How very touching!

What does touch reveal about national character?

Sep 14, 2024

Hola Global Jigsaw,

This week we will take a break from my series on Kashmir and Ladakh, the third installment of which I am still writing. This week, a reprisal of a piece I had worked on in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic on touch.

As you know, I’ve been in geographic flux for the last quarter of a century, having lived in nine cities, in eight countries, on three continents. With every new “home” I’ve had to learn to read the streets anew, to navigate the disorienting waters of household shopping (in Tokyo I used Google translate on a label of air freshener to be told it was “odour of a good nazi”) and to zero in on the best dentist.

Every city has its own look. Beijing’s, in the early part of the new millennium, was a cross between bathroom-tiled Bauhaus and Blade Runner. Brussels’ was a damp green expanse strewn with Art Deco and dog poo. Jakarta presented as a minaret-punctuated gridlock. Tokyo’s style was schizophrenic, juxtaposing disposable-looking architecture best described as haute refugee camp, with gleaming skyscrapers from some future century.

Countries also taste different. Some are spicy, others bland. Japan was fishy, Indonesia chilli, Belgium sweet and Spain garlicky.

Nations have distinct sounds. The USA was loud with nasal chatter and SUVs. London’s streets were filled with the clickety-clack of shoes as people walk-shoaled purposefully across the city. Tokyo’s public transport was as hushed as a church, pregnant with unuttered words. Beijing’s aural backdrop was of the jack hammering of construction machinery ratatatating promises of infrastructure and prestige. While Madrid’s soundscape is hot and loud with tapas-scarfing friends milling about in streetside cafes.

But it is differences in touch that are perhaps the most revealing of the nature of places. In how peoples express touch, respond to it, yearn for it, or recoil from it, there is much to learn about a nation’s disposition. This isn’t the sexual touch of lovers, but the touch of the platonic urban, generated between acquaintances or strangers in a city, as they commute, consume and communicate their way through the day.

French President Emmanuel Macron (L) bids farewell to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (R) as he leaves the Elysee presidential Palace following their meeting in Paris on May 16, 2019. (Photo by STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN / AFP)

I grew up in the Delhi of the 1980s, where to live was to jostle, to rub up against. The claims by others on one’s body were constant. At bus stops ample-bosomed matriarchs reached out to use my arm without comment or consent, to steady themselves as they heaved themselves up into vehicles. Queues of every kind- for cinema tickets, college admission forms, onions - had a tendency to dissolve into melees of intertwined legs and elbows.

The norm was to share space – physical and aural. On trains travelers divvied up their eggs and parathas with everyone in physical proximity. It was always possible to squeeze one more person into a car, a tuk-tuk, the back of a truck. In retrospect this had much to do with the proximity of the village to the city. People made demands of strangers as though they were bound together in mutual networks of social obligation, when in fact they no longer were.

The upshot was an upbringing that was lacking in a strong consciousness of private space/property, something that dawned on me only after I moved to the U.K in the late 1990s. I still smart with embarrassment remembering the sharp reaction I provoked in a college mate when I unselfconsciously helped myself to his open packet of crisps, as we sat chatting in the common room one afternoon. In my initial few moths in the country I was always crossing the lines of permissible touch. I’d notice an undone shoelace and lift my foot onto the boot of a parked car so I could tie it, setting off an alarm.

I was wholly unprepared for the fear that touch could generate, that you shouldn’t tweak the cheeks of a random cute baby, that you needed to apologize if you brushed up against someone inadvertently, that it wasn’t in fact thoughtful to scooch up really close to someone on the tube to create space.

I moved to China, and back to recognizable tactile territory, in 2002, where I lived in the hutongs for several years. These neighbourhoods comprised a warren of criss-crossing alleyways, where cramped quarters forced much of life to be lived out on the streets. When I returned to my lane after a day out, I was often handed things by the neighbours lounging in the street outside my home: a chirping cricket in a bamboo box, or a left over bit of candied crab apple on a stick.

In 2008, I became pregnant and my tummy swelled. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to reach out and steady me as I waddled down the stairs to the metro station. “Xiao xin,” they might say, “take care.” We left China when my son, Ishaan, was only a few months old, but many years later we returned with him on vacation. On a day trip to a small-town near Shanghai an elderly couple grabbed him - he was around 10 at the time, -and hugged him repeatedly, all the while exclaiming how handsome he was. Various others materialized to hold his hand or pull him close and take photographs.

My boys on a trip to China in 2018. Credit: Pallavi Aiyar

Societal touch lies at the interplay of class, culture and architecture. “Development” is accompanied by privacy, skyscrapers, gated communities. Expensive things cannot be touched, they are breakable, valuable, in contrast to the dented possessions of the hutongs or any crowded street in India, which are remarkable only for how marked by touch they are: worn, resilient.

Asia’s teeming megalopolises are palimpsests, with material textures, historical memories and manifestations of time – premodern and postmodern- superimposed upon and in constant interaction with each other. In Beijing I once saw a wrinkled old man dressed in a frayed navy blue Mao suit – the standard garb of the communist era-worker, walking along a six-lane highway, dodging fancy cars, holding a caged song bird aloft in his hand.

Different types of spaces – cramped vs commodious, private vs public – generate different types of touch, but there is a universal aspect of touch that is hardwired into people: humans, as a species, like to touch, need it. This is evident from how babies respond to cuddles, or how we instinctually reach out to console someone in distress.

But not all touch is equal. There is obviously ‘bad touch’ – punches, pinches, unwanted caresses and worse. And even innocent touch can hide calamity, for within it lurk the germs of disease: bacteria, viruses.

I spent the first 8 months of the annus horribilus that was 2020 in Tokyo, the national capital of Japan and the global capital of social distancing. Few cultures are as chary of touching in public as the Japanese. Greetings, even amongst friends, involve touch-free bowing. On the metro it is common practice for someone sitting next to you to move away the moment another seat, affording greater personal space, becomes available. In convenience stores it is a faux pas to hand money directly to the cashier. A shallow tray placed next to the till is the correct receptacle for the customer to place cash into, and any change is then deposited there as well, ensuring that no touch is inadvertently encountered during the exchange.

There are complex cultural reasons for why, but here it suffices to say that Japan’s lack of touchy-feelyness made it a nation built to withstand a pandemic. In the first half of 2020, as countries across the globe were imposing rigid lockdowns and counting daily COVID cases in the tens of thousands, life in Japan, which had featured mask-wearing and social distancing long before coronavirus entered the popular lexicon, continued largely uninterrupted; daily COVID cases numbered in the dozens. By June amusement parks had reopened for business with one tweak. People were requested to refrain from screaming on rollercoaster rides and asked to “scream inside their hearts,” instead.

Moving to Spain, mid-pandemic, was therefore disorienting from a sensorial perspective. This is a country where you begin to kiss someone you are being introduced to for the first time, even before the introduction is over. It’s a country of big smiles, babble and physical display of affection. Watching Madrileños coping with the corporeal strictures of the pandemic would have been comical, were it not somewhat dolorous.

Two masked friends would spot each other across a road. One immediately plunged into the traffic to cross. Once face-to-face they would begin pulling each other into an embrace, before remembering COVID and reluctantly returning their empty arms to their sides. Then one might decide to throw caution to the wind and return to cinch-mode only to be rejected by her virus-conscious amigo. But then the friend would feel remorseful about having refused the hug, and in an act of contrition take off his mask altogether to apologize with a kiss, on both cheeks. Forcing a Spaniard to socially distance was akin to ordering a Japanese to break into a Bollywood-style song and dance routine in public.

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Dear reader, how do you feel about touch and culture? Do you have any stories to share about getting it wrong on travels or new places? I would love to hear from you, so do comment by clicking the button below:

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