Penises

Deep in the Bundelkhand lies a lonely airstrip that sees one or two planes landing every single day, in an area where the bus comes by almost as rarely. Bundelkhand is a dry, sparsely populated region of plains and craggy hills separating the north Indian plains from central India. It is known, above all, not for great riches or sacred places, but as a historical redoubt of "dacoity". A dacoit, it should be explained, is a member of a bandit gang. The Bundelkhand is a poor, empty expanse of scorching fields where you don't travel the roads at night. There is, however, a successfully operating airstrip just outside of a village called Khajuraho. But why? Three words: ancient stone vagina.

For some reason (which is as specific as the historians get), in the middle ages the kings of the Bundelkhand decided to build a temple city at the site of present-day Khajuraho, and adorned nearly all of these temples with large, intimately detailed sculptures of mind-bogglingly kinky sex. If you've ever wanted to see a sculpture depicting such details as the cleft between a bull's testicles as it sodomizes a nobleman, this is where it's at.

Your narrator, in his nigh godlike humility, disdains to travel within India by airplane and instead penetrated the Bundelkhand by train. As soon as I got on the platform in Varanasi I could tell something was amiss, namely the sleeper carriage in which I had booked a ticket was not attached to the train. A trio of foreign tourists wafting their precious ticket reservations got in the lonely sleeper car down the platform. The fools. I know Indian Railways to well for that, so I boarded a general-seating carriage at random and swung myself wildly into an unclaimed overhead luggage rack. Comfortable it was not, but as the trio of other tourists no doubt both envied and beheld in dismay, at least it was attached to the train when it pulled out of the station. No sandstone orgies for them.

After further ordeals which included a brief interlude trapped on the roof of a moving bus (fortunately, pounding on a bus ceiling has a certain universality in the message it conveys) I clambered off in the dusty assortment of hamlets that together comprise Khajuraho. Visiting Khajuraho is like being trapped on a desert island with your worst enemy's CD collection. First of all, it's hot and isolated enough to be a desert, and secondly the entire human population depends upon annoying the crap out of you or collecting the providential fallings of fruit. On my first day of touring I somehow amassed an entourage in my rickshaw, including the driver, some dude from my hotel who wanted me to teach him how to talk about Hindu architecture in Spanish, and a wrinkly old goatherd with three teeth and nothing better to do. We visited the lesser-known and more far-flung temples that day, and though it was certainly a curious experience ("How you say 'Vishnu ten avatar' in Spanish?"), there was a notable lack of ecstatic stone figures being spit-roasted by throbbing dick. In fact, before I saw a single erotic nude, I happened to see actual people sitting around naked.

I was wandering in a Jain temple and headed into the main shrine, entering quietly as I heard voices. I looked to the source of the noise and saw a young monastic pupil reading intently from a holy book while receiving instruction from a bald, middle-aged man who was not wearing any clothes. They looked at me with some curiosity, though probably less intensely than I was looking at them. I muttered a quick "...er, carry on." and was off, thinking it poor decorum to start taking photographs in a room with naked people in it.

Around the corner was a cluster of more ancient Jain temples, and I did as I do and snooped about. As I was admiring an image of the tirthankar Parsvanath, I heard someone beckon "Please, sit down." I peered into the ambulatory and sure enough there was a similar scene of a studious man about my age receiving instruction from a conspicuously bald and unclothed Degembara Jain monk. Accompanying them was a second monk, asleep in a dark corner of the temple with his head tilted back against a statue of an elephant and his old legs splayed open wide, a sight which brought to mind a caterpillar shuffling in the joint between two rotting branches of driftwood. The monk who invited me was more reserved. Indeed, from the various photographs I've seen in temples and now through personal observation, I must say that Jain monks are incredibly adept at sitting without revealing more than the layperson strictly needs to behold on the path to wisdom. We chatted for quite a while, and I soon found myself on the defensive as the monk repeatedly outdid me in measured nonchalance. "I like to travel simply; I don't need luxuries. Sleep in the luggage rack, whatever, no problem", I would be saying, trying to find some common ground in our outlooks. Then he would respond without giving a single hint of smugness or being a wiseass "I travel only on foot. No vehicle, no animal. I have no clothes. I only walk. Walking everywhere. It is not hard."

Talk progressed in due course to my diet, and I told him that in India I had experimented with strict Jain vegetarianism but had found it incompatible with my bodily needs, and had therefore resumed eating nonvegetarian food, usually eggs. He raised an eyebrow, and when a bald naked man raises an eyebrow the quizzical look is greatly magnified. "But eggs are not a vegetarian food..?" he said. "Well, no, like I was saying, I tried vegetarian food but found I need nonveg food for my health."

"Look at me" he began, choosing a poor moment to change the crossing of his legs. "I eat only fruit and vegetables and I am healthy" he said, running his hands over his naked, middle-aged paunch and down towards the dark, shadowed crease he had reestablished around his own fruits. "I do not eat even all vegetable. I do not take any food that kills or damages the plant. I must wait only for the fruit to fall to me, or to be plucked without harm. This is the holy way..." he said, as he gave his thigh another ill-timed stretch. "...it isn't hard."

This time I had reason to raise an eyebrow. "...Sure isn't."

For a long time after that we debated the philosophical and scientific points of chicken-egg fertilization to the point that there wasn't a single avenue left for me to be defeated in. I uncharacteristically refrained from asking "But which came first!?", yet found myself in no less of a logical quandary, as I was pretty sure I had talked myself into a position where I conceded that eating eggs was only ethical if the hen somehow consensually mated with a non-inseminating omelette-ovulation-provoking contraption. I had one more flash of inspiration but silenced myself when I remembered the Jain prohibition on alcohol, so getting the hen drunk wouldn't count. Finally, I had to say it. "Well, you must be right" I conceded.

"Yes," the monk said matter-of-factly "but come, we have sat and spoken long. Let us stand and part our ways." So he stood and I quickly followed, preferring to meet him eye-to-eye than eye-to-...eye. "It was a good talk" he said, and shook my hand. There was a rustle and the elderly second monk, now almost forgotten in his nook, mumbled "Goodbye", flipped his penis over onto his other leg, and went back to sleep.

I emerged into the light of day and returned to my neglected entourage. "Que tu fues hacendo?" my would-be Castillian compadre inquired. "Hablando con un monje sobre sus huevos" I responded. "Kya?" he asked in Hindi. "Forget about it."


That night I was threatened with physical violence by a jilted drug dealer who took my disinclination to purchase any marijuana from him as a personal affront, but really, what's new.

The next morning I slipped out without my spastically polyglot retinue and headed to the main enclosure of world-famously raunchy temples. Though the quantity of erotica was not as legendary as they would like you to think, it makes up for this deficiency through sheer imagination. The ancient Hindus were determined to make a science out of everything, as so to this day the Hindu rules of rituals, art, writing, logic, music, and yes, sex all carry the strict burden of scripture. Thus, musical composition is rigorously categorized into 85 or so "moods", which strictly define which notes and rhythms may be used in which contexts of key and subject, etc., leaving no possibility, however obscure, unexplored. The same goes with sex. The ancient attitude was roughly "Now, consider, if you were one man and one woman and one horse, and the man is to be in the foremost position with the woman underneath ...not that one should include a horse, obviously... but if you were to do so, the formal fuck-logics dictate that it would have to proceed as follows:..." Most of the erotic sculptures are a fairly benign assortment of differently-arranged couplings, foreplay, and my personal favorite, sexy maidens peeling themselves out of clinging dresses. There are however, some spectacular exceptions, including the infamous horse-sodomy niche, and a renowned panel of an upside-down man so mack that he has three wenches about him, two of whom he isn't even debauching, but is just allowing them to assist with the balance of his partner bouncing on top of his ludicrously-inverted frame. You know you're a real pimp when you keep two of your hoes just to have as scaffolding.

As mind-expanding as the acrobatic sculptures were, they were not even the most surreal part of my day. You see, I rose early in the morning thinking that this would earn me the day alone to enter and explore the temples unperturbed. I was wrong.

Friends, Ghostface Buddha is now literally a poster-boy for the Indian tourism industry.

I was walking to the compound's main gate and saw the guards ushering through a big herd of fat rich tourists without checking their tickets. Some younger, upscale pseudo-backpackers strolled by speaking French, and these the guards glanced over, inspeting them as one would a tangerine. I was baffled. As I walked to the ticket booth I could feel the same gazes bearing upon me, and was suddenly seized by a rifle-wielding guard. "Entrance is free today" he said, remembering to smile as he hauled me across the driveway. "Today celebrate world heritage." A portly Indian man with a mustache and a safari hat walked up and gave me a once-over. He burst into a grin. "You are perfect!" he beamed. I snapped out of my panic (I had been trying to remember what, if any, incriminating material was in my day-bag) and mustered "....Uhhh, yes?", then as my composure returned "Perfect, yes. Continue..."

"I am the Deputy Head Assistant Director of Archaeology for the Srivagayapanam sub-circle of Patna division of Archaeological Survey of India" he more or less said. "Today is world heritage. For the promotion of tourism, we take your picture." Two stupidly-grinning lackeys ran in behind me and held taut a suddenly-unfurled Hindi banner extolling the magnificence of India, and Indian world heritage. "We have many tourists here but we need best tourist. You are looking very good, sir." I smirked and tried to form a witty response, but was cut short when the rifle-hefting soldier magically produced a bouquet of pink flowers and thrust them into my hands before posing next to me and the cretinous grinning minions. "SMILE!!!" the head archaeologist shouted wildly, and a photographer popped out from behind him with the daft spring of a Whack-A-Mole. After the flash, the archaeologist spoke as I grinned for more photos, still holding the ridiculous bouquet. The photographer began taking video of us standing there, grinning like fools. And that is how Ghostface Buddha became the Khajuraho poster-boy for India's contribution to the World Heritage program.

When it was all said and done (essentially, when I succeeded in ridding myself of the bouquet), the archaeologist spoke again. "You are the very finest tourist, sir. We will put you on official items for the Khajuraho and the world heritage. India wants to show you. We are wanting more visitors like you."


Ohhhh ho ho.

Oh ho ho.

You have no idea.