Or, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love India"
I got up early this morning and left Chandigarh. Now that sounds easy enough, but trust me, it wasn't; turns out the bus station the rickshaw man took me to wasn't the right bus station (who knew?) But no big thing - I just asked around and found a local bus that'd take me to the correct bus station. And then I got on the next bus to Delhi.
I felt pretty good about myself and my ability to navigate the wackiness of India. It isn't hard - you just keep asking strangers if you're going the right way and sooner or later you wind up where you want to go. Which is what I was thinking while I was on the bus to Delhi - actually I felt pretty damn good about myself. I figured I was kind of a cool guy to have sorted myself out across the sub-continent, and I figured arriving in Delhi would be no big deal.
It wasn't until the conductor was tapping me on the shoulder, urgently spouting off in Hindi that I suspected I was wrong.
Turns out this bus doesn't stop at any bus terminal. Sue me for figuring the capital city of the most populous country on earth would have a terminal. All the other cities do. But what have we learned here? If you're expecting something in India you can fuck right off.
Anyway, some guys asked me where I was trying to go ("Paharganj," I said, naming the main backpacker area.) They nodded and told the driver to pull over for me.
No big thing right? Except that they dropped me off in the middle of a highway and left me there.
"Uhh.... What?" (None of the vehicles speeding by bothered to answer this question.)
Eventually a guy driving a rickshaw spotted me and picked me up, and actually the ride into town was pretty peace on the back of his bike cart.
Did I worry that I'd missed Delhi? No. And did it bother me that I suddenly found myself stranded on a highway outside of one of the biggest cities on earth? No it didn't. Why should it? India is great.
1/14/2009
Mystical Experience
NOTE: This post involves drug use.
...
Day 79 - Macleod Ganj - Jan. 13, 2009 -
I had a "mystical experience" today.
Because of the hash I smoked, because of being alone, because I've had my ass kicked across the continent the past 3 months. Because that's what it felt like and anyway what else am I supposed to call it?
Weed turned on me when I was 22. Smoking it now gets me down. Today was the same: I felt the same thick, coils of anxiety and self-doubt moving through me, felt my placid acceptance of "the world" (that is, my "normal outlook") falling away like the last dry leaves clinging to a branch; nothing was fine, nothing was alright, nothing made sense. I saw my world view (through the drug's haze) as nothing more than a product of deadened senses and an innate tendency towards complacency.
In other words, I was paranoid and high.
But I could still move and as I walked down the hill my eyes started fixating on the spaces between the pines, fixated on nothing, pale colours and dim, impressionistic shapes: bank, soil, earth, concrete. I fixated on the air between these shapes and myself.
"Nothing matters" - the thought formed as if it was written, but somehow it sounded hollow ("sounded" in the boundless plane of my mind), an echo of earlier reactions to similar stimulus.
"Nothing matters" - I'd thought it before and like one breath following another, unconsciously I thought it again.
A familiar thought pattern progresses like the mechanisms of entrenched bureaucracy, the grooves on vinyl that spin the same notes each time it's played, a string of ones and zeroes leading inexorably to the same command function.
But something reflected the thought back at me (what something? What is there on a blank page to generate words? In a boundless void there is nothing to reflect anything, but something reflected.) I heard the words "nothing matters" as if they were spoken by someone else. And they were: I didn't think these words. An earlier me did. It wasn't me saying it because I'm no longer the same person. I make his mistakes and I think his thoughts and I live in his flesh but we are not the same.
And so I thought:
"Nothing matters?"
My face creased in confusion.
"Nothing matters? Everything matters."
And that was as far as the new born thought went on its own. From there the chain reasserted itself - my old self - the string of repeated patterns realigned and the continuity of my consciousness returned, taking over the examination of this thought in the way I normally would. But because it was new and because it didn't stem from any previous thought (the familiar patterns beginning at a different central locus) the shape of my examination was necessarily changed.
So, I thought, "Everything matters, because everything is already signified by the word "matter."
Everything is matter.
Nothing is not matter.
I felt my thoughts born away like currents of air. They drifted and fastened from one distinct point of reality to another (the gritty pavement, the light falling on the moss edging a tree branch, the dead leaves scattered at the side of the road) and landing on each, they crystallized, exactly as freezing water vapor latches to particle after particle to form snow.
Everything matters.
Nothing is not here.
Everything I see and feel is matter (external or internal - thoughts and feelings only a matter of electro-chemical processes in a physical brain.) This thought did not originate with the hash, but rather inspite of it.
There was an odd blue bird crying from a stone ledge.
There was me walking on the road.
"I'm having a mystical experience."
I said the words out loud.
...
Day 79 - Macleod Ganj - Jan. 13, 2009 -
I had a "mystical experience" today.
Because of the hash I smoked, because of being alone, because I've had my ass kicked across the continent the past 3 months. Because that's what it felt like and anyway what else am I supposed to call it?
Weed turned on me when I was 22. Smoking it now gets me down. Today was the same: I felt the same thick, coils of anxiety and self-doubt moving through me, felt my placid acceptance of "the world" (that is, my "normal outlook") falling away like the last dry leaves clinging to a branch; nothing was fine, nothing was alright, nothing made sense. I saw my world view (through the drug's haze) as nothing more than a product of deadened senses and an innate tendency towards complacency.
In other words, I was paranoid and high.
But I could still move and as I walked down the hill my eyes started fixating on the spaces between the pines, fixated on nothing, pale colours and dim, impressionistic shapes: bank, soil, earth, concrete. I fixated on the air between these shapes and myself.
"Nothing matters" - the thought formed as if it was written, but somehow it sounded hollow ("sounded" in the boundless plane of my mind), an echo of earlier reactions to similar stimulus.
"Nothing matters" - I'd thought it before and like one breath following another, unconsciously I thought it again.
A familiar thought pattern progresses like the mechanisms of entrenched bureaucracy, the grooves on vinyl that spin the same notes each time it's played, a string of ones and zeroes leading inexorably to the same command function.
But something reflected the thought back at me (what something? What is there on a blank page to generate words? In a boundless void there is nothing to reflect anything, but something reflected.) I heard the words "nothing matters" as if they were spoken by someone else. And they were: I didn't think these words. An earlier me did. It wasn't me saying it because I'm no longer the same person. I make his mistakes and I think his thoughts and I live in his flesh but we are not the same.
And so I thought:
"Nothing matters?"
My face creased in confusion.
"Nothing matters? Everything matters."
And that was as far as the new born thought went on its own. From there the chain reasserted itself - my old self - the string of repeated patterns realigned and the continuity of my consciousness returned, taking over the examination of this thought in the way I normally would. But because it was new and because it didn't stem from any previous thought (the familiar patterns beginning at a different central locus) the shape of my examination was necessarily changed.
So, I thought, "Everything matters, because everything is already signified by the word "matter."
Everything is matter.
Nothing is not matter.
I felt my thoughts born away like currents of air. They drifted and fastened from one distinct point of reality to another (the gritty pavement, the light falling on the moss edging a tree branch, the dead leaves scattered at the side of the road) and landing on each, they crystallized, exactly as freezing water vapor latches to particle after particle to form snow.
Everything matters.
Nothing is not here.
Everything I see and feel is matter (external or internal - thoughts and feelings only a matter of electro-chemical processes in a physical brain.) This thought did not originate with the hash, but rather inspite of it.
There was an odd blue bird crying from a stone ledge.
There was me walking on the road.
"I'm having a mystical experience."
I said the words out loud.
Day 80 - Macleod Ganj - Jan. 14, 2009 -
I hiked for six hours today, over one set of mountains and along the ridge of another to a temple on the summit of a third. I wrote this while I was up there:
...
I'm sitting on the crumbling brick ledge surrounding the grounds of a deserted temple on top of a mountain in the Himalaya. A village is carved into the slope below me. The sounds of women arguing rise on the air, and cows braying, crows, a man hammering rock in the distance.
I haul air into my lungs, exhale quickly and haul again.
The sun burns cool through thin clouds, their edges fading to blue and yellow.
I sit on the ledge.
The women argue.
The man hammers.
The rest goes on without us.
...
I'm sitting on the crumbling brick ledge surrounding the grounds of a deserted temple on top of a mountain in the Himalaya. A village is carved into the slope below me. The sounds of women arguing rise on the air, and cows braying, crows, a man hammering rock in the distance.
I haul air into my lungs, exhale quickly and haul again.
The sun burns cool through thin clouds, their edges fading to blue and yellow.
I sit on the ledge.
The women argue.
The man hammers.
The rest goes on without us.
1/08/2009
Day 74 - Amritsar - Jan. 8, 2009 -
It hits me when I look back at what I've written on the road that so much of it is dominated by worry and anxiety: "Will they let me into Thailand without a return ticket?" "Can I handle India?" "Will the train be late?" "How will I know when it's my stop?" "Is my bag going to be stolen?" "Will she leave me?" "Come back to me?" "Leave me again?"
And now that I'm sitting here in the future (in the late afternoon sunlight on the roof of my guest house in Amritsar) I look back on all of those worries and they seem incredibly hollow - even if things don't work out they're fine, and I've worried for nothing.
And now that I sit here in the present and think about tomorrow ("Will the bus be there when they said it's going to be?" "Will it be full?" "Can I get a ticket?" "Will I find a place to stay when I get there?") I try to tell myself that a future me will look back and see these worries as hollow too.
Even suffering is just a span of time, and death is only a moment.
RULE: You will go through everything that happens to you.
If I try to remember this maybe I can start to make some progress.
And now that I'm sitting here in the future (in the late afternoon sunlight on the roof of my guest house in Amritsar) I look back on all of those worries and they seem incredibly hollow - even if things don't work out they're fine, and I've worried for nothing.
And now that I sit here in the present and think about tomorrow ("Will the bus be there when they said it's going to be?" "Will it be full?" "Can I get a ticket?" "Will I find a place to stay when I get there?") I try to tell myself that a future me will look back and see these worries as hollow too.
Even suffering is just a span of time, and death is only a moment.
RULE: You will go through everything that happens to you.
If I try to remember this maybe I can start to make some progress.
Night in the Blue City
[I wrote this while I was in Jodhpur, Rajastan.]
I stood at one corner of the roof and listened to the sound of a half dozen different muezzins calling the faithful to prayer. In the sky, at the edge of the blue city, fireworks went off, slowly, one after another, as if they only had so many and didn't want to rush it. Red Christmas bulbs were strung along the fence beside me. The smoke from my bidi drifted past them, exactly like my breath had drifted, years ago, in winter, caught in the glare of a cab's tail lights.
I stood at one corner of the roof and listened to the sound of a half dozen different muezzins calling the faithful to prayer. In the sky, at the edge of the blue city, fireworks went off, slowly, one after another, as if they only had so many and didn't want to rush it. Red Christmas bulbs were strung along the fence beside me. The smoke from my bidi drifted past them, exactly like my breath had drifted, years ago, in winter, caught in the glare of a cab's tail lights.
1/07/2009
P.S. I'm Not Crazy
Amritsar, Punjab (The Turban Capital of the World)
Well honestly this place is a bit of a shithole. Except for the Golden Temple, which is, for lack of any other qualifiers, golden. Sitting down to a free meal of curry and fresh baked chapati with thousands of other people is a unique experience. Rich and poor, Hindu, Sikh, Muslim and Tourist, all eating together in a spirit of brotherhood and "hey, it's free so why the hell not?" But the city's cold, and it's also humid for some reason, and that's a bad combination.
Basically this post is just to send a shout out to everyone back home and around the world who's been reading this blog and getting a sense that I'm totally depressed and strung out in India.
That's only half true! Yes, I'm strung out, but other than that I'm doing great, and generally enjoying my time here. It's stressful traveling alone, and in India there's a tonne of really intense experiences to deal with, usually when you're already tired and totally fed up with it all. At least that's how it's been for me. And as a writer I find those moments and experiences the most interesting to narrate.
So don't worry - I'm doing fine. If I had the time and energy to blog more there'd be a lot of variety in the posts, but unfortunately I only ever get around to it when I've got something particularly nasty to relate.
Anyway, my next stop is Dharamsala, and the Himalaya.
P'ace!
Well honestly this place is a bit of a shithole. Except for the Golden Temple, which is, for lack of any other qualifiers, golden. Sitting down to a free meal of curry and fresh baked chapati with thousands of other people is a unique experience. Rich and poor, Hindu, Sikh, Muslim and Tourist, all eating together in a spirit of brotherhood and "hey, it's free so why the hell not?" But the city's cold, and it's also humid for some reason, and that's a bad combination.
Basically this post is just to send a shout out to everyone back home and around the world who's been reading this blog and getting a sense that I'm totally depressed and strung out in India.
That's only half true! Yes, I'm strung out, but other than that I'm doing great, and generally enjoying my time here. It's stressful traveling alone, and in India there's a tonne of really intense experiences to deal with, usually when you're already tired and totally fed up with it all. At least that's how it's been for me. And as a writer I find those moments and experiences the most interesting to narrate.
So don't worry - I'm doing fine. If I had the time and energy to blog more there'd be a lot of variety in the posts, but unfortunately I only ever get around to it when I've got something particularly nasty to relate.
Anyway, my next stop is Dharamsala, and the Himalaya.
P'ace!
1/02/2009
Indian Idiosyncrasies
So here's a tip: don't get sick in India.
Anyway, I figure I'd take the time to write about some of the weird shit I've noticed here. I don't want everyone to think that all I'm doing is wandering around with a head full of existential angst, raving about the crap conditions and generally being a bit of a bitch. Of course, all of that stuff is true. But it's not the ONLY truth.
So, here it is, a list of weird things in India:
i) Male friends walking down the street holding hands - this is true not only for small kids but also for full-grown men. It's not uncommon to see a couple dudes idly strolling in a park, one guy gently cradling the other guy's index finger. They also like walking with their arms around each others shoulders, sometimes in a group of 3 or more. As far as I've been told, this isn't homosexual behaviour, just boys being boys.
ii) Having to take your shoes off to walk along a ghat or go into a temple - I totally get this - shoes are dirty, and therefor disrespectful. But the same guys who get on my case for leaving my shoes on are the guys who're totally cool with cows wandering around shitting everywhere.
iii) Loudspeakers blaring music/angry rants - I was expecting the loud speakers at mosques calling the faithful to prayer, but I wasn't prepared for the Hindu temples to blast upbeat pop tracks at 5:00 AM or to have to listen to some angry cleric rant about God knows what. Probably Pakistan.
iv) Never send one guy to do one guy's job - this is probably more a result of overpopulation than anything else, but it's still weird to commission an autorickshaw driver and have his buddy/co-driver come along for the ride. This is also common in the construction industry, where you'll have a couple guys digging up the road and five or six just hanging out beside them. Apparently the government is even worse.
Well, there's more, but now that I've tried to catalogue them I can't remember. I'll get back to this later. In the meantime I thought I'll go cough in bed for awhile.
Anyway, I figure I'd take the time to write about some of the weird shit I've noticed here. I don't want everyone to think that all I'm doing is wandering around with a head full of existential angst, raving about the crap conditions and generally being a bit of a bitch. Of course, all of that stuff is true. But it's not the ONLY truth.
So, here it is, a list of weird things in India:
i) Male friends walking down the street holding hands - this is true not only for small kids but also for full-grown men. It's not uncommon to see a couple dudes idly strolling in a park, one guy gently cradling the other guy's index finger. They also like walking with their arms around each others shoulders, sometimes in a group of 3 or more. As far as I've been told, this isn't homosexual behaviour, just boys being boys.
ii) Having to take your shoes off to walk along a ghat or go into a temple - I totally get this - shoes are dirty, and therefor disrespectful. But the same guys who get on my case for leaving my shoes on are the guys who're totally cool with cows wandering around shitting everywhere.
iii) Loudspeakers blaring music/angry rants - I was expecting the loud speakers at mosques calling the faithful to prayer, but I wasn't prepared for the Hindu temples to blast upbeat pop tracks at 5:00 AM or to have to listen to some angry cleric rant about God knows what. Probably Pakistan.
iv) Never send one guy to do one guy's job - this is probably more a result of overpopulation than anything else, but it's still weird to commission an autorickshaw driver and have his buddy/co-driver come along for the ride. This is also common in the construction industry, where you'll have a couple guys digging up the road and five or six just hanging out beside them. Apparently the government is even worse.
Well, there's more, but now that I've tried to catalogue them I can't remember. I'll get back to this later. In the meantime I thought I'll go cough in bed for awhile.
12/29/2008
Day 62-63, Pushkar to Udaipur, or India: "Expecting Something? Fuck You."
It was my last night in Pushkar and I felt like a mild kind of shit. Not the gungy, cow shit you see in the street, just the regular kind; I ached, and I was tired. I sat at the table at my guest house and quietly ate naan and dhal, trying to work out the Times of India word puzzle.
"You like word puzzles?" I asked the fat old white woman across from me. She'd been glancing in my direction off and on all night and I figured maybe she wanted to talk.
"Word... puzzles?" He brow creased, more in annoyance than confusion. "I don't understand?"
For some reason her annoyed confusion annoyed me.
"Do you speak English?" I asked, condescendingly.
"I speak a little... I am very exhausted."
"I'll leave you alone then."
She left shortly after.
It's funny but sometimes I have no choice but to be an asshole and at those times I don't even feel bad about it. Although when I got up to leave I left Hanuman, the under-caste serving boy, a fat tip, so maybe a part of me wanted to make up for it.
I walked to the bus stand and got on one bound for Ajmer. It stalled almost immediately, and two kids had to get out and push the thing before they got it going again. The driver waited at the intersection for around 10 minutes while they packed in as many people as they could; I ended up crammed between the window and an overweight mother cradling a sleeping toddler.
As soon as we left the bus stand bindi pop started blaring from the crusty sound system. They had this shit going, on repeat, over and over again, non-stop, all the way to Ajmer. After awhile, listening to the screeching Hindi lyrics was like having locusts crawling around inside my brain.
You can get settled somewhere pretty easy. All you need is a consistent place to sleep. I was "settled" in Pushkar, just like I'd been in Varanasi and Bodhgaya, and every time I uproot myself it's like doing it for the first time all over again. Suddenly I remember what it's like to carry everything I have on my back and nowhere in line to sleep. It's free, but it's stressful.
The mountains crawled by in the dark outside the window, low houses, men in dusty shawls squating next to open fires.
I got off the bus when everyone else did (you never know exactly when you're supposed to get off. You just watch the locals and do what they do.) But we weren't at the bus station I'd been expecting. Instead, we at some seemingly random intersection a block and a half from the bus station. Which made no sense, except that it seemed to to the Indians, so maybe it was me.
I walked to the station, past cows grazing on piles of garbage, toothless women selling bananas and cabbage, men sleeping in cabs. I hailed an autorickshaw and showed the driver the slip of paper the travel agent had given me.
"Can you take me there?" I asked.
He mumbled something in Hindi and we took off, making a short stop to pick up a father and son and drop them off at another random intersection for some reason. Finally he got me to the bus stand, which was just a couple buses parked at the side of a road.
This is what India is like:
"Expecting something? Fuck you."
I got out, paid the guy, and sat with a young chai wallah and his posse. They had a fire going, burning a couple pieces of old wood, carbdoard and any garbage they could find. We huddled around the coals, holding our faces back from the smoke.
I waited until my bus arrived, without warning, on the opposite side of the road. If I hadn't made a kind of peace with the tea boys then their dad wouldn't have been there to tell me that was my bus. So the lesson is it always pays to be good to the locals, even if it means getting smoke in your eyes.
I crossed the road, pissed in the dirt next to a car and got on the bus.
It was crammed with Indian families heading my way for who knows why and my "deluxe" berth turned out to be a capsule about the size of a luggage rack. ("Expecting something? FUCK YOU.")
I stuffed myself in and had to take my backpack apart to make enough room for it down at the end of the berth. So the lesson there is that all those hours I spent playing Tetris weren't a waste of time.
A Swedish girl got on and we made traveler's small-talk for awhile and then the bus got rolling.
Her name was TUULIKKI.
I know because I had her spell it out.
The bus rattled like it wanted to fly apart. (I thought wistfully of Star Trek VI: "She'll fly apart sir!" "Fly her apart then!) It veered wildly around slower transport trucks, sped madly over speed bumps and things that felt like sharp, furrowed patches on the highway, jolting every nerve and bone in my body.
The was no sleep but the wall on my left was all window and there were faded buildings, the tips of gray trees, a wide expanse of clear stars.
I thought "Now I'm on a bus in India lying back looking at the stars."
But there was no sleep all the way to Udaipur at five in the morning. I thought it'd be a good idea to share a rickshaw with Tuulikki but it turned out she's an adherent of the Gospel according to Lonely Planet and we had to wander around the dead streets for an hour trying to find a place it recommended.
Some temple was playing abrasive, Krishna mantras from loud speakers and as we went from one closed hotel to another I felt like murdering whoever it was that thought the streets need to be serenaded with that shit at five in the morning.
Finally, we found a place in the book that had a room. Of course, the "only room" they had was the most expensive one, a deluxe, honey-moon style suite.
"We need two rooms," I said.
"Only this room we have," said the guy.
"This is the only one."
"Yes."
"You only have one room in the whole hotel and it's the most expensive one."
"What? You don't believe me?"
"No."
Angered: "You think I'm lying?"
Flatly: "Yes."
"Fine! I am lying. You go find empty room! I give it you free if you find!"
"Look I'm not trying to offend you or nothing, but I know you've got other rooms."
"How you know? Huh? Huh?!"
"Because I saw all the extra locks and keys you've got hanging up in the lobby."
"No!"
"Fine." To Tuulikki: "You take this one. I'll find another. I'll see you, maybe, later."
I walked out. Like Pavel said: "The drama they go through for 100 Rs man."
Good guy, Pavel.
I walked the winding, cow-shit streets on my own. I thought maybe I'd lie by the lake and wait for the sun to come up before trying the hotels again, but when I went down to the water an invisible dog started barking at me and I left.
I walked back the way I came and some guy who looked like a middle-aged black man asked if I was coming or going.
"Just arrived," I said.
"You need room?"
"Yes."
"Rawla Guest House. Very good, and cheap."
He led the way.
It turned out to be one of the hotels Tuulikki and I had looked at earlier. But at that point the guy who answered the door said he only had one room, and now he was asking if I needed a single or a double.
It's fuckin bullshit like that man, all the time in this country.
I took a single and lied down on the bed and for awhile I couldn't even manage to take my clothes off. I just stared at the ceiling, half-consciously muttering religious epigrams:
"Jesus Mary and Joseph."
"Mary mother of God protect me."
"Dear Jesus watch over this poor sinner."
Finally I went to sleep.
"You like word puzzles?" I asked the fat old white woman across from me. She'd been glancing in my direction off and on all night and I figured maybe she wanted to talk.
"Word... puzzles?" He brow creased, more in annoyance than confusion. "I don't understand?"
For some reason her annoyed confusion annoyed me.
"Do you speak English?" I asked, condescendingly.
"I speak a little... I am very exhausted."
"I'll leave you alone then."
She left shortly after.
It's funny but sometimes I have no choice but to be an asshole and at those times I don't even feel bad about it. Although when I got up to leave I left Hanuman, the under-caste serving boy, a fat tip, so maybe a part of me wanted to make up for it.
I walked to the bus stand and got on one bound for Ajmer. It stalled almost immediately, and two kids had to get out and push the thing before they got it going again. The driver waited at the intersection for around 10 minutes while they packed in as many people as they could; I ended up crammed between the window and an overweight mother cradling a sleeping toddler.
As soon as we left the bus stand bindi pop started blaring from the crusty sound system. They had this shit going, on repeat, over and over again, non-stop, all the way to Ajmer. After awhile, listening to the screeching Hindi lyrics was like having locusts crawling around inside my brain.
You can get settled somewhere pretty easy. All you need is a consistent place to sleep. I was "settled" in Pushkar, just like I'd been in Varanasi and Bodhgaya, and every time I uproot myself it's like doing it for the first time all over again. Suddenly I remember what it's like to carry everything I have on my back and nowhere in line to sleep. It's free, but it's stressful.
The mountains crawled by in the dark outside the window, low houses, men in dusty shawls squating next to open fires.
I got off the bus when everyone else did (you never know exactly when you're supposed to get off. You just watch the locals and do what they do.) But we weren't at the bus station I'd been expecting. Instead, we at some seemingly random intersection a block and a half from the bus station. Which made no sense, except that it seemed to to the Indians, so maybe it was me.
I walked to the station, past cows grazing on piles of garbage, toothless women selling bananas and cabbage, men sleeping in cabs. I hailed an autorickshaw and showed the driver the slip of paper the travel agent had given me.
"Can you take me there?" I asked.
He mumbled something in Hindi and we took off, making a short stop to pick up a father and son and drop them off at another random intersection for some reason. Finally he got me to the bus stand, which was just a couple buses parked at the side of a road.
This is what India is like:
"Expecting something? Fuck you."
I got out, paid the guy, and sat with a young chai wallah and his posse. They had a fire going, burning a couple pieces of old wood, carbdoard and any garbage they could find. We huddled around the coals, holding our faces back from the smoke.
I waited until my bus arrived, without warning, on the opposite side of the road. If I hadn't made a kind of peace with the tea boys then their dad wouldn't have been there to tell me that was my bus. So the lesson is it always pays to be good to the locals, even if it means getting smoke in your eyes.
I crossed the road, pissed in the dirt next to a car and got on the bus.
It was crammed with Indian families heading my way for who knows why and my "deluxe" berth turned out to be a capsule about the size of a luggage rack. ("Expecting something? FUCK YOU.")
I stuffed myself in and had to take my backpack apart to make enough room for it down at the end of the berth. So the lesson there is that all those hours I spent playing Tetris weren't a waste of time.
A Swedish girl got on and we made traveler's small-talk for awhile and then the bus got rolling.
Her name was TUULIKKI.
I know because I had her spell it out.
The bus rattled like it wanted to fly apart. (I thought wistfully of Star Trek VI: "She'll fly apart sir!" "Fly her apart then!) It veered wildly around slower transport trucks, sped madly over speed bumps and things that felt like sharp, furrowed patches on the highway, jolting every nerve and bone in my body.
The was no sleep but the wall on my left was all window and there were faded buildings, the tips of gray trees, a wide expanse of clear stars.
I thought "Now I'm on a bus in India lying back looking at the stars."
But there was no sleep all the way to Udaipur at five in the morning. I thought it'd be a good idea to share a rickshaw with Tuulikki but it turned out she's an adherent of the Gospel according to Lonely Planet and we had to wander around the dead streets for an hour trying to find a place it recommended.
Some temple was playing abrasive, Krishna mantras from loud speakers and as we went from one closed hotel to another I felt like murdering whoever it was that thought the streets need to be serenaded with that shit at five in the morning.
Finally, we found a place in the book that had a room. Of course, the "only room" they had was the most expensive one, a deluxe, honey-moon style suite.
"We need two rooms," I said.
"Only this room we have," said the guy.
"This is the only one."
"Yes."
"You only have one room in the whole hotel and it's the most expensive one."
"What? You don't believe me?"
"No."
Angered: "You think I'm lying?"
Flatly: "Yes."
"Fine! I am lying. You go find empty room! I give it you free if you find!"
"Look I'm not trying to offend you or nothing, but I know you've got other rooms."
"How you know? Huh? Huh?!"
"Because I saw all the extra locks and keys you've got hanging up in the lobby."
"No!"
"Fine." To Tuulikki: "You take this one. I'll find another. I'll see you, maybe, later."
I walked out. Like Pavel said: "The drama they go through for 100 Rs man."
Good guy, Pavel.
I walked the winding, cow-shit streets on my own. I thought maybe I'd lie by the lake and wait for the sun to come up before trying the hotels again, but when I went down to the water an invisible dog started barking at me and I left.
I walked back the way I came and some guy who looked like a middle-aged black man asked if I was coming or going.
"Just arrived," I said.
"You need room?"
"Yes."
"Rawla Guest House. Very good, and cheap."
He led the way.
It turned out to be one of the hotels Tuulikki and I had looked at earlier. But at that point the guy who answered the door said he only had one room, and now he was asking if I needed a single or a double.
It's fuckin bullshit like that man, all the time in this country.
I took a single and lied down on the bed and for awhile I couldn't even manage to take my clothes off. I just stared at the ceiling, half-consciously muttering religious epigrams:
"Jesus Mary and Joseph."
"Mary mother of God protect me."
"Dear Jesus watch over this poor sinner."
Finally I went to sleep.
12/26/2008
Leaving Pushkar
I've spent a week in Pushkar. It's really peace here, and probably my favourite of all the places I've been to so far. For one thing, there aren't any autorickshaw wallahs lounging around shouting at me ("Hello sir! Where you going sir? You need rickshaw sir?"), and for another it's fucking gorgeous here:
Originally I was going to head further into the Thar desert for a camel safari, but now that tensions between India and Pakistan are coming to a head I've changed my plans. Apparently the town of Jaisalmer (where I was going) is a main staging ground for the Indian military, making it less attractive as a tourist destination.
Which brings me to another topic: India and Pakistan are fucking ridiculous. I mean, this is just my opinion. What do I know? But ever since the Mumbai terrorist attack the Indian media has been working overtime to create the same type of hysteria we saw in America after 9/11. (They've gone as far as dubbing the attack "26/11" here, which is completely retarded, since they reversed the order of the day and month as they're arranged in "9/11" just so their own date would sound cool.) Every day the papers are full of editorials going on about how soft the Indian government is and how much more aggressive they should be in calling out Pakistan for its involvement in the attacks. I understand these feelings of anger and resentment, but more than anything else it seems like the media is just trying to whip-up public sentiment. And to what end? I hate to think it's for something as cynical as "selling more papers", so what are these editors really hoping to accomplish? War between nuclear-armed neighbours? I'm not sure what the rationale is. Maybe there isn't one.
Anyway, I'm going to stay well clear of all that shit, and in the meantime just keep on keeping on with a journey that feels less and less like a spiritual quest, and more and more like a sightseeing tour.
Ah well, sais la vie in 2008. But that's another post.
Originally I was going to head further into the Thar desert for a camel safari, but now that tensions between India and Pakistan are coming to a head I've changed my plans. Apparently the town of Jaisalmer (where I was going) is a main staging ground for the Indian military, making it less attractive as a tourist destination.
Which brings me to another topic: India and Pakistan are fucking ridiculous. I mean, this is just my opinion. What do I know? But ever since the Mumbai terrorist attack the Indian media has been working overtime to create the same type of hysteria we saw in America after 9/11. (They've gone as far as dubbing the attack "26/11" here, which is completely retarded, since they reversed the order of the day and month as they're arranged in "9/11" just so their own date would sound cool.) Every day the papers are full of editorials going on about how soft the Indian government is and how much more aggressive they should be in calling out Pakistan for its involvement in the attacks. I understand these feelings of anger and resentment, but more than anything else it seems like the media is just trying to whip-up public sentiment. And to what end? I hate to think it's for something as cynical as "selling more papers", so what are these editors really hoping to accomplish? War between nuclear-armed neighbours? I'm not sure what the rationale is. Maybe there isn't one.
Anyway, I'm going to stay well clear of all that shit, and in the meantime just keep on keeping on with a journey that feels less and less like a spiritual quest, and more and more like a sightseeing tour.
Ah well, sais la vie in 2008. But that's another post.
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