To Hellholes and Back Page 14

  “You supply the driver; we’ll supply the cash,” I hear myself saying, getting into the spirit of things with a forced enthusiasm that Ajay doesn’t bother smashing before once again it’s time to go.

  6

  The Unyielding Indian Workforce

  Indian merchants are the fucking worst? I stand corrected. Forget salesmen. For that matter, forget terrorists, railroad saboteurs, halfhearted butt wipers, uninhibited massage gurus, belligerent mosque grifters, Ramadan fast breakers, flag burners, presidential assassins, filth, disease, open sewers, child beggars, and the cheese-ball torment of Indian pop music. The single biggest impediment to the traveler’s appreciation of India, the primary and most available reason to mistakenly dismiss the whole damn country as just another blighted Third World shit heap, are Indian drivers.

  I’m not criticizing the subcontinental wheelman’s actual driving skills, which are either terrifying or masterful depending on your appreciation of county fair thrill rides and the hayfoot savants who operate them. The real horror of India’s suicide army of “professional” drivers—which includes the operators of everything from bulletproof SUVs to discarded lawn mowers retrofitted with sidecars into which families of five can and will be crammed—is their unwavering commitment to approaching every job as an opportunity to work a scam.

  Here, for example, is a one-act play inspired by actual events in Delhi:

  Walking Rupee Sign (aka Tourist, aka Me): How much to Kahn market?

  Cabbie: Yes! Kahn market! I take you! Get in!

  Walking Rupee Sign (WRS): How much to Kahn market?

  Cabbie: As you like!

  Third World taxi advice is always to settle on a fare before getting inside the vehicle. Since most Indian drivers regard agreed-upon prices as mere starting points thirty seconds into any ride, however, this stratagem is basically futile here.

  WRS: How about ten rupees?

  Cabbie: Sir! No ten rupees! Eighty rupees!

  WRS: I paid twenty rupees for the same trip two days ago.

  Cabbie: OK, sixty rupees. Get in.

  WRS: Forty rupees is too much.

  Cabbie: OK, fifty rupees!

  WRS agrees to fifty rupees, knowing actual fare for Indians is ten rupees. Thirty seconds into journey, Cabbie turns to WRS.

  Cabbie: Sir, Kahn market prices are too high. I take you to better market.

  WRS: I don’t want to go to another market. I want to go to Kahn market.

  Cabbie: Sir, five minutes, just have a look. I can get you good price on anything you like. Kahn market is terrible place, filled with thieves.

  WRS: Just take me to Kahn market.

  Cabbie: OK, sir, no problem. It is eighty rupees to Kahn market.

  Curtain falls as Kahn market passes unacknowledged by Cabbie.

  Since most drivers are recent transplants to the cities in which they work, navigation is also a challenge. Owing to the fact that the layout of streets in large Indian cities roughly resembles the pattern you get by throwing a pot of cooked spaghetti on the floor, taxi and autorickshaw drivers often drop passengers miles from their actual destinations. Because Indians are also fond of assigning the name of the same patron or deity to ten or fifteen different streets and buildings, cab journeys usually cannot be completed without repeated stops for consultations with guys hanging out on street corners, who always wave to the north, south, east, and west while delivering extended narrative histories of the neighborhood before finally pointing the driver in the wrong direction.

  The fact that I can get from my house in the Pacific Northwest to my brother’s house in Maryland with no more than nine turns might take a bit of the thrill out of driving in the States, but Western predictability generally trumps being abandoned on an empty street corner by a clueless yokel who gets so frustrated trying to locate an address that he finally gives up and politely asks his passenger to get out of his cab. But to please pay him first. This actually happened to me in Mumbai.

  All of this by way of introducing the remarkable Belu, the swarthy thirty-year-old, ninety-five-pound long-haul driver Ajay pulls out of his Rolodex for the all-day ride from Delhi to Jaisalmer. We haven’t been in Belu’s banged-up Tata hatchback long enough to escape suburban Delhi before he begins rearranging our plans. Instead of driving us to Jaisalmer, Belu now insists we make the much shorter trip to the alleged attraction of Bikaner.

  “Sir, we can reach Bikaner easily in one day. It is beautiful place. You like it so very much, I am sure.”

  “We agreed to Jaisalmer,” I say, attempting to project cooperative-but-no-pushover-foreigner mettle.

  “Sir, Jaisalmer no good place. Bikaner very nice.”

  “We have no interest in Bikaner. Anyway, we’re catching our onward train from Jaisalmer.”

  “Sir, now no train. Gujjars make trouble. Very bad people.”

  “The newspapers say there may be a quick settlement.”

  “Sir, not with Gujjars. They crazy people.”

  Keeping Belu on track is like flogging an elderly mule, but insubordination is hardly the worst of his behavior. As has already been noted, the gulf between driving standards in the United States and India is wide enough to plunge a bus filled with schoolchildren into, but Belu is in a stunt category of his own. Congenitally unable to remain in his own lane, the jittery chauffeur does the bulk of his driving on the half of the road reserved in every mind but his own for oncoming traffic—which, over the course of the day and night we spend as his passengers, sets up literally thousands of chicken duels with every bus, truck, jeep, car, motorcycle, autorickshaw, goat, dog, cow, and camel with the temerity to be traveling in the opposite lane.

  “Jesus, Belu, can you stay in our lane?” Joyce says after we nearly clip a pregnant woman scurrying for her two lives.

  “No problem, ma’am. Indian-style driving!”

  Crossing the Thar Desert in the dead of summer with the windows of your Tata hatchback rolled down is pretty much like sitting in a rolling pizza oven while someone blasts you in the face with a hair dryer. The only thing worse than making this journey with a Hindu fatalist behind the wheel cranking the Best of Bollywood Duets for seventeen straight hours is making this journey with a Hindu fatalist behind the wheel cranking the Best of Bollywood Duets for seventeen straight hours while your traveling companion is in the backseat starting her period.11 (Strictly speaking, I suppose it could be worse; you could actually be the traveling companion.) At ten in the morning, in triple-digit heat and Joyce ready to stab everyone in the car including herself, I ask Belu to hit the air-conditioning. I figure this should buy Joyce at least another ten or fifteen minutes of sanity.

  “Sir, sorry, AC is no working.”

  “No working?”

  “Yes, sir, compressor is broken.”

  To prove the point, Belu cranks the AC knob and hits us with a cloud of heat. Then he points to the temperature gauge on the dash, which I note with concern is rising faster than my blood pressure.

  “If run AC, car is overheating.”

  “But we specifically agreed to a car with AC. I paid extra for a car with AC.”

  “Yes, sir, this car has AC.”

  “But the AC isn’t working.”

  “AC is fine. It is compressor which is not functioning properly.”

  “But the compressor is part of the AC.”

  “Not technically, sir.”

  After the backbreaking haul across the desert, and with a disquieting mood of treachery descending upon Joyce, dawn rises over Jaisalmer like Christmas morning. By now, it ought to be apparent that I’m not much for traditional travelogue descriptions of charming boutique hotels, sumptuous “dining experiences,” and witless prattle about captivating local markets populated by rustic craftspeople who specialize in recycled-plastic folk-art statuary. By any reckoning, however, Jaisalmer is an authentic treasure; relatively unknown, the city deserves a few lines of gushing praise.

  Jaisalmer’s principal attraction is a gargantuan, triang
ular sandstone fort, inside of which lies the most interesting part of the old city. Established in 1156 on a rise overlooking the vast inferno of the Thar Desert, the fort owed its wealth and size to a line of powerful Rajput royals who imposed draconian taxes on the passing silk-and-spice camel caravans that once dominated Central Asian commerce. Within its ancient walls is a labyrinth of twisting streets, narrow alleys, and miniature passageways where those interested in instant cultural immersion can spend two or three rewarding days pursuing the exotic among swarms of salesmen and cow pies; the former, as previously discussed, are the unavoidable spawn of capitalist doxies, while the latter creamy calling cards are left by the sacred creatures who roam the city’s cobblestone streets with the impunity of princes.

  That’s as close as I get to a guidebook rave and it’s the honest truth, one I’d stick five stars and a “must see” icon next to were I writing a mainstream blurb for the city. But as interesting as Jaisalmer itself—again, fabulous, especially if you stay at the Nepalese-staffed Killa Bhawan hotel—is the wild terrain that surrounds it. After the decline of the caravans in the nineteenth century, Jaisalmer was pretty much left for the vultures and assorted jerk-water rabble who never received word that the twentieth century had dawned. The first paved road to the city wasn’t completed until 1958; in a country that the Brits began covering in train tracks in the 1850s, the first rail connection came only in 1968; in nearby Pokaran, the Indian government tested its first nuclear device in 1974. So, an outpost with little to attract the jet set but much to offer the seeker of out-of-the-way thrills.

  Today, only the occasional flybys of Indian Air Force Mirage and Sukhoi fighters patrolling the border zone between India and Pakistan, just thirty miles away, disturbs the bleak silence of the Thar. Armed camps belonging to both nuclear nations dot the desert, making this one of the most heavily fortified and potentially lethal standoffs this side of the 38th parallel—troop deployments fluctuate, but as many as a million total soldiers have been massed along the border at various times over the past decade. According to writer Suketu Mehta, Mahatma Gandhi feared that India’s fractious separation from Great Britain would lead to “the most savage independence movement in world history,” owing largely to the centuries of animal hatred between Hindus and Muslims.

  Although Indo-Pak relations have stabilized in recent years, the old enemies don’t exactly get together to laugh over photos of themselves in the bathtub together as kids. Travel between them remains restricted—a barbed wire fence runs across the border near Jaisalmer—and half a century of animosity is openly acknowledged. In Jaisalmer, Joyce and I run into four gregarious young men in civilian clothes who have recently joined the Indian Army. When Joyce asks what their jobs in the service will be, the tallest one smiles like a Pathan warlord and says: “Two words: Attack Pakistan!”

  He’s clearly joking and his buddies crack up. But a minute later when I ask where the group is stationed, the tall one levels his gaze at me again and repeats: “Two words: Attack Pakistan!”

  Just some overaggressive boy soldiers convincing one another of their bravado? No doubt. But what military isn’t full of this sort of posturing, all the way up to the four-star gunslingers with their hands on the budgets and buttons?

  The classic tourist excursion in Jaisalmer is a camel trek into the surrounding desert. After taking an Indian-made Mahindra jeep into the countryside, I hire a crusty old camel jockey—a ten-year-old boy named Lala whose rough hands, cracked lips, and eyes like glazed ceramic make him more at home in the desert than a lizard. Lala comes from one of the sandblasted villages—round, one-room houses built from flagstone, mud, and cow dung—where locals herd goats, grow a few meager crops, and pay even less attention to the condition of their yards than my next-door neighbors back home who leave their Christmas lights on their house all year.

  In the December-January high season, sunset camel tours are a big enough business that the Frommer’s guidebook goes out of its way to bitch about all the damn tourists you have to put up with on the ride. In the off-season, however, the scattered dunes pretty much belong to me and Lala and a group of Indian tourists large enough to require nine camels. The afternoon high temperature is variously quoted as 112, 113, and, 114 degrees.12 Not coincidentally, these are the three principal reasons Joyce has elected to remain horizontal below a ceiling fan back at the hotel while I ride doubles atop a reeking desert beast with a ten-year-old who relentlessly coaxes our ship of the desert onward by whacking its haunches with a long cord. Lala would have come in handy in the Tata with Belu.

  If you’ve never done it, riding a camel is like sitting atop a washing machine that’s churning with an uneven load. Each more or less fluid roll is followed by a jarring dip as the ungainly creature makes its way through the eternal wasteland at a dawdling pace that suggests it believes a dromedary slaughterhouse awaits around the next pile of tumbleweeds. As for the views, the Thar is mostly flat and looks a lot like West Texas, only with fewer water towers and Hindu fundamentalists in place of the football fanatics, which is actually more of an even trade than you might imagine.

  With the sunset making a pastel mural of the sky, the ride is pleasant and, in a way, so is the highly competent Lala’s mute, cowboylike company. The action doesn’t really pick up until after we return to the parking lot.

  “The sand will soon come!” Joshi my jeep driver is in a state. He points into the distance, where it looks as if someone has taken a black marking pen and drawn a thin line at the point where sky meets land. I see no cause for alarm in this but Joshi is frantic, and soon enough I understand why. Before I’ve even taken a farewell photo of Lala, the barely perceptible black line has swollen into a dark cloud stretching across twenty miles of horizon and roiling a thousand feet into the air.

  “Hurry! We must get to the jeep!”

  Joshi sprints to the Mahindra. In the near distance the sandstorm is gathering steam like a CGI effect from a bad Brendan Fraser movie, thundering across the desert, threatening to block the only route back to town. We jump in the jeep and peel out. Joshi taps the brim of my baseball cap.

  “Take it off or the wind will take it off for you!” He has to scream to be heard over the whining engine and howling, hot wind baking our faces.

  “Can we make it to town before it hits us?” I shout.

  The storm still looks like it’s a few miles away, but this is apparently a stupid question. Joshi smiles. He’s about sixty. His teeth are dark yellow. Two are missing from the lower deck.

  “When the sand comes, close your eyes and turn your head away from the wind!” he yells, squinting and watching the road from a chancy angle.

  Joshi hasn’t even finished shouting when an explosive gust whips a sepia grit over the road. A scorching wind engulfs the jeep, nearly pushing us into the soft shoulder. Fine-grain pepper shot begins scouring my face. It doesn’t hurt—it’s like being pelted with discarded beard bristle—but being swallowed by the cloud is like being inside a closet after somebody shuts the door.

  Curtains of sand billow through our headlights. Dense drifts accumulate along the road, forcing us to slalom and swerve over invisible asphalt. When a large truck flies by it’s like being passed by a semi in a rainstorm on the interstate. Its rear tires launch a sheet of sand that splashes across our windshield, blinding us for a terrifying instant before Joshi hits the wipers and the truck careens ahead.

  The jeep has no roof, and Joshi eventually has to pull over to clean sand out of his eyes. I jump out and run into the desert to experience the full tornado of sand.

  “Sir, you are fine?” Joshi has chased me into the desert. I spit out a mouthful of sand and nod. For no reason, we begin laughing hysterically. This causes us to inhale a few gallons of sand and subsequently spend the next thirty minutes coughing like rheumatic seals.

  “Now in the desert the wind will blow for a month,” Joshi tells me. “This will bring the monsoon from the south. We are waiting.”

  At th
e hotel that evening, I pick up a newspaper. The text is all Hindi, but the front-page photo shows a boy in Mumbai floating in a flooded street. Behind him a cow plashes through chest-high water. In the north of the country, Rajasthan remains as dry as Baptist happy hour, but the sandstorm means relief is on the way.

  Jaisalmer proves to be a tough place to leave and not just because Joyce and I like it so much. The morning we check out, I find Belu loitering in front of the hotel. This is a surprise given that when we’d arrived in the city three days earlier, I’d promptly fired him for reckless driving, general petulance, and air-conditioning malfeasance.

  “Belu, what are you doing here?” I ask.

  “I will drive you to Udaipur as planned.” Belu says this the way Steve Buscemi says, “I’m not going to debate you, Jerry. I’m not going to sit here and debate,” in Fargo.

  “You’re supposed to be back in Delhi.”

  “Sir, get in the car. I will take you to Udaipur.” Belu reaches for my bag, and a minor struggle for control ensues.

  I’m no grudge holder and insofar as petty disputes are concerned, a three-day cooling-off period is pretty much like soaking me in a vat of Palmolive. Much as I dislike him, I also feel sorry for Belu. If his driving is any indication, the guy’s entire life has to be a disaster. Unfortunately for us both, extraneous circumstances are at work.

  “Belu, normally I’d be happy to ride to Udaipur with you. But at this point, doing so would require divorcing my wife. Now that the Gujjars have stopped rioting, we’re going to resume our itinerary by train.”

  “Sir, please get in the car.”

  Getting rid of Belu is like breaking up with a psycho girlfriend. Apparently, he’s been lurking in the shadows for our entire Jaisalmer visit. If it turned out that he’d been disguised as a guide on the camel trek, I wouldn’t be surprised.

  “Sir, as my employer in India, you are considered my big brother,” Belu says, shifting from bossing to pleading. “It is your obligation to take care of me.”