Broken Wheels and Broken Hearts

My life frequently resembles a bad Indian movie. This is what happens when you go to India. Of late however it has also resembled a bad Hollywood movie, involving a stalker and culminating in a gratuitous mountainside Jeep accident.

Some time ago I joked about having a masseur-stalker. I now have an actual stalker. When I was seriously ill a charming young man aided me greatly in navigating the farce that is the Indian hospital system, expending great time and energy and asking nothing in return. Out of gratitude, I hung out with him and his friends just a bit as I was still quite weak. Then he started calling me. Then he started calling me a lot. I grew increasingly suspicious as he would drunkenly say that I was a "beautiful person", attempt to liquor me up, and then offer drunken motorcycle rides to other parts of town for mysterious purposes. He started showing up outside my hotel and waiting for me to venture out for food. He then offered to join me in my trip to Jaipur, over 130km away. This would not do. I connived to leave without his knowledge, lying about my date and train of departure. His calls kept coming. Then came the texts. They grew more and more desperate, from this:

"If luck is a raindrop i send u showers, if hope is a minute i give you hours, if hapiness is a leaf i give you trees & if u need a frnd u'll always hve me"

to this:

"you cal me now"

I am very glad to be alone in Jaipur.

Ajmer, when not spent vomiting or in the company of a deranged lunatic, is actually quite nice. Its two main claims to fame are 1)being close to Pushkar, which is why tourists come here, and 2) being the holiest Muslim city in India, which is why Indians come here. Both Hindus and Muslims agree (this is in itself remarkable) that Ajmer is precisely 1/7th as holy as Mecca. Taking readings around town on my saintometer, I was able to confirm that the town emits exactly 142.86millimeccas per square meter. The town's holiness derives from the tomb of a medieval Sufi saint. The tomb complex is quite nice,  lots of marble and such, but a bit of a letdown for being the holiest Muslim site in India.

I actually started my tour of Ajmer at the Red Jain temple. I was prepared for the typical Jain madness, expecting ancient paintings of nude holy men being embraced by elephants while being irradiated by lotus flowers and such....but this was something else. Denied access to the main temple, I was led around back to the subsidiary hall. Let me tell you, this is some subsidiary hall. Turns out it was commissioned by a 19th-century emerald mogul who could apparently  afford to  have built an entire miniature city covered in gold leaf. The hall, about the size of a volleyball court, was covered in mirrors and just completely filled with gold. 350 kilograms of gold leaf on a model of the golden city of Ayodhya while a procession of deities rode by the temples on golden elephants and tigers while various other deities hung from the ceiling in flying swan- and tiger-boats also coated with gold leaf and ringed with emeralds. I turned to the priest and asked "so where are the monkeys?". He was confused. "I've been to Ayodhya. There's definitely more monkeys and less 10-storey golden temples." He was both pleased to hear I had schlepped to Ayodhya and annoyed at my criticism. "This is before Aurangzeb time. Artist's imagining."

The man has a point. From a touristic point of view the iconoclastic fanatic Mughal emperor Aurangzeb was one of the biggest pricks in recorded history. Almost any religious monument in northern India bears a plaque saying something to the effect of "Though the temple dates to the 7th  century, the current edifice was built only in 1823, replacing the building destroyed by the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb 40 years earlier." For a bit of delicious irony I wandered out to the edge of town where there lies a crumbling, ruined mosque whose ornate Arabic calligraphy carvings now serve as a roost for a flock of pigeons. A cursory examination of the interior reveals all too clearly that the mosque literally was just built out of gigantic pieces of Hindu and Jain temples, but has since itself fallen into disrepair. A handful of devoted individuals continue to use the site of the mosque, and a group of old men do an admirable job of barking at women and making them pray over by the side of the mosque where they belong, and a less admirable job of preventing Ajmer's oversized goats from fucking on the tombs.

The next day I decided to climb a mountain and see a fort. A word of advice: if ever you decide to climb a mountain first ascertain that said mountain is not located in a desert. Nevertheless I foolishly proceeded up the ancient stone path to the summit for some two hours. Along the way I stopped at what was apparently a magic stone based on the number of people kissing it, and at the summit enjoyed my hard-earned vistas. At the top is a filthy village surrounding another dargah, dedicated to a later Muslim saint who did all kinds of crazy shit, his exploits recorded in scholarly article I posted yesterday. It was a great day. Nothing had gone wrong. I went around the village and got in a "taxi" (i.e. jeep-bus) with an Indian family and started our descent down the winding single-lane mountain road. That's when the wheel fell off.

To be precise, the axle broke and the entire Jeep nose-dived into the pavement, scraping a deep groove in the asphalt for some 15 feet and leaving the front-left wheel disconnected from the vehicle and leaning outwards from the wheel-well at a 45-degree angle, a decent 2km walk uphill in the afternoon sun to civilization. So basically the fucking wheel fell off. During the ensuing lengthy wait for an empty Jeep to pick us up I used my meager Hindi to befriend the Indian family, with the exception of the old patriarch, who erroneously assumed that this was God's punishment to me for not making a charitable donation at the dargah.

I had made my charitable donation. And besides, God doesn't punish me. India does.