Mahatma Ghostface

I knew I had to take a vacation when I saw four Santa Claus heads on pikes by the side of the road. "Aaah it's almost Christmas!"

Traveling Gujarat has taken its toll and I was eager to get to my last stop in the state, its major city of Ahmedabad, a metropolis of 5 million people notorious for its traffic and pollution, and famed as the home of "Mahatma" Mohandas Gandhi's spiritual and political movement. But to get there first I had to cross 100 kilometers of "the most nail-bitingly terrifying road in all of India." I was prepared for the worst, but perversely excited for the thrill.

"Fear has its uses; cowardice has none."
-Mahatma Gandhi

I boarded the bus with solemn resolve.

It was nothing close to the worst. Perhaps ashamed by the highway's reputation, state authorities have apparently replaced it with a beautiful divided highway with a median with purple-blossoming shrubs, and the sturdy, efficient bus didn't even stop for pedestrians at the side of the road. It was the most pleasant bus ride in all of India.

Ahmedabad is indeed a huge city with terrible congestion and air that melts the lungs. The town is about evenly split between Hindus and Muslims. This place became a great city as capital of the Sultanate of Gujarat and is full of majestic mosques. The Islamic influence is very strongly felt here. There is an especially high ratio of women walking the streets in burkhas, forced to do so by their conservative families. Joke's on the men, though. Their oppression of the women, who having been forced to cover their mouths are going to have 15 years added to their lives. I am now so accustomed to smog it hardly consciously bothered me and I noticed that only sissy tourists wore masks, so I refused to do the same.

"Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to makes mistakes."
-Mahatma Gandhi

I probably have cancer.

I arrived at breakfast time and found myself in Lucky's Cafe. At first I noticed there was a tree growing out of the restaurant, as one sometimes finds, but then I noticed something weirder. There were little knee-high fenced enclosures squeezed between the tables at seemingly random spots around the restaurant. I looked in and saw that they contained green Muslim gravestones, which decorated the floor almost like carpeting as waiters shuffled about serving lassis and sandwiches between the tombs.

I took a rickshaw out to the Sabarmati Ashram, the commune from which Gandhi conducted his political activities for almost 15 years. It was the most fascinatingly boring place I have ever been to. There is nothing to please the eye. Even its formerly serene location by the riverside is now in the hub of endless gray apartment blocks. There are just a few sparse huts and a tiny museum with a handful of inspirational posters and photographs. Nonetheless, I highly recommend it. You can look into Gandhi's room as he kept it, with nothing more than a mattress, a spinning wheel, and a little table. All around the museum you find pictures of him spinning textiles, making sandals, and generally being manhandled by or leading marches of people twice the size of his frail frame. I recently finished reading his autobiography, which taught me that he was a very, very strange man. I also felt he was deeply mistaken in his belief that the masses could be spiritually awoken on a pursuit of Truth that would lead to true freedom, but can not help but admire greatly how his solitary example of an astoundingly virtuous and pure-hearted path could prove so effective.

The rest of the day was spent on a tour of numerous Indo-Islamic mosques, of which two merit special mention. The Siddi Sayed mosque is a squat little thing but it features carved lattices that are said to have single-handedly made the rest of India start praising Gujarati architecture. And damn, they are some nice lattices, a delicate, irregular but harmonious pattern of carved loops forming the shape of draping tree branches. The other, the grand Jama Masjid, is a huge, well-proportioned building supported by a thicket of slender Hindu columns. Beneath the main entrance is a black stone slab used as a welcome mat. It is actually the base of a Jain idol buried head-first in front of the mosque. OWNED.

Behind the mosque lies the sprawling Ahmedabad bazaars, a warren of streets of various crafts completely packed with human traffic. At some point I found myself in the Ladies' Bazaar, a huge open-air brassiere market. I had numerous opportunities to take great photographs of groups of burkha-clad women browsing the forest of undies, but kept my camera tucked in my pocket. For a cosmopolitan sophisticate like myself, getting lynched is a bit passe. There were also other men around, lurking to watch the shopping in progress and guffawing as they placed bets on what bra size the burkha- and sari-clad women would end up buying. Regardless of whether they won or lost, they cheered when a woman's purchase exceeded their expectations and sighed when they had overestimated. They encouraged me to participate but I politely refused. "The women in your country have big breasts?" they asked. I responded that like everywhere they came in all shapes and sizes. "The ladies having the biggest breasts is bests, yes?" they continued. I informed them I believed breasts of any size could be enjoyable, both aesthetically and as tactile experiences. Feeling inspired to do so, I further pontificated on the importance of inner beauty, and how happiness is truly best attained by joining oneself not to the woman with the fullest tits, but the woman whose meritorious and caring heart beats most endearingly beneath her full, ripe tits.

"Even a single light dispels the deepest darkness."
-Mahatma Gandhi

As my words sunk in they came to a deeper recognition of what they knew to be true and nodded their heads in agreement.

I wandered about the bazaars some more and killed time in a number of other ways. In the old citadel I was surprised to discover the courtyard to be a nest of lawyers and typists conducting legal business under the trees, and was frequently harangued by tatty-looking typists whose skills with the typewriter obviously did not pay for their drug habits, and completely ignored by the sharply-dressed attorneys who zipped about on Indian scooters in their business-formal wear. I was puzzled enough, when I left the citadel's side gate, rounded the corner, and came across a half-naked man riding an elephant towards a crate of bananas. I sat on a bench nearby to write, but was distracted by the efforts of stall-keepers to constrict the elephant's fruit-grabbing to the designated crate, and while watching this somehow fell asleep .

I woke up on a park bench and there were the Santa heads on pikes. I was exhausted and the reminder of the upcoming holiday was pretty hard to ignore. Upon completion of my work in Gujarat I resolved to take a soothing vacation from being on a wearying professional vacation. I booked a ticket up to Rajasthan via a rail line that recently suffered a serious accident in which several people died, but would take me to a place where a relaxing atmosphere, an absence of work, and a beautiful woman await me. I weighed my options and decided to be true to myself.

"Forsake not pimpin', even unto death."
-Mahatma Ghostface

Mahatma Ghostface is big pimpin'.