To Hellholes and Back Page 18

  The Kawasaki is so heavy that the guys below look like they’re struggling with an injured cow. Finally, someone arrives with a line of thin cord. One end is tied to the bike, the other thrown up the hill. It lands a yard from my feet.

  Southern Indians are notably short and wiry, and since I’m notably tall and overfed, I’m the obvious choice for anchor position on the ad hoc rope gang. With four guys pushing from below and five guys pulling from above, you’d think a motorcycle would be pretty easy to rescue. You’d be wrong. But the organization required to get eight screaming Hindus and Muslims and one gung-ho American to do anything in concert does provide fascinating insight into the prickly business of Indian politics.

  Aside from the cheap nylon rope cutting into my wet hands, hauling a lump of steel over roots, logs, trees, bushes, and boulders is sort of fun. With the Kawasaki back on the pavement and profuse thanks received from the biker, Baiju and I return to the car with the self-satisfaction of Good Samaritans. Still in tune with the spirit of my quest for larger-than-life monsoon experiences, though, Baiju loyally manages to summon a dark cloud.

  “Had there been a serious injury, we might have gotten better photographs,” he grouses as we move down the road.

  The big drama comes during a late-afternoon lull in the rain when the ever-alert Baiju spots a group of three elephants—a bull, a female, and a baby drinking at the far edge of a lake, about half a mile from the road. We pull over and gaze with reverential appreciation upon the lumbering dots from behind a barbed-wire fence—the elephants are on a wildlife preserve. It’s exciting to see elephants in the wild, but since we’re so far away, our conversation goes like this:

  “See the young one standing behind the mother?”

  “Oh, yes, I see it now.”

  “That male looks like he could be pretty big.”

  “Yes. But he also looks quite small from here.”

  After a few minutes of this scintillating interaction with India’s rare charismatic megafauna, an older man wearing a steeply peaked policeman’s cap pops out of the nearby woods. This is a local game officer, who, after a brief chat with Baiju, shows us a spot where a cut in the barbed wire fence is hidden in the brush. If we’re so interested in the elephants, he says, why don’t we climb through the fence and hike down to the edge of the lake while he looks the other way?

  Just as in the Congo, Indians in official positions are depressingly shitty stewards of the land. On a visit to the Kerala Forest & Wildlife Department office near Munnar, the head ranger ran me through the wildlife I might encounter in Pampadum Shola National Park. When I asked him about bird species, he said, “Of course, there are many birds.”

  “Yes, but what kinds?”

  “Don’t worry, there are many birds. Look up in the sky and you will see them.” He snickered at my apparently ridiculous question, then made a crack in the local dialect that got a pretty good laugh out of the office underlings.

  The old dude in the cop hat is officially in charge of keeping interlopers out of the elephant habitat, but he suggests again that we slip through the fence. Since I’ve grown resistant to blatant solicitations to grease official palms, I do what I can to help him maintain the integrity of his position.

  “No, we’re fine,” I say, trying to convey the immense personal satisfaction I derive from respecting the terrain of wild animals. “We’re happy to watch from here.”

  Baiju, however, has no intention of letting an official offer to skirt the law pass him by, especially as it gives him a rare opportunity for close-up wildlife photography. Baiju charges into the brush shouting “Come on, come on!” Not because he’s afraid I’ll miss out on anything but because he knows my pricey Canon 200 mm zoom lens will bayonet right onto his shitty old EOS body, instantly making him four times the photographer his after-market 50 mm lens keeps him from being.

  Feeling guilty about trespassing on protected land but also wanting to get a better view, I follow Baiju through the fence. We sidestep down a slippery hillside covered with tall razor grass. Pellets of rain begin tickling our faces. At the bottom of the hill we get a clear shot of the elephants across the water, barely fifty yards away. I hand Baiju the 200 mm.

  “I can see the hairs on his ass! It is fantastic!” Baiju clicks off twenty identical frames. He shakes with delight each time he lines up a trunk in the viewfinder, but with the rain picking up I can’t help worrying about my lens. That thing was expensive as hell and it’s not like I’m sitting on a trust fund back home myself. I shove my camera under my shirt for protection, but Baiju waves my lens around as though it’s made of Gore-Tex.

  After snuffling around the lakeshore for a bit, the elephants make an unexpected plunge into the water and begin swimming directly toward us. Judging from the fresh turds, flattened grass, and rapid approach of the great gray dreadnoughts, Baiju and I are standing in the middle of a popular elephant hangout. I mutter something about our possibly illegal and certainly uncool encroachment on pachyderm property, but Baiju stays crouched in the reeds.

  While Baiju burns chip memory—he’s recently discovered continuous-fire mode—I detect a slight itching near my ankle. I look down through the wet grass at my Teva’d feet and find two slimy, purplish-black streaks, like squiggles of dark snot, writhing on top of my right foot. For a moment, I have no idea what I’m looking at. Then I hear a sudden, guttural scream, as though someone has just had a basketball thrown into his stomach. The scream turns out to be mine.

  “Leeches! Baiju, goddamnit, leeches! Let’s get the hell out of here!”

  The rains have brought the bloodsuckers out in force, and they seem particularly excited for the opportunity to dig into something warm-blooded that’s not protected by two inches of elephant hide. I swipe at my feet and shout at the leeches like a gorilla hoping to intimidate a rival.

  Holding his ground against the approaching elephant onslaught, still in the thrall of Japanese technology, Baiju is blind to my horror. This is the dumbest part of all because by now it’s raining really hard and also getting dark, and even in the best circumstances, you need a 400 mm lens, minimum, to get worthwhile wildlife images. Baiju is bracketing for all he’s worth, but I know damn well he’s getting a bunch of shit shots no one outside of his biweekly Essence of Photography workshop will look at twice.

  I haul ass up the elephant track and back to the road. The game officer is still there, standing in the rain next to our car, smiling as though he’s expecting a tip. I ignore him and conduct a deeply personal body search, toenails to taint—I think I’ve gotten all the little vampires but you never know. Baiju pops out of the bushes five minutes behind me, out of breath, out of battery power, and, most alarmingly, out of professional boundaries.

  “There were many leeches where I was standing,” he says. He peels one off his calf as though picking a spot of lint off a sweater and holds it up for me to examine. “I must ask you the generosity of allowing me to take a hot shower in your hotel room tonight. You may have to call for an extra towel.”

  For two days after the motorcycle wreck and elephants and leeches, Baiju and I drive through magnificent countryside exposing ourselves to the full power of all-encompassing showers and endangering the lives of more camera lenses. We share the welcoming laughter of strangers huddled for shelter in doorways. We watch umbrellas mauled into useless skeletons of twisted wire, even ripped clean from their owners’ hands by unexpected gusts. In obscure villages we stand on the sidelines while delirious boys slip, slide, and howl through mud soccer games. In Alleppey, we laugh at two men who race out of a bus and literally dance a jig amid drops of rain so big they look like a meteor shower. The happiest discovery—because temperatures are in the eighties and nineties, you can stay out in the rain forever and never get cold.

  It’s all pretty great. Except for one thing. Sure, the rains are exhilarating, but with each inch that falls I feel my arch monsoon theory being washed away in a tide of collective joy. Far from being hostile or even in
different to the monsoon, the people of Kerala embrace it, clearly drawing from the storms a reaffirming, communal assurance. Nature still matters, at least to some Indians.

  At some point the old woman and wall of water return to haunt my sleep. My last night in country becomes such a restless hell that by the time Baiju picks me up on the morning of my flight home, I’m in an uncharacteristically pissy mood.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I complain, as we claw through Cochin traffic.

  “Tell you what?”

  “That I was wrong. My theory. That India is a capitalist death ship willing to drag the planet down with it, and that deposing the monsoon proves the point. We talked about it for a week. You translated interviews. You told me I was a man blessed with keen insight.”

  “I believe you have a good theory five days a week. Look out the window. It is Monday again.” Baiju motions at the traffic. “The soccer games and dancing you will find only on the weekend. Now the people are going, as they say, back to the real world. It is just another gloomy Monday.”

  I roll down the window. Dirty rain, diesel exhaust, angry blares of late-for-work car horns roll into the Ambassador. It feels like India again. I recline the seat, close my eyes, and settle in for the rush-hour slog to the airport.

  For the schmoes on their way to jobs in threatening IT office parks, predatory call centers, and world-altering auto factories, it most certainly is another gloomy Monday. For me, though, things are looking good. Thanks to Baiju, I have five-sevenths of my theory back. I have some decent, if gore-free, monsoon pictures. And I have a reliable ride back to the real world, from the dull comfort of which I look forward to extending to India a hearty and empathetic: welcome?

  Part III

  City

  Mexico City

  8

  Red Fighters, White Tequila, and Cruz Azul

  For a guy who once spent an evening held captive by kidnappers—huddled on the floor of a moving cab while a knife-wielding goon draped an arm over his wife in the back seat—David Lida is remarkably sanguine about crime in Mexico City.

  “It happened a long time ago,” Lida tells me. “I was unlucky. This is a fantastic city.”

  Lida and I sit in a cantina called Bar Montejo at a heavy wooden table crowded with plates of pork tacos and shot glasses of white tequila. With mariachi trumpeters playing for a rowdy but good-natured bunch of drinkers in the corner and more annatto-roasted pig meat on the way, it’s hard to argue with Lida. Mexico City is a fantastic place—for the moment, anyway.

  Lida’s “express kidnapping” took place in 1996 during a wave of similar abductions, which he writes about in his gritty yet affectionate city profile, First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century. After a night out in the fashionable Colonia Roma neighborhood, Lida and his wife flagged down a cab. They got in and found nothing amiss until the driver turned down an unlit side street and hesitated at a stop sign. Two men barreled out of the darkness and into the car, brandishing a knife and pushing Lida to the floor. The larger one cozied up to Lida’s wife “so that if anyone looks inside we don’t raise suspicions—we’ll appear to be sweethearts.” Promising no violence in return for cooperation, they immediately confiscated wallets, watches, wedding rings, and jackets.

  What they were really after was Lida’s ATM card. In typical “express kidnappings,” culprits demand a bank card and PIN, then withdraw the maximum amount allowed before releasing their victims, who are sometimes held twelve, twenty-four, or more hours, through several ATM availability cycles. Lida and his wife were freed after two hours. Neither was harmed, let alone raped, which had been known to happen. As Lida writes of the mid-nineties crime wave in the capital, “Taxi kidnappings had become widespread. Anything but cooperation was a bad idea.” One friend of his was “tattooed pretty badly” for resisting. Another had his ear sliced open when he tried to escape.

  I’m a sucker for screamer headlines, and I tell Lida that if I’d been writing his book, I’d have never had the self-control to wait until page 176 to introduce the kidnapping. I’d have been quivering on the floor of that cab on page 1. Not only that. I’d have slapped it on the cover, outlined a novel, pitched a screenplay, written two Spike TV specials, and booked a guest shot on Larry King before even turning on the computer.

  “It’s funny you say that because originally I’d had it as the first chapter of the book,” Lida tells me. “But I wanted to demystify the crime problem here and I decided that starting with an abduction might give people the wrong impression of Mexico City.”

  I tell Lida I can see how this might be a concern.

  Like most chilangos (the term for residents of Mexico City, though it’s used across Mexico as shorthand for rude, abrasive, arrogant louts), Lida loves his city. His superlative book reflects the matchless complexity of the largest metropolitan area in North America and the unofficial economic and cultural capital of the entire Latin world. From music and business to buying dildos and the Good Friday tradition of dragging a splintered cross through the streets pretending to be Jesus on his way to Calvary, nothing escapes his celebratory view.

  “If it’s so safe, why aren’t more Americans interested in Mexico City?” I ask. “It’s just a few hours flight from Houston. I came direct from LA and there weren’t more than ten or fifteen gringos on the plane.”

  “Propaganda works.” Lida shrugs. “Mexico City is the poster child for contemporary urban chaos, with a terrible reputation for crime, poverty, pollution, overpopulation, social injustice. As a member of the media I grow weary of the myopic tendency to blame the media for every societal problem. But in the case of Mexico City, the toxic affect of the U.S. media on its reputation has significant validity.”

  “But doesn’t getting ‘express kidnapped’ have validity, too? You’re the first person I’ve ever met who’s actually been kidnapped. By someone other than their stepdad, I mean.”

  Lida is calm when he talks about the kidnapping ordeal, but I notice the tequila has been going down a little faster since we got on the subject. He repeats for the third time in the single hour I’ve known him that as long as I’m not out at two in the morning looking for smack in the barrio, nothing bad is going to happen to me in Mexico City.

  This sounds reasonable. After all, the nineties are ancient history, and, the tocsin sounders of the American press aside, everyone I meet tells me Mexico City has cleaned up its act. I might as well be as worried about mad cow disease or a Lindy Hop outbreak as an express kidnapping.

  “For as long as I’ve been here, this city has been associated with crime, and that’s not fair,” Lida says. “I can’t possibly make a list of all the good things that have happened to me in Mexico City. The kidnapping and getting my camera stolen are the only bad things that have ever happened to me here.”

  “When was your camera stolen?

  “Last week.”

  “Last week?”

  “In a bar in the Centro Histórico. But don’t worry, you’ll be fine.”

  “Last week?”

  “Yes. But it was mostly my fault. I wasn’t paying attention.”

  Oh. OK then. As long as it was the victim’s fault, I shouldn’t have any problems.

  Given its reputation for all-purpose hazard, for many, travel to Mexico City has become the equivalent of the old Seinfeld joke about scuba diving: “Another great activity where your main goal is to not die.” For the first few days, however, I find Mexico City just as Lida has promised—agreeable locals, historic architecture, and not a masked insurgent in sight.

  The city’s ridiculous size—seventeen million people spread over six hundred square miles—promises an enormous hassle. Like Los Angeles or the Law & Order franchise, there seems to be no beginning and no end to Mexico City, but the grand plaza known as the Zócalo is a logical orientation point with plenty of breathing room. The extensive subway system, opened in 1969, is faster and cleaner than New York’s and quickly banishes my nightmares a
bout navigating this supertropolis of unbroken humanity. Traffic is bad, but rush hour is no worse than in Chicago, Dallas, or Denver and is far better than in any big city I saw in India. None of the cab journeys I chance end in extortion or assault.

  Though patches of what is euphemistically called “haze” are occasionally visible hanging over the surrounding mountains, the Chinese-style pollution I’d anticipated is nowhere to be seen. Afternoons are marked by deep blue skies and cotton puff clouds that sail like friendly cartoon characters through beams of sunlight. October is apparently a good weather month here.

  The kill-or-be-killed mercantile ethic that imbues the sale of everything from striped blankets to cocaine in Mexican border and beach towns is almost nonexistent in the capital, but a little survival technique I’ve picked up helps ward off what few unwanted solicitations come my way. Mexicans live in mortal fear of appearing rude, particularly toward foreigners, and do everything they can to avoid using the word “no” in negotiations or business conversations. The polite method of indicating refusal is to respectfully raise the back of the hand and say, “Gracias.” I incorporate a little Don Corleone squint and try the move on an over eager shoeshine boy in the Zócalo—it works on him like Kryptonite. Later in the week, a strip bar tout shrinks from the gesture like a vampire trembling before a garlic necklace.

  Then there’s the food. Though saying so will probably disqualify me from future gigs with Bon Appétit and Cooking Light, I’ll stand behind the opinion that Mexican food ought to be a player in any discussion of great cuisines, right up there with eggy French glop and whatever other country’s gastronomy is currently considered world class by overstuffed elites. Find another country that lays out a buffet with so many things on it that you know in advance you’re actually going to enjoy eating. Noted for its variety and deliciousness, the Malaysian city of Penang has become an eating-safari destination for rich Singaporeans, who have been known to make the ninety-minute flight each way just for dinner—it surprises me that Mexico City hasn’t become a similar junket destination for Americans whose love of the taco is so great that it can now be eaten in pizza form.