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We roared out of Heathrow Airport in the early morning riding high on business class accoutrement and Soho-induced hangovers. Drinks delivered by lovely ladies, a lovely yet vested man, and leg space for my restless foot syndrome.
I don’t know if that’s a real syndrome or not, but I take medication for it. Dr. Dre, you know.
It’s a long flight from Dreary Old England to its former dominion and colony of India. But I knew every second was another mile between me and the lazy, touchy prostitutes of London.
I amused myself for the most part with an old Operation Ivy LP called Seedy and digging into Robert Jordan’s Crown of Swords.
I had already downgraded the miracle of flight to a dull feat of engineering brilliance by then. I was an airplane veteran. Just another hop across half the planet in less than a day from the comfort of my ass while served cocktails and beer.
Dull, dull, dull at six-hundred miles an hour, twenty-thousand feet up.
We did eventually land. I seem to recall it was about noon on some damned day. With the differing time zones, one realizes keeping track of time is mostly impossible and not really worth the time.
More important, and most unignorable, is the change in climate.
Cold dampness in England is mostly just how it is. Exiting cold dampness to enter the cold dryness of a climate-controlled airplane is your first transition. Stepping from the plane onto the Delhi tarmac? Sweet, sweaty swamp butt occurs immediately and most forcefully.
White people always whine about how it’s not the temperature, it’s the humidity. But that’s bollocks. Total crap. It’s both. Both of those things are going to work your dry, cracker fundament into a moist, mushy mound in seconds.
But you will accept the new fill line about your nethers. All thoughts of what you think you know are immediately dispelled by the more urgent and present necessity of chewing the air before you swallow it.
It has a bold taste, with hints of woodsmoke finish to it. And you will love it, readers. You will absolutely love it. By all the gods you will love it.
Because India is incredible. Other than Mountain Dew, coffee, cigarettes, and some chick at summer camp whose name I’ve long since forgotten, India was my first love.
She still sings to me after all these years, and I still don’t quite understand what she is saying to me. But gods damn she can move, and she is always wet.
Stepping off the plane and down the steps onto the tarmac, I immediately sparked a cigarette.
I expected, due to the increasingly totalitarian nature of western society, to receive any number of cross-eyed looks from travelers who were just then beginning to consider punishing smokers.
I did receive a few frowns. The kind they likely describe as withering to their social circles over breakfast drinks. But only from fussy white people. The locals couldn’t have cared less about it.
Me and India we were already off to an excellent start. In fact, I smoked in the airport. Right at the gate. It made travel quite satisfactory as an activity, really.
But that was then. Before cowardly collectivists and terrified mommies and daddies determined airports should be locked into the soul-crushing, movement-eradicating infernal safetyness zones they are today.
But as mentioned, my visit to the cradle of eastern civilization occurred back in 1998. Before the neo puritans fully rose anew from Tipper Gore’s snail trail of conservative pearl clutching.
They demanded the passage of PATRIOT to prove they were tough, because that’s what weak cowards do. They didn’t care if lives were saved, that was obviously never the point. They just wanted a new government agency, and they got one.
But India was untroubled by any of this trash just yet. Nor was I. It hadn’t happened yet, other than Tipper’s slime reflecting an oily black in the pale moonlight. That started in the 80’s.
But it was the late 90’s and I was sixteen years old. So, when in Delhi…
We were picked up from Indira Gandhi International by the mensch tasked with the near impossible job of ensuring we did not die during our time in India.
Singh would keep us out of trouble we didn’t even know existed more times than I can relate here. He was our driver, interpreter, helpful negotiator at times, unhelpful in others, and an all-around great guy.
He was always smiling. I assume because he was paid damned well to tolerate us for two weeks running. I hope he took his family on vacation afterward.
Or at least got blindingly drunk with buddies or however he managed to decompress after babysitting the worst kids in the world. Gods know he deserved it.
But something to know about India is just about everyone is always smiling. This cannot possibly be true, of course. Reason forbids it as well as just looking around the place.
But one most genuinely feels it is true while there. Unless they happen to be Winston Churchill, whose opinions on India were mostly wrong at all times he provided an opinion on the subject. Which was always.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, perhaps, felt people weren’t smiling at him when he divided the newly independent India into India and Pakistan along religious grounds. Broke Gandhi's heart. He wasn’t smiling then, and he was murdered not long after.
I knew this when I visited, and that history was with me the entire time.
I’m told identity politics are useful and important, but I’m inclined to disagree. The worst among us always seem to cling to their identities as the most important thing about themselves, while in reality it is always the least interesting.
Worse, they trouble the rest of us with their individual psychodramas and historicist fever-dreams. This resembles nothing more than a drunk striking at phantoms.
In any event, the energy of the place is quite different than one experiences in the United States or England. People are polite, for instance. Or at least as polite as they can be when there are sixty people inside a bus and twenty atop it. India moves.
That is something else one will notice immediately upon disembarking in India.
There are people absolutely everywhere. If there is a surface to sit or stand or walk upon, it is being sat, stood, or walked upon. The entire world seems assembled everywhere you go, and everyone is talking.
Vehicles speeding through streets at sixty miles per hour - again on the wrong side of the road due to dreary English influence - are most often quite full inside and out. There is honking of the horns at all hours. The custom was to honk if you needed to pass, and folks are going somewhere at all times.
The population of India during my visit was roughly one billion souls. Today, in 2022, that population is roughly one billion four-hundred million.
If human beings are the horniest species on the planet - and we are scientifically speaking - Indians must be the horniest among us. This makes sense if you’ve met their women.
No, I won’t explain that line. Use your imagination. Get yourself into trouble this time. Ask your wife if you have to. She may not know what you’re talking about, but she will react. Please let me know how she does.
Electrical wires hung across packed streets bearing traffic signals no one appeared to heed alongside a patchwork of road signage above what can only be described as chaos to one suffering an overly ordered mind. To me, it was heaven.
London layouts made mad sense compared to Delhi. From high above it must look like a Jackson Pollack painting on acid. Or a Jackson Pollack painting.
There is no hope for a sixteen-year-old boy from the United States if they want to find something in particular. If one wishes to find anything in general, however, they need only walk for a while.
As mentioned, Singh was my Mahatma the entire time we spent in India.
He drove us to our hotel first, adeptly dodging death at every intersection according to ancient, unwritten rules. I saw zero car accidents while we were there. Traffic rules are mostly just convention. If everyone obeys them, no matter how crazed, it’s all right.
Singh expertly deposited us at our hotel in one piece, if frazzled and sweaty.
This colossal palace was erected of marble in an invitingly pink color. It was run through and accented with gold trim. Hopefully not real gold, since the stuff was absolutely everywhere.
That kind of ostentatious display of wealth is considered poor form by those without it. Knowing India, it probably was.
India is a place of both obscene wealth and astonishing poverty. American children and profiteers enjoy whining about wealth disparity in the United States without any idea how the rest of the world is. But staying in that palace hotel reminded this snot-nosed Yankee brat of it every single day over the two weeks we spent there.
Opulent manors, encircled by twenty-foot-tall walls manned by automatic rifle toting guards, were sometimes directly adjacent to slums. That explained the weapons for me, but not to any satisfaction.
Alongside these palaces were mud yards full of hovels crafted from whatever seemed to be lying about. The juxtaposition of the slums and palaces touching each other still haunts me. Just like the smiles plastered on the faces of the poor, the employed, and the rich alike.
And if that wasn’t enough to blast a real understanding of wealth disparity inside me, the couple hour drive from Delhi to the Taj Mahal handled it.
With Mahatma Singh at the wheel, we experienced Indian freeways of the time. Lanes were present I assume, though never saw much evidence of them. They were paved most the way, though not entirely. I don’t recall them being terribly bumpy rides.
At least not like country lanes in Uzbekistan proved many years later. Perhaps I just had a younger pair of buttocks to absorb the shock while in India.
We experienced rush hour out in the country, inspired by livestock wandering out onto the strip. Around a half-dozen emaciated cows - unaware of the bacon-grease infused grass we feed American bovines - lazed about the pavement.
They stared at the patient drivers in that dumb cow fashion so reminiscent of my ex-wife and dared them to do anything about it. Also like my ex-wife. Namaste, bitches.
This type of non-violent protest - one of many Indian tactics adopted by American activists over the years - doesn’t seem to translate well.
In Seattle in 2020, several cow-eyed youngsters decided a dance party on the freeway was a great way to protest police brutality. After one was killed and another injured during the protest against the police, they then sued the police for not keeping them safe.
Way to smash the patriarchy, ladies. And way to sick the police on them.
These cows fared much better, however. No one ever did anything about them. It could be due to the fact we were all held hostage but had no clue whatsoever what their demands were. They weren’t talking and this was the only moment during my travels in India where the honk of car horns was absent.
Still, after only maybe thirty minutes of this they waddled on, and traffic began to move again allowing Mahatma Singh to deposit his dumbfounded, culture-shocked wards at the most astonishing edifice in the modern world.
At the time I couldn’t comprehend why anyone would drive several hours simply to see a single building. This was entirely due to my suffocatingly stupid ignorance of what the Taj Mahal actually is.
It isn’t possible to overstate its magnificence and it becomes even more ostentatious once one discovers it is a tomb. A mausoleum. Just for stuffing a corpse into. A single corpse.
We parked waddled towards the gatehouse to the place. There, we were handed some large burlap sacks we dutifully tied over our shoes.
This seemed like overkill to me until understanding the walks around and outside the building itself beyond the gate were made entirely of white marble. The walks wove between sunken gardens, perhaps a half-foot below the surface.
This is relevant as it rained while we were there. When it rains in India, it quite often means it. One can enjoy a fifteen-minute sprinkle and find torrents washing passed their feet. The quantity of water falling from the sky would shock a Seattle resident.
This was initially bemoaned by my compatriots, but not myself. I love a good rain and at the Taj Mahal, that meant the gardens flood and fill and create reflective pools. It is incredible and no doubt intentional.
The tomb itself is built in the same white marble but with the additional twist of every three or so inches, in all directions across its entire surface, is a precious gem of some sort. Sapphires, rubies, amethysts, all of brilliant colors. Every three inches.
It doesn’t sparkle, that word is rubbish in comparison to what the Taj Mahal does. It is blinding.
It is like seeing the love of your life for the very first time, again and again, every time you blink your eyes. This is the only sense that compares and even then, it falls short. It found it difficult to even look straight at it.
It was built by a wealthy man many centuries ago to house the body of his love, a woman he obviously loved very much. Or at least much more than he loved money considering the expense it must have been.
But he also loved himself and had begun to build another across the river, this time entirely in black marble. The dualism of it would have been beyond beautiful, even if they were monuments to the dead, static, and gone.
Alas, he died before it could be finished and the project funding dried up, so it was never finished. Over the years since, every scrap of black marble has been carted off by enterprising grave robbers and/or the state - but I repeat myself - so no evidence remains of the planned mausoleum across the river. This seems a shame.
We almost had eight wonders of the world, rather than a paltry, impoverished seven. The black marble would have been a sight to see across the way. The union of white and black standing against eternity together divided only by a lazily winding river.
Complimenting the eternal love between a man and a woman from so very long ago. I could be romanticizing this, but that’s how it works out at the Taj Mahal. Don’t blame me. It started it.
The hotel we stayed at - the pink marble thing - was shaped like a crescent concaved out in the back with every room on that side enjoying a terraced balcony. Most nights, we kept those doors closed and relied on the ozone smell of conditioned air allowing us to sleep in addition to muting the incessant horns.
I keep mentioning the horns because I can’t not do that. Car horns in Delhi are like Twitter. It just keeps going and never stops, offering nothing in the way of substance beyond the understanding countless people are trying to get passed each other.
One evening my esteemed compatriot’s father determined we should experience a bit of Delhi night life. At sixteen years old, this was quite illegal in India. They have their hangups about alcohol. Just not tobacco.
But as is also the case at times, a mild form of bribery can get one around many legal difficulties. He greased a few bouncer palms, and they ushered us right along into the club with no further interrogation.
The music was a fun mix of local goa style music with the usual Eurotrash club stuff I’d heard quite a bit of in the United States. Just think A Night at the Roxbury and your favorite Bollywood musician had a fetal alcoholic together and you’re probably pretty close to what got played there.
More important than the music was the fact my compatriot got utterly, completely, and one hundred percent trashed. Not me, of course. I’m the picture of moderation. I got a bit buzzed. Nothing serious.
We eventually noticed the local patrons - more importantly the local bouncers - were beginning to look at the three of us cross-eyed. The first evidence of disapproval from any of the locals we had experienced up to that point. So, we took it as a sign to make ourselves scarce.
Greased palms quickly become angry fists if you miss even a single autopay.
Blindingly drunk, we pirouetted and slobbered straight onto our faces in the middle of the street outside. As always, traffic was a constant stream of death deftly dodged, and the addition of our own soft, pink bodies to the milieu didn’t help things.
I seem to recall my buddy fell into the street first and I heroically face-planted trying to help him out of it. So, in reality, I probably fell in with him diving after. That sounds more like me and more like him, really.
We survived for no good reason I’m aware of. In fact, my next memory was then back-planting in the elevator at the hotel. The upward motion of the thing was enough to sweep my legs out from under me.
I laughed the insane laugh of a child deep under the influence of drugs and my friend did the same. Ironically, I will always remember this moment I can barely remember.
That’s part of the problem with drugs, of course. You’re pretty sure you had the time of your life, but you can’t always take your word for it.
We crawled the rest of the way to our room, promptly declared air-conditioning and climate control was no way to live and flung the balcony doors wide open before finally passing out in our beds. In reality, we did a fair amount of puking as well but that’s not what’s important here.
My drunken stupor the next morning was interrupted by what I thought could only be a bouncer having broken in and finally found us. It turned out to be something quite different.
Every morning the hotel staff silently broke into our rooms and deposited a gigantic bowl of fresh fruit within. At the time I ignored fruity offerings unless accompanied by bacon or some similarly superior form of food. So, every morning I simply noted its presence and cognitively moved on.
I couldn’t this time.
The bouncers turned out to be a half dozen monkeys, hopping up and down on the table discussing the merits of the various fruits the hotel staff had left for them. This isn’t some stupid crypto-racist reference about the locals being monkeys.
It is a stupid statement asserted the dudes I feared might be vengeful bouncers were literally monkeys. Like, with tails and shit. I stared in groggy disbelief at the nightmare playing out in front of me.
My safetyness space had been invaded and violated as my head caved itself in from hangover. I pulled myself together and addressed them. “Hey! Monkeys!” Five of the six fled, while the sixth monkey screamed in reply, “Hey! SKREEEE!”
Clutching a banana and hissing, like a trashed white girl cradling her chardonnay and giving me a piece of her drunk-addled mind, he fled out the balcony door.
I followed out onto the balcony and was rewarded with the sight of hundreds of monkeys crawling all over the curve of the hotel across several floors. They swung from balcony to balcony, locating open doors, and moving in and out of rooms.
The hotel was a favored hunting ground for them, apparently. At least that morning. They were everywhere. It is quite impossible to properly describe the sound they all made.
They swung into other hotel rooms empty-handed and exited loaded with fruity booty. Their screams and screeches of victory filled the air like randy birds. They fought a bit with each other over what I assume to be the choicest of the pilfered fruits.
Dumbfounded and hungover I couldn’t go back to sleep feeling as violated as I did.
Not only had someone broke into the hotel room to leave fruit in the first place, but a grip of monkeys had also broken in to steal it. My place, my space, as the kids insist on calling it these days, had been doubly violated for no reason other than fruit.
More pressing was the merciless Indian sun, though. I didn’t actually care monkeys stole fruit. That stuff literally grows on trees.
So, feeling culturally insensitive, I ordered up some cheeseburgers from room service and rooted around the room, something I hadn’t done yet. Expecting a bible in the drawer next to the bed, I found something else instead.
An orange hardcover book without any decor or sleeve rested next to the obligatory bible. I picked it up and flipped through it, curious what it could be.
It was a poem, I realized, if a rather long one requiring a binding. It had illustrations with a blue dude who might have been a blue chick. It detailed what seemed to be a war, or at least a battle, many years ago.
An azure chariot driver seemed to be lecturing his lord and master on a variety of subjects, and I found the idea of a servant lording it over their lord to be deeply fascinating and satisfying.
But as I read further it became clear those roles were really reversed in a manner one can only convey through mythology, conspiracy theory, and the gods hiding behind the conspiracy.
I read most of the thing that day until my eyes crossed, dried, and popped straight out of my skull in protest. I took a break only to inhale a delicious, greasy burger I hadn’t expected to be any good at all. Over the next several days, I would eat many.
The poem turned out to be called Bhagavad Gita and I promptly stole it from the hotel room. This is the custom among my people. At the time, there was simply no way I would have known or believed it could spark a further interest in theology.
I’d already been interested in such things, having scored excellent grades in my short-lived career as a student at my Catholic school. But that was mostly fueled by disdain.
I didn’t understand the lessons behind many of the stories one finds in Genesis at the time, but I wanted to. Even if I completely ignored their lessons, which I did. I knew there was something there and it didn’t have to do with the literal story. Or morals.
A single act of scriptural thievery made possible via substance abuse, accompanied by revelations of parsimonious simians, all came together within twenty-four hours. The memories of it are still intensely vivid.
That chunk of time changed me forever in ways I can’t really describe. Mostly because attempting to exposes how silly it and I really am. I like for people to come to that realization gradually, not all at once.
While there is no one person I can reasonably credit with any specific change in myself, I will thank India at large for culture-shocking a young man into something more. I will also thank Mahatma Singh, my parents, my friend and his family, Dutch Uncles, depressed British prostitutes, and everyone else involved.
Mark Twain once said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice.” No doubt, my man. But the death is via poison, not a gunshot or guillotine.
He was obviously only half right about this. There is most certainly something to the idea of inserting oneself into different scenarios, environments, and people. Particularly that last.
Expanding one’s consciousness is not limited to drug abuse nor from reading smart and/or stupid people. It can be all of those things. But it all requires experience. Something you cannot learn in school. You must travel.
Drugs and books can help you get there under the right conditions. One need only experience more things to become wiser. Maybe they reflect a bit. A little more there, a little less here. But you must experience things to know anything about them.
My trip to India is directly - if messily - attributable to an expansion of my limited understanding of the world. I learned very little in Holland and England other than the Dutch are gorgeous and hookers can be a touchy lot.
India didn’t make me wise. That’s a project which never ends and only ever has murky beginnings. But it was a leap forward, at least. One small step for man-child, one giant leap for man-child kind.
Not due to reading words, but due to experience.
Since then, I have read the Bible possibly a dozen times. I’ve consumed Quran twice, once in Uzbekistan even. I’m about to begin my third reading. I understand LaVeyan Satanism. I know pantheism isn’t a sexual orientation, no matter my love for Spinoza.
I know of gods and men, of myth and lore, and the lessons hidden within at least some of them. I know they’re as useful as science is. The two complement each other in different areas and anyone who doesn’t realize this should reflect on it more.
I have traveled somewhat on trains. And when I say on trains, I don’t mean inside the cars. I mean on the cars. I have feared for my nipples. These points become clearer if you keep reading. Pinky swearsies.
But I noticeably grew as a human being during my time in India, whether I wanted it or not. I became something more than just an ignorant abroad, quite against my will. I learned racism is not limited to the United States. I learned laughing is its remedy, in addition to the most beautiful thing in the world.
I learned how to bribe both private and public officials. I learned religious animus is a waste of time, almost as stupid as racial hatred.
But the land wasn’t done with me just yet, even if that miserable and simultaneously expanding and contracting hangover did eventually fade after eight bottles of water, two bottles of aspirin, and three most salty and sacrilegious Indian cheeseburgers.
After a couple more days spent tooling around Delhi, visiting and denied entrance to fantastic Hindu temples on the basis of my race, I bought a dagger at a small bazaar. It was that or a jade tiger figurine and I wagered it would be difficult to cut a bitch on a plane with a statue.
It is perhaps eight inches long or so, a most admirable length measured from the hilt to tip. Meaning it is roughly a foot long, measured taint to tip. A part of the American system of measurement is we decide where to measure from.
The hilt is a tiger’s head worked in bronze or brass. I don’t know metal stuff, honestly. Metallurgy is about as interesting to me as malaria medication, both in ‘98 and in 2020 when similar pills would be touted as a miracle cure for COVID-19.
If didn’t take them when it made sense to fight malaria, there was no way I was going to take them when it didn’t. I didn’t want to get vaccinated either, but that’s another story.
My habit of packing light came in handy when I stuffed this weapon into my carry-on prior to heading to the airport for another boring round of soaring through the air like Perseus. Preferably not like Icarus, but that wasn’t up to me.
Upon reaching the security line at the airport I hit a snag, though. Apparently, my carry-on bag was too large for the X-ray machine to handle. This is not something I’ve ever encountered before or after. That anything of mine would be too large.
The security fellow in full uniform, with little badge on his chest, waved his left arm while not directly looking at me and I was overcome by a sudden wave of confusion. My befuddlement intensified after noting his other hand was vigorously rubbing his thumb and forefinger together in a motion everyone on the planet understands.
And no, he wasn’t playing the world’s smallest violin for all the waitresses of the world.
My brain didn’t understand until I noticed the troublesome bag most certainly would fit in the machine. It was then I put the two variables together. My eureka moment in the Delhi Airport. I was shocked this guy wanted a bribe.
Well, not that he wanted a bribe to begin with, or that he would ask. I never deny anyone opportunity if I can help it. But that he would ask so publicly. The line stretched out in front and behind us with everything in full view.
I fished out my last couple thousand rupees I’d planned on keeping as a souvenir and forked them over right there. He pushed the bag right on through without resistance as onlookers smirked. None were foolish enough to say a damned thing about it.
I, however, laughed as he waved my dumbass through security and into the now most assuredly safe confines of the airport. The TSA behaves quite similarly, though they seem to traffic in shampoo rather than taxing travelers of legal tender.
The knife, it must be mentioned, was never flagged through the remaining airport security checkpoints we encountered the entire time home. It was safely secured in my carry-on, well within reach if I ever wanted to have some words with the pilots.
I suppose, again, it is possible I may have had to defend myself on the plane. Several airports later, each requiring me to pass my carry-on and lethal weapon through security checkpoints. A different time, readers. It was a different time entirely.
We did finally land back at the Spokane Airport maybe twenty-four to thirty-six hours later. Again, it makes no sense to make sense of time while traveling like this. You set it all up while conscious prior to the trip and just hope you got it right.
I was met by my grinning parents, and I was most pleased to see them again for the first time in over a month.
“Welcome back, son! Hope you had fun! Because you’re grounded!”
My father always does have a sense of humor. Unfortunately, he wasn’t joking, even if he did leverage a most deadly serious pun in pursuit of a joke at the expense of my liberty. At least I’d have time to read my Gita.
The adventure takes a pause to return to school in the next entry.