4:20 Die Of Heat Stroke Every Day

On April 20th, 2010, in the tranquil village of Orchha, it was 115 goddamn degrees outside.

CHRIST ON A CRACKER. 115 DEGREES?!?!? IT'S FUCKING APRIL

Indian people wave at me from shops and say "Come in! Come in!" Then when I go in they dont even try to sell me things, they just say "Please, sir, don't be outside."

Orchha is a lovely place, truly one of the most beautiful and relaxing spots in all of lowland India. It's the abandoned capital of the erstwhile kings of the Bundelkhand, and now is little more than a minor pilgrimage village surrounded by scenic ruins crumbling in fields, on the riverside, and being swallowed by the dry forests. I haven't a clue how it's stayed so small and lovely when its epic palaces and temples and its not-that-remote location could easily put it the must-see list of India. Maybe it has something to do with it feeling hotter than drinking boiled chilli sauce from a flaming camel's ass.

I had arrived several days earlier, via a local train so dismally slow the peasants around me took to standing in the doorways and washing their turbans. The last few miles had to be covered by comically-overburdened rickshaws that reminded me that motor vehicles subjectively move twice as fast when you're standing tip-toed on the rear bumper.

As I wondered around the sleepy vegetable patches that now cover most of the fortified river island, I noticed that I had sweated through my shirt, through my backpack, and that this sweat on the far, outer side of my backpack straps had evaporated and left lines of salt and the sweaty frontiers. I felt a need to scratch and salt shook out of my arm hairs. I feel like a potato wedge. My forehead was the same, a sparkling white expanse of sodium chloride. My skull is apparently a salt flat. Pretty soon people are going to start testing rocket-powered cars on my face.

I defied the advice of my well-wishing Indian acquaintances, not only because ignoring sensible advice is my custom, but also because Orchha is just a wonderful place to explore regardless of the weather. After much effort, I found it: the perfect spot. I settled down to read in a breezy nook between swaying green bushes on the riverside in an unperturbed nature reserve directly across the river from empty farms and the nigh-perfectly photogenic memorials of the Bundela kings. I reclined in the shade and took to leisurely reading a collection of essays on modern India (chapter 1 summary: holy hell, Bihar is awful). After a couple hours I reluctantly turned in, because I had just finished my seventh liter of water for the day and felt that not needing to piss after consuming that quantity of fluid probably signalled some kind of impending medical emergency. I would have to be evacuated to a real city by rickshaw, and in a weak condition I would probably have to be tied to the roof. It was either that or die on the forest for my undiscovered corpse to become the local deers' salt-lick, so I shuffled back to my blissfully dark cell in the village.

It was about 111 degrees when these events transpired. The next day, I hiked out in the opposite direction from the village to see the abandoned Lakshmi temple and its fabulous Bundeli paintings. It was then that I checked the meteorological data in the newspaper and thought to myself "Dear God, and it's still only April. What day in April is it, by the way? Let's check the top of the newspaper....The 20th? Oh dear. I almost forgot." Suffice to say, on April 20th (for complicated reasons relating to electromagnetic currents and the counter-longitudinal azimuth of the pole star), it was of paramount importance that I go smoke some weed.

This presented a bit of a dilemma, as I had already budgeted the afternoon to visiting a palace in the village of Datia. Then it ocurred to me...what's the conflict? I hopped onto a bus right away. The palace at Datia is something of a fantasy castle, a ridiculously tall Rajput fortification that begins with several levels of pitch-black chambers at the bottom, passes up through a labyrinth of staircases, and climaxes in an almost Escher-esque courtyard with a gigantic keep in the center which can only be summited by navigating a series of hidden passages, balconies, flyover walkways, and hard-to-find, locked-up stairwells. Nobody comes to Datia, and in this heat, I was literally the only visitor in the logbook, so I had the citadel all to myself.

"But wait," you ask, "you said the stairs of the inner tower were locked up?" Well, they were locked up. The empty palace of Datia was the perfect place for me to combine my two favorite criminal offences, the second being breaking and entering. I actually have something of a history of breaking into castles. The most memorable such adventure culminated in a frenzied nighttime escape through the rain on a wooded hillside in a desperate bid to evade the Luxembourg police. But that didn't happen in India so it's besides the point. Anyways, it just so happened that one critical staircase tucked away within a giant stone pillar was sealed shut with nothing more than a metal door with a twisted metal wire holding it in place. The wire was too thick to untwist with my bare hands, so I began digging in my backpack for some kind of tool. For reasons long since forgotten, there was a toenail clipper at the bottom of my bag. I examined its filed edge and could positively feel the mischievousness glowing in my eyes, or maybe I was just high. In any case, if prison inmates can use a file to break out of jail bars in weeks or months, I could certainly get through a 1/8" cable in a an afternoon. All I needed was patience, and I had several lumps of it in a small plastic bag.

Finally, after what seemed simultaneously like aeons and moments, I had sawed through enough wire to snap it by brute force. I clambered into the forbidden stairs, completely failing to contain my giggles, and loosely eased the door into place behind me. Even in my hyper-alert state of paranoia, my main concern was that somebody's dog would come sniffing up after me, lured by the trail of salt I imagined stretching behind me like an edible, biscuit-seasoning version of Ariadne's thread.

So, for the second day in a row, I spent much of my day listlessly pretending to enrich myself in a tranquil spot marked by architectural beauty, and for a second day in a row I eventually retreated because I was as parched as a trout in a tumbleweed. Once again, I have had my way with the primitive defensive systems that just can't come close to keeping Ghostface Buddha out of a fucking castle. And no one shall ever know. Except you, I guess, or anyone who can read the cached draft of this post, like I guess anyone with a grudge against me and subpoena powers. What's that sound? Are those sirens? Shit...fuck....shit....where are my firebombs? IT'S TIME TO SMOKE SOME BACON.