In February 2009, I took a two-and-a-half week vacation from work to travel India. My first stop was Mumbai, where I stayed with my aunt’s brother, Shaffat, for a few days. Shaffat lived in Canada and was spending one year abroad in Mumbai for work. In the evenings we went to dinner together and met some of his friends, and during the day I was on my own, though often serviced by Shaffat’s personal driver, Sheker. Afterwards, I continued my trip on my own. Throughout those first few days and the solo ones that followed, I took to writing notes about my trip in a pocket-sized notebook. It hadn't been my intention to keep any kind of journal or to write anything down; rather, the desire sprang spontaneously and I enjoyed the occasional reflection.
I have pages worth of notes from the first half of my trip. The time alone was conducive to hovering over a notebook and mulling over experiences and my reactions to them. The second half of my trip was quite different, and I have no notes from it for one simple reason: I had started meeting people, and the desire to write became secondary. After returning to the States I started writing about my trip, eager to share details with friends and family. I wrote furiously for several weeks, after which, as often happens, my enthusiasm waned and I never got around to finishing.
It's been a year since my trip to India, and during the past year there have been a few days when, fueled by a rare spark of inspiration, I've either added to or edited this travelogue. It became especially difficult to continue writing after my notes ran out and I had to work strictly off of memory, which was the case for the second half of my trip. A few times I considered documenting only the first half and calling it quits, sending it off to friends as a kind of half project, but I felt it wouldn’t be a good representation and I didn't want to leave out the stories of those I befriended.
I was incurably stunted in this project, though, pushing this thing along toward some semblance of a conclusion while omitting many moments along the way. So the following pages are my incomplete ramblings about a year-old trip. Thanks for reading.
Mumbai, Part I
Over half of Mumbai’s population lives in slums. They are visible at every turn: along the highway, by the train station, at the foot of posh apartment buildings. Shaffat lived in an expensive condo in Powai, which is in northern Mumbai, and from his window he had a view of construction workers bathing in buckets in makeshift scrap housing. You could pass high-rises with windows overflowing with pink and white flowers that dripped onto the slums below. Maybe during monsoon season the petals broke off and rained onto shack roofs. It’s an obvious feature of the city, the high and low rubbing elbows with each other everywhere you go. Shaffat and I were walking home from a friend’s dinner party one night when I almost tripped over a string of five or six people sleeping on the sidewalk.
Mumbai is filthy, like almost every place I visited in India, but unlike other cities it’s also heavily polluted, similar to Beijing and Seoul but probably worse. The skyline is so hazy that you never see more than a ghost of a silhouette, like a half-erased chalk drawing against a white sky. When I was walking by the large green lawn of the Oval Maidan on my way back from a lunch at Samrat, a car passed me and puffed out an enormous cloud of exhaust, so big that I was immediately blinded and the pedestrians just a few feet in front of me became nearly invisible. It was like a fog machine—but an exhaust machine! This pollution only adds to the dirt situation. Even fancy condominiums are left untended to, so that, a few years after popping up, they look black and miserable much like the apartments the government erects in shantytowns. The glass balconies of modern office buildings are covered in a thick layer of dust. This general lack of upkeep makes you feel like the whole city is about to crumble, and at first I found this—along with the mad traffic and pollution and frenzy—very overwhelming. Everything was rotting away, even the air.
It was only after returning to the U.S. that I found some explanation for Mumbai’s depressed housing situation (in Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found). In 1948 the government enacted a Rent Act that froze rents on all leased buildings and allowed the transfer of leases to tenants’ legal heirs at the same fixed price. Tenants simply had to continue paying rent and in turn could never be evicted and never need to resign a lease. The act was initiated as a temporary emergency measure at the end of World War II, when rich newcomers caused landlords to hike prices that left locals floundering for affordable housing. But the Rent Act, instead of being repealed after a few years, has been extended more than twenty times. Because tenants are a more numerous and therefore much stronger lobby than landlords, all political parties have bowed to the tenants. And because the landlords won’t sell their properties to the tenants—the amount they would receive would be a pittance, not even enough for a room in a slum—the landlords have no other option than to refuse to maintain their properties. So, there are thousands of dilapidated buildings in Mumbai. Additionally, there are hundreds of thousands of empty buildings that landlords don’t rent out in fear of losing them to their tenants. So while some in the upper class have an inherited rent-controlled hold on their homes, many of the newcomers that continue to pour into the city have nowhere to live but in slums.
But it’s hard for me not to fall in love with big, vertical cities, and with chaos and people and noise. So it didn’t take long for me to find something romantic in all this grime. The pollution wasn’t the acidic, lung-scuffing variety that I’d come across in East Asia; instead the air had a kind of toxic spice. The exhaust mixed with the food and the fumes mixed with the incense, giving the city a thick, potent, exotic air.
A fascinating feature of Mumbai is that you can actually feel that you’re in an overpopulated country of one billion. Having been to Seoul and Tokyo, I was familiar with the “densely populated Asian city”. But there, people packed themselves efficiently into fluorescent-lit shoebox apartments in secure high-rise buildings. There was an order to the throngs. Urban bedlam had a tidy solution. In Mumbai, it was the opposite. Everything in this city was half exposed. People poured onto the streets from sidewalks that only half existed. Windowless rickshaws clogged the roads and sandwiched themselves between cars and pedestrians. Shacks and storefronts opened out onto the street. A barbershop not much bigger than a gym locker would have five people crammed into it. An even tinier shop would pack seven. People were everywhere, and the confusion of it all could be quite disorienting.
Trying to navigate through downtown Mumbai for the first time was in itself a nightmare. My map was nearly useless. I would think I knew where I was heading and then a few feet farther I’d feel completely lost again. I would forget even what I had been thinking just moments before, like when I felt a drop on my head and wondered whether I’d been shat on by a passing pigeon, and only five minutes later remembered to check for it. At one point in the evening I decided to abandon the effort to get somewhere specific and just walk aimlessly along the streets. I had a vague sense of direction from the few sunrays that peaked through the haze, but otherwise I just roamed, taking turns at random. I walked and walked and eventually thought maybe to call it a day and get a rickshaw home, when out of nowhere the street opened up in front of me to a delightful surprise: a sprawling view of sand and sea.
It was a wonderful feeling, stumbling on Chowpatty Beach. Suddenly the teeming boulevards were behind me and it was just breezy ocean air, couples strolling and children playing. There were groups of friends picnicking and laughing, lovers huddled together on blankets, kids buying balloons and flying kites and chasing pigeons. On this part of the shore, the city wrapped around the water so that the skyline extended in both directions on either side. The barely visible outline of buildings in the haze made it feel like you were sleepwalking through a sweet dream. My nerves calmed. I walked around the beach for a long time and sat in the sand as the sun started to set. The sun went down behind the buildings as I walked along Marine Drive, just above the silhouette of a man and a woman sitting side by side on the sidewalk’s ledge, and for the first time that day I felt happy and at ease.
In the evening I went with Shaffat to visit his friend Nupura, who lived within walking distance of his apartment. Nupura was Indian and she lived with her expat Finnish husband. I told Nupura that one of the things I was going do in Mumbai was take a tour of a slum.
“Oh, how we laugh at you tourists who do that!” she said. “You pay to take a tour of something you can see all around you everywhere! It’s like if I went to DC and took a tour of the poor areas there.”
I told her first of all if she was going to go to the bad parts of DC she might indeed want to take an organized tour, unless she wanted to get shot. Second, I said, I completely understood her. I was uncomfortable with the obvious voyeurism of a slum tour myself. But I had read about the tour in more than one place, and it was supposed to be “insightful”, so I figured probably there was more to gain from the $10, two-and-a-half-hour affair than there was to lose. And that turned out to be true.
The tour guide’s name was Rakish, and he was about my age. He had a great face and a great white smile, which was a little distracting but I mostly paid attention. Rakish led us through Dharavi, Mumbai’s largest slum. (Fun fact: It is also where parts of the movie Slumdog Millionaire were shot.) In Dharavi you didn’t see aimlessness like you sometimes saw on the side of the street: a little girl pushing concrete with her feet; a boy walking in between traffic looking for change. In Dharavi you saw business and purposeful movement: life. It was a filthy, sweaty, repetitive life, but there was meaning to people’s actions, and that was something.
The government owned the land and the residents owned the factories. You were on your own there and you took care of yourself. If the giant burn-swell you got from the factory got infected, you had to figure out where to go to get it treated. Dharavi was a big producer of recycled plastic, among many other products, like pottery, textiles, leather, furniture, and biscuits. If you recycled plastic, you recycled plastic all day long. If you made textiles, you made textiles all day long. Often factories stayed open around the clock. If you were the night-shift biscuit maker, you made biscuits all night long. All this happened alongside tiny, cramped living quarters complete with leaking sewage pipes that mixed with the drinking water and oozed under kids’ bare feet as they skipped through narrow dirt walkways.
At the end of the tour, we hung around briefly in the English classroom that the tour company operated, waiting to pay. There was a threesome of fat Australian women in our group, and they started questioning Rakish about his love-life, marriage, and dowries.
“So when you get married, your wife’s family will pay you?”
“Yes, that’s how it works, yes.”
“And it’s a lot of money?”
“It depends. It can be.”
“It’s backwards! Why should the woman pay the man?”
Rakish gave a big laugh, revealing rows of white teeth against a dark brown smile, and it might have been one of the nicest laughs I had ever seen.
Jodhpur
It’s good to have connections wherever you are, but in India it’s especially good to have connections. I avoided fumbling through transit bureaucracy when Nupura found me a first-class train ticket to Jodhpur through her travel agent. My first travel arrangement was taken care of headache free, and on top of that, Nupura lent me her spare cell phone, without which the rest of my trip would have been severely more complicated. The train ride would take 17 hours and I was looking forward to it. I had heard about the trains. I had seen movies. Everyone raved about the trains. This was going to be fun.
The experience turned out to be somewhat miserable. I’d been expecting what a first class ticket from Beijing to Shanghai got you: clean white sheets in cute little compartments with tea and flowers on window side-tables. But this train was neither the Shanghai express of my past travels nor the Darjeeling Limited of Wes Anderson’s imagination. It had no sparkling sheets, no dining car, and no privacy in cute little compartments. And that was fine. But it did have bugs, and that was not as fine. I could deal with a sore ass and whining kids and a ripped blanket, and even bugs on the floor that I could crush under the sole of my shoe were somewhat tolerable. But to my shock and horror, I would sometimes find bugs crawling on my seat, and even brushing past my fingers or by the wall next to my face. This I wasn’t expecting, so it bothered me more than it should have, and as the train left Mumbai and the comfort of Shaffat and Sheker grew distant, I realized that everything ahead of me was a mystery. And from that point forward my trip became a game of expectations. When I expected a lot I was disappointed with less, and when I expected little—which I quickly learned to do—I was given more, and sometimes much more than I could have ever anticipated.
***
When I got off the train in Jodhpur, poorly rested and half dazed, I went straight to Hare Krishna Guesthouse, where I would meet Gemar Singh, a desert tour guide. I didn’t really like tours, but here I was on my way to a second one. This one came highly recommended by my friend Puja, who had family in India and had just spent five months touring the country. Clueless and trustworthy, I’d shot up north to Jodhpur especially for Gemar’s tour, which he had already planned with others and for which I preferred to rearrange my schedule to join rather than do a tour alone. (I liked being alone, but not with strange men in the middle of the desert.) Hare Krishna was in the old city, and driving there from the train station gave me my first whiff of old Rajasthan: narrow streets, bright walls, colorful shops, and cows and their excrement in the street. It was still very early in the morning, so the city was calm and quiet, and I felt good.The guesthouse owner knew immediately that I was there to meet Gemar, and he took me to the rooftop to wait for him. The guesthouse stood right next to Mehrangarh Fort, which towered above the city, beaming a burnt orange from atop the neighboring hill. All around were rooftops, mostly painted blue but also in terracotta, yellow, and beige. It was like a Lego city, or a 3D Tetris game, with different-sized residential units stacked in every direction on an ancient game board of sand. The view was magnificent. Hello, Jodhpur! I loved it, walking up and down the three-tiered rooftop, watching people hang their laundry in doorways and spotting the bald white heads of tourists in adjacent rooftop restaurants. Hare Krishna had a rooftop restaurant too, which was decorated in standard hippie drag: tile flooring, seat cushions, a multicolored sari canopy. The place looked cute, but it was a bunch of bohemian hoopla. Marije, my soon-to-be desert tourmate, told me that the owner of the place had looked at other guesthouses to see what travelers liked and copied the formula. Lonely Planet had made its rounds, spotted Hare Krishna, noted its charm, and would feature it in the next edition of its India guidebook. I was happy for the owner; it was a great thing to be in Lonely Planet. People found places to stay through Lonely Planet, and in a city of labyrinthine streets, they didn’t find places that weren’t in there. Lonely Planet soothed weary travelers with brief but alluring synopses about attractive lodgings with “dramatic views” and “enchanting rooftop cafes”. I could imagine Hare Krishna’s future write-up:
A 225-year-old building that’s just minutes away from the fort, this friendly, family-run place is a solid budget choice. Try to get a spot in the upper part of the building, where rooms are spacious, tiled, and themed by color. The rooftop vegetarian restaurant, though unimaginative, is nicely decorated with floor cushions and sari curtains and has sweeping views of the Old City.
When you had to book your room in advance, there was nothing to do but to narrow down the hundreds of possibilities to the five or six options that the guidebook handpicked for you, and then to narrow down further based on the phrases that “fit” you best:
Fort views: Yes, please.
Consistently spotless: Usually an exaggeration, but yes, please.
A little bit out of the way: Potentially romantic, but too complicated.
A good-sized billiard table: Not interested.
Stunning rooftop restaurant: Yes, please, always.
Threadbare rooms: Shame. I like threads.
Newly renovated: Better than threadbare.
Filled with young adventurers: Ew. Pass.
It was eHarmony for housing, and I ate it up.
I had just a short time to eat breakfast, drink coffee, and exchange a few words with my two tourmates when Gemar showed up. He was a dark skinny man with a long, bushy mustache and a few hints of age on his face, and just the sight of him put me immediately at ease. His look was fantastic, the way you would expect a wise man of the earth to look, and soon we were in the back of Gemar’s jeep driving out of the now awake, bustling city.
***
It was good to get a taste of life in the country. Gemar was Marwari. Marwaris are the entrepreneurs of Rajasthan, often called the Jews of India. Gemar did well for himself, but nobody out there was rolling in diamonds, and getting by in the desert was a dusty affair for sure. But, it was still cleaner and more civilized than being in the city. Poverty in Mumbai was toxic. It seemed to bring out the basest of conditions. In cities filled with tourists, children were trained to beg for money, but far out in rural areas the kids chased after you waving and yelling greetings. All they wanted was a hello and a smile, and that was refreshing.
We spent the day riding camels, eating what Gemar dubbed “desert food”, and lounging around lazily on blankets among the sand dunes. At night we gazed at the stars from cots outside and shivered under blankets in Gemar’s guest hut. Conversations with Gemar were interesting, and his wife was truly lovely. She seemed to constantly have a smile on her face, whether she was cooking, washing dishes, or just passing a bowl. Even when she talked she maintained a kind of half grin. She wore a red and gold sari, the veil of which she continually pulled down over her face. She seemed to be a woman very much at peace and happy with her life.
But I quickly grew impatient with the slow pace. There wasn’t much to see in the desert. The rolling sand dunes of my Lawrence of Arabia fantasy were few and far between. The ones we laid among were miniature versions of those in the Jaisalmar photos I had perused in my travel guide. There were some desert animals to look at, but they didn’t interest me much. Why did animals interest people so much? Maybe if I was a scientist of some sort they would be interesting, or if there were white tigers running around then maybe that would be impressive. But as a traveler with no background in biology, I couldn’t understand it. What did animals make? They made balls of shit in different sizes. I couldn’t relate to the widespread fascination with creatures that couldn’t carry on even the most inane of conversations. Having an interest in chimpanzees or some monkey of that sort I understood a bit better, if only marginally. Monkeys in general had some primitive human qualities and a certain amount of intelligence that could make for intriguing interaction. But a day spent in the desert with gagging camels, aimless peacocks, and the numbing silence of sand was a day of few sensations.
It was during these silent moments spent staring at sand dunes or watching the painful pace of the sunrise that I enjoyed inner tirades on the phenomenon of natural-living worship. First of all, to me, manmade things were far more interesting than most natural ones. Nature evolved and created and destroyed according to the laws of the universe and at the whims of the weather. Sometimes beautiful things resulted, certainly. And those beautiful things could be wondrous, indeed. (Give me a weekend away on a tropical island among waterfalls that flow into turquoise pools, sunbathing and eating mangos straight from the trees, and I will be happily amused.) But human creations were conscious ones; they required thought, purpose, and, often, emotion. And when from that thought and purpose and emotion came stunning and innovative structures, then those, in my opinion, were things truly worthy of admiration. Besides, humanity began in the country. What drove us forward as a civilization were the advances that moved us away from the primitiveness of a purely primal existence: science, technology, medicine, the arts, paved roads. Cities are the playground for these collaborations. Metropolises face the common challenges of dense population and housing; pollution and clamor; business, money, and confined recreation. And yet each one handles these features in radically different ways, and with varying aptitudes. Meanwhile, every city must deal with different climates; they are either blessed or dismissed by architects; they attract and expand and change; they gentrify and degenerate. These were the counterproductive thoughts that passed through my mind as I waited impatiently for morning.
***
I left the desert trip one day early. Partly I was nervous about running out of time to get through my itinerary, and partly I just wanted to get the hell out of there. The bus that I took back to Jodhpur looked like it’d been through nuclear war. The seats were all empty and half gutted, their yellow foam insides popping out of split seams. The windows were partially opaque from dust and grime. But, they were open, letting in a breeze that quickly turned the bus ride into one of my favorite parts of the desert trip. What more could you ask for? Clean air, wind in your face, the smell of sand and then food and then fumes. Motion… The bus filled up along the way until eventually it was completely full and I was sitting next to a woman in a beautifully colored sari. In this area all the women wore the traditional sari, and in Rajasthan the saris were the most exquisite in all of India. They were brightly colored and ornately decorated with gold thread and sequin designs. I tried to sneak peaks at the faces of the women sitting near me, but they were all modest and shy and continually pulled their headscarves over their faces. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the company. When a bus is full of rainbow women, you forget about the nuclear war.
I was eternally grateful to return to Jodhpur, and being back in the city I felt an overwhelming sense of urgency. I got back to Hare Krishna, chose the cheapest room available (which I later regretted, because it was a low-ceilinged windowless dungeon), threw my luggage down, and left for Mehrangarh Fort. I had considered taking a shower because I had not bathed since Mumbai, having spent one night on a train and the next in the desert. But the thought of any delay was far more depressing than the fear of body odor, and I abandoned the idea.
At the fort, I took the audio tour. I generally prefer not to take audio tours, because there’s only so much history I can stomach in old clothes (or ever). But whoever wrote the Jodhpur section of Lonely Planet must have been a history buff of sorts, because the fort’s audio tour came highly recommended. It also came free with the price of admission, so there was no guilt-free excuse not to give it a try. Even the man who gave me the headset assured me with absolute confidence that it would be the best audio tour I’d ever heard. In fact there was a wealth of information in the tour, and some of it was indeed interesting, but it was also impossibly lengthy and detailed. The man who’d given me the headset looked genuinely deflated when he saw me show up at the other end of the fort, apparently too quickly.
From the fort I walked to Jaswant Thada, an all-white marble memorial built for Maharaja Jaswant Singh II (obviously in admiration), after which I continued to the city’s central market. In between I had gotten lost about ten times and combated hundreds of merchants selling me spices for food I didn’t cook and knickknacks for wall space I didn’t have. I wandered in circles in the labyrinth until eventually I got frustrated enough to battle a rickshaw. I asked the driver if he knew how to get to Hare Krishna.
“Yes!” Total confidence.
He asked for directions about five times and finally we made it back to my guesthouse.
I arrived exhausted and full of self-loathing for having chosen the cheapest room. I could survive the prison cell and the detached, smelly toilet, sure, but it would be unpleasant. So I asked if they had a room with a window available. They said yes, and a nice-looking guy led me through a different section of the complex, up a much airier stairwell. The room he showed me was larger and had three windows. Each window had a lovely view of rooftops and sky. The bathroom was larger and cleaner and attached to the room. I asked him how much it was.
“500 rupees.”
About $10. My current room was 200 rupees, about $4.
“OK, well, do you have other rooms, like for 300 or 400?”
“No, but you can take this one for 400 if you want.”
It wasn’t my intention to bargain. I was ready to take the room for 500, I had asked merely out of curiosity. Who knows, maybe there was an equally pleasant room with two windows and less floor space for 350?
“Great! I’ll take it.”
I had haggled for prices many times in my life, but never by mistake. For four more dollars I had transformed my night from dingy and depressing to comfortable and relaxing. I felt good.
After a frozen shower I collapsed into bed. I had already decided not to venture out for dinner. The idea of wandering away from my guesthouse in the middle of the night in search of a notch up in cuisine wasn’t worth the effort. My alarm woke me, and, still groggy, I contemplated sleeping until the morning, as I had to wake up before dawn to catch a bus anyway. But I got up to peak out my window, and through half-open eyes I noticed that at night the city was sparkling. A real gem, it was! The breeze caught my hair and the city glowed with a kind of hushed magic that all the hippies who wandered through here probably went gaga over. For one, the daytime clamor had disappeared. The streets that had been packed at every turn just a couple hours before were empty and still. Lights dotted the rooftops, illuminating turquoise walls, and a misty glow cast silhouettes of buildings on the horizon. Cows slept silently in the street. It was my only night in Jodhpur, and I decided against sleeping through it.
On the rooftop, two travelers spoke softly in French, and I stared at the fort in front of me. The waiter brought me a candle to write by and the air was cool and refreshing. Between the pale blue railing and the canopy I could see the stars that just last night I had gazed at from outside Gemar’s hut in the desert. I thought of Gemar and his wife and son out there in that obscure emptiness, and I felt glad that I’d met them and spent a night in their home. There was a peaceful life outside of urban bustle, the maddening confusion of which I now realized extended far beyond Mumbai.
I got distracted from stargazing when I started to get eaten alive by mosquitoes and realized that I’d forgotten to put on repellent. I went back to my room and sprayed my body until I was toxic probably even to myself. But back on the roof the antiseptic smell was muted by the earthy, smoked scent of Jodhpur, and I could have sat there all night, with the cool air and the breeze and the silence and the mosquitoes. A rooftop view of Jodhpur during the day is delightful, but a rooftop view of Jodhpur at night is not to be missed.
Pushkar
At some point during my brief stay in Jodhpur I had decided to add Pushkar to my itinerary. I had never heard of the place before, but on one of the Lonely Planet photo pages there was a picture of a white lakeside temple so beautiful that I thought I couldn’t miss it. And on the map it looked reasonably close, on the way to wherever I might want to go next in Rajasthan. Pushkar is a small town and to get there I would have to go through Ajmer, another small city. The transfer sounded like a hassle, but that photo was so appealing to me that I didn’t think too much about it, and I bought a bus ticket for 7 a.m. the next day.In the morning it was still dark and everyone was asleep except for the nice-looking guy who had discounted my room. He said the cook was still asleep but that I could eat a banana if I wanted to. He invited me into the kitchen to choose something from the fridge. I took a few rolls. I wasn’t used to continental breakfasts here, but his effort was sweet.
“How much coffee would you like, big pot or small?”
“Small please, thank you very much.”
He brought me a big pot and I wanted to drink the whole thing, he was so nice, but if I did I’d be pissing in bus aisles.
I wandered the dark streets looking for the rickshaw drivers that were supposedly just around the corner, and the few dead ends that spun me around in circles brought on a mini fit of panic. When I finally found a rickshaw, I asked the driver if he would take me to the train station—where I would catch a bus to the bus station—and he agreed.
“How much?” I asked.
“500.”
“500?”
“Yes.”
It sounded pricey. The room I had just left had been less. I offered something lower, though the exact amount escapes me now.
“No, nighttime price is 500.”
I quickly ran my options through my head:
You are in the middle of a deserted street. With a huge bag on your back. It is pitch dark outside. Aside from sleeping cows there isn’t a living thing around you. Except for this rickshaw driver. You are trying to bargain a fare. You are an idiot, and your pride is pitiful.
My options weren’t great, so I got in the rickshaw.
***
The bus ride was fun. They stuck me in the first single seat, diagonal from the driver, so I had a good view of the street in front of me through the big windshield, which was laced with flowers all around. I could see in profile the driver’s expressions every time he nearly ran someone over. The honking was clear and incessant. The door stayed open so there was a constant breeze, and the driver’s sidekick hung halfway out the bus and yelled at cars and potential passengers. The bus itself was a pit. It was so beat up that it was hard to believe that it ever at some point was new. In fact maybe it never was, maybe someone had made it out of scrap parts that had survived World War II, been found decades later, sometime back in the 70s, and had been carried on camel-back from Europe through the Middle East to India, and not a single part of it had been replaced since. There was a pile of cardboard in the aisle by my feet, and as two men walked by and stepped on the scraps, big puffs of dust came out of the boards and rose into the air, and in the dust you could see flakes and bits of dirt illuminated by the light that came through the window. But the dust wasn’t bad compared to the filth on my window curtain. Window curtains are a pet peeve of mine. Something about the proximity of this obviously unsanitary, bacteria-infested cloth to my face is enough to bring on a spasm of nausea. And that’s even when they’re clean. Here they were not clean at all. These bus curtains were the ultimate fear. They were black. Black with filth. They were the filthiest pieces of cloth I had ever seen in my life. They were red curtains. Or pink curtains. Who could say for sure?
Yet surprisingly, the curtains didn’t bother me. Nothing on that decrepit bus bothered me at all. There was something far more endearing about this bus than the train I had taken from Mumbai to Jodhpur. Maybe because it was colorful. Maybe because it didn’t pretend to be first class. Maybe because there were no bugs. Whatever the reason, I liked it on that bus. It was a dirty, dirty place, but it was open to the elements in a natural, refreshing way. Life was good on that bus.
Life was not so great off the bus. The bus to Ajmer dropped me off about six kilometers outside of Ajmer. It was lucky that I’d seen this information on a street sign right before the bus driver told me to get off. It was unlucky that I didn’t process the information until after I’d gotten off the bus.
“Ajmer?” the driver had asked.
“Yes, Ajmer.”
But the driver had other plans. What to do? I didn’t know where I was, I got off, I landed right in front of a long strip of rickshaws. It was business. There was so much bullshit flying around all the time, it was hard to know when it was going to hit you in the face until it did. I had started the day at the mercy of a rickshaw driver and I was continuing on in the same sad fashion. It was dumb luck that I was in such a good mood coming off the bus that I was able to exhibit a bizarre combination of good cheer and confidence in the bargaining session that followed. It was mid-afternoon, so I had the cushion of daylight to comfort me. I went back and forth on prices endlessly. I walked around to other drivers. I shot them evil eyes, skeptical eyes, don’t-bullshit-me eyes. Occasionally I would throw out a big, throaty laugh, buzzing around and laughing and arguing. I was loud and obnoxious and I was having a hell of a good time. They dropped their original price by more than half, so I felt victorious despite having been cheated simply by being there. But as long as you are in a moving vehicle and your driver knows you have another destination—I planned to take the bus from Ajmer to Pushkar—the bargaining never ends. A price is never final. The drive to Ajmer brought on another round of haggling, pleading, role-playing, and threats on my part to jump out of the rickshaw, which eventually ended in an agreement to drive all the way to Pushkar, a tension-ridden deal that hung heavy in the whipping air until we finally made it there and I got the hell out and onto my feet again.
***
At first glance, Pushkar is beautiful and seductive. It is a small town surrounded by hills with a little lake in the middle. A long strip of pale blue-white temples wraps around the lake, a string of sleepy shrines with steps that lead down into their own wet reflections. Pigeons fly overhead and perch on black-and-white checkered marble floors. A colorful bazaar runs along the dirt road that winds around the lake, and walking through it you can catch views of the water through openings in the temples that lead to the ghats. There is an unarguable romantic appeal to such a view.
But it wasn’t long before I wanted to get the hell out of Pushkar, too. It was a town completely overrun by tourists. Pushkar suffered from tourism like the plague. White people were everywhere. They gutted the place. And they were all hippies. Hippies with long hair, frizzy hair, dreadlocks, messy up-dos, lopsided buns. They all wore baggy maharaja pants or long flowy bohemian skirts fastened with heavy bejeweled leather belts, intricate blouses wrapped with shawls and big, chunky earrings. They took over the streets and cafes and guesthouses. They filled the shops, sat in chairs outside and smoked, listened to headphones and mindlessly doodled henna designs on leather-bound notepads. They were depressing. Gandhi’s ashes were likely writhing at the bottom of that lake, mobilizing to self-ignite and take the whole town down once and for all. The hippies turned Pushkar into Disneyland. They ate its soul.
I spent a lot of time back at my guesthouse, sitting on the rooftop—which had a lovely view of other rooftops and the surrounding hills—contemplating the holocaust brewing among Gandhi’s ashes, among other things. I frittered away my time gazing at pastel patios and wondering what I was doing there. Did I have to be a hyper-spiritual pothead yoga junkie to appreciate Pushkar? Would a henna tattoo help? I tried to give the streets another chance in the evening, but it was the same disappointment. There was nothing to do but shop and pray, and I had no taste for either.
I wandered the bazaar hopelessly, combating disingenuous hellos. A man approached me and started the infamous Pushkar ritual of selling prayer flowers, another thorn in the side of this twisted place. I had been warned about these people by the hotel staff.
“Whatever you do, ignore the men that approach you with flowers. They will give them to you and then take you to throw them in the lake, and then they will charge you a lot of money!”
Apparently gullible travelers ate up the idea, and at the end of the charade they were met with a mind-boggling charge—I heard $50 from somebody—all for the chance to channel their consciousness through a drowning flower in an evaporating lake. It was a sham. Religion was a sham in its own right, but locals feeding it to tourists for a profit was even more dismal a spectacle than religion itself.
The flower seller made small talk for a while and then put a flower in my hand. It was magenta, bright and innocent-looking. The man made more small talk. I gazed at the flower. We walked on casually. I was starting to enjoy myself. I was talking to a local. I had a pretty flower in my hand. Eventually he asked me to join him in throwing the flower into the lake. I had been momentarily distracted from what was coming; a man gives you flowers and you lose sight of reality for a moment.
“No, thank you,” and I pushed the flower back at him.
“But miss, you should come to the lake to say a prayer and throw the flower.”
“No, thank you,” and I tried again to force the flower into his fist.
“Everybody comes to Pushkar to pray and throw flowers in the water!”
“I don’t want to pray and throw flowers in the water!”
“Come and throw flowers in the holy water!”
By now the flower was crumpled and half the petals had fallen off of it. It wasn’t just the tourists who polluted Pushkar.
On my own again, I went to a sweet shop in the bazaar. The shop was on a corner at the intersection of the main street and a side street, so it had two faces that were completely open to everything outside: shoppers, sellers, pedestrians, bikers, monkeys. I bought one of each type of sweet and took a seat on one of the benches. I spent the afternoon nibbling milk creams and sugar balls and watching the throngs of white people, trying to recover from disillusionment.
On my last day in Pushkar I befriended Praveen. Praveen was a journalist from Delhi who was taking a few days’ vacation to see a new part of India. I met him while climbing the steps to Savitri Temple, which sat atop a large hill. Praveen struck up a conversation on our way up the hill, which, me being in a foul mood and out of breath, I met with hesitation. At the temple we talked about our work, our travels, India and the U.S., Bollywood, etc., while overlooking the now shrunken town surrounded by rolling hills and green plains. Ultimately I recognized Praveen’s sincerity and intelligence as genuine, and when he offered to show me around Delhi, I graciously accepted. The stop in Pushkar was, on the whole, unfortunate, but for meeting Praveen I was very grateful.
Delhi
From Pushkar I decided to go straight to Delhi. There were a couple more cities I wanted to visit in Rajasthan—Udaipur especially—but after Pushkar I craved a change of pace, a new region to wander, and I made a plan to return to Rajasthan on my way back to Mumbai.
I consciously scheduled the long bus ride to Delhi so that I would arrive in the comfort of daylight. The ride itself was a riot of a good time, as I had never slept in a bus sleeper car before, and lying outstretched up high with my head out the window was, despite the filth of the place, a wonderful experience. The passengers were charming as well, from the young boys I befriended at the start of the trip, who in broken English riddled me with questions about the price of my pants, to the couple in the sleeper across the isle from me, who shared their tea and swatted bugs on my aisle window.
The bus arrived in Delhi at 6:00 a.m., and it was still completely dark outside. After the Ajmer debacle, I couldn’t be sure whether the driver, who spoke no English, was dropping me off in Delhi or miles outside of town. Getting off the bus, I saw nothing but a dark dirt road and the distant silhouettes of a few half-crumbled buildings and pedestrians who seemed to be moving in slow motion. It was a haunting, post-apocalyptic scene, and I found myself once again at the mercy of a single rickshaw driver. He was old and withered, with long gray hair, eerie eyes, and a frustrating incompetence, asking for directions from pedestrians as he faked his way to my hotel. Eventually I called the hotel, which, in a fit of anxiety in Pushkar, I had fortunately booked in advance, and the desk attendant guided my driver in a series of nerve-racking calls. In the end, the driver dropped me off in a quiet and deserted alley, at the foot of my hotel, the sky above me still black.
Exactly which hotel I had booked and which had claimed to be full escapes me now; I simply remember knocking on locked doors, crawling over sleeping bodies sprawled in entranceways, and arguing with an agitated man about reservations and check-in times. After some shuffling between one hotel and another, I was finally given some breakfast on the roof of one of them and assured a room in a few hours. At that moment, being forced to wait was a blessing, for after a rocky overnight bus ride and a fitful morning, I wanted nothing more than to sit quietly with a coffee, with no agenda, and to watch the sun slowly rise above the roofs of a new and mysterious city.
***
Delhi presented new shocks of its own. It is an expansive, sprawling city, not easily manageable on foot, though naturally I tried. Its sidewalks smell of urine, its hustlers are persistent, and its rickshaw drivers are merciless. My guesthouse was in Paharganj, a tourist-infested maze of mogul-ridden dirt roads and packed-to-the-brim bric-a-brac shops. Lonely Planet warned of the area’s uninspiring frenzy, but its proximity to the New Delhi train station and the relatively cheap rooms it offered were worth the sacrifice.
I spent some time wandering Delhi on my own, which mostly proved complicated and tiresome, and some time I spent on the back of Praveen’s motorcycle, weaving through traffic on crowded downtown streets and the surrounding highways, visiting sites, shopping for gifts, and eating Indian Chinese. Praveen’s company and guidance offered brief respite from the commotion, but I was faced with enough hounding, deception, and other myriad obstacles as a lone traveler that my nerves grew taught in Delhi nevertheless. It didn’t help that I found the city quite unattractive, too. I spent one day visiting the neighboring city of Agra, which, aside from its beautiful fort and the obvious Taj Mahal, has absolutely nothing to offer tourists but maddening rickshaw drivers and dirt. Back in Delhi, other than the charming Connaught Place—a series of concentric roads downtown that lit up at night with fairy lights, window shoppers, and corny jazz music—I had a hard time finding enough moments of peace to appreciate the city that many of the people I later encountered apparently loved dearly.
On my last night in Delhi, I met Soni for drinks. Soni was from New York City, where she used to work as a math teacher at the same school in Manhattan where my friend Yasmin had worked. I had met Soni a few times in New York, and since then she had left her hometown behind for a stint in Delhi working in fashion. Her whole family aside from her parents lived in Delhi, and she had good connections here.
Getting to the bar was a pain, having wrestled through the chaos of the train station parking lot to arrange a prepaid taxi, only to surrender to an additional fee once seated. The bar was apparently in a nice area of town, GKI, but it was nighttime and from the taxi window it was hard to make out exactly how different these parts were from all the others. But once I got to the entrance of Smoke House Grill, I knew I had entered another world.
The bar was exquisite. It was modern and spacious with a long well-stocked bar, high ceilings, and east-Asian-styled walls with dark brown bamboo stems that curved elegantly from floor to ceiling against amber papier-mâché wallpaper that was illuminated from behind. There were long, dark, shellacked wood tables with cream ribbed runners, and each table had a square cutout in the corner, space for two or three orange birds of paradise. A wall at the back was painted red with a Warholian photograph of the severed head of a white woman with cropped hair, surrounded by black flower prints and grass leaves that framed her face. A DJ played loungy bossa nova. The place was nearly empty aside from one woman in the back dressed in an elegant back-and-white-patterned sari talking on her cell phone. I sat down to wait for Soni.
A waiter came by and handed me a menu, and I flipped through its many pages, which were long and thick with embossed lettering. This place served dishes like seared scallops with Serrano ham and iced zucchini soup with marooned mushroom flan. The gorgonzola ravioli dish that Soni and I would share was enjoyable, but the truffle-infused risotto was one of the most delicious things I had eaten in a long time. The name of the restaurant implied that they smoked a majority, if not all, of their dishes, and the touch of smokiness in this dish was truly wonderful. A reviewer had written about the place: “The meal didn’t disappoint; rather it touched the stratospheric spheres of sensuality.” In April of 2008, Hello magazine had selected this place as one of the top five celebrity hangouts. Soni texted me that she would be a few minutes late. I told her I was in the cleanest place I’d been in over a week and that I was drinking a wet ginger martini. I could wait.
When Soni arrived, I greeted her warmly as if I had known her for years. Among a sea of strangers in a foreign place, even a mere acquaintance can feel very close.
“So how are you?!” I asked.
“I’m great! I’m doing really well,” she said.
“Yeah?? So why are you here? Why’d you leave New York? What are you doing here?” To think she was living and working in this maddening city…
“Well, I got this PR job and I’m really enjoying it. I coordinate all the fashion shows we do and everything else. It can get crazy but it’s a lot of fun.”
“So you like it.”
“I do.”
“That’s great. Is it really hard?”
“None of it is hard exactly, but I put in a lot of hours. I work on Saturdays, which is rough.”
“You work on Saturdays?” Horror.
“Everyone works on Saturdays. I have second Saturdays off. Some people have second and fourth Saturdays off. Sometimes you can choose. And Sunday is family day. I love Sundays; the streets are so quiet and you can get anywhere fast.”
It was one thing to work overtime every weekend. It was another to have the weekend built into your work schedule.
“That’s the one thing I miss, I miss my weekends. But other than that life is good. I don’t know how long I’m going to be here, but for now I’m really happy.”
“But you weren’t happy in New York? You like it better here?”
“Yeah, I mean, I had to get out of New York. I’m from there and I’d spent so many years of my life there. It got old. And anyway, it’s better here.”
“Better? How so?”
“There’s no bullshit here.”
“There’s bullshit in the U.S.?”
“Yeah, tons! Being Indian, I’d get shit all the time. Like, ‘Oh, I know an Indian, do you know him?’ Or like, ‘Oh, I’ve always wanted to have an Indian girlfriend.’ All the time, things like that.”
“I see.”
“Here, I look like everyone else. There are no questions. It’s much easier.”
Interesting.
“Okay, so, you like this city.”
“This city is amazing. Delhi grows on you. I love it.”
Aside from Connaught Place and now this bar’s risotto, Delhi still seemed like a pisshole to me. I obviously had not seen enough of it.
Soni had an apartment, which she shared with a roommate. She had a maid. She had a cook. And she had a boyfriend in Bangalore.
“And this is where I hang out,” she said. “These kinds of places.” Style.
I asked her about her boyfriend. “How’d you meet him?”
“When I first got here I was living in Bangalore, though we actually met at a beach party in Goa. We were together in Bangalore, but after a couple months I got bored of the city so I moved here.”
“So, now it’s long distance for you two.”
“Yup.”
“What are you going to do if you decide to leave India?”
“I dunno.”
She told me they were pretty serious and that he was very much infatuated with her.
“Why doesn’t he move to Delhi to be with you?” I asked her.
“He would do it in a heartbeat if I asked him to. I just don’t know.”
It was hard to know. I changed the subject.
“So, do you drink the tap water here?”
“Nobody drinks the tap water. They all have filter systems.”
“Do you ever wear saris?”
“Never. Nobody at work does.”
“But many people still do!” I had seen them with my own eyes, on that bus in Jodhpur…
“If I was working at a bank I’d wear a sari. If I was a teller or something. But otherwise they’re just for weddings.”
She told me about an incident in Bangalore where a woman was denied entry to an event because she was wearing a sari. Apparently the story was causing a bit of a fuss all over the country.
“Is it weird to be 26 and not married?” I asked her.
“No. None of my friends here are married either.”
“But isn’t there an expectation to get married young?”
“Sometimes there’s some pressure,” she admitted. “Like, my friend doesn’t like going to weddings. Family members will whisper hints in her ear about settling down. But still, her parents are pretty chill.”
Soni and I talked for a while longer and the bar filled up as the night went on. But by midnight we had to part, as it was dangerous to go home alone too late at night; just recently a girl had been raped by a cab driver in the pre-dawn hours. So we took a deluxe taxi service home, per Soni’s insistence.
Jaipur
The next morning, I took an early train to Jaipur. I wanted to sleep on the way there, but all the free things they gave out along the way made it impossible. I couldn’t give up the free bottle of water, or the newspaper, or the little paper cup with a teabag and sugar packet and stirrer, and the personal plastic thermos of boiling water and the little vegetarian patties and the white rice with peas and the stale white bread. It was all free, and free was fun. So I arrived in Jaipur totally exhausted, but still I had studied the city map during the ride and had a pretty good sense of how to walk to my hotel. So I walked. And it was hell.
The walk itself wasn’t hell, but attempting to walk was a miserable experience. It took me about 10 minutes to find my way from where I had exited the train through the massive parking lot to the exit I knew I needed. The entire time a man tried to get me to take his rickshaw. The. Entire. Time. His resilience knew no boundaries. It defied logic, reason, empathy (for me), any sense of compromise, and the natural extent of human patience.
“Where are you going?” he asked me.
“I’m going to my hotel.”
“I take you in my rickshaw, 30 rupees.”
“No thanks, I want to walk.”
“Nooooo, so far! Where is your hotel?”
I could have ignored him then. I had declined. I owed him nothing. But the man was so near, so eager, so poised to pounce, and somewhere behind my razor ribs I have a soft, jam-like soul. It can be unfortunate.
“It’s on MI Street.”
“Oh! MI Street! So far away! I take you.”
“I want to walk.”
“It’s too hot outside to walk, you can’t walk in this heat.”
But I could.
“Miss, MI Street so far away, I will take you in my rickshaw, 30 rupees.”
“No, thank you!”
“Where you from madam?”
“U.S.”
“U.S.A.? 30 rupees I take you in my rickshaw madam. MI Street is too far away.”
It went on. It went oooon and ooooon and oooooon through the heat and the dust and the weight of my bag and I wanted to die, I wanted him to die, somebody had to die damnit! I tried ignoring him. It didn’t work. The poor guy wouldn’t leave me alone. Poor me! The whole time I’d been looking straight ahead, his head bobbing into my periphery, but I never turned to look. Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore, it had become intolerable. I had to whip out the bitch, the bitch that comes out around those closest to me but that I rarely let a stranger see. I turned around and glared into the driver’s eyes with a wild ferocity. It was the stare of a cracked-out lunatic on the brink of a violent act, and I put my hand up to my face, enunciating with grim intensity:
“I don’t want a rickshaw.”
The man disappeared, and I arrived at the entrance of the station, an intersection of gridlock and mayhem in front of me.
I made it to my hotel with only one wrong turn, so despite the station encounter still weighing heavily on my soul, I still enjoyed the sweet tang of victory. That same rickshaw driver had pulled up next to me while I was walking and asked again if I wanted a ride. It was a truly stunning display of desperation, the shock of which first amused and then saddened me. My hotel was pleasant and my room was clean and comfortable. I took a shower and fell into bed. I awoke refreshed, lying in clean white sheets under the breeze of the ceiling fan. Kicking myself out of bed, I studied my map for directions to the Old City, calculated that it would be pathetic to drive there, and settled on walking. Navigating was the way to see things.
***
Jaipur was a mess, and trying to cross its streets was a nightmare. I quickly became totally exhausted again, and I visited the sites only out of a sense of obligation. I had not eaten since the mini breakfast on the 6 a.m. train, and by now it was late afternoon and I was starving. I didn’t really mind shedding a few pounds, but combining fatigue and malnourishment with chaos and confusion was hard on the system.
On the side of the street a man was selling pakori, some kind of dough mixed with chilies and spices, deep fried, and served in newspaper with mint chutney. Ignoring all my qualms about street food and the threat of diarrhea, I bought some and ate them while walking. They were so spicy and delicious I almost died from happiness eating those things. And people noticed too, they were like yeah! Pakori! You like pakori? I like pakori! Very spicy pakori? I like spicy pakori! This girl likes pakori! Way to go girl! The exact dialogue escapes me now, but it went something like that. It made them happy that I was eating pakori and it made me happy that they were happy for me. Any kind of interaction other than buying and selling and driving made me happy.
One of the sites I visited was the City Palace, and inside they were setting up for a party, probably a wedding. The decorations were extravagant, as one would expect from a palace affair. There were strings of fairy lights, mirrors cut into stars and crescent moons, red velvet drapes and rugs, and bouquets of long-stemmed white and red flowers. One wall was lined with table-clothed buffet tables and china. The palace itself was beautifully elaborate, with ornate detailing in every corner, but I found the wedding preparations even more intriguing. A part of me wanted badly to take part in the festivity, to sit and watch the setup for so long until maybe they would feel some kind of pity for me and invite me to join. Perhaps as a waitress? A fair-skinned tray holder to pass out desserts or glasses of champagne?
As I left through the front gate of the palace, I noticed several white charter buses in the parking lot nearby. In the palace there had been a lot of old people, mostly clustered in groups, and I wondered if all they did here was shuffle around from site to site on those big white AC buses, from 5-star hotel to 5-star hotel. I couldn’t bet my life on it, but that’s what it looked like. And it was a sad thing if it was true. Who did these people encounter? The guys who sold postcards outside tourist sites. The people who sold things in markets and on the street. The beggers who had nothing to sell. The tour guide. The bus driver. The hotel staff. Seeing India this way, you could leave thinking it was a country of beggars and servers. A country of the beautiful palaces of dead maharajas and the alien pandemonium that surrounded them. That was all part of it, certainly, but it was only one part. And if that’s all you saw, it could leave you as unaware as having seen almost nothing at all.
***
In both Mumbai and Delhi, I had gotten a taste of India’s second face: dining with Shaffat at top-of-the-line restaurants, haggling over Kashmiri hand-painted papier-mâché collectibles with Praveen, and sipping martinis with Soni in poshland. But it was in Jaipur where my trip took a turn, and what had started as a taste of “the good Indian life” became, for the remaining days of my stay in India, my life.
I had come to Jaipur not to see the city—and thankfully so because compared to other cities it is missable—but for the specific purpose of meeting Radhika and Druhv, the cousin of a high school classmate who, after finding out about my trip to India, suggested that I get in touch with some of his relatives. It was a lovely gesture and a great opportunity to interact with people on a more personal level. In the evening I received a call from them saying that they would like to take me to their home. This sounded wonderful to me, and had they sat me down for a mere half hour with a cup of tea, I would have been beyond satisfied. Instead, they invited me to join them at two weddings. Their invitation, which they extended casually—as though they went to weddings every other Thursday and often back-to-back—I naturally accepted, stunned and elated.
It was wedding season, and weddings in India are often a 1,000-person-plus affair, which explains why people get invited to so many, and also why it’s so easy to crash them. Everyone invites everyone they know, and often the friends and relatives of all those people. Radhika and Druhv kindly picked me up at my hotel and brought me to their beautiful home, in a quiet suburb removed from the hectic downtown, where they hovered over me with warm attention. Radhika showed me her day’s purchases, a bag full of multicolored fabrics that she would give to her tailor to transform into outfits. She explained which fabrics she would pair together, the designs she had in mind for each pattern, and for what occasion she would wear each one. Then we ate a small meal, which was actually a large one, and made our way to the first wedding.
The wedding venue was a large open space outdoors on a long street that was lined with a series of nearly identical ones, offering an endless selection of cloned marital hotbeds. The groom was the uncle of a co-worker of Dhruv’s, our party’s loose link to this sprawling affair. We were in and out of there in a flash, taking the time to shake hands with the family, watch the groom ride in on a horse, and down a serving of naan and curry from the vegetarian buffet. Dhruv explained that all Rajasthani weddings were meat and alcohol free. In light of that fact, I was impressed by the festive atmosphere.
We drove to the second wedding. The groom was the son of Dhruv’s dog walker. The newlyweds were already sitting for pictures and the bride looked mortified.
“Radhika, why does she look like she wants to kill herself?”
“Well, she is probably overwhelmed. She has to move in with her husband’s family and take care of them now. It’s a big change.”
Radhika, Druhv, and I popped in for a picture, then went to the buffet for another meal. I mustered another plateful and a lovely milky drink for dessert, which was served in a ceramic cone-shaped mug. I felt really good, sitting in on these anonymous weddings and eating platefuls of wedding fare, a bit like a crasher but mostly just like the most content, whitest girl in the world.
Udaipur
With only a few days left in India and being somewhat pressed for time, I booked a flight from Jaipur to Udaipur and flew out the next morning. It was my first time on a domestic flight in India, and it felt oddly efficient. Airports everywhere seem to function in relatively the same manner. The passengers were mostly middle- to upper-class Indians and white tourists. The flight was sanitary and seamless, and my destination turned out to be the same way.
In Udaipur I met Sunil, a marketing manager from Delhi living in Mumbai and a member of the online Couchsurfing community, through which we met. Sunil was in town for the wedding of his good friend, Runi, and he graciously invited me to join him for the preliminary festivities and for the ceremony.
Everything about my stay in Udaipur was a real joy. My room was very cute, with a view of a temple and passing school girls. The rooftop of my guest house offered views of the whole city and the floating palaces on the lake just below. Udaipur felt cleaner and quieter than any place I had been thus far in India. I could walk the winding streets in peace, and I finally found the patience to spend my money and shop. Sellers beckoned, but only softly and intermittently. During the day, I met Sunil and his friends to tour the city palace and other sites, and I ate lovely meals of spicy chicken tikka under the flower-petal archways of hotel restaurants that overlooked the lake. Each evening I met Sunil and his friends for Runi’s wedding engagements, which were so festive and full of color, and she so beautiful and welcoming, that being there felt simultaneously natural and totally unreal. At night, Sunil and his friends and I searched in vain for bars or nightlife of some kind, and instead drank vodka on their hotel-room balcony, listening to music from their cell phones until early morning. Udaipur is a fairy tale city, in its look and in its feel, and for me, also for its company.
Mumbai, Part II
After the wedding I returned to Mumbai with Sunil and his friends, and my last few days were a whirlwind of amusements. Shaffat had gone to Canada for vacation, so I stayed downtown in a sparse but clean room overlooking the Victorian gothic Chhatrapati Shivaji railway station, its onion-dome silhouettes on the horizon. I went to galleries and cafes and revisited my favorite Oval Maidan. I met more Couchsurfers, with whom I went to restaurants, bars, and nightclubs. Prem, a devout “surfer”, took me on rides all over the city on the back of his motorcycle, through Bandra and Juhu Beach, where the middle class gathered side by side with India’s richest. Driving on a Sunday, we passed streets flooded with families and young people enjoying their day off, sitting in outdoor cafes and walking by the beach. Fireworks went off in the night sky above wedding venues. It was a view of India’s second face, a face so familiar and friendly that, even when I was alone, it helped make all that had felt so alien and unnerving feel comforting. The streets of Mumbai, at first mazelike and frustrating, were now easily navigable, and I walked among them in a kind of euphoria and with surprising sentimentality and affection. After two-and-a-half weeks, I had filled my borrowed cell phone with phone numbers and my itinerary with social engagements, and I didn’t want to leave.
***
I spent my last day in Mumbai as an extra on the set of a Bollywood film. It was an experience filled with absurdities that I don’t have the patience to outline here, but I will never forget the drive to the airport from the set in Film City. From the comfort of Shaffat’s SUV, I made some final phone calls to friends and then handed over my cell, with all its contacts, to Sheker, who would return it to Nupura. Having spent all day walking through dirt in sandals (the accessory to my far-too-skimpy Bollywood wardrobe), I arrived at the airport sweaty and filthy, and I spent my time pre boarding washing my feet in the bathroom sink and unraveling the cocoon of pins and hairspray on my head. When I got off the plane in Washington it was morning, and I took the metro straight to my office and started the workday, my travel bag under my desk and my hair still sticky with styling product. The trip had turned out to be quite a success, and I was spilling over with excitement and stories over the next few weeks. Of course, it is always hard to describe a trip to curious friends and family, and it is only the smallest anecdotes that ever get shared. So I got the absurd idea that maybe I should write about my trip, in an attempt to share a few more of those stories with whoever might care to read about them.
You can view my photos from India here.
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