No Cheating.
• Tim Pile in India
Tim sets out to challenge the stereotypes

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Photo:© Tim Pile

"Hello! You like wooden elephant? Special price for you. Looking looking" Welcome to India where it’s best to stare at your sandals unless you want to return home with kilos of kitsch excess baggage. Veterans of the subcontinent are no doubt familiar with the touts, hawkers and miscellaneous middlemen that badger us into buying items so trashy that we end up hoping our luggage will get lost in transit. Not everyone sees you as a meal ticket though. I spent some time in Varkala, a coastal town in the southern state of Kerala, with three honest, upstanding representatives from the professions with the worst PR in tourist folklore. The Souvenir Shop. A walk along the clifftop at Varkala is a sweet and sour experience. On one side the path drops away to the Arabian Sea, all glint and shimmer, all blue and foamy white. Face the other way and a ramshackle assortment of guesthouses, cafes, restaurants and souvenir shops meet the eye. You’ll be hailed to book a room, have lunch, enjoy an ayuvedic massage or bargain for a bedspread. But as you stroll along scrutinising your flip-flops you’ll become aware that some of the traders leave you in peace. All offer huge smiles. All run souvenir shops. All are Tibetan. It’s a long way from Tibet to Varkala both in terms of distance and temperature. Weren’t they in danger of melting? "Yes I feel very sweat" agreed Tenzing, who is currently expanding his shop to include the first Tibetan restaurant in town. "By October there is no business at home in Ladakh – too cold!" Tenzing explained that his family have a guesthouse in the Himalayan town of Leh, in the far north of India, where many Tibetans live in exile. "We go back in May," he added, outlining an existence closely harmonised with the migratory patterns of Western globetrotters.

The twice yearly journey across the sub continent with his family is a drain on more than their finances. "Two days on a bus across the Himalayas with a break in Delhi, then three days and nights on a train." Tenzing didn’t mind, but his grandmother and the younger ones found it gruelling. I couldn’t imagine any of these serene Tibetans ever becoming ruffled or short tempered.

"Easy compared to 1959" Tenzing said. He told me how his parents and grandmother spent two years living in forests and caves to escape from Tibet and Chinese occupation. "Three days on a train, no problem" he said, by way of comparison. On a shelf above the fridge Tenzing has created a shrine with a photo of the Dalai Lama flanked by coke, sprite and plastic water bottles. He joked that if he lived in Tibet, the bottles would be in front, hiding the picture. I began to feel that if I spent much longer drinking tea with him, I would end up wanting to write the family biography rather than a brief travel article.

Along the clifftop, travellers were browsing in the Tibetan shops instead of the Indian ones as usual. I mentioned this to Tenzing and suggested that Westerners preferred to do their shopping without being hounded at every turn. Fixed prices rather than "how much you pay?" helped too. Characteristically he refused to be drawn into criticism of the Indian approach. "We just hope we can make a little money before it gets too hot and we have to head to the mountains. "

The Rickshaw Wallah.
Anu has a catchphrase. Pulling up beside me in his three wheeler, he scooped up my bags, motioned me to sit on top and set off for a cluster of guesthouses chanting "I won’t cheat you." His fare was fair, he made no attempt to persuade me to stay in a commission paying hotel, and as he left he advised me to make a hot drink with honey, lemon and ginger because he thought I had the start of a cold.

Experience has taught me to hang on to helpful, honest characters when I’m a long way from home – trustworthy rickshaw drivers are gold dust. So the next morning I found Anu and asked him to take me to a hairdresser. He replied with a vigorous sideways head waggle, the Indian way of saying OK, whilst appearing to shake something out of his ears. Off we went with " I won’t cheat you" ringing around the cab. At the New Hindustan Hairdressing and Beauty Parlour my knight on three wheels hung around to ensure that I paid the ‘rickshaw drivers rate’ for my short back and sides. Unfortunately paying only 20 rupees ensured that I left with a ‘rickshaw drivers hair style.’

It was often hard to get him to take any payment for a ride. Sometimes it would be two days before I’d manage to track him down to settle my account. At no time did he display any of the craftiness that so many in his profession rely on. "Do you ever overcharge tourists?" I asked. "No cheating" he responded.

Life isn’t easy for the approximately 25 million motorised rickshaw drivers in India. It currently costs around 80,000 rupees ($1650) to buy one outright, beyond the reach of all but a wealthy few. Most have no choice but to rent their machines for 100 rupees a day. During a busy season drivers make a little money, but for the rest of the year it’s hard to cover costs. "Indians only use tuk tuks for emergency - hospital or the airport. When tourists go, profits go" he lamented. Anu lives at home with his mum and gives her most of what he makes for fish, rice and vegetables, and keeps a little for himself.
Soon my cold cleared up and I decided to catch an early train to Trivandrum. I asked Anu if he could collect me from the guesthouse at 6.00am. "No problem" he waggled, "I am servicing you 24 hours."

The Beach Vendor
Sangeeta is 13. "Actually I’m 15 she confided, but I get more sympathy if tourists think I’m 13."
Sympathy, it appears, is all important in her profession. Sangeeta and her family come from a village in Karnataka, "a day and a half by train and a day and a half by bus away." She stopped going to school when the government stopped paying her to go. In Karnataka, only primary school is free.
Her grandmother has worked as a beach vendor in nearby Kovalum for the past few years and encouraged Sangeeta, her mother, two brothers and sister to try their luck in Varkala. Her father is blind; the streets in her village aren’t paved with gold - or even tarmac. They had nothing to lose.

On most days I encountered a dozen or so sellers, usually on the clifftop where most hotel and restaurants are located. The degree of persuasion and persistence was proportional to the number of trinkets sold. Sangeeta, by contrast, never stopped smiling and chatting with visitors. Once I asked her how trade was and she confessed that she’d sold nothing for a couple of days. "No problem" she volunteered. "Sometimes I wait four days to sell something."

During December and January patrolling the beach was lucrative. On one day in December Sangeeta made 1500 rupees ($30) in 24 hours – a family record. She likes the French and German tourists most, although perhaps her decision is based more on their generosity than any cultural affinity.
Her brother joined us and told me that Sangeeta is getting married next year. She smiled coyly and played with her bangles as he explained how their parents had arranged for her to marry a boy from back home. "Is he working in the village now?" I asked. " Oh no, he sells bottled water to tourists in Goa."

They giggled naively at my suggestion of a honeymoon in Bombay, although Sangeeta does cherish a dream. She lowered her voice to a whisper as if raising it might bring bad luck, "We want to have our own souvenir shop."
During a coke and a chat one morning I asked Sangeeta how I should deal with the relentless sales pitches that become part of life on a trip to India. "Be polite. We are people, not beggars" she advised me.
"So if I ask each hawker about their family do you think they’ll stop pestering me?"
She smiled. "Oh no, they’ll still pester you, but much more politely."

© Tim Pile march 2003
tim pile timpile@email.com

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