The Monkey Temple

It’s nine o’clock in the morning and it’s hot in Hampi.  Scorching.  Boulders and rocks sit on top of one another–red and copper and sunburnt–and this is the landscape.  Like a planet, like Mars, really.  Like the red planet, minus aliens, but plus otherworldly ruins.  And it’s hot.  Hot as hell.  I already said that.

I am walking to the Monkey Temple.  The monkey temple, which I heard about on my first day in the bazaar, waiting for the ferry to bring me over to my side of the river.  “There’s a monkey temple?” I asked.  “Yeah,” the woman said.  “It’s filled with monkeys.”

This was something I needed to see.

So I am walking to the Monkey Temple.  Asaf has not come along because he feels sick.  He feels sick from the watermelon he ate yesterday.  He had the shits all night.  You can get sick from anything here.  Even watermelon.  And that’s exactly what Asaf has done.  So I lather myself with sunscreen and set out walking.

It’s nine in the morning.  I already told you it was hot.

Everywhere where there aren’t boulders, there are ruins and rice paddies.  And palm trees.  And little shops.  And cows.  Water buffalo.  But mostly rice paddies and ruins.  Oh, and banana trees.  But anyway, rivers feed elaborate, tiered and quartered irrigation systems, the rice sits with its roots submerged in water, and on the little barriers separating the paddies grow the palm trees and the banana trees that I was talking about.

So there’s this–ancient farming, lush and green and tropical–set amid that–a landscape 300 million years of erosion in the making, though it looks as though it were created by God–and it’s a nice walk.  Truly.  To the Monkey Temple.

You should try it sometime.

I arrive at a fork in the road, have some water.  “Which way to the Temple?”

A man is standing outside of his car.  He points down the road I’m on.

“This way or that way?” I ask, pointing at each.  I need to clarify, and I need to ask questions that cannot be answered by resorting to yes or no.  There is in India a cultural aversion to saying ‘no’ or ‘I don’t know,’ one that you need to be on your toes to remember, lest the answer always be “Yes.”  A yes answer is only the one you want fifty percent of the time.

The man at his car assures me that I’m on the right road.  So I keep walking.

A kilometer or so further, sweating now, a boy herds water buffalo with a stalk of sugarcane.  Three of them.  I ask him if I’m on the right road.  “Monkey Temple?”

“Yes.  This way.”  He points down the road I’m on.  I say, “Not that one?” then, correcting, “That one or this one?”  There is another road, the one that I skipped at the fork, that has so far run parallel to mine, but which looks as though it is the one that in fact leads to the Monkey Temple.  Not the one I’m on–this road doesn’t.  Rather, the road I’m on looks like it’s heading away from the Monkey Temple.  Which would be bad.  So I’m curious.  Because it’s ninety-five million degrees outside and I don’t want to be on the wrong road.

“That one,” he says.  He points at the road on the other side of the rice paddies.  Fuck.  Okay.  “Are you sure?  Is the temple this way or that way?”  He again indicates the road over the paddies.

Fuck.

I make him tell me for a third and fourth time that it’s the other road–not this one–that leads to the Monkey Temple.   He affirms that it is.  He then asks me for rupees.  I say, “No rupees.”  Repeat.  Then he asks me for a pen.  “School pen?”

Fuck.

I give him my pen.  “This better be the right road, little dude, or I’m going to be pissed.”  I start crossing the rice paddies.

It takes fifteen minutes or so, but eventually the other road winds behind a grove of banana trees and completely reverses direction.  Wrong road.  Obviously, Tom:  it isn’t paved.  I turn around, retrace my steps, cut back through the rice paddies, to the main road where, as one would expect, the little kid has disappeared, and I’ve got another two kilometers to walk.

So I shut up and walk them.

And then when I get to the bottom of the hill that the temple sits on, six hundred stairs up through giant stones and monkey shit, I shut up and walk those too.  In the sun.  Drenched in sweat.  And I only stopped once, shit you not.

At the top, were there any monkeys?  There was precisely one.  They come out in the morning and in the evening, when it’s not unbearably and oppresively hot, because they are smarter than I am.  From what everybody who had been up there at sunrise told me, it was quite a sight to behold–monkeys taking your clothes, trying to put them on; monkeys jumping in your hair and trying to pull fleas out of it; monkeys stealing bananas and screaming and yelling, hooting and hollering.  But, did I see it?  Did I see the monkeys at the Monkey Temple?  No.  I had to take it on faith.  I had missed it.  I sat on the wall in the shade, looking at Hampi, ancient, ancient forevermore crumbling Hampi, and drank water for an hour.  Then I turned around and went back down.

Goodbye To Goa (And All That)

Benaulim was nice but eventually I had to get moving, otherwise:  skin cancer and death on the beach.

So I booked a train to Hampi.

Cook and I woke up at 6:00 in the morning to meet the rickshaw we had told to meet us on the football pitch at 6:30.  My train was at 8:00 and his was at 7:30.  Cook:  South Korean, 23.  I met him and Asaf (Israeli, 24) on my first day in Benaulim.  I asked them if they knew of a good restaurant.  They didn’t, but we became fast friends anyway.  Cook and I shared my room the last two nights to save precious rupees, and we had the happy accident of having booked our departure trains for the same morning and from the same train station.  So it was all very good.  Really, it was.

6:35.  Rickshaw to Margao.  At the train station, give the rickshaw driver 150 Rs.  Ask the enquiry booth man about platforms and late trains, drink chai for 5 Rs, and 7:25 rolls in, I wish Cook safe travels, shake his hand, tell him I’ll be in touch if ever I find myself in South Korea.

Then I go to my platform.

Indians walk up and down the strip, offering more chai, samosas, other foodstuffs.  The train shows up fifteen minutes late.  The white people all board.  We’re all going to Hampi.  We’ve all got Lonely Planet, and Lonely Planet tells us to go there.

So this is what we do.

I find my seat in the sleeper car.  It’s grungy.  I sit opposite a young Belgian with a shaved head and a single nappy dreadlock.  Across from the Belgian and me are two Swedish families of three, traveling together.  The Swedish families will purchase something from practically everyone who walks by selling something for the first two hours of the trip.  In that time, I will listen to music, and watch the jungle roll by, take pictures of the train, smoke a cigarette in the bathroom.  I will daydream and buy dhosa for brunch.  I will think about you.  I probably will.

I cannot do justice to the Indian rail experience.  You must simply see it to believe it.  It is a market on wheels.  It is a small self-contained city, replete with beggars, cripples, the middle class, and tourists all living side-by-side.  Men and women walk up and down the aisles selling chips and water.  Indians and foreigners sit and stand by the open doors at the end of every train car smoking cigarettes and talking to one another.  I befriended Shafraz for the first four hours of my trip.  Shafraz is a 20 year old Muslim engineering student from Hubli who loves Hollywood movies and would like to one day live in either America or Saudi Arabia.  He has eight sisters, five of whom are married.  He would prefer if he could marry based on love, but he understands and accepts that his marriage will be arranged.  I tell him that I am unmarried, he asks me how old I am, and when I tell him that I’m 26, he looks at me with obvious surprise.

“You have girlfriend?” he asks.

“Sort-of girlfriend,” I say.

“Will you marry her one day?”

I answer this the way that I always do.  ”I don’t know.”

He is practically green with envy.

Shafraz is the first of ten or so Indians who ask me what my tattoo means.  I explain it the way I’ve learned explains it best, by appealing to a cliche that resonates more in this part of the world.

“You give a finger, they take a hand,” I begin.  ”You give an inch, they take a foot.  So, ‘Never give an inch.’”  He nods.  He thinks it’s badass.  He tells me so.  I thank him, but I finally understand what Kate meant when she told me that getting a tattoo would invite unwanted conversation, uninvited justification.  I ask Shafraz if he has a tattoo.  He shakes his head.  ”No.  In my religion it is not allowed.”  I nod.  Then I remind him that he could always get it someplace that other people wouldn’t be able to see.  ”Like your ass.”  He smiles.  He nods back.

He will not get a tattoo.

Shafraz gets off in Hubli.  I give him my backup email address, tell him to feel free to write, tell him that if he makes it to America that I’d be happy to show him around.  But it’s an empty promise.  Shafraz is a man I met on a train.  I feel no obligation to him.

This is a new feeling.  It has something to do, I think, with the amount of attention you are accorded as a white person in India.  ”Rickshaw, rickshaw!”  ”Do you have coin from your country?”  ”Rupees?”  ”Motorbike?”  ”Do you need guide?”  ”Postcard?  Map?”  It’s a cacophony of requests for attention.  You get used to it, of course, and it turns into background noise eventually, but background noise is still noise–and it’s noise, moreover, directed at you–and there are times when you want everybody to just shut the fuck up so that you can sit down and think for a minute.

So Shafraz got off in Hubli, is my point.

Then I met the German, whose cigarettes I smoked, leaning out the doors, watching the rice paddies and the Indian plains whiz by.  The Israeli girl who borrowed my lighter over and over again.  The English couple with their children.  The man from the Indian navy.  The children begging:  ”Rupees?”  ”No rupees.”  Then, as if the response hadn’t made sense:  ”Rupees?”  And the second time you just ignore them until they go away, because your heart is cold and hard.  Your heart has adapted to India.  A warm and beautiful place.

In Hospet we get off the train.  ”Rickshaw, rickshaw!”  I bump into Emma, an Australian who I’d met on the train.  She and I decide to split a ride to the Bazaar rather than take the bus.  We haggle for the price.  ”150 rupees,” the man who has followed us out of the station suggests.  ”80,” I say.  ”No, no, no,” he replies, then adds, “120 rupees.  Final price.  Emma chimes in, “100 rupees.”  He shakes his head.  ”120 rupees, final price.”  Emma says, “All right, then,” and we begin to walk away.  The rickshaw man smiles and says, “Okay, I take you for 100.”

We pack our shit in the rickshaw and drive.

Backgammon On Benaulim Beach (And Other Things)

Pardon me, because I’m slightly sunburned, and maybe dehydrated; and drinking beer in the scorching heat, even if it’s only two, has a way of messing with your head; and the sweat hasn’t dried yet, and I’m covered in Arabian sea salt, which makes my eyes, or the area around them, sticky, tacky, chalky; and I’ve been here for four days, making friends, walking around the beach, laying on the sand, swimming in the water–rinsing, washing, repeating.  So pardon me, that is, if this doesn’t make sense, or if I leave you in the dust, or if I don’t introduce characters properly, or flesh them out suffificiently, or describe their motivations with accuracy.  If you lose me, it’s my fault, and I will take all of the blame.

Herewith:

Peter (37 years old, British Indian, bald, videographer, artist, wedding photographer, deep thinker, hash smoker–we spent last evening drinking brandy and smoking hash and debating various aesthetic theories) told me that there was a backgammon tournament on Thursdays at Hawaii (little restaurant by the sea, serves Western food to old hippies–i.e., not Hawaii the United State).  I had to go.  I had to.  I am a backgammon afficianado.  Eric and I spent days and days and days in the cold Montreal winter smoking joints and playing backgammon.  So I am good.  I am really, really fucking good.  I could crush you at backgammon.  And even though I hadn’t played in months, I was pretty sure I could win the backgammon tourament on Benaulim Beach.

The pot was 1000 Rs.

Hawaii, as mentioned–old hippies.  Hippies that return to Benaulim year after year after year to sit on the beach, smoke hash, drink coffee, and work on their tans and beards.  There were ten of us in the tournament.  Eight old hippies, me, and Stefanie.  Stefanie and I were opponents in the first round.  Stefanie, briefly:

Canadian, 28, married, stunningly beautiful.  Out of place at Hawaii.  Like me.  Only more beautiful.

Stefanie:  somehow beat me in a match to 15 points.  Let me explain.  Backgammon is a game that’s roughly half skill and half luck.  I say this because I’ve been beaten many, many times by far lesser players.  You know they’re lesser as you play them because 1) they are counting out their moves, and 2) the moves that they make are frequently stupid.  They are moves, in other words, that you would not make, because you are not stupid.  So, to take a quick example or two:  leaving people open for no reason, always trying to hit the lone man, irrespective of the rest of the setup–moves like that?  Stupid.  Amateurish.  And I know that you probably don’t care about all of this, but I do.  I dislike playing against amateurs.

Especially when I lose to them. 

Anyhow, the point of the story is that sometimes the stupid moves pay off.  Sometimes, against all odds, the stupid moves work out.  Because in the end, you’re rolling dice.  And dice do whatever the fuck they want to do.  They don’t always reward good strategy.

So Stefanie has been making stupid moves all game, and she doubled, and I doubled back, and it started out with a double because we rolled doubles on the first roll.  So the game is worth 8 points.  8 points in a match to 15.  It’s a big game.

And I’m ahead.  I’m sitting in my chair, taking out my men, and Stefanie is three rolls behind me, with stacks in the back of her home base, and so I’ve got it.  I’m going to win.  The only way she can win is if she starts rolling double sixes.

Which is precisely what she starts to do.

Two double sixes in a row.  A double four.  I am flabbergasted.  She’s suddenly ahead.  She’s suddenly going to win.  And now I’m the sorry bastard who needs doubles to have a chance.

I already told you I lost, so I’m not going to pretend there’s suspense anymore.  I didn’t roll my doubles, Stefanie won the big game and took the match, and I finished the rest of my Kingfisher in dejection.  

I wished her well in the next round, walked down the beach, glanced at fat Europeans and Russians–beached whales, really–tanning in the sun, and went back to Rosario’s to wash the salt out of my hair.  That was the end of that.

Going To Mass In Panjim

First things first: 

I haven’t been to church since Linus died.  Linus was an old retarded man I took care of for a while.  One day he died.  I went to his funeral, where Bill, one of his developmentally disabled roommates, gave the most heartbreaking speech I’ve ever heard delivered at a funeral.  Until Bill, I had kept my shit together, but once Bill started talking, I lost it.  Everyone did.  Bill brought the house down.

So that was a year and a half ago, and before that, I can’t remember the last time I’d gone to church.  Years.  Years and years.

But I’m in Goa, and I’m in Panjim, it’s capital, and Goa was the crown jewel in the Portugese empire for a hot minute, and the state still carries a heavy Roman Catholic burden–and so… And so.  And so, my hotel man, Edgar, is a practicing Roman Catholic and I lied to him to get on his good side and told him that I was, too, that I was religious, that I was a follower of the Lord.  It worked, my lie:  he took to me immediately upon hearing it.  Became my unofficial tour guide, pointed me in the direction of interesting things to see in the city while I recovered from a head cold, the like. 

But then yesterday, walking around the grounds of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception church, I suddenly decided that I would go to mass.

So I asked Edgar.  “Edgar,” I said, “does the church do a Sunday service in English?”

He said that it did.

I asked him when.

“8:15 in the morning,” he told me.  Then, “It is a very beautiful church, with comfortable benches and fans on the roof, and beautiful statues.”  He went on, “And the priest is young.  His sermons are very good.”

I didn’t really need to be sold.  I had already decided to go.

I had Edgar set me a wake-up call, arose before it, showered, shaved, put on my collared shirt, my nicer pants, and walked to the church.  It really is pretty, by the way.  All white, set upon a hill, twisting stairwells guiding you to the entrance, and the Virgin Mary in stone, thrusting toward the heavens.

I made my way inside.

Mass was mass.  I forgot some of the call and response aspects, but pretended that I knew them.  I said “Peace be with you” and the Our Father. 

Then I took communion, which I hadn’t intended to do.  Then I went back to my pew, knelt down, and prayed, which I definitely hadn’t intended to do.  Then the service was over, I went outside, took a deep breath, and lit a cigarette.

I didn’t pray, when I was praying, to God.  I prayed to no one in particular.  Maybe the proper term for what I did was “wish” as I lack the requisite faith to truly pray.  But it felt like prayer.  I prayed that good things would happen for people I love.  I prayed that I might discover something about myself. 

And that’s about it.  That’s about all I prayed for.

When I left, I couldn’t help but feel dishonest.  But I couldn’t help but feel honest, too.  I was all alone, I decided.  And I didn’t need any excuses.

The Craziest Fucking Bar I’ve Ever Been To

Mumbai.  It’s my last six hours there, and I have no place to stay.  I’ve purchased my bus ticket for Goa–550 RPS.  It’s too many rupees, but such are the perils of last minute travel planning.  At any rate, I am at Mumbai Central Terminus, with six hours to kill, no one to talk to, and a plan to concoct.

So I go to sit at a bar.

It will be my first alcoholic beverage in India, as Dongri is Muslim and Muslims don’t drink.  Or, if they do drink, they don’t tell white people where they keep the booze hidden.  So I go to a bar, as I’m no longer in Dongri.  The bar is called Lucky Star, as in you can thank your lucky stars, or when you wish upon a star, or whatever.  The name is inapt for a number of reasons, which I will do my best to enumerate below.

1) There are disco lights.  Disco lights at a bar at 2:00 in the afternoon?  Never a good idea.  I do not thank my lucky stars for disco lights at 2:00 in the afternoon.

2) The Foster’s is 120 RPS.  ‘Nuff said.  This is an American price for a beer.

3) There are perhaps five customers in the entire bar.  For every one customer, there is a waiter, who will not stop cleaning ashtrays, even when you don’t want him to.  What you want to say is, “Chill the fuck out with cleaning the fucking ashtrays already, okay, pal?”

4) For every one customer, there are two women–some of them no more than teenagers–dressed scandalously in saris.  The women are not customers.  Walking into the bar, I think to myself, “Whores?”  But it is not a whorehouse, and they are not whores.  It is just a bar.  The craziest fucking bar I’ve ever been to, granted, but ultimately just a bar.  The women, I deduce, are simply eye candy for sexually repressed Indian men.  They apparently get paid in this function.  This is really fucking odd.

5) There is a live band.  This live band cannot, for the life of it, figure out how to work the PA system, which means that when the lead singer’s microphone is not producing painful feedback, his voice is boomy, or too low in the mix, or lacking definition.  It is painful to listen to. Truly, utterly painful.

6) The lead singer, also, cannot sing.

7) Of the five customers in the bar, three of them are drunken idiots.  These drunken idiots, despite being drunk and idiots, are going to make my rich Western ass look bad.  They are going to make it look bad by getting ridiculously drunk and throwing 10 RPS notes up in the air with reckless abandon–tipping perhaps 2000 RPS over the course of the hour that you share the bar with them.

This is going to make me look bad because at the end, when I have milked two beers over the course of three hours, studying Lonely Planet and coming up with a plan of attack for the next several days, I will lay down 60 RPS on a 240 RPS tab.  This is my tip, and for those keeping score at home, it is 25%.  It is, in other words, an extremely generous tip, all things considered.

But it is not generous enough for the craziest fucking bar I’ve ever been to.

The waiter, or one of them, comes over to me and pleads with me for more money.  “No,” I say.  He continues to plead.  “Look, I had two beers, and I tipped you guys 25%.  That’s really fucking generous.”  He signals for the maitre d’ to address the situation at hand.  The maitre d’ comes to me.  I explain:  “The tip isn’t for the girls–I don’t care about the girls, the girls just sat around being unhelpful.  The tip is for the people who brought me beers.  Distribute it among them.”  He tries to explain that I should be more generous.  I say, “Jesus fucking Christ.  Take what you get, and take it gracefully.  You’re not getting another goddamned rupee.”  I am somewhat buzzed, what with not having had a drink in a week, and this buzz makes my language flow a bit more liberally than perhaps I should allow it to.  But he finally relents.  I get up to leave, grabbing my backpack, thrilled by the idea of sitting on the sidewalk for three hours until my bus comes.

At the door, the doormen–two of them–ask me for a tip.  “What for?” I ask.  “Watching door,” they say.

“What the fuck is it with this place?” I say, more to myself than to them.  Then I throw up my hands and laugh.  “Your goddamned tip’s inside.  Go ask them for it.  For crying out loud.”  I walk away, no doubt being shit-talked all the way down the street by the doormen.  But I don’t care.  I truly don’t.  I could not care less about the crazy people at the craziest fucking bar I’ve ever been to.  Not if you paid me.

I sit on the sidewalk for three hours.  Then I get the hell out of Mumbai.

Waiting By The Window For You (India Love Song)

I’ve been sitting in my hotel room for three hours, reading The Wind Up Bird Chronicle and waiting for you.  Your flight into Mumbai has been delayed over and over again.  First, you were due in at noon.  Then two.  And then finally you told me that your plane was taking off, and that you’d be into Dongri by six.  The whole time I’ve had butterflies.  And now it’s ten to six, I’ve just finished a chapter in my book, and I’m leaning out the window, smoking a cigarette, and waiting for you.

Down below, four stories deep, the goats are tied up, ravishing mysterious greens.  The pigeons are engaged in a mating dance on my air conditioning unit.  The rats on the roof across from me–rats the size of possums–are weaving in and out of abandoned pipes, scouring for food.  Mumbai is covered in a thick paste of haze.  Dilapidated buildings, perhaps once beautiful, melt in the heat.  The workmen across the street stand on breaking walls with sledgehammers, demolishing one of those dilapidated buildings brick by steady brick.  Saris sway in the breeze, drying in the heat–red ones, purple ones, yellow ones.  Blues.  The rooster crows again (as he does all day, every day) jumps from a hand rail to a motorcycle to the ground, to chase his hen.  Men and women buzz by on mopeds and in taxis, tooting their horns, the toots saying, “Pedestrians, get out of the way, or I will kill you.”  Children walk home from school, dressed smartly in their academic uniforms, little ties for the boys, little skirts for the girls.  Bicyclists ring their bells for no apparent reason.  The street vendors cook their kebabs.  The big sign on Tantanpura Street–pockmarked and browning–floats aimlessly.  And I lean out the window watching it all, pulling on my cigarette, waiting for you.

Suddenly–and somehow–I see you.  Strolling towards me on Tantanpura.  Hauling a big bag.  It looks heavy.  Your jeans–this is how I identify you.  No one here wears tight jeans.  No one.

I wonder if you can see me, too–white guy with a cigarette, waiting by the window for you.

And then you do.  You wave.  I wave back.  You smile, maybe laugh.  I smile, not quite believing, wave again.  Gulp.

Then I throw on some pants, and rush down the stairs to meet you.  Because I’ve been waiting for this.  Waiting by the window for you.

Two Lunches In Dongri

Let’s start with the first one:

My new favorite restaurant of all time:  Restaurant Some Hotel Whose Name Currently Escapes Me.  It’s around the corner from my hotel, Hotel Al Najaf.  I’ve gone to Restaurant Some Hotel Whose Name Currently Escapes Me at least once a day since I’ve been in Dongri.  Yesterday I went there twice, for both of my meals.  Today, after I leave here, I’ll probably go there again, unless I can be convinced otherwise by some set of enticing aromas along the way.  But I’m getting ahead of myself, because I’m not particularly hungry, and because I have shit to do first.  Like this.  Wait a minute.  Let me begin:

All of the waitstaff at Restaurant Whose Name Currently Escapes Me by now know me, and I recognize them all.  There is the head waiter, tall for an Indian, mid-thirties, best English-speaker in the restaurant, no beard, quick with a coffee at the end of the meal; there’s the severe-looking teenager, perhaps second in command, who holds a special place in my heart due to his instrumental role in creating the joy I felt eating there for the first time–he literally pointed at dishes I should eat off the menu until he’d constructed the most perfect meal I could imagine; there’s the googly-eyed tween who still looks at me with a mixture of awe and delight when I sit down, and who I catch smiling wildly when he busses my table, or brings the lemon water with which to wash my hands, or when I simply look his way–ever eager to serve; and there’s the rest of the bunch, too, but I don’t have all day here.  These three are my Restaurant Some Hotel Whose Name Currently Escapes Me triumverate, is my point, and if you can love the people who serve you food and don’t speak your language and treat you graciously–people with whom you can barely communicate except via hand signals, but with whom you share a mutual respect, even camaraderie–then, fuck it, I do.

Especially you, googly-eyed kid.  You’re the best.

Today I go in, eat a Muslim mutton dish, two rotis, bottle of water, coffee for dessert.  Googly-eyed kid rushes to bring me the hot lemon water to wash my hands.  I can’t help but laugh.  Except I do help it, and I hold it in.  The fans are whirring and I look out at the main street at the heat undulating in the crowd, sipping coffee, pondering my check.  97 RPS.  Two dollars.  For some of the best food I’ve ever had.

I tip big, as I always do here, and walk back to my hotel.

But today, it is some sort of Muslim feast, which happens twice a year, but whose name Google would not yield in five minutes of admittedly none-too-thorough searching.  Anyway.  It’s a big deal, this feast, and the streets in front of my hotel and to the west of it were washed yesterday in preparation, a fact which my hotel owner and I remarked upon as I stood outside smoking a cigarette last night, me thinking that somehow it had rained on our street, and our street alone.  He laughed when I said this, set me straight.

Me:  What’s going on?

Hotel owner:  Cleaning the street for [insert name of festival].  Tomorrow.  Very delicious food.

Me:  Huh.

Fin

And this morning, from six to seven, I sat in my room smoking cigarettes and looking down as old holy men sat in front of large vats stirring large stews, while younger men began to organize the street–setting up benches and picnic tables–for the meal.  I had no idea what to expect.

But then, walking back from lunch, stuffed silly, I find myself standing once more outside my hotel, where hundreds and hundreds of people stretching up and down the street are dining, laughing, talking, celebrating.  I talk to the hotel’s right-hand-man, ask him why he’s not eating:  “Oh, full, full,” he says, pointing to his stomach.  “Me, too,” I say, pointing to mine.  “I wish I’d known.”

Suddenly, a small child, Yassam, who is serving everyone their meal out of a big metal pot, calls out to hotel right-hand-man, saying essentially, “You want some fucking food, hotel right hand man, or what?” in whatever language they both speak, and hotel man once more points to his stomach, declining.  But then a funny thing happens and Yassam says to me, “You want food?” in English, and hotel right-hand-man laughs and tells Yassam that of course I want food.  My own nervous laugh says, “You bastard, hotel right hand man,” and I am immediately brought a plate filled with a glop of yellow curried deliciousness, a large roti, and some red-sweet deliciousness, the likes of which I’ve never tasted.  Another man tells me that if I like it I can have as much as I want.

I am, in short, welcomed so completely and thoroughly to this holy feast, that my heart can’t help but quake a little bit.

Hotel right hand man leads me inside, gives me a chair, and I eat as much as I can with my right hand before hotel small child assistant leads me upstairs to a washroom, to wash my hands.  I drink more water, thank everyone profusely, but explain that I am now so full and so about to explode that I really must rest for a while.  I thank them.  They say, “Welcome,” and they bid me adieu.  I walk upstairs, lay on my bed, feeling fortunate, blessed, sated–mentally fellated.

Welcome To Mumbai

The first thing you will feel is awe.

Walking out of the airport, with your prepaid taxi slip in your hand, the throngs of people outside of the airport, waiting for loved ones, or marks, or saps, or customers.  “It’s four in the morning,” you’ll say to yourself.  “What the fuck have I gotten myself into?”

This is me we’re talking about.  But it could just as easily be you.

So I walk past security, past the two soldiers guarding the doors, and I am immediately approached by a taxi driver, the first of many.  “I have a prepaid taxi,” I tell him.  “Yes, but I help you.”  He tries to grab the slip from my hand.  I stop in my tracks, give him the evil eye, and pull it away.  He continues to offer his help.  “Are you my taxi driver?”  He is not, which I already knew.  He will help me, he says.  I do not believe him, but  I stop, listen to him for ten seconds, then turn around and walk away.  He doesn’t follow.

I find my cab.  I get into my cab.  We drive to Colaba. 

Colaba is forty five minutes away from the international terminal at the airport.  At least by night.  Along the way are some of the most devastating sights in the world.  A vast slum.  Houses with roofs sagging in the middle, held up by twigs and old newspapers and the sheer will of the gods.  Scraps of cloth drying in the early morning heat, sewage on the streets.  There are children and adults sleeping on the highway median, goats and cattle strolling aimlessly, people bathing and pissing and walking to no particular place.  Imagine, if you will, the movie Slumdog Millionaire, and then imagine that it is real, that it is one hundred times more overwhelming than the cinematic portrayal of poverty, and that it is the permanent state of affairs–that it does not end happily, or when the credits start rolling.  I asked the taxi driver if I could smoke a cigarette, and since he didn’t speak English, I took his grunts as an affirmative.

The drivers in India are a thing of much mystery, as are the roads, and the rules of the road.  First rule/only rule:  there are no rules.  Traffic signals could hardly be called even suggestions, so brazenly are they violated.  The horn functions as a turn signal, a register of presence, and a signal of dissatisfaction.  The roads are shared by taxis, rickshaws, cyclists, cattle, strollers, people pushing their wares on large wagons, and everything else under the sun.  Or, in this case, under the moon.  It’s four-thirty in the morning, and though the city is mostly asleep, there are more people out now than there are in Brooklyn at four-thirty in the afternoon.

Then I got to the YWCA.  Colaba.  Of course there were no rooms at four in the morning, so I bid my original taxi driver a farewell, tipped him 50 rupees, and enlisted the services of another, middling about, talking to the guards in front of the YWCA.  I took him to be a more reliable source of information regarding hotels that would take someone in at five a.m.  We went to one guest house, which asked for 1700 rupees for 24 hours of bedding.  I said “Too many rupees,” and walked out, taxi driver in tow.  Then we went to another, which asked for 1200, had bigger rooms, and would let me stay until 10 a.m. the next day.  This room I took.  And even though I knew that the taxi driver was getting a kickback from the hotel to bring me there, I tipped him 50 rupees, too, because he had told me his life story, and it was not a pretty one.

I slept until the afternoon.  I awoke to blazing heat.  The whir of the fan.  The call to prayer in Muslim Dongri.  I washed my body off, put on my sandals, and went downstairs, to find water that I could drink, to see the streets illuminated by the sun, to soak it in. 

It’s easy, now, to act as though this was an easy decision.  It was not.  I spent the better part of an hour rolling around in bed, looking at the ceiling, thinking, “Too much, too much, too much.”  Thinking, “Flee, go, leave.  Now.”  Thinking, “What am I trying to prove?”  And, “To whom am I trying to prove it?”  

But then I went outside.  Because I had to.  Found water, because I had to.  Found the Internet, because I had to.

I talked to Aliya, in Bangalore, who asked me how I was, and I said, “Oooh.  Don’t know about all of this,” and she said, “Takes time, takes time.”  And I realized, after a while, that she was right.  And that I needed something to eat.  That I needed more water.  I bid her adieu, went to the restaurant recommended to me by the man at the Internet cafe, ate delicious Muslim food, paid 96 rupees for a giant meal, and felt, instantly, alive.  Capable.  Happy.  In the course of three hours I went from feeling utterly destitute and lost to feeling like I had made the best decision of my life.

It must have been something I ate.

Back at the hotel, talking to the owner, who likes me and implores me to stay in Dongri–”Colaba is bad, filled with tourists, not real Mumbai”–he asks me if I am married.  “No, not married.”  Why not?  He wants to know.  “I thought I was going to get married once, but it didn’t work out,” I explain.  “Oh.  How come?” he wonders. 

“We were going to kill one another.”

He tells me that I will perhaps find wife this year.

I ask him if he’s married, because this is the polite thing to do.  He is.  “Children?”  He has seven of them.  “Boys and girls?”  He smiles, wags his head, “Yes, it is a mix.  So it is okay.”

He, his friend at the desk and I all laugh.  I don’t know why I laugh.  I laugh perhaps because they are both laughing, or perhaps because it’s genuinely funny to exhausted-jet-lagged me that a Muslim man with seven children would be relieved that they are not all girls.  Of course he would be relieved.  I would be relieved too.

I wish him well, I walk upstairs, I read until my eyes won’t stay open.  Then I go to sleep.

On Haiti

It is while on your way to tangentially help people in Haiti that you will again help people in Haiti.  A fireman will be in the middle of the road standing next to a sign that says “Relief For Haiti.”  You will be stopped at a traffic light, and you’ll open your window and shout to him, “Hey,” and he’ll come over to your car with his helmet, which is doubling as a donation box, into which you’ll throw all of your loose change.  Mostly quarters, maybe a buck and a half.  You will briefly consider giving him the five hundred dollars in your pocket, but you will think better of it.

You will drive to Best Buy, because you have been charged with purchasing two handheld waterproof GPS units for two friends of yours who have decided to abandon Spain and fly to the Dominican Republic, from where they will travel by land to a country that has recently been devastated by a magnitude seven-point-something earthquake.  They will be going to this country to assist with the relief effort, because they’ve both spent a lot of time there, and because they feel a moral obligation.

They will be going to devastated Haiti because they can help.

And since they have a three-hour layover in Boston, you will be asked to help, too.  You will be asked to help them help.  And you will feel the same moral obligation that they do.  So you will say, “Yes.”

So you will arrive at the store.

Then you will go into the store.

You will find the GPS salesman, and he will be talking to some man who you recognize but cannot for the life of you put a finger on.  You will be in a hurry.  You will want to interrupt their conversation by saying this:  “Hey!  Do you work on fucking commission, or what?  I’m trying to spend four hundred dollars in five minutes, and you’re standing around talking to some shithead in a wife-beater!”  You will not say it, though.  You are not in that emotional state yet.

Eventually, the shithead in the wife-beater will admit that he’s not going to purchase anything today, and you will get your turn.

The salesman will not try to up-sell you, because he senses that you are in a hurry, and he will give you two GPS units to bring to the counter and purchase.  First, he will give you two different ones–two different models.  You will realize that one of them is much more expensive than the other one, that their combined cost totals more than the five hundred dollars in your pocket, and leave the cheaper one with the cashier while you go back to retrieve its match.  The salesman will give it to you.  Then you will go back to try to find the cashier who has stashed your other GPS device.  But he will have disappeared.  You will cut through the line to look for him.  A man with a handlebar mustache and a cowboy hat will say to you, “There’s no cutting in line,” and you will reply by saying, “Jesus–I was already in line, and I’m looking for the guy who has my fucking GPS unit.  Chill the fuck out.”  You will say this testily; and because you are bigger than the man with the handlebar mustache, he will indeed chill the fuck out about it.

You will ask a random cashier about the missing GPS unit, and he will–as if by magic–pull it from beneath his counter and hand it to you.  You will go back to wait in line.  On the way to the back of the line you will glare at the man with the handlebar mustache.  Your glare will say, “See, motherfucker?  Fucking GPS unit, see?  You think I was cutting in fucking line, asshole?  You think I’m fucking ten-years-old, motherfucker?”  But he will not meet your eyes.  You have intimidated him.

Good for you.

When you meet the new cashier, she will scan your GPS units.  One of them–the display model–will scan for ten thousand dollars.  This will confuse you both.  She will try again.  The bar code will not have changed.  She will call another employee over, who will go back to the GPS section of the store looking for a replacement.  You will wait around for fifteen minutes, during which time you will return phone calls and relay messages.  Many customers will make their purchases without incident, which will annoy you.  It will annoy you because you have to get to the airport, and this shit is getting ridiculous.

The employee who was sent to get a replacement GPS unit will return with bad news.  He will say, “We’re all out.”

And this is the part where you will flip out.

You will say, “No, you aren’t.  There’s another fucking one right back there.  It was just in your fucking hands.”  You will point, for effect.

He will reply, calmly, “We can’t sell you that one.”

You will ask him why:  “Why the fuck not?”

People will start to notice.

He will quote company policy, “We can’t sell a display model unless we’re actually not selling the product anymore.”

You will audibly sigh.  It will be a sigh of rage, if such a sigh exists.  If it doesn’t, you will invent it.

Then you will say, “That’s fucking ridiculous.  I’m trying to get this shit to fucking Haiti tonight, and you’re telling me that you can’t sell it, because you’re fucking out of the product you’re trying to sell, and you need to keep the display case warm?”

He will say yes.

Then he will say that he’s arranged for another store location to put that same GPS unit, which they have in stock, on reserve for you.  You will realize that this store location is on the way to the airport.

Then you will snap out of it.

You will apologize for being a dick, “Look, I’m sorry for being a dick.  It’s just been a really stressful couple of days,” and he will nod in customer service agreement.  He will lead you to the customer service counter, where he will refund half of your money, and give you directions to the next Best Buy.  You will apologize again.  “Again, I’m sorry.  You’re just doing your job,” and walk out the door.

When you get to your car you will be physically shaking.  The shaking will be a consequence of a mixture of rage at corporate whoredom and guilt.  It will include a dash of feelings of helplessness in the face of widespread horror.  You will open the car door, put the singular GPS unit tenderly on the ground, and start the car.  You will shift into reverse.  You will travel a distance of two feet.

And then you will burst into tears.

You will put the car in park.  You will cry for fifteen seconds.  Then you will wipe your eyes, drive out of the parking lot, and do what you still have to do.

This is what you will do.  I know.  Because I was there.

**********

Donate, please, please, please, to Michael and Leah, two heroes of our time, here.

India Blogging: An Introduction

New theme:  Insensitivity!

At the travel doctor’s clinic yesterday, the nurse giving me the vaccine (I only got the typhoid shot, as I have to go to my primary care doctor for the rest, minus Japanese encephalitis and rabies, which I’m apparently too late to get) says, “So, where are you going?”

I say, “India.”

She says, “How long?”

I say, “Two and a half months.”

She says, “That should be fun,” and drops the needle in my lap.

I say, “Yeah, something like that,” and hand it back to her.

She says, “Don’t worry, that part doesn’t need to be sterile anymore.”

I say, “It’s fine.”

She regains composure, says, “Well, at least you’re not going to Haiti.”

She: smirks, giggles.  Jams needle in my arm.

I am: gawk-eyed.  Slack-jawed.  Dumbstruck.

Moral of the story?

“Too soon, travel doctor nurse!  Way too motherfucking soon!”

That is all.