Freedom

I awoke. Everything was a golden brown. I looked around in bewilderment. This was not the same bus I had fallen asleep on. Had I unconsciusly transferred buses? And if so, where was I? I crinkled my nose at a fleeting smell and felt that in the dry, oppressive heat my boogers had fried themselves into sharp chits with the consistency of an Aztec obsidian dagger within my nose. There was no doubt about it; I was back in the Deccan.

I came to my senses and looked around. Everything seemed to confirm that I had passed Hyderabad and was on my way to Bidar, a dusty backwater even in a land of dusty backwaters. Everyone else in the bus was sleeping too, beaten into unconsciousness by the currents of scorching air tearing through the windows of the bus. It was a neccesary misery; if the bus were to slow down, the furnace-like gusts of air would be replaced by flocks of vultures bursting through the windows and squabbling over perches in the luggage racks as they wait to see who's the first to die.

So this is freedom, I thought. Upon leaving Tirupati I had made a decisive cut, a final end to my toils for the ever-ungrateful bastards who henceforth held the purse-strings of my travels in India. I've now reached the threshold of self-sustainabilty so now, I am proud to say, I'm on my own shiat, biatch. One alter-ego has been consigned to the rubbish-bin of history, whence it shall probably be thrown into a gutter or an empty lot to be nibbled on by pigs until it is set on fire in giant trash-burnings that spill into the street and set people's car paint ablaze (that happens here). Only Ghostface Buddha remains.

I woke up some 700km from the scene of my last labor, and took immediately to savoring the taste, the feel, and the smell of Freedom. I squirmed in my seat to try and stretch my muscles after a night on the road, and found that I had I had clearly left the sweart-drenched climate of the far south behind. Only where I stuck to my chair was there any feeling of moisture. Elsewhere, I noticed odd accumulations of salt on my body, crusting up my collarbone and getting knotted in tangles of Brillo-pad tummy hair. Freedom indeed. Somehow I had expected a big sloppy chili dog accompanied by the sounds of a college marching band, or at least a plate of cocktail sausages with little flags in them. As for the smell of Freedom, out in the baking nothingness, all I could detect was the fumes of the bus itself poisoning my charred nostrils with an odor not unlike a napalm-coated village of Communist sympathizers. The smell of Freedom, at least, was just right.

Bidar is such a dusthole that the Indian Air Force has put its training academy there. The Indian military brass are the first to admit that when fast-moving vehicles are concerned in this country, it is best to center them where there is nothing of value to crash into. Even if a trainee loses control and ejects, leaving his training jet to crash into the desolate countryside and kill a passing goat, the military wouldn't even have to compensate the farmer. "The goat would have died out there anyways" they'll argue. Aside from the odd fighter jet screeching overhead, there isn't a whole lot of motion once you get off the main roads of Bidar. I would turn into a small red-dirt alleyway to check for any quaint scenes to photograph, only to find myself on the edge of town looking off a slope into miles and miles of emptiness.

In the town itself are varios attractions including the requisite fort and the ruins of a once-esteemed Islamic university. Right next to my hotel was a park full of the tombs of the Badir Shahi sultans, who were kings here after the Bahmani sultans but before the Adil Shahi sultans, who were in turn conquered by the...whatever. I have a theory about medieval Deccan history. The only reason their culture was able to flourish so greatly in those war-riven times was not despite the era being centuries of bloodbaths, but because of it. A good battle was probably the only form of irrigation you could hope for in ten months of the year. I imagine grateful peasants bowing before the king and saying "Thank you, oh Master, for spilling the blood of our enemies upon the fields, such that it flowed like rivers, whatever those are. We may have wheat this year." I entered the park as usual to poke about the tombs and was miffed to find they charged a little entrance fee. This fee, I discovered, was for the aesthetic upkeep of the park, and by "aesthetic upkeep" I mean "bizarre Barcelona-esque landscaping around the ancient tombs complemented by statues of naked golden babies hugging geese and fish."

About a mile outside of town lies a cluster of large, crumbling tombs (these ones belonging to the Bahmani sultans), some of them in such an advanced state of ruination that their domes look like half of a cracked eggshell. They call the village Ashtur, but I don't know where the village is. There didn't seem to be a whole lot of life around, just a handful of huge tombs, the hot, brown earth, and an endless sky. The air was so still, and the scenery so implacably limitless and monotonous that even tumbleweeds disdained to roll on through. What plants there were to be seen were firmly rooted. I stared at a bush for a moment, entranced by its utter motionlessness, even for a bush. Not a twig stirred in the still silence of the countryside and the bush seemed to roll its would-be eyes at me and say "What? You want me to move? To where? Look at this shit, what's the point?" before grumpily resuming the silence of its timeless, dusty squat. I tromped about from one tomb to another, and found myself most unpleasantly reminded of that other Deccan sensation, the infiltration of dust in one's sandals, from which is created a sticky brown mire where the pressure and sweat of your feet turn the surface of your footware to a wet, grainy, shit-colored morass. I tried to remain optimistic. This was my first day of freedom, after all. I told myself that at least if I was lost and starving out in the countryside I would be able to catch insects to eat by taking a nap with my gluey feet pointed at a termite mound. I almost didn't mind taking my shoes off to enter the tombs. I hopped across the scorching stone floors with great dispatch, only to be utterly dismayed that the hot floors were a blessing compared to the Deccan crabgrass towards which I had so urgently and gracelessly bounded.

As I shuffled back across the stone making little puffing sounds of "Ooo ahhhh ahhh", I was pulled into an open tomb by a curious Muslim man. Oh great, soon he shall kindly offer his services as a guide, I thought. He did, but he was no ordinary guide. He led me over to a leather messenger bag in the darkness and started pulling out reams of documents, grabbing my hands and forcing me to flick through them. He seemed particularly intent on showing me a genealogical table of the Bahmani kings that continued to the present day. Just like Indian royals, I thought, to continue their dynastic pretensions even when they had lost their throne to another line of sultans in the 1500's. He laid the document side-by-side with a local newspaper clipping in which he was clearly illustrated. I began to read. "Descendant of Bahamani kings maintains ancestors' tombs in life of penury." I was there face-to-face with the current head of a much-declined royal household that had once controlled all of south-central India and was now reduced to a snaggle-toothed man whose best luck in life so far seemed to have been being given a free village hut from the Archaeological Survey of India when they evicted his family from squatting in the tombs themselves. I had the vague feeling of brushing dust off a walking exhibit of Bidar's history, and that this history was about to use the sudden revelation of its ancient mystique to ask for money.

I may not have had to pay our tax-loving, freedom-hating, communist, fascist Kenyan Nazi terrorist President a dime in taxes this year, but I did have to give the fucking Sultan of Bidar twenty rupees.

Freedom is dead.