As Cadelas Não São Merda

OK, enough of this heroic modesty nonsense: it's time for me to boast about something, for once. I am really, really good at travelling on Indian buses. In Hampi I challenged an acquaintance of mine to a race. We were both heading to the city of Panjim in Goa, and he was taking a private bus from the Goa travel agency cartels, and I was hellbent upon going by government bus. We agreed to time ourselves traveling to Panjim, with a system of deductions for whoever managed to save more money also. Needless to say, I blew my rival out of the water. I masterfully traversed 421 kilometers of countryside on no less than 5 local buses, including one to a town I had only heard of 2 hours before. I arrived there only 35 minutes slower on a 10-hour trip, having saved 67% of the cost. Who's the champion? I'm the champion. The champion of what? Of everything.

The bus rides were surprisingly enjoyable, as I got to watch the scenery transition from the dry, brown fields of the Deccan Plateau into the lush, jungled southwestern coast. Going down from a plateau of course you have to pass through some mountains, which in southern India form a textbook case of rain shadow. This is what the tropics are supposed to be like. Palm trees swaying in the breeze, rivers pouring down green mountainsides, monkeys jumping from tree to tree above the highway. Taking a bus down these mountains, however, could be a little more comfortable, as even the main highway was quite sinuous and bumpy and we bounced about like we were going downhill in a barrel. The worst part of it all was when me and my seat-neighbor simultaneously fell victim to the ever-present, probabilistic danger that when men are launched from a sitting position into the air, it is sometimes possible to land back in the seat on top of one's own testicles. While my companion was occupied with kneeling in the aisle and crying, I was curled up in my seat, trying to regain control of my breathing and biting my cheeks hard enough that now I can't eat salty foods.

Goa is an oddity in India. It's always been a little aloof from the rest of the country because it is a bit of a pain to get to, as you have to cross densely forested mountains to approach it from any direction. So while the rest of India was in constant flux between various warring powers, Goa was just chilling, which it continues to do to this day. Also, crucially, during the imperial days it was occupied by the Portuguese rather than the British, with the accompanying differences in cultural attitudes. For starters, even now there are Catholics everywhere. Walking around Panjim you find more churches than temples, and there are little Jesus shrines with burning incense on the street corners. The people have names like Laurenco de Souza, and you can even hear Portuguese alongside Konkani on the streets. Panjim is a lovely little place, even though it is an Indian state capital, which usually guarantees a place will be a shithole. It feels like a little piece of Central America plucked up and filled with really mellow Indian people, which is probably why I like it.

It isn't surprising that the Portuguese had more success converting the locals to Catholicism than the British did winning converts to Anglican Protestantism. Well, for starters the Portuguese had a little thing called "the Inquisition", which proved to be pretty convincing. If you thought heretics in Iberia had it bad, imagine how the Inquisitors reacted when they got to India and found Hindus worshiping elephant-headed gods and blue-skinned messiahs. On the other hand, it seems to me that Catholicism and Hinduism are naturally well-adjusted for conversions. They have a lot in common. The Catholic 'gods' are forever taking up various aspects. The Virgin Mary, who might as well be Shakti, is a great example of this as she is at one time Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, Our Lady of Sorrows, Our Lady of Necessity, and so on. She even has place-specific manifestations, appearing on yams and shit around the world. Catholicism has its Supreme Being incarnate as a messianic "avatar" on Earth. (By the way, the film "Avatar" is HUGE in India because people are convinced that a film with the name "Avatar" starring a bunch of blue people must be hinting at Hindu legend in some way). The Catholics have an endless supply of saints, equivalent to Hindu sages, who are always undergoing the most improbable miracles like putting their decapitated heads back on. Indians love hagiographies. Catholic churches, like Hindu temples, have a large number of shrines attached that worshipers can go to to address a particular need. Vishnu or Jesus not the man for the job? Go pray to Lakshmi or St. Stephen. Catholicism and Hinduism both love bells, candles, and big processions in silly costumes, and neither is trusted in Alabama.

There is a popular belief going around India, propagated by various books on the subject, which holds that during Jesus's youth he must have come and lived in India. The reasoning seems to be something like this:

1) From the time Jesus was a teenager until his early thirties or so, there are the "missing years", in which the Bible doesn't mention what he was doing.
2) During that time he got all wise and shit.
3) So he must have been in India.

This blog is partly an attempt to document my time in India, so that none of my years may go missing and be open to the speculation of my many followers in centuries to come.

Aside from the religious aspect, which really is quite interesting, the people of Goa have also seemed to adopt a more Portuguese attitude to the pace of life, which is a refreshing change from the general intensity of the rest of India. If you've ever been to Portugal, you'll see that the similarities are striking, and that the Portuguese imperial regime, harsh as it was, was at least ameliorated by this pleasant approach to living. Portugal is basically Spain with its shirt-buttons undone. In Portugal you might see a sheared sheep walking around with a full layer of wool on its legs because somebody wanted a vest without any sleeves. The Portuguese in Goa raised pigs instead of goats, because pigs don't run as far if you fall asleep while you're watching them. Britain, France, and Portugal walk into a bar. Britain goes to the bartender and says "I'll have a gin." France says to the bartender "vin blanc, sil vous plait". They start sipping their drinks, and Portugal says to the bartender "What do you mean I'm cut off?!?! You can't cut me off! Your mother was a fish and your father was a grapefruit! I piss on the very name of your....I piss on my shoes."

That being said, Portuguese chicks are pretty hot.

In Goa I managed to check into an Indian hotel in a part of Panjim lying in the Twilight Zone. Indian hotels, by which I mean hotels where Indian people stay, are already "interesting" enough in that they are really goddamn annoying. Words cannot describe the feeling one has being awoken every single morning by a platoon of Indians clearing their throats, a dramatic ten-minute exercise which sounds like the throat-clearer is trying to dislodge a live kitten from his trachea while giving birth to the chest-bursting monster from Alien. Some mornings, such as this one in Goa, you are treated to an early-morning awakening by Indian guests who don't know which hotel room their friends are in and approach the predicament with a primitive heuristic scheme of randomly knocking on doors. "Shuwa!?" I heard along with the door-pounding some time around sunrise. "No" I groaned. The pounding grew louder. "SHUWA???". "NO" I bellowed. POUND POUND POUND "SHUWA?!?!?". "FUCK OFF YOU IDIOT". Silence...a pause....pound pound "Shuwa?" At this my patience wore out. I really don't understand what the people here find so fucking hard about locating the proper hotel room. I stomped over to the door, opened it and stepped into the hallway nude to shout something to the effect of "LISTEN YOU GODDAMN MORON, NEXT TIME YOU'RE IN A HOTEL, TRY FINDING OUT THE RIGHT ROOM IN ADVANCE, AIGHT? Now, this may have been a touch rude on my part, but I believe the experience of seeing a completely nude Ghostface Buddha burst into the hallway to chastise him probably made a memorable impression, and at least one person will henceforth think twice about knocking on random people's doors in the morning.

All of this though, was completely standard, par for the course in Indian hotels. Other incidents elevated this place to true strangeness. After touring about Old Goa and Panjim for a day, I returned to my room quite late at night. Some thirty seconds after I stepped into the room, I turned around to see the owner of the establishment standing about two feet behind me. He grinned, rubbed his fingers together, and said "Pay". My heart jumped at the sight of this man, some kind of Indian leprechaun that lurks in cupboards at night, waiting to pop out and ask for money as soon he magically detects that a guest has entered his room . I paid him and settled into bed. That's when things got weird. At about half past midnight, I noticed my room becoming a bit lighter, and realized that the door was slowly opening, and a member of the hotel staff was walking in. "Oh, you are sleeping?" he asked. No, I'm lying in bed reading the infrared newspaper.

"Yes, I'm sleeping" I responded. He then switched on the lights. "What the fuck?" I groaned. "Lights?" he asked. "OFF" I said, while making as much of a waving gesture as I could without blowing the small, flimsy sheet off my nude body. He looked at the light switch, left it on, and walked further into the room. "You are sleeping or may I sit?" he asked, pointing towards the other bed in the room. "I. Am. Sleeping" I said as authoritatively as I could. As this was clearly topsy-turvy world, he took it as an invitation to sit, and plopped himself not on the other bed, but at the foot of mine, where let me remind you I am quite naked. He then started poking through my things, read a few pages of my Mahabharata, and took a great interest in the Goa section of my India Road Atlas. "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?" I asked. He rotated the map about, apparently to read Portuguese upside-down, and leisurely examined the earmarks in my "Dictionary for Writers and Editors". Finally, he asked once more "you are sleeping?". "Get. Out." He took a minute or two to contemplate this, then decided he felt like leaving. He motioned me to get up. "You have to close the door" he said. In a tone dripping with contempt I answered "Trust me, I will be closing it quite securely. Don't be alarmed if you hear furniture moving." He continued to sit there, indicating I ought to get up right now and walk him to the door. So I did, instructively burning the image of my naked form on a deranged person's mind for the second time in twelve hours.

The next morning instead of checking out and risking any human contact, I tossed the spare mattress out of the broken bathroom window and jumped after it from the second floor into the empty lot below.

In between my various hostage conversations with deluded individuals, I actually got quite a bit of work done and did a full tour of Old Goa, the ruins of the once-great Portuguese capital upriver. Now, where there used to be one of the world's largest and richest cities, there isn't a whole lot but a cluster of very large and very impressive Catholic churches and some ruins. I ambled about admiring the architecture, gaping at truly massive altarpieces, and paid a visit to the tomb of St. Francis Xavier. I grew hungry but realized it would be my fourth meal before nightfall if I ate and I feared becoming a hobbit, so I settled on sitting on a balcony and sipping a coke. As I left I handed the cashier a banknote and asked for my change. He sifted through the cash-drawer but couldn't find the proper change. Then he reached into a glass jar and in lieu of coinage handed me a roll of Mentos. "What the fuck is this shit?" I asked. (By this point, as you can tell, I was already having a rather expletive-laden day). "No change" he said. I looked at the Mentos in my hand. Seriously, what the fuck is this shit? Does this look like legal motherfucking tender to you? If you were up slinging on the drug corner and a fiend gave you a roll of Mentos would you take that shit? Would you walk into the Reserve Bank of India, hand a motherfucker some Mentos and ask to redeem that shit against fucking bullion? Are your Mentos on the fucking gold standard? No? You at least going to control its price fluctuations against the Yen, bitch? Get that shit out of my face...mmmmm these are delicious.

There are a lot of beaches in Goa, but they have a bit of a reputation. If I wanted to hear Balkan techno remixes of Nickelback songs I would go back to Croatia and look for a crowd of Serbs with the bottom of their asses hanging out of their shorts. That, and Goa had clearly become a Portuguese answer to Australia, but instead of becoming a penal colony it was a province for the mentally insane. Sorry, Jesus, but I'm going to have to leave you behind and spend my idle beach days across the border in Karnataka, hanging around flamboyant paintings of Hindu gods and flute-playing hippies. It's nothing personal. Oh, and if you are still in South India, we should hang. Call me. I know a great place if you like didgeridoos.