(3) Delhi
The idea to head for Delhi was ultimately a sound one, though you couldn't have convinced me of that until the end of my stay there. The Flight from Aurangabad took one hour to Bombay with what turned out to be a one hour layover, but passengers in transit from Bombay to Delhi couldn't leave the plane. They turned off the air conditioning, opened the doors to the days accumulated harbor miasma, and then security police rooted through all of the hand baggage compartments, selecting a few unfortunates for minute scrutiny of their carryon luggage. Those selected were usually the people who looked most forthright and sincere to me. The flight left Bombay around 6 in the evening and arrived at Delhi around 9:30. I felt awful. I retrieved my luggage and prepaid a taxi to my hotel at a booth inside the airport. I wheeled my stuff out the door and toward the taxi lines. My bags were seized by two "porters". They were two really pushy assholes who ignored my protests when I told them I didn't need help and that I wasn't going to pay. They kept going, hurling my suitcase onto the roof of a waiting cab and opened the door for me. I gave my fare voucher to the driver, told him my destination, threw the coins I reserve for beggars at my cursing porters and hurtled off into the night.
The cabbie didn't speak a word of English and it soon became clear that he had no idea where my hotel was. He conferred with other cabbies several times over the next hour, always ending up in a places where you were less and less likely to find a hotel. He finally got it right, knew not to hang around for a tip and departed in what I hoped was a state of professional mortification. The lobby of the hotel was promising. There was an adjacent South Indian vegetarian restaurant full of happy looking diners which I saw it as a good sign as I checked in. The two clerks however were weird. One was a very tall skinny guy with a shaved head, he looked like a caricature of a mortician that had embalmed the other guy, his partner, a rigid shrunken gentleman whose suit was several sizes too large. They seemed testy and confused as I checked in. We passed from the modern brass and hardwood lobby into a long narrow concrete corridor that had 3 story wings abutting it at right angles. It looked like a charity mental hospital from another time. My spirits sank further when I saw the room, a musty tomb that stank of mildew and mothballs. I noticed that the door lock allowed the door to move a half inch even when it was closed, and that the bathtub had never ever been cleaned. I didn't have the energy to protest- I wanted a shower and I wanted to go to sleep. I noticed a group of men whispering furtively outside my door as the bellhop left. I resigned myself to these miserable circumstances, started to unpack, and was interrupted by a loud knocking on my door. I opened it and it was the two geeks from the front desk, irate because I hadn't put my passport number on my check-in document. I answered that the room was a dump and I wanted another. After a quick conference in Hindi they showed me to another room, just as dismal, but with a real door. The mummified guy remained behind fiddling with the air conditioner for a good ten minutes. I was shivering and telling him not to bother, but he kept tinkering and left when the air conditioner started arcing inside, like a little intermittent strobe light. I unplugged it, went to the bathroom to take a shower, something I absolutely have to do in order to sleep well, and discovered there was no hot water. I called the front desk and they explained that there was hot water from six until ten in the evening, and that I was too late.
This was like being worked over by Mike Tyson - a methodical barrage of indignities designed to humiliate and break the spirit. I crawled into the tiny itchy bed, felt like I was going to pass out, and waited for the deliverance of unconsciousness. I was about halfway there when there was another knock on the door! I answered it, and there in the darkness was a tiny man, under five feet tall with a white beard, wearing dark glasses, carrying a five gallon plastic bucket full of boiling water - I tipped him and actually took a bath, mixing the hot water with the cold in a small vessel, ladling it on myself and it actually felt great. I was finally as comfortable as I was going to be in a decrepit gulag run by zombies, and fell immediately to sleep.
I was awakened at 9:30 the next morning, Sunday morning January 26th, Indian Independence Day, by the steady rocking of a large earthquake. THE quake. I momentarily thought that death by earthquake was the only logical culmination of my recent experiences. I heard voice s outside speaking without alarm, no one seemed upset, and then I thought I may have hallucinated the whole thing, a dream in my sound sleep so disturbing that it woke me up. a little later the TV news confirmed that there had been a major quake in Gurgurat. The media and bureaucracy leapt into action attempting to discredit one another, squabbling about details and relishing the tragedy as an excuse to snipe at each other. I spent the day shivering in bed in my third room in two days, this one was on the second floor, as odious as the first two, but at least not in traffic and away from the sinister nocturnal shuffling that always seemed to be present below. It was cold and overcast, actually a welcome respite from the baking heat of Aurangabad. The food at the vegetarian restaurant was a conspicuous treat in this dismal place, and the following day, I set out to make arrangements to continue my trip.
I asked a rickshaw driver to take me to Indian Airlines- He answered "why not go to the Government of India Tourist office- they can handle everything". This sounded like a voice from Olympus intervening in my feverish wanderings. We went to a nondescript office some distance from the El Dump Hotel where a effusive gentleman with a Hitler mustache asked me where I wanted to go, for how long, what I wanted to spend, reassuring questions. He made a few phone calls, nattered in Hindi with some office folks, pecked furiously at a calculator and presented me with an itinerary and a price. My credit card shrieked in pain as it went through the imprint machine one more time, and I was set for the rest of my time in India. I felt like an anvil had been removed from my chest. One of the things the travel agent insisted on was that I be driven by car for the first two stops of my trip, from Delhi to Jaipur and from Jaipur to Agra. The number of hours on the road each day seemed ok, so I agreed. I didn't know if he did this because of the chaos in travel and communications caused by the earthquake, or for maximized sightseeing. Either reason seemed adequate. I was introduced to Harminder Singh, a large quiet turbaned man who had been present during the planning, who would be my driver for the overland parts of my trip. It was agreed that we would leave at seven o'clock the next morning. I was elated. I felt that my travails had at last reached bottom and there was only upward left to experience. I took a leisurely trip back to the hotel, stopping to send e-mail, get more cash and eat something else besides South Indian vegetarian food. I was delighted that the coming evening would be my last in the Hotel from Hell, and that logistics would no longer be a concern.
I felt good enough to go for a short stroll away from the hotel. I took a road off the traffic roundabout by the hotel that followed a turgid looking river in the direction of Nehru Stadium. On this busy wide tree lined thoroughfare I had my first close-up look at urban poverty in India. Families lived in lean-to shelters made from everything imaginable. Everything was is a state of distress, of unreadiness, everything was patched, fires smoldered, clothes dried, children bathed in a pot that was also used for cooking, animals slept and meandered, it was a slow-motion primal counterpoint to the rushing urbanity on the roadway. A man slept soundly in his clothes on a bed of crude rope lattice. He was in the middle of the sidewalk, with a dog sleeping next to him on the ground. They were both in no hurry. I had my first sense that there was a survival-driven deliberation to all of these folksÕ movements, a ballet of economy to a score far beyond anything I had heard of or experienced. The dark slight people were easy to lose in the late afternoon shadows beneath the trees, there was a natural camouflage to the whole of the roadside dwellings, no straight edges, no right angles, vigorous shadows, everything dappled and mottled into a state of hallucinogenic simultaneity. All movement seemed deliberate and fluid. There was urgency but it wasn't expressed with rapidity. A few children gaped, but mostly I was ignored. I looked into faces to see familiar psychic territory and concluded that we were probably mutually indecipherable there by the road. No one was begging here, this was home, I was walking through peoples homes. Through the debris and chaos the sense that this is where people took their rest and indulged in a daydream now and then was strongly present. There is something about seeing someone deep in sleep where they most often sleep that is supremely candid- even more so if it is someone you don't know and where they are sleeping is on the ground. I felt like the supreme voyeur whose motives were so alien to the lives he peered into as to render himself invisible in his peering. On the way leaving Delhi at 7 am the next morning I had an indelible experience, particularly haunting because of its brevity. The traffic circles or roundabouts that occurred regularly in Delhi were favorite places for daredevil beggars who would wander amongst the slowly circling vehicles, tapping on windows in search of alms. It required great agility to keep moving with the traffic, elicit and receive a few rupees and avoid being crushed by the freeform converging and exiting of traffic. In the middle of this perpetual turn was an island with a few plants and the resting place of the hardworking toreador beggars. A young man came in my general direction from the island. He was hopping, he had one leg and one arm. Both amputations were severe, at the hip and shoulder respectively, and it must have happened early in his life because he seemed totally natural within these dramatic limitations. His pelvis was permanently tipped so that his remaining leg was centered underneath his weight, and his shoulders were similarly tilted for optimal leverage of his single arm. He hopped briskly amongst the moving cars with his long curly hair bouncing, yelling at people to give him money. There was no cajoling or piteous posturing from this human pogo stick bobbing on his one bare foot amongst all those moving cars. This all occurred in an instant, and I thought to myself "this guy looks like a human noodle" before the startling reality of his situation registered on me. He was so real he couldn't be categorized, the worlds biggest pigeon hole wouldn't hold this guy. He remains actively in my mind because there is no place to put him away. I wonder what his dreams are.
© Richard A. Berger. All rights reserved.
The cabbie didn't speak a word of English and it soon became clear that he had no idea where my hotel was. He conferred with other cabbies several times over the next hour, always ending up in a places where you were less and less likely to find a hotel. He finally got it right, knew not to hang around for a tip and departed in what I hoped was a state of professional mortification. The lobby of the hotel was promising. There was an adjacent South Indian vegetarian restaurant full of happy looking diners which I saw it as a good sign as I checked in. The two clerks however were weird. One was a very tall skinny guy with a shaved head, he looked like a caricature of a mortician that had embalmed the other guy, his partner, a rigid shrunken gentleman whose suit was several sizes too large. They seemed testy and confused as I checked in. We passed from the modern brass and hardwood lobby into a long narrow concrete corridor that had 3 story wings abutting it at right angles. It looked like a charity mental hospital from another time. My spirits sank further when I saw the room, a musty tomb that stank of mildew and mothballs. I noticed that the door lock allowed the door to move a half inch even when it was closed, and that the bathtub had never ever been cleaned. I didn't have the energy to protest- I wanted a shower and I wanted to go to sleep. I noticed a group of men whispering furtively outside my door as the bellhop left. I resigned myself to these miserable circumstances, started to unpack, and was interrupted by a loud knocking on my door. I opened it and it was the two geeks from the front desk, irate because I hadn't put my passport number on my check-in document. I answered that the room was a dump and I wanted another. After a quick conference in Hindi they showed me to another room, just as dismal, but with a real door. The mummified guy remained behind fiddling with the air conditioner for a good ten minutes. I was shivering and telling him not to bother, but he kept tinkering and left when the air conditioner started arcing inside, like a little intermittent strobe light. I unplugged it, went to the bathroom to take a shower, something I absolutely have to do in order to sleep well, and discovered there was no hot water. I called the front desk and they explained that there was hot water from six until ten in the evening, and that I was too late.
This was like being worked over by Mike Tyson - a methodical barrage of indignities designed to humiliate and break the spirit. I crawled into the tiny itchy bed, felt like I was going to pass out, and waited for the deliverance of unconsciousness. I was about halfway there when there was another knock on the door! I answered it, and there in the darkness was a tiny man, under five feet tall with a white beard, wearing dark glasses, carrying a five gallon plastic bucket full of boiling water - I tipped him and actually took a bath, mixing the hot water with the cold in a small vessel, ladling it on myself and it actually felt great. I was finally as comfortable as I was going to be in a decrepit gulag run by zombies, and fell immediately to sleep.
I was awakened at 9:30 the next morning, Sunday morning January 26th, Indian Independence Day, by the steady rocking of a large earthquake. THE quake. I momentarily thought that death by earthquake was the only logical culmination of my recent experiences. I heard voice s outside speaking without alarm, no one seemed upset, and then I thought I may have hallucinated the whole thing, a dream in my sound sleep so disturbing that it woke me up. a little later the TV news confirmed that there had been a major quake in Gurgurat. The media and bureaucracy leapt into action attempting to discredit one another, squabbling about details and relishing the tragedy as an excuse to snipe at each other. I spent the day shivering in bed in my third room in two days, this one was on the second floor, as odious as the first two, but at least not in traffic and away from the sinister nocturnal shuffling that always seemed to be present below. It was cold and overcast, actually a welcome respite from the baking heat of Aurangabad. The food at the vegetarian restaurant was a conspicuous treat in this dismal place, and the following day, I set out to make arrangements to continue my trip.
I asked a rickshaw driver to take me to Indian Airlines- He answered "why not go to the Government of India Tourist office- they can handle everything". This sounded like a voice from Olympus intervening in my feverish wanderings. We went to a nondescript office some distance from the El Dump Hotel where a effusive gentleman with a Hitler mustache asked me where I wanted to go, for how long, what I wanted to spend, reassuring questions. He made a few phone calls, nattered in Hindi with some office folks, pecked furiously at a calculator and presented me with an itinerary and a price. My credit card shrieked in pain as it went through the imprint machine one more time, and I was set for the rest of my time in India. I felt like an anvil had been removed from my chest. One of the things the travel agent insisted on was that I be driven by car for the first two stops of my trip, from Delhi to Jaipur and from Jaipur to Agra. The number of hours on the road each day seemed ok, so I agreed. I didn't know if he did this because of the chaos in travel and communications caused by the earthquake, or for maximized sightseeing. Either reason seemed adequate. I was introduced to Harminder Singh, a large quiet turbaned man who had been present during the planning, who would be my driver for the overland parts of my trip. It was agreed that we would leave at seven o'clock the next morning. I was elated. I felt that my travails had at last reached bottom and there was only upward left to experience. I took a leisurely trip back to the hotel, stopping to send e-mail, get more cash and eat something else besides South Indian vegetarian food. I was delighted that the coming evening would be my last in the Hotel from Hell, and that logistics would no longer be a concern.
I felt good enough to go for a short stroll away from the hotel. I took a road off the traffic roundabout by the hotel that followed a turgid looking river in the direction of Nehru Stadium. On this busy wide tree lined thoroughfare I had my first close-up look at urban poverty in India. Families lived in lean-to shelters made from everything imaginable. Everything was is a state of distress, of unreadiness, everything was patched, fires smoldered, clothes dried, children bathed in a pot that was also used for cooking, animals slept and meandered, it was a slow-motion primal counterpoint to the rushing urbanity on the roadway. A man slept soundly in his clothes on a bed of crude rope lattice. He was in the middle of the sidewalk, with a dog sleeping next to him on the ground. They were both in no hurry. I had my first sense that there was a survival-driven deliberation to all of these folksÕ movements, a ballet of economy to a score far beyond anything I had heard of or experienced. The dark slight people were easy to lose in the late afternoon shadows beneath the trees, there was a natural camouflage to the whole of the roadside dwellings, no straight edges, no right angles, vigorous shadows, everything dappled and mottled into a state of hallucinogenic simultaneity. All movement seemed deliberate and fluid. There was urgency but it wasn't expressed with rapidity. A few children gaped, but mostly I was ignored. I looked into faces to see familiar psychic territory and concluded that we were probably mutually indecipherable there by the road. No one was begging here, this was home, I was walking through peoples homes. Through the debris and chaos the sense that this is where people took their rest and indulged in a daydream now and then was strongly present. There is something about seeing someone deep in sleep where they most often sleep that is supremely candid- even more so if it is someone you don't know and where they are sleeping is on the ground. I felt like the supreme voyeur whose motives were so alien to the lives he peered into as to render himself invisible in his peering. On the way leaving Delhi at 7 am the next morning I had an indelible experience, particularly haunting because of its brevity. The traffic circles or roundabouts that occurred regularly in Delhi were favorite places for daredevil beggars who would wander amongst the slowly circling vehicles, tapping on windows in search of alms. It required great agility to keep moving with the traffic, elicit and receive a few rupees and avoid being crushed by the freeform converging and exiting of traffic. In the middle of this perpetual turn was an island with a few plants and the resting place of the hardworking toreador beggars. A young man came in my general direction from the island. He was hopping, he had one leg and one arm. Both amputations were severe, at the hip and shoulder respectively, and it must have happened early in his life because he seemed totally natural within these dramatic limitations. His pelvis was permanently tipped so that his remaining leg was centered underneath his weight, and his shoulders were similarly tilted for optimal leverage of his single arm. He hopped briskly amongst the moving cars with his long curly hair bouncing, yelling at people to give him money. There was no cajoling or piteous posturing from this human pogo stick bobbing on his one bare foot amongst all those moving cars. This all occurred in an instant, and I thought to myself "this guy looks like a human noodle" before the startling reality of his situation registered on me. He was so real he couldn't be categorized, the worlds biggest pigeon hole wouldn't hold this guy. He remains actively in my mind because there is no place to put him away. I wonder what his dreams are.
© Richard A. Berger. All rights reserved.