To Hellholes and Back Page 13

  “You’re a poor negotiator, Dabi,” the Brit reprimands the owner. “Your starting price is too high.”

  “The price is clearly marked on each item,” Dabi replies. “If they don’t like my price, don’t buy.”

  “Yes, but your price is five times what it costs anywhere else. It’s a rip-off.”

  “People who are smart enough not to be ripped off should be smart enough to avoid my shop. There is no sense getting angry about it.”

  A turn off one of Delhi’s nondescript, smog-choked thoroughfares leads us into a five-hundred-year-old Islamic neighborhood known as Nizamuddin, a Middle Ages hive of stacked adobe buildings so thoroughly Muslim that Delhi locals regard it as the closest thing to Pakistan this side of a stolen Sidewinder missile. Dark, narrow passageways meander like Faulkner prose deeper and deeper into one of those teeming backwaters that either repels or seduces the Western visitor. Fortunately, I’m easily entranced by Eastern exotica even if, as is the case here, I have to step over puddles of urine to get to it.

  Every block is a wonder: Five men squat around a stone oven sunk into the ground, slapping slabs of stretched dough against the smooth rock. Frothy white liquid steams in open vats—it looks like dirty bathwater but apparently is some kind of beverage. An open window exposes a roomful of men in prayer kneeling on mats. A line of goats lounge on a flight of crumbling stairs ascending to a faded blue door. Women walk by covered head to foot in black robes without even a slit for their eyes. Old geezers in skullcaps, ZZ Top beards, and flowing white robes argue, laugh, and fling good-natured Arab curses at their friends, the bastard sons of milkless whores every last one of them.

  I buy a cell phone at a street stall for thirty dollars. Easy transaction. Just as in the Congo, my experience in India confirms how jacked up American phone plans are—ten dollars of minutes will end up lasting me two weeks, eight or nine calls to the States included.

  After eating two oily curries from a local legend called Karim’s, Joyce and I trip the Islam fantastic until well past dark. Like the catacombs of Paris, Nizamuddin is a hidden universe within the recesses of an utterly different city, the kind of hostage-hiding alien maze your mother would shit bricks to see you in. (Relatively few American moms appreciate the thrill of getting lost among Muslims.) I’d be lying if I said that “crowded market…homemade bomb…twelve killed…forty-four injured” didn’t ticker through my head like an AP bulletin from some distant hellhole. Except that this time I happen to be in the heart of it, shoulder to shoulder with Joyce, brushing against people who may or may not begrudge our nationality.

  While the idea of projectile-nail bombs and mangled faces does give the thoughtful traveler pause, my mind is more occupied in places like this by how little interest most Americans seem to have in them. More U.S. servicemen have died in battle in Asia than any other continent, yet we still understand so little about it. Nizamuddin will turn out to be one of my favorite stops in India, though I doubt that saying so will inspire anybody I know to book a ticket. Still, if you find yourself in Delhi without dinner plans—Karim’s.

  Whatever upbeat traits can be attributed to Islam—generosity, hospitality, innumerable recipes for fresh goat shanks—they coexist in India alongside the combustible touchiness you sometimes see harnessed for flag burnings, Great Satan protests, and ever-popular rock-throwing parties. At the gates of Jama Masjid, the largest mosque in India—built by five thousand laborers in the 1650s, the Muslim megachurch can brainwash twenty-five thousand followers at a time—Joyce and I get a harsh toke of the testy manners that must drive the hard-working folks at the Visit Islam publicity office absolutely bonkers.

  Admission to the enormous mosque is free even for infidels, but as soon as I remove my shoes at the entrance a pair of rough-looking teenage boys collapse on me like Punjabi horse thieves and begin grabbing at my trusty Jansport. (If this pack survives my danger year abroad, I’m going to have it bronzed and displayed on a pedestal at the entry of my home.)

  “You have camera! You have camera!” The guys gets so close that I can smell their donkey breath as they shout bits of afternoon curry into my face.

  “Yes,” I say. “I have a camera. What about it?”

  “Two hundred rupee! Now! Camera charge! You pay two hundred rupee! Give to me!”

  India is filled with grifters, scam artists, bullies, and fakes of all kinds. If cadging money from stupid foreigners is an art form, avoiding scams quickly becomes an artful dodge for tourists.

  “No, no,” I say, smiling and pulling my bag from their grip. “Admission is free.”

  I try to continue through the gate, but the boys circle around and block the way. A small crowd coagulates behind us.

  “Camera charge two hundred rupee! Give to me now!”

  Two hundred rupees is about five U.S. dollars. Not worth getting kneed in the balls over, but the guys extorting the ad lib fee are dressed in the same rags as everyone else, nothing at all that suggests officialdom. Even in Kinshasa the shakedown artists appeared to carry some sort of administrative credential, such as an automatic weapon.

  Charging ahead like Thomas the Apostle, Joyce has disappeared from view. But it’s obvious we’re together, and a random psycho breaks from the crowd and chases her down like a Border collie, escorting her back to the gate where a sizable crowd is now lowing for action.

  With the tide moving against us, I grab Joyce’s arm and say, “Fuck it. It’s a nice building, but what do we give a shit about this place? I’m not giving these assholes two rupees let alone two hundred.” If we really want to see the giant worship hall of some bat-shit religion we can go to Eighty-second Avenue back home and watch the Pentecostals—they meet every weekend in a converted multiplex movie theater.

  Joyce and I slink away from the sneering mob as more Arab oaths—“May the fleas of a thousand Jewish camels infest your sister’s crotch!” and so forth—mock our departure. Taking all of two minutes, the episode nonetheless erases the agreeable vibe of Muslim amity we’d taken away from Nizamuddin; this even after we find out that, despite no signage, visitor kiosk, or indication of any kind, there really does turn out to be a two-hundred rupee fee on the books for taking a camera inside Jama Masjid.

  Which is fine. God knows I’ve paid thousands of dollars in trumped-up tourist fees across the planet without complaint or physical altercation. Had someone merely spoken to us like normal human beings and explained the situation, I would have coughed up two hundred lousy rupees faster than you can say, “As Allah wills it.” Instead, within seconds of a minor infraction, Joyce and I were surrounded as though our Blackhawk helicopter had just crashed-landed at the Gate of Mecca.

  At Jama Masjid, it’s not the bogus camera charge I resent—I actually believe in the gringo tax in poor countries—but the foaming hostility that has become such a stereotypical part of the Islamic posture toward the West. And anyone who wants to deny this in the name of the great pacifist religion is either a liar or has never been drummed out of a mosque by teenage dirt-ball believers hoping to squeeze an easy five spot from unsuspecting visitors.

  What a bunch. A few years ago I recall watching news footage of the Pope in Turkey, a trip taken on the heels of a speech the raccoon-faced pontiff had delivered in which he noted the historic violence of the Muslim faith. Peace-loving fundamentalists, of course, don’t much care for reminders of all the beheadings, jihads, and IED explosions carried out in their name over the centuries. The predictable angry mob that greeted the Apostolic See in Turkey included a seventy-year-old woman in a black robe who’d turned out to huck a few rocks, rattle her wrinkly fist, and belt out toothless profanities in the direction of the CNN cameras.

  Now, I’m as appalled as the next CCD alum that the Catholics chose a pope who not only looks like an aging Nazi, but who actually is an aging Nazi (well, former). I get that forgiveness and revelation are part of the package but shouldn’t that “Hitler Youth” line on a résumé disqualify you from at least some jobs? Stil
l, it’s hard not to contemplate a society that produces rock-throwing old women who can’t handle someone’s vaguely offensive historic remark without thinking, “What a massive head trip has been done on this part of the world.”

  Fifteen- and sixteen-year-old boys venting hormonal rage by whipping pieces of cinder blocks at tanks I sort of get. But seventy-year-old women? Over one crummy comment? These people literally haven’t moved past the sticks and stones stage of playground interaction.

  It’s easy to see why Muslims come off so uptight. In a good year, your basic Christian attempts to observe ten commandments. Only one or two if they’re “born again” or some other form of “nondenominational” KKKristian.9 By contrast, Muslims, theoretically at least, are required to observe as many as 2,793 Islamic Laws, some with so many variations and addendums that the World Federation of Khoja Shia Ithna-Asheri Muslim Communities maintains a heavy-going Web site to keep everybody up to speed.

  Islamic regulations can range from the self-evident Law 2645, subsection xviii—“When eating a fruit, one should first wash it before eating”—to the mildly helpful Law 57, which points out, “It is obligatory to conceal one’s private parts from insane persons.” All in all, not much to argue with there.

  Things get trickier when the guidelines turn to such matters as the relationship between sex and fasting. Law 1593, for example, is pretty clear-cut: “Sexual intercourse invalidates the fast, even if the penetration is as little as the tip of the male organ, and even if there has been no ejaculation.” A few lines later, however, Law 1595 attempts to sneak in some leeway by speaking to doubts about whether “penetration was up to the point of circumcision or not.” Roughly twice as many Islamic laws govern masturbation as intercourse, including a personal favorite, Law 1600: “If a person who is observing fast wakes up from sleep while ejaculation is taking place it is not obligatory on him to stop it.” On-the-record proof that Muslim clerics aren’t complete sticks in the mud about everything.

  I know religious talk puts lots of people in the mood for a long afternoon nap, but even if I wasn’t in India in part to confront the bleeding Mohammedan heart, the topic is virtually impossible to ignore in a country dominated by religion in a way that America didn’t approach even back in the day when almost half its population was wearing square hats and buckled shoes, sniffing out witches, and voting for Sarah Palin. Given my habit of lobbing Molotov cocktails at organized religion, it’s probably prudent at this point to clarify my own position on affairs of the unknown.

  First of all I’m no atheist, though plenty of my close friends seem to be. This is because while I do believe in the spiritual order of the universe—and one pretty much in line with the hard-to-shake Christian principles I grew up with—I also consider myself a rational and pragmatic person. As such, I realize that anyone who’s being intellectually honest with themselves has to concede that on the God vs. No God question, pretty much all of the logical points fall on the side where the atheists are busy giving hand jobs to Christopher Hitchens. And by the way, how’d you like to have your long-running ax to grind against the perverted ruling order finally articulated so well by such an unlikable war pig, a guy who actually believes that Mother Teresa deserves bashing as much as George W. Bush deserves fellating?

  This doesn’t mean that atheists are necessarily correct. The spectrum of human understanding would be woefully incomplete without a consideration of the spiritual complexity of the universe. The problem that religious people get into is trying to apply their ethereal beliefs to the real world. This is why atheism is a good and probably necessary invention and why we might be better off in this country if we just once gave a shot to an atheist government. Or at least one honest enough to stop lying about its lack of faith and genuflecting before mouth-breathing KKKristians, who believe that God hid fossils under eons of sedimentation to test our faith and that the Dark Ages pathology of Leviticus actually has practical application in a world in which guys like Ray Kurzweil are preparing for the great singularity when we’ll all dispose of our imperfect organic bodies in favor of silicon containers housing innumerable copies of our brains in sturdy metal cages.

  I grew up Catholic and as a kid considered Catholicism as natural as breathing. Like the rest of the flock, I believed that while other religions were fine and probably had their place, none of them were ultimately very important in the grand scheme of things. As the original and central font of Christianity, Catholics were essentially the Yankees of the religious world—tolerant to the point of understanding that other teams had to exist and have their fans, but also never in doubt at the end of the day that without our organization the rest of the league might as well not exist. The hierarchy of rivals was self-evident. The Muslims were the Red Sox (violent, bitter, dangerous underdogs). The Jews the Dodgers (Brooklyn, Koufax, the showbiz move to LA). The Protestants the Giants (second-rate breakaway squad with delusions of grandeur). The Baptists the Cubs (also-rans clinging to tradition while mired in heartland futility). All those murky copycat denominations—Presbyterians, Methodists, Seventh-day Adventists—the equally irrelevant Texas Rangers, Arizona Diamondbacks, and Colorado Rockies of the world.

  For the first couple decades of my life, this worldview served me well. I emerged as apparently one of the five or six people raised in the church not left emotionally scarred by the experience. On the contrary, despite a significantly broadened adult outlook, I retain positive feelings about my Catholic upbringing—confessional booths, the excruciating childhood boredom of Friday mass, and 2007 Notre Dame football team notwithstanding. I was never fondled by a priest. The nuns who oversaw the early years of my formal education were as skillful, patient, and dedicated as any teachers I ever had. I’ve long maintained that my first three years of Catholic education were as valuable to me as the following thirteen years of public school combined.

  The entire discussion of which might have been avoided had those tense dicks at Jama Masjid just said something like, “Hey, bro, there’s actually an extra charge to bring your camera inside the mosque,” and let it go at that.

  From the devout fire into the fanatic frying pan, our last stop in Delhi is the house-turned-museum where Indira Gandhi, daughter of independent India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, lived and, tragically, was killed in 1984. The big attraction is a glass case displaying the sari the prime minister was wearing at the time of her assassination. Bullet holes are still visible in the cloth. Visitors crowd around the case three and four deep to have a look.

  A path behind the house on which Gandhi took her final footsteps on earth is marked by a series of crystal panels embedded in the ground. The panels are meant to invoke a tranquil river, but given that many of them are cracked, broken, or missing, the tribute looks more like a static security obstacle outside a gated Florida retirement community. The walk culminates with a large glass sheet at the spot where the controversial leader was felled. In an act of supreme treachery—even for this part of the world—she was gunned down by her own Sikh bodyguards.

  It’s sobering stuff, and I might be more moved had I not seen the same thing, or something very much like it, so recently. The parallels between Gandhi and Delhi and Kabila and Kinshasa are impossible to miss. A leader offed by trusted bodyguards. The succession of a son to power (Rajiv Gandhi became India’s prime minister upon his mother’s death and was himself assassinated in 1991). Crypts, blood, dynastic families, and shabby memorials erected to the whole catastrophe. The seamless continuation of nationalized corruption. Think about this stuff long enough and the entire sorry procession of history starts looking the same, whether you’re in Asia, Africa, Europe, or Crawford, Texas.

  After the Gandhi downer, Joyce and I take a cab to the train station, where we discover that civil discord is still the third rail of Indian society. While we’ve been staring down angry mosque teens and touring the slain prime minister’s home, an ethnic group called the Gujjars has spent the day protesting what they feel is a lack
of deserved government recognition by ripping up railroad tracks across Rajasthan. As a result, our overnight train to Jaisalmer has been cancelled.

  It’s doubtful that train service will resume within the week. Worse, because we booked through a travel agent in Mumbai, the harried ticket manager at the Delhi train station—whose window it takes me fifteen minutes of crowd surfing to reach—is unable to make any changes to our tickets. After my third helpless-foreigner plea for mercy, he looks at me sympathetically, indicates the screaming mob pressing against his window, and very politely says, “Sir, your train is cancelled indefinitely. Your situation is beyond help. You must now go away.”

  We slog back to the guesthouse. It takes ninety minutes to ford Delhi in rush-hour traffic. Ajay gives us our old room back, then sits down to review our options, which look about as promising as a new Rob Schneider movie.

  “You could go to Bikaner instead,” Ajay suggests.

  Ajay is trying to be helpful, but substituting Bikaner for Jaisalmer is like trading Sierra Mist for 7-Up. The ancient caravan city of Jaisalmer, an architectural marvel hidden deep within the great Thar Desert, is one of the national treasures that had convinced Joyce to swap her Mexican poolside vacation for the rigors of India. Neither of us is ready to abandon it.

  “There is one more option,” Ajay says, spinning a dusty paper Rolodex. “If you are willing to pay for a car and driver, you can perhaps reach Jaisalmer by tomorrow night.”

  Joyce shrugs. I know what she’s thinking. With no airport in Jaisalmer, the Gujjars raging, and our destination at least two days away by bus, we can’t be picky. If we want to see Jaisalmer, we’re pretty much forced into a classic mode of India tourist transport we’d been hoping to avoid: the private driver. We take our time, but eventually come around.