Day 1 India

We flew out of Istanbul Monday and arrived in Mumbai Tuesday morning at about 4am. The wacky Mumbai airport has been modified since we were last here. You no longer have to fight for your place on a coach to the domestic side of the airport!!! Instead, you arrive at a location near the end of the international terminal and wait inside until the shuttle arrives and then they load your bags in the under compartment and you climb on board. There is no pushing, shoving or climbing any longer. BRAVO. Then you arrive at the domestic terminal, go to the check in at the airlines, wait in a long, long security line but it does move along and then voile’ you are inside the gates area. 6 years ago, this was a nightmare. This year - only slightly so, Keith did not get a security tag for his carry on because someone down at the men’s side forgot to put it on his bag and stamp it. So he had to return to security for the bag to be rescanned and get the tag. We had a momentary panic but it worked out. We left Mumbai and flew into Ahmedabad (Ahmadabad) arriving at 9:30AM. By the time we got through baggage and were pretty tired having slept only a short while on the 6 hour flight from Istanbul and certainly no more on the short up and down flight from Mumbai to here especially with a breakfast served and collected within the 1 hour flight.

OK, so we get to Ahmedabad (Ahmadabad) and at the airport we find a Airtel shop that will sell us a sim card for Keith’s old phone from London. But to buy that, we have to have a copy of his picture, show our passports, have a local address (the hotel) and fill out tons of paperwork. But they sell him the sim without putting minutes on it so of course, it does not work for more than trying to call a couple times and hearing in Hindi that there is some issue. Since we do not speak Hindi, or Guijarati, this means nothing to us. We were picked up by the hotel car but they had the wrong names on their display sheet but it was not until we noticed the hotel name did we realize that they might be able to take us with those other people….Nice guy took care of us and got us to the hotel. Now the fun is beginning…

For those who never heard the story, we were owed about $400 by an arts residency house where we were supposed to stay, but after 6 weeks of having our reservation and our money they told us that there was a mistake and the room was already booked. After much haggling back and forth on email about getting a refund, they said they were unable to process a refund. I was not happy with this at all but today the man from there arrived at our hotel with this envelop filled with $18,500 Rupies in small bills from a bank to give to us. That is a big pile of paper. (It’s a longer story but I will save you the details).

Then we went to eat lunch in the hotel dining room but were too early by 3 minutes so we cooled our heels in the lobby. At 12:30 we were the only diners. The meal we ate was good. During that meal, the woman from SEWA.org returned a call that Keith had made while trying to learn to use the mobile phone. We arranged to go to their offices and meet them at 3pm. So, we took an auto-rickshaw from the hotel to where their website says their building is located. The rickshaw driver spoke no English and had never heard of them and only vaguely knew about the location. We will supply either photos or video of part of the ride. To say the least, you are riding in an open sided three seater motorcycle on roads with hundreds of these loud machines moving every which way with no thought of lanes, rules of the road and always, always beeping their horns. We finally found SEWA and left that driver who was yelling what we should have asked for in terms of an address and waving his arms.

So, then we met with the charming Pritaba, who is the administrator of SEWA now, and another woman who will certainly be our lifeline and take us to the visits I will need to photograph. They had a dense schedule for us and suggested that they could accommodate it to make sense to me while I work on this project. At the end of the meeting it gets really fun. We were told of a meeting of the paper pickers out in the front of the building and that we could photograph them. On the way to do that, I was photographing some of the interior of the space but never really got much done because a woman spotted us and took us to her “shop” of goods made by SEWA workers. I must say I wanted to buy the entire table of cloth goods, which were not only beautiful but well made and extremely inexpensive. I bought one beautiful piece, which may eventually will go to Joyce and Tim since it is like their table.

Just behind her “shop”, table, was the meeting of the paper pickers. I stepped over to take a couple of snaps after making a couple of the shopkeeper. All hell broke loose as all of the women wanted to be photographed and I was a bit mobbed. Some of what I shot today is quite nice, but I was so tired and unprepared to mix and mingle and work that I only had my one lens, no flash, no tripod, and only a part of a memory card. Finally one of the women from the office saved me from these ever so willing subjects.

You know in the States, how when you want to photograph people on the street, there is a hesitation and a bit of a dance happens to give permission for you to make the image? Well throw all of that out and here you could continue to make pictures until the line of people jumping in front of your camera finally ceases. There were about 50+ willing subject who wanted their pictures made with a variety of best friends. They were so willing, vunerable, sweet, and it seemed happy to be singled out. They work each day picking paper from office buildings, streets, markets, and dumps, making their money selling this paper back to the recyclers. They live on a tiny fraction of what we think is way too small an amount for our lives. They seemed joyful, empowered and warm.

I will have to learn to control the situation better than today. The thing got away from me but the photo gods gave me a few images that I can use.

So after this ½ hour with the SEWA women, we came back still having only slept a little in the last 24 hours and wanted to stop in the dining room for a Kingfisher beer. We were told by the hotel staff that this is a dry town because of Ghandi, who lived here. “No beer or alcohol is served on this block”, which led us to believe if we walked a block further, we might imbibe. Wrong. However they have a “Wine Shop” downstairs under the hotel around the outside. Funny that you can buy a permit to buy the equivalent of 10 units of liquor every two weeks. A unit seems to be two bottles. Bottles of whatever don’t seem to be clarified A N D the Wine Shop has no wine. In order to get a permit to buy, you must have a letter of declaration of registration from your hotel with beginning and end dates, your passport with specific pages copies, boarding pass or documents showing you were indeed traveling. Sounds simple but the hotel guys sent us down without any letter of declaration and said we get the permit downstairs. We were up and down a bit between the “shop” and the hotel lobby but finally we were allowed to buy 3 bottles of Kingfisher. They were delivered by one of the shop workers although we could have easily carried them up the driveway and into the hotel and to our room. Each in the purchase chain of events needed a small tip to be given. Some were more forward in demanding. They just said when we protested the guy carrying the beer upstairs: “This is India, we all need to work” implying that the other guy needed to make some money. They were warm so we are just now drinking one of them some 4 hours later.
During all this time, Keith and I were laughing about the system, the fact we were so tired and the absurdity of our day. The hotel staff thinks we are crazy for sure.