In India, there’s a sucker born every second

Today, my friends, I got rooked. I mean fleeced in the most embarrassing way. My host Dhanna says that Indians will cheat you with a joke and a smile. In my case it was a cup of chai and a good story. I am a complete sucker for a good story. I take small comfort in the fact that I was cheated by a true master of his craft. I am also heartily ashamed of my wasteful spending in such a poor place. It isn’t often that I blunder in such a way as to remind myself of how completely American (and comparatively wealthy) I am, but today was a real stinker.

The ironic thing is that today I had no intentions of buying anything at all. I was passing the afternoon with a stroll through the narrow alleys of Jaisalmer’s medieval fort. Since the Desert Festival is in full swing, the streets were deserted and shopkeepers were loitering and only half-heartedly trying to get my attention. I’d already stopped and chatted with a few locals and had been idly pricing some porcelein doorknobs that I’d been eyeing. By playing one merchant against the other I had finally arrived at my magical price: 15 rupees each down from 50. I was really getting the hang of bargaining in India. As they say, pride most definitely went before my fall.

Raj, my new friend, had wrapped up my parcel of five doorknobs and since there wasn’t another customer in sight, he invited me to stay for chai and a chat. Flushed with pride at my clever negotiations, I agreed. Raj spoke excellent English and was a spirited conversationalist. We had already argued over the relative merits of cricket vs rugby and had made our way to India-US relations. It seemed a shame to end the conversation and besides, I had nowhere particular to be. We were practically old friends.

I had already learned a bit about caste culture (it’s a big deal in the desert) and Raj began telling me of his father’s days traveling the desert villages, performing services as a Brahmin. Brahmins, as the priest caste, traditionally perform marriages, christenings, and give funeral rites. Raj and his brothers have taken over and in the off-season they go from village to village upholding these ancient traditions. Sometimes villagers pay in livestock, rarely in cash, and sometimes when they have nothing else to give, they pay in old antiques collected through the years. You can probably see where this is going.

To give the proper setting for my downfall, imagine being told these stories while sitting on a rickety leather stool, with a cup of chai in your hand, in a shop filled with dusty carvings. In a crumbling medieval citadel, in a desert city, by a weathered old Brahmin. I was captivated. He pulled out a stained leatherbound notebook where first his father, then he noted the date and payment for all their services. (A note here - I should probably have noticed that it was written in English. How many desert-dwelling Brahmins do you think keep personal notes in English? This did not occur to me until later) With a flourish, my story-telling friend unwrapped something he had gotten in a village deep in the desert this past summer. It was a heavy old lock with four oddly-shaped keys attached. He explained that it was a puzzle lock that could only be opened if the keys were used in their precise, hidden order. It was only used to protect the most valuable things a family might own since if one of the keys were lost, the lock would never open again. He challenged me to open it and I couldn’t. When he showed my how the clever contraption worked, I had to have it. (Cue huge sucking sounds here)

I justified it by telling myself that it was a perfect gift for my father, the engineer, who loves oddball gadgets. His birthday is coming up in a week. He’d love it. I was afraid to ask the price, and sure enough it was way more than I wanted to spend. But it was so perfect. Raj gently took it away and wrapped it up saying that he didn’t expect me to buy it, it was just an interesting oddity he had picked up in his travels. He showed me a smaller one that was a fair bit cheaper, but it didn’t have the same allure. I wanted that one. Our conversation continued but the hook had been set. My eyes kept wandering back to the lock, sitting on a shelf. It seemed to beat with the heart of the desert.

I’m not going to tell you what I paid, but I’ll tell you that it was about five times too much. It turns out that my antique was probably made of scrap metal in Jodhpur and was just varnished in black oil to make it look old. Ouch. I think the worst thing was that as I left the dim shop and cleared my head in the light of day I realized that I had probably been cheated. I just didn’t know how badly. I’m not one to begrudge a merchant a profit and it came with a great story. No, the worst thing was shamefacedly admitting it to Dhanna and his friends and then realizing what could have been bought with that money.

See, Dhanna helps run a local school for Dalit (the politically correct name for Untouchable) kids in the poorest section of Jaisalmer. What I spent on an idle trinket could have sponsored three kids for a year or helped repair the school roof that was damaged in an earthquake. I’m certainly nowhere near the richest tourist that wanders through Jaisalmer, but I’m worlds away from how these people live from birth until death. Dhanna is not rich himself, but he opens his home to travelers and lets them stay as long as they like for free. What I wasted on a bauble might be more than he makes in a week, or longer. How awkward and shameful.

It’s not that I’m ashamed of being a relatively wealthy tourist or an American. By good fortune I was born into a wealthy culture. It’s not a fact I want to change, it’s just the way things are. It’s just embarassing to have paraded my wealth and gullibility in the face of such true need. I am humbled. In part to make things right with myself, and because it’s a good and necessary thing to do, I have embarked on a project to build a website for the Free School for Disadvantaged Children (rough translation) or Gurukul Vidya Mandir Siksan Sansthan and then raise money to fix their roof.

In the spirit of my hard-won cynicism, I will check the school out and find out the particulars of its finances before committing my reputation on its behalf, but it looks pretty legit thus far. Stay tuned for more.

Tags: India, Jaisalmer, travel, volunteering