Hampicapped

On second thought, let's pretend that post didn't happen. I'll do it again later with better..well, let's just not talk about that.

Sorry about that. Would have had to write myself up on a GFBWI, but let myself off with a warning. Hampi will do that to people.

Hampi is a village located in the ruins of the mighty city of Vijayanagar, capital of the empire of the same name. At its peak, in what we would call Renaissance times, it was one of the richest and most fabulous cities in the world. Then everything came to a crashing halt after a massive military blunder against an alliance of Deccan Muslims, and essentially the place was destroyed overnight and the vast majority of its people put to the sword. Now there are just ruins and ruins and ruins, scattered amongst rocks and rocks and rocks.

There are so many rocks that Indians actually hold it sacred for that reason. They built Vijayanagar on the site of what they believed was the capital of the monkey-kings of the monkey/bear demigod army that fought on Rama's side against the forces of evil in the Ramayana. The boulders lying everywhere as far as the eye can see were supposedly thrown there by the monkey/bear army while it was pumping itself up to go to war, like Kentuckians shooting into the air before a much-awaited night of heavy drinking and shooting into the air.

And speaking of the Ramayana, let us speak no more of the Ramayana. I just finished a wearying summary and commentary on the epic-poem-that-shall-not-be-named for work and don't want to think about it again for a good, long time. I did however consider the completion of this monogram to be as good a reason as any to get myself quite splendidly drunk.

Cut, as my memory did, to about four o'clock the next afternoon, and I'm wondering why the fuck there is a strip of Valium tablets next to my bed, where they came from, and why in God's name is this strip of Valiums completely empty. My suspicions turned immediately towards... hippies.

It would be fair to say that there are quite a few hippies in Hampi. Naturally so. The place is beautiful, as well as huge enough to justify spending many days here, and exhausting enough to justify sitting around doing absolutely nothing. So you can see why there are plenty of hippies. I did little to ameliorate the hippie-saturation of my life by choosing to sleep not in the village of Hampi, but in the village of Virupaggada across the river, which is much quieter and less full of idiot tourists and the rabble that leech on them, but is completely overrun with poorly-groomed people of the lethargic persuasion. In this regard, at least, I fit in marvelously. The reason Virupaggada, (pronounced "the other side of the river")is so much quieter is because to get there you have to take an extremely inconvenient boat across the waters, which keeps most of the swarms at bay but concentrates the intrepidly lazy in one spot. The Other Side Of The River is a veritable bastion of shirtlessness and floral tattoos, where people sit in dimly-lit exotic cafes between the palm trees listening to Bob Marley and Now! That's What I Call Vedic Chant Trance Remixes! Vol. 7, generally having a good time and idly contemplating maybe visiting a temple tomorrow until some asshole who won't shut up about ketamine totally kills the vibe, man.

Yet somehow, the other side of the river avoids the absurd heights of disastrous hippiedom found among the mixed tourists in Hampi Bazaar (pronounced "that side of the river"). There must be a mystical barrier above the river which prevents the passage of most of the countless Trustafarians and Om T-shirt wearers. This magical filter is, however, porous to Russians who still think the existence of underwear is American propaganda, and Spaniards from parts of the Iberian peninsula where shampoo commercials are broadcast in Swahili. Our side of the river may be hopelessly dominated by people with gender-neutral views on armpit-shaving, but at least we don't have that one guy I saw in the bazaar with a full-back tattoo of Sai Baba forming a yin-yang orb between his electrified hands, or the dude with a t-shirt of the villain from Sonic the Hedgehog as an eight-armed robotic Shiva with a red mustache.

You see now why I suspect hippies may have been involved.

Having thus lost a day to some serious sleeping, I resumed my exploration of Vijayanagar the day after. And what a day it was. You know you're going to have a good day when one of the first things you do is go to a temple where you can give a rupee to an elephant and it will kiss you on the top of your skull with its trunk. An auspicious beginning indeed.

I spent two entire days from sunrise to sunset clambering around the ruins of Vijayanagar, following paths up boulder-hills, poking through rocks to find temples by the riverside, walking along baking-hot paths to the ruins of yet another bazzar, temple compound, or palace. The place really must be seen to be believed. There is just so much. And the rocks....godDAMN there are a lot of rocks. At one point I had a distance of about three kilometers to cover, and as I did not want to retrace my path along the banana plantation road, I resolved to just go to the river in a straight line. A straight line, as it turned out, bushwhacking over some serious boulder hills, a stream, a canal, and about a billion thorn-bushes. I got to the riverside Vitthala temple and its famous stone chariot with my feet blackened by filth, my trousers a regal yellow from my new leggings made of pure burs, and my arms trickling with sweat and blood. I marched up to the ticket office, showed them my same-day ticket from the "Lotus Mahal" at the other end of my expedition, and triumphantly saved myself 250 rupees. A group of people I recognized got off an air-conditioned bus and did the same, but I earned it.

I can't tell you about everything I saw. I didn't know most of what I was looking at. Even while pushing through the brush I kept stumbling upon old stone hulks that bore no trace of their original purpose. There are just so many ruins you have to treat most of them as scenery, man-made piles of rocks to complement the rocks piled by cheering bears. But I will tell you about the single coolest thing in Vijayanagar, which is the Narasimha temple. It is a stone wall with a large statue of Narasimha inside. Narasimha, as you must be wondering, is the god Vishnu incarnated on Earth as a half-man half-lion being with four arms, sitting on a coiled, seven-headed cobra that is at once his throne and his parasol. Heavy fucking metal. Don't miss it.

But if you want something really fucking hardcore, I recommend walking along the river where you might be lucky enough to witness the same spectacle as I. I followed the sound of drums, not because I was the slightest bit interested in the would-be novelty of Indian people playing the fucking drums, but because it was directly ahead of me. Below me on a spit of sand in the river was a large gathering of people and a handful of religiously-decorated beach umbrellas. In the middle of the gathering a shirtless man was flailing about and yelping loudly. "A trance?" I thought at first. "Self-flagellation?" I thought as I drew closer, observing the back-striking motions he was making before each scream. Well, you could call it self-flagellation if your definition of that term includes repeatedly stabbing yourself in the back with a fucking axe. As the scene grew more and more intense, so did the drums, until eventually one of the crowd members intervened. He grappled with the axe-swinging man and wrenched the weapon from him. The crazed man collapsed, but then the interloper began swinging the axe at his own back in a gentler mimicry of what the first had done and was screaming unconvincingly. Then this second man started smashing the axe-blade into the ground all around the body of the first guy, who rose ferociously as if to wrestle again, only to be restrained by a quartet of writhing, wheezing priests while men in turbans frantically pushed the encroaching crowd back to safe distances.

People from around the way had stopped their tractors up on the hill and were watching this like it was the most natural of things. Children grew bored and splashed about in the water. And this is a country where people get worked into a screaming fit over fucking cricket. If anybody -even an Indian- tells you they understand this culture, they are lying.

I made it back to the other side of the river every night, and managed to spend even more time doing nothing, this time under the pernicious influence of people who were pretending not to be hippies...the most devious kind. It was around this time that I wrote this post for the first time, and I consider it one of my more astute moves that I struck that little composition from the record. In a burst of energy I had finished my writeup of Hampi and Vijayanagar, and for the first time ever I was actually up to date with my writing. This, I figured again, was as good a reason as any to get quite splendidly drunk. And that's how that happened and how this came to this.

The circle is now whole.