To Hellholes and Back Read online

Yearly attacks stretch well into the last century. The gruesome Hindu-Muslim violence of the Bombay Riots of 1992 and 1993, for example, left more than 900 dead. As Time magazine reported: “The bestiality of human mobs was gruesomely exemplified at Bombay last week, when rioting Hindus and Mohammedans stoned and slashed and disemboweled one another until the dead totaled 106 and the wounded over 600, with the seven-day riot still going on.”

  Oh, wait. That Time quote actually describes Bombay’s Hindu-Muslim riot of 1929. Anyway, the picture is clear. This is an explosive place.

  Climate Change and Degradation

  India receives 5 percent less sunlight than it did twenty years ago due to a cloud of airborne particles released by industrial plants that filters the sun year round. The World Health Organization claims that air pollution is responsible for 527,000 deaths in India each year. The country’s rivers are toxic dumps. If global warming is going to strike North America with a vengeance, India is the place where we’ll get a preview of the horror.

  Peak Oil

  During one of many summer 2008 price hikes, the cost of gas increased 10 percent overnight. Literally, overnight. The ensuing panic led to alarmist news reports, including one that ended with a clip of the dog-eat-dog desert resource wars from Mad Max and a grave prediction from a Kent Brockmanesque anchor that similar Aussie-style barbarism could become a daily feature of Indian life in a matter of months.

  Another depressing thing about India—its news media, like its American counterpart, is perpetually in the grip of doomsday prophecy. Gloom and ruin are inescapable in any newspaper or TV news program. Military conflict. Water shortages. Overpopulation. Poverty. Pollution. Yet another humiliating cricket defeat at the hands of the filthy Sri Lankans. If the world is going to hell in a handbasket, it seems inevitable that the handbasket will be made in India—and at a cut-rate cost American producers of handbaskets can never hope to compete with.

  On a personal level the forecast is just as horrifying. During pretrip research, I bring up my abiding fear of gastric distress and doctors diagnosing phony appendicitis to an Indian friend who spent most of her life in the mother country. Anita nods and says that although I have little to fear from rotten meat or toxic chemicals, I am nevertheless likely to suffer a spiteful anal purge and vicious streak-of-thunder vomiting while visiting her country.

  “The problem is that most people in India don’t use toilet paper,” Anita explains. “The majority can’t afford it. After they go to the bathroom they simply wipe with their hands. Sometimes they don’t wash themselves so thoroughly.”

  “When you say ‘most people’ wipe their asses with their bare hands…”

  “Yes, this includes those who will prepare your meals. It’s particles of excrement, not spoiled or bad food, that will get you sick in India.”

  With that sprinkling of fecal glitter on its reputation as global financial hobgoblin—poised to swamp the U.S. economy by thieving every call center job and American motel lease available—India emerged for me as the great nexus of all fears. If Africa was a sump pit of primordial simplicity, India promised to be an overflowing cauldron of contemporary complexity.

  In Flashman in the Great Game—a fictional account of India under Victorian rule written in 1975 that nonetheless distinguishes itself as a valuable primer for visitors to the country—the brilliant George MacDonald Fraser writes, “Everyone hates India for the first thirty days then loves it forever.” Taking chances on neither side, I book my visit for thirty-one days.

  Next, I go to work on the one and only Joyce, sitting her down in her favorite chair, urging her to forego the dream of a beach casita in Baja for another year, burn her entire allotment of annual leave, and join me for the first half of the trip (discreetly leaving out details of my conversation with Anita). Like that Grizzly Man knob who grandstanded himself into a bruin Happy Meal while getting his girlfriend to anonymously film the final slaughter—in which she became dessert—if I’m going to release myself to the Armageddon of India I want someone around to document the heroic effort without horning in on my glory. If there’s one regret I’ll carry to my grave, it’s not having any photographic evidence of my death-defying passage through the hard-currency black market alleys of Kinshasa.

  “Colorful bazaars by day, blazing curry dinners by night,” I say, painting a picture of Oriental wonder and putting on some George Harrison.

  “Am I going to have to get any shots for this?”

  “Depends how current your hepatitis schedule is. And you might need a tetanus booster. Have you had a typhoid inoculation? There are also about a hundred dollars’ worth of medications you’ll want to buy.”

  “For what?”

  “Apparently an issue with the vegetables. Flesh-eating bacteria or something. And malaria, of course.”

  Joyce takes her time, but eventually comes around. “Just keep me away from the tainted lettuce,” she finally says, forcing a smile before getting into the spirit of things with a childlike enthusiasm that I fleetingly consider smashing for her own good before it’s time to go.

  For world wanderers, the debate between the independence and loneliness of traveling solo versus the compromises and companionship of traveling with a partner is unending. A robust Italian couple I encountered some years ago while camping on the beach at Bahía de Concepción in Mexico with my Texan friend John May provided my most memorable example of the eternal dichotomy.

  Thrillingly tanned in the way only Speedos, French-cut bikinis, and a carefree approach to skin cancer in the face of an unremitting Mexican sun can get you, Marco and Maria were having the time of their lives, chugging Coronas, frolicking in knee-high surf, and talking in that noisy, extroverted fashion that you do at Italian surprise parties (I imagine). Marco was heavyset. Not fat, but thick in an impressive Sicilian bodyguard kind of way. Balding handsomely, he was gilded with an impressive array of jewelry that quite obviously hadn’t been purchased from the band of imitation gem and turquoise salesmen that roamed the beach. Maria was even more stunning, a boobtastic, midthirties Sophia Loren ringer with shimmering black hair, deep mysterious eyes, and radiant skin. Everything Italian you’d ever want, minus the marinara sauce.

  Marco, Maria, John May, and I stood in our swimsuits talking and drinking beer for thirty or forty minutes—Marco had come over to borrow our bottle opener—watching the sunset and throwing sticks into the ocean for a friendly dog who’d wandered by to check us out. When the sky turned dark, Marco invited us to join them for dinner at a restaurant a few miles up the road.

  The fiesta vibe continued at dinner—shots of tequila, a jug of sangria, heartfelt toasts to international friendship. About an hour into the party, Maria—ten drinks in and still as poised as the guy on the Beefeater label—rose and excused herself. Marco watched her like a doting father all the way to the bathroom, but as soon as the door closed behind her his mood darkened. Stretching both arms across the table, he leaned toward us with searching despair.

  “My friends, I am in hell!” he said. “It is torture. This woman, she is drowning me. All day, all night. Every minute, we are together. There is no escape. I am ready to die!”

  “But she’s gorgeous,” I replied. “And you guys seem like you’re having a great time.”

  “It is an act.” Marco turned both hands into claws and gestured as though a wild animal were tearing apart his rib cage. “Inside is only death. I cannot escape.”

  “Is she acting, too?”

  “I don’t know. Who knows these things? Women!”

  Marco stole a furtive glance at the bathroom, then lowered his voice.

  “Tell me, where will you be later tonight?”

  “Later tonight?”

  “There is a disco in town, thirty minutes away. Maybe you will be going there?”

  “Uh, actually, we’ll probably just head back to our campsite after dinner.”

  “You have drinks there? You will be drinking?”

  “We have some Coronas lef
t in the cooler.”

  At this point, Maria reappeared across the room. As she shimmied toward us Marco whispered, “OK, I will see you at your camp.” But when Maria returned to the table he jumped up to greet her with kisses, and after dinner we never saw either of them again.

  Joyce and I arrive in Delhi late at night and check into a guesthouse called Eleven, which is run by an instantly likable, mellow-gold fifty-year-old named Ajay. Fortified with Ajay’s boundless supply of tea and bananas, we spend our first two days in country on basic tourist detail.

  The biggest Delhi attraction is the Red Fort, a redoubtable Mughal construction of red sandstone and white marble synthesizing elements of Persian, Indian, and European architecture. Completed in 1648 by thousands of typically underpaid workers, the ornamental fortress is studded with turrets and bastions and surrounded by a mile-and-a-half-long wall that rises as high as a hundred feet in some places. The complex is worthy of the considerable hype it receives, though it should be noted that its guidebook-baiting UNESCO endorsement may be less impressive than many travelers realize. UNESCO currently counts 878 world heritage sites, including such biggies as the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site just outside of St. Louis, an attraction appreciated by Missouri public school field trippers as a chance to get out of grinding classroom tedium for a day, but few others beyond the creative grant petitioners who secured its august international standing.

  At the Red Fort, Joyce unexpectedly becomes a side attraction for Indian tourists, several of whom ask to preserve their memories of the historic spot by having their pictures taken alongside her. “Please, Miss,” they say, approaching with giggles and waving cameras at her like delectable snacks.

  After a third stranger requests a picture, I catch a startling glimpse of Joyce through a viewfinder and realize that while her pleasing all-American radiance may be a factor, the more probable explanation for her unexpected intercontinental allure is an abundance of clearly visible nipple sweat. The modest khaki, button-up blouse Joyce had pulled from her bag this morning in our air-conditioned room has been transformed by the hundred-degree midday swelter into a clingy sage canvas that makes every drop and, quite frankly, pool of glandular secretion available for randy public assessment. On the world stage, Joyce is no pansy—this is a woman who’s hovered over the rankest squat toilets in Southeast Asia and shuffled away without a mark on her pant cuffs—but who wants to greet exotic foreigners with twin chalices of perspiration rimming each breast? Even for an infidel, the look is a bit déclassé.

  The fort itself is superb, but the sweaty shirt, unwanted attention, and laxative rumbling of Ajay’s tea and bananas puts both of us in an edgy temper that’s magnified at our next stop, Chandni Chowk, the snarling, overpopulated hub of Old Delhi underclass shops, cafés, temples, apartments, safe houses, hideouts, and DVD pirating labs. In this nest of pickpockets and preachers, the leering shutterbugs are absorbed into the human cacophony, clearing the way for our first encounter with the inescapable agents of darkness who will be constant companions for the next four weeks—salesmen.

  Indian salesmen are the fucking worst. The irrepressible dickheadishness of the country’s merchant class stalks you like a disease from the moment you step outside your hotel, forcing you to become the kind of blinkered, “Get the fuck away from me” survival-mode tourist asshole you’ve always promised yourself you’d never become. Being white in this country puts a target on your back the size of a garlic naan.

  Amid the stream of pleas, promises, and come-ons there are flashes of levity—“Sir, wouldn’t you be honored to visit the shop where Richard Gere, Paul McCartney, and Wes Anderson have all bought spices?” Mostly, though, the pressure comes from wheeler-dealer jackoffs who throw themselves at you in unrelenting waves, like postmodern cinematic hyperzombies—forever approaching, hooting, hissing, demanding, wheedling, pawing, clawing, badgering, hassling, negotiating, renegotiating, reneging, hectoring, flim-flamming, lurking, following, promising, promoting, emoting, up-charging, lying, prying, spying, conniving, and, worst of all, sometimes actually convincing you to buy crap you’ve got absolutely no practical use for. All of which makes India by a developing-country mile the most annoying place in the world in which to be a tourist. Of course, I’ve never been to Egypt. Or Target the day after Thanksgiving.

  In India, the torment is amplified because you can’t even buy things you want without engaging in a mano-a-mano duel of wits and nerve with some street shark who’s far more adept at the game than you. At a train station in Udaipur, a wild-eyed schemer selling magazines follows Joyce and me like a piranha closing on a pair of guppies. From the instant we climb out of the taxi all the way to the platform, he stays with us stride for stride. Through my constant rejection—first polite, then increasingly belligerent—his bludgeoning pitch continues for fifteen nonstop minutes and includes everything from the unimpeachable standards of Indian journalism to the seven hungry mouths he’s got to feed at home.

  We finally shake the guy when we load into our reserved second-class compartment, only to have him burst through the curtain two minutes later and start laying out his entire stock on a bunk, demanding payment for magazines we damaged by forcing him to chase us through the station. To get rid of him I have to literally push him out of the compartment and off the train—after agreeing to buy a fucking magazine. I know, I’m a chump, but this is the way it happens.

  I’m not asking for change. India without its army of sleazy, dishonest, pushy merchants would be as lackluster and “safe” as America’s smoke-free bars. I’m just saying, even if they’d actually let you look at the merchandise without crawling into your underwear and telling you it’s the wrong size, you can only take so much abuse from a gang of opportunists whose personal sensitivity ranks just below Phnom Penh cathouse touts.

  I grew up in a tourist town. You expect a few rip-offs in these places. “This traditional painting is done on genuine camel bone,” a vendor tells you. Take it out of the wrapper. Tap in on a table. It’s plastic. Fine. But as craftsmen of hustle, the Indians make Henri look like a peanut vendor at a minor league baseball game.

  A typical, verbatim exchange:

  Me (entering restaurant): Is the full menu available? Waiter: Yes, sir! Please have a seat.

  Me (ten minutes later): I’ll have the tandoori chicken and a garlic naan.

  Waiter: So sorry, sir, these items are not available because we are not operating the tandoor oven.

  Me: No naan, either?

  Waiter: Yes, sir. Because not busy today.

  Me: But you told me the full menu was available. That’s why I asked.

  Waiter: Yes, sir.

  Me: Could I at least get that beer?

  Waiter: So sorry, sir, because we have no license for beer, sir.

  Me: Because you have no license for beer, what?

  Waiter: Yes, sir.

  Me: Because you have no alcohol license you have no beer?

  Waiter: Yes, sir.

  Me: But when I sat down you took my order for a beer.

  Waiter: Yes, sir. One large Kingfisher beer, sir.

  Me: But there’s no beer?

  Waiter: So sorry, sir. Because we have no license for beer, sir. The beer may come later.

  Me: May come later?

  Waiter: Yes, sir.

  Me: Um, OK, just a mineral water then and the vegetable curry.

  Waiter: Yes, sir. I will check on the water.

  Even in their celebrated holistic arena, Indians’ tenacious sales instinct remains a core attribute. In the Kerala town of Thekkady, I lay down for one of the region’s famed ayurvedic massage treatments, a blizzard of oils, herbs, and “vein straightening” considered medicinal when submitted to in large, agonizing doses. On the advice of a reliable contact, I’d sought out a venerated local specialist, an organic, gray-bearded guru with several martial arts degrees and thirty years of experience rubbing people down before twisting them around like an antler. Ten minutes into the session, with
bamboo flutes, burbling water, barking dogs, and fighting children in the background, the visionary master launched the up-sell.

  “Best ayurvedic program is seven-day course,” he said while wrenching my shoulder into a position best known to orthopedic surgeons and NFL linebackers on the disabled list. “You do seven-day course you are new man.”

  “I’m leaving Thekkady the day after tomorrow.”

  “Perfect! Two-day course is even better. You come back tomorrow. Eleven o’clock, first appointment of morning is best. I give special price.”

  The shocking low point came after the massage when the guru climbed naked into the shower with me to wash my back and me having no small difficulty convincing him to leave.8 I stumbled away reeking of cumin and lemon furniture polish—an all-natural potion, the guru assured me, though I’m certain Dow Chemicals was involved—with no further commitments, financial or otherwise. Even nude and soapy, you have to remain resilient in the face of the Indo hard sell.

  The most instructive retail lesson comes in a dingy textiles shop in Delhi—everything from elephant-embroidered eye pillows to elephant-embroidered shoulder bags—where Joyce and I watch a middle-aged French couple in matching faux-leopard-skin outfits attempt to drive a hard bargain with the equally intense owner, a tall, skinny guy with bloodshot eyes and a mouthful of canine teeth. The French want ten elephant-embroidered baskets for thirty euros, exactly one-third the asking price. They really don’t want to budge from their “We’re volume buyers; you will meet our price” position, but with Broadway exasperation the French woman finally slams a fifty-euro note on the counter and huffs, “Last offer. You take fifty euros; we take all the baskets.”

  The French woman appears to believe that fifty euros will feed all of Delhi for a week, but the owner still wants his ninety euros, and the couple eventually storms off in a cloud of disgust. As the climax of this petty drama is being reached, a gaunt, unshaven Brit, the same form of postcolonial ghost you see all over Asia, wanders into the shop with his two cents.