaguely associated it with a walled courtyard and a palm tree with neon purple lights.
I was getting my taxpayer identification card in the furniture market and it began to rain, and I walked into this almost abandoned building with a restaurant on the top floor.
I ate chhole bhature for the first time, alone. I cried a lot when I first moved to Delhi (I don’t cry anymore). There was only one other family in this giant restaurant and building in the rain.
There’s no point to that story except for sentiment.
