Surviving In New Delhi On $3 A Day | India

Editor’s Note: I am not discouraging people from visiting India. In fact, I loved so much about the country- the welcoming people, the beautiful sceneries, the tuk-tuks and food, and culture. Delhi is a bustling metropolitan. There is so much culture, history, lovely markets, lively cafes, nightlife, vibrancy, life. I’ve had friends who lived in 5-story houses with a theatre in the basement, friends who lived in family homes that faced beautiful gardens, and others that had a simple apartment or cozy condo.

Every experience is different, each is worthwhile. 

With love, 
Daisy

pps, sometimes I look back at these words I wrote in my early 20s, and think of what to make of them

New Delhi

If you’ve ever lived in India, you would have noticed murmurs of Mumbai’s unrest and Delhi’s seeming ease, Mumbai’s hot winters, and Delhi’s dramatic monsoon, Mumbai’s friendly crowds, and Delhi’s hidden competition.

Yet, India’s theatrical contrasts are not just between its most well-known cities. Within each urban hub, there exists the greatest dissimilarity to which reflects India’s social structure – its socioeconomic difference.

For many foreigners, Delhi is hard to grow accustomed to. Rid the streets of vibrant traditional attire and fancy cars, the charming neighborhoods with beautiful apartments and perfectly trimmed plants, the carts of fresh fruits and vegetables and high-end pubs and bars and restaurants, Delhi is sweat and tears and inequality.

Of course, this is a condition in many developing countries. But Delhi hit me hard. The smell, the dust, the pollution that gave my ‘fragile’ Canadian lungs episodes of asthma attacks. The bugs, the temperature, the viruses that gave me Chikungunya. The landlord, the fraud, the confrontations that made me question confidence. But what hit me most, was facing poverty head-on – looking at 3-year-olds in the eye when they begged for money, not because they thought it necessary for survival, but nonetheless conditioned to believe that’s part of their livelihood.

It is in this Delhi that I lived for four months.

Before I left for India, I confidently told my family that I made the right choice. Great internship, great research project, great people I’ll be working with, and great fun.

And psssssh what do you mean culture shock. I’ve never experienced culture shock. Besides, India is one of those mystical places you hear about, where people convert to Buddhism and live in the mountains to understand the meaning of life. Where’s the harm to that? Of course, I wasn’t keen to become a yogi by any means, but breathing in some spirituality on holy land wouldn’t hurt.

Boy, Was I Wrong

I set foot outside the Gandhi airport on a hot summer July noon. Right away, I noticed the welcoming/curious/aggressive stares I received from men crowded by the airport door. Pulling my cardigan a little tighter, I waited for my friend to pick me up.

We rented a small two-bedroom apartment in Lajpat Nagar, a sweet place that cost around $120 a month. To save money on electricity, we opt to share one bedroom so we can lessen the workload on our 1990s’ AC. The initial days were hot. We’d roam around in our underwear and cook on a knee-high stove, making sure our sweat won’t drip into the pots.

On the fourth day, monsoon got the best of me. While on a rickshaw home from work, it started pouring cats and dogs. My phone went to waste after losing a hard-fought battle with the depth of a pond formed inside my bag. I do seem to have really bad luck with phones.

Two weeks later, it became apparent that our landlord was overcharging us. Each with a considerable amount of student loans on our back, my friend and I decided to move to a more affordable location.

Initially, our landlord and her family had a crying fit. We had to stay for six months. She said. We must pay for all the rent. She said. We will never get our deposit back. She said. While sorting out the legality of this whole fiesta, we asked our friends to secretly help us transfer our luggage into the new place.

This second place costs $74 a month.

It was here that I truly understood what budget living meant.

Kitchen

My bed

I mean, it wasn’t all too bad. Disregarding the broken window, the door that didn’t lock, and our outdoor kitchen, we had a pretty nice backyard in a great ex-pat neighborhood. Though, when it rained, it would pretty much flood our entire kitchen/balcony. Our western toilet leaked like a summer’s day garden hose and our India squat toilet was in this tiny 2×2 walled room. I’m being completely discreet when I say that I could have died in there on multiple occasions from the lack of ventilation. :'(

There was no AC. On the hottest nights, we’d blast the fan and the air cooling machine to drown out the street dog/catfights, a regular occurrence in the neighborhood.

We would run around screaming our heads off while these lost souls fly around dazed and confused. Over time, my roommate developed the ultimate skill of insect entrapment. We even had a dedicated water jar just for this whole new sport. *For my insect lovers: no harm was done/all released afterward.

Then I Caught Chikungunya.

Other Expenses

Coming back to the rest of my expenses. During my time in India, I rarely ate out except for the occasional fresh fruit shakes. Every day, I’d stop a vegetable cart and give the vendors 30 rupees, which was roughly 40 cents, and ask them to fill a bag for me. Since we didn’t have a fridge, this was the only way to attain fresh veggies. True, I lost some 10 pounds within weeks, true, sometimes I’d go to bed a bit hungry and true, I began losing hair and getting crappy skin problems. But this ended up being more of an experiment if a bit unhealthy.

Bag of veg for 40 cents, some lentils and a bag of powder for 5 cents

My roommate and I would wash our clothes and bedsheets by hand in buckets (: real fun during the sweaty summer months)

We also used our buckets as speakers.