Hyderabad To The Hyderabone

Hyderabad is one of the largest cities in India. It has a population of over 8 million people, 5 million of whom are at any given time about to run you over with a motorcycle. It should almost go without saying that as a large Indian city, Hyderabad must be completely insane, and it is. While it may be one of the most successful cities in the country thanks to its massive software industry (a.k.a. Cyberabad) and some attempt has been made to run it like a proper urban area, you still have to proceed through the streets seizing upon gaps in the murderous traffic that exist for fleeting periods of time that last shorter than a hummingbird's handjob. The local solution is to have a small army of traffic police who at least prevent disaster at intersections by waving their hands about and looking intimidatingly at anyone with the nerve to creep forwards out of turn. Where there are no cops, it's an utter anarchy of bikes and buses hurtling towards packs of pedestrians scurrying across the lane like a set of highly-evolved bowling balls. When the Indian people around are cursing and wheezing in terror as they run, you know it's pretty bad. I tried to conceive of a way to contain the chaos, but could do no better than inventing a cumbersome blockade made of a giant counterweighted beam with an unbroken chain of live cows strapped to it. This, at least, would make people stop but would present certain practical difficulties, like how to make sure the cows only poop when they're on the ground. Progress is not a vocation for the easily daunted.

But enough griping about urban India. Same shit, different sewer.

One of the first things one notices about Hyderabad while not competing in the devil's decathlon is that a large portion of the population are Muslims. This goes back all the way to the age of those tediously belligerent Deccan Sultanates, a tradition that continues to this day in the person of the incredibly conceited Nizams of Hyderabad, who haven't noticed that they stopped being a semi-independent state 63 years ago. Nevertheless, considerable energy is expended reminding the visitor of such facts as that the Nizam was the only Indian prince entitled to a 21-gun salute in all realms of the British Empire (19-gun princes, obviously, are bitches), and that the Kohinoor diamond, with which everyone in India is obsessed, came from here. Less energy is expended reminding everyone that said diamond got passed around the warring powers of 19th-century India like a stripper at an NFL team's Super Bowl victory party and is now sitting exhausted, used, and suspiciously still in the Crown Jewels in London and nobody's quite sure how much cocaine she just had.

The upshot of monomaniacal royals with garish wealth is that centuries later we get to enjoy all the cool shit they build and softly applaud them for having the noble inspiration to commission themselves expensive palaces. The old city, where a good third of the population seems to be comprised to shuffling black sacks with feet, is full of such delightfully pointless monuments. By far the greatest of its edifices, surpassing the usual gamut of mosques and palaces, is a...thing...called the Charminar, or "Four Minarets", a giant triumphal arch/mosque/tower doodad that soars dramatically out of the heart of the city between eight other massive street-spanning arches, just because. All around the Charminar is the sheer insanity of a thriving sprawl of 17th century bazaars with 21st century traffic running down the middle. Thousands of women, mostly in burkhas, swarm around between shops and carts examining what I sincerely hope is the world's largest concentration of bangles. If there exists a place on Earth with more bangles than old Hyderabad, it's time to reconsider the creative priorities of the human race. I don't even know what they're going to do with all those bangles. They're wearing burkhas. They could be banglin' from head to toe and nobody but their husbands would ever know that the odd look of discomfort one detects through their eye-slits is because they're waddling down the road like an otter trapped in a slinky.

On the fringes of Hyderabad, out between the newest residential constructions, is the older, ruined city of Golconda. This may come as a shock, but there is a Very Historic Castle. And tombs. I don't think I ever need to see a castle or tomb again. But I wondered, as I meandered about the enormous yet uninspiring graves, what would the bloodthirstily pious sultans of old say if they knew that a visit to Golconda and the tombs of their forefathers was now primarily an excuse for the young people of Hyderabad to meet and (by the Prophet's beard, such words are to me like poison at the feast of Eid!)...cuddle?

I spent much of my last day in Hyderabad on a worthless quest to look at its celebrated lake and their new giant Buddha statue, and it sucked. I was at least expecting the statue itself to be good since they went to the great trouble and expense of fishing it out of the lake after the barge carrying it sank (even prophets are at the mercy of deathly incompetent transportation in this country). Anyways, whichever latter-day Michelangelo that directed its post-dunking installation on the lake forgot the minor detail of standing it so that it faces the brand-spanking new park they built to view it from. I shall never know if the Buddha maintained his zen-filled countenance in the face of a sinking ship.

The morning after this pointless endeavor I set out on a venture that I knew was going to suck from the outset. Little did I know that I was in for a hot, bumpy ride on the tranny train all...night...long.

Let me rephrase that.

I had booked myself a 23-hour train journey way up the east coast on a ticket that made no guarantee I would get more than half a sleeping berth. I knew deep down that all the reassurances I found from travelers online that such tickets usually turn out alright would be comprehensively wrong, and that the train would arrive at my destination probably about the same time as the neighboring piece of the Earth's crust. I was relieved when I got on to find that the train was surprisingly empty, save for a few passengers, an entire parade of differently-differently-abled beggars, and a family of mice licking at the edible footprints left in the crusty deposits of spilled lentil curry. I was awoken from my morning nap once by a mouse scurrying up my backpack and over my feet, and countless other times by prodding mendicants. Sleep is one of the few things that Indians don't consider sacred. You will be woken up at any time of day or night to be asked for money, informed that the bus-driver is stopping to take a leak, or asked if you would like any tea delivered to your hotel room. "Oh yes, I would love some tea. I'm feeling a bit groggy SINCE YOU JUST WOKE ME UP, ASSHOLE." I have a theory that by some divine intervention of an irritating minor Hindu god dwelling in a shrine next to an IT firm in Hyderabad or Bangalore, every time you 'poke' someone on Facebook it is transmuted into an actual poke to be suffered by an innocent person somewhere in India.

I was half-conscious, in that turbulent state of disturbed sleep when I became aware of the sound of clapping drawing nearer and nearer in the carriage. Oh great, I thought, hear comes some idiot with his one-stringed fiddle and insect-covered baby sister to sing some godawful tune and look maudlin until I pay him five rupees not to start anew with his tambourine. I was therefore surprised, though I probably would have been surprised under any circumstances, to be prodded awake by a clique of clapping trannies.

When I say "trannies", I'm not entirely sure if they were technically transvestites, transsexuals, hermaphrodites, or something else. They define the categories differently over here. In any event, I noticed the juxtaposition of saris and square jaws. This is one of those things that many people evidently find much more magical than I do. Entire forests have been felled to print the numerous books written about the "invisible lives" of the puzzling caste of people who are, for lack of a more coherent definition, sexually different. One of the things they are best known for is showing up at people's weddings, sometimes invited for an arcane blessing but usually on the tip-offs of informers, and then proceeding to dance around until the host gets the message that if some money isn't delivered soon the wedding-guests will be treated to an extended glimpse of what's under those skirts. Invisible lives indeed. But wide-eyed Westerners of the sentimental type just can't seem to stop writing books about them as if they were just discovered after thousands of years evolving in a sealed-off cave. I, for one, upon my first extended encounter with them, was merely irritated and gestured that they should move on, preferably without clapping. I've lived in Amsterdam. You'll have to do a lot more than just put on a lady's dress to impress me.

As night fell and the train reached the coast, the carriage was suddenly inundated by passengers well beyond capacity. The transvestite troupe had dissapeared, but I was faced with the much more unpleasant situation of having to spend the entire night bent up in a half-sized bed which I was sharing head-to-foot with a complete stranger whose little toe was growing out of the top of his foot halfway back to the ankle and periodically threatened to insert itself up my nostril.

It was a hard, bumpy ride on the tranny train, all night long.

In the morning we entered Orissa, the poorest state in all of India, which is to say that it is very, very poor. I was particularly concerned the train would crawl through here hopelessly slow because Orissa and its neighboring states have spent the last week or so having their rail lines blown to pieces in a coordinated Naxalite Maoist offensive against the government. As soon as we crossed the state border, all the passengers abruptly abandoned the train in the town of Brahmapur, which I looked up later and found to have no touristic, religious, or transport-link significance. They just wanted to get off the train immediately, probably because they weren't in the mood for a repeat of the other day's dramatic bombing/derailment in Bihar. The vacancy was almost immediately filled by large groups of Orissan peasants on their way to business in the city on the morning express. For them, as they had boarded just before dawn, it was a day train rather than a sleeper, and they wasted no time in poking at me to demand I cede the quarter-bed I had just finished painfully ossifying in. Then, with the influx of new passengers, came a new (and I must say even less inspired) march of the clapping trannies.

Only a few more hours to the end, I thought. And that's when shit got really weird. The train arrived five minutes early.