On The Badness Of Colombo And Other Matters

Inc. Rude Manners, The Insanity Of Indian People, and The Sexual Necessity Of Umbrellas

At first when I arrived in Colombo I was impressed. It was so clean! And the people were so friendly! As far as third-world cities are concerned, Colombo has a lot going for it. The only real stench is the cloud of automotive fumes in the air, as opposed to giant pools of festering water, exposed and clogged sewers, and man and animal alike defecating where they will. This is is significant improvement. There isn't even much litter, something unthinkable in an Indian city. Public transport is swift and efficient. Buildings are bland, but not ugly, towers of glass and concrete, rather than plastered brick hulks with the bent steel reinforcing bars still jutting out of the walls. Traffic follows the rules of the road (more or less), and the city is full of policemen and soldiers keeping order and safety for the citizens. What, you may ask, is not to like?

Colombo is massively boring.

The city offers something of a glimpse of the future. It looks out to all the other South Asian metropolises and says "You know, if you do things right, you can be a well-ordered expanse of featureless concrete as well! We can be just like America!"

Local people are very proud of Colombo, though it seems the rest of the country thinks it's hot and lacks a pleasant atmosphere (in both senses of the word). It's hard to argue with them about these things, because it would be rude and Sri Lankan people are so polite you feel bad for even thinking about slighting their hometown. Dealing with Sri Lankan people has been nothing but a pleasure. From time to time I catch myself being something of a jerk, a paranoid side-effect of living in India for almost a year. In India, people often treat other humans, especially those "lower" than them, mostly as physical obstacles (which on the Indian street, they are) or in the case of employees, livestock. Additionally, as a foreigner, there is the fact that a large minority of those who approach to speak with you are going to turn out to be some sort of hassle. Thus I've become accustomed to being a little curt to random people on the street, lest I spend my entire life telling people I don't want antiques. So, in Sri Lanka someone will come up and ask me a question and I'll say "I'm busy" or something, and then they look a little taken aback, so I use what has become one of my all-purpose excuses for uncivil behavior: "Oh, sorry brother, you must forgive me. I have been living in India." This always works.

Sri Lankans don't much care for India. Besides the fact that India is their overbearing neighbor, they tend to view India as a massive, teeming bowl of chaos. Gee, I wonder how they got that idea? Various people I've spoken too have also complained (in low whispers) "You know.... I don't like Indian people." I was curious why. An extension of cricket rivalry perhaps?... The whisperers continue, "They are such big rude peoples!" Aha! that's it! The first time I heard this I finally put my finger on something I had been trying to define with all the other long-term travelers I met there, the one thing about India that made it impossible for us to truly commit to spending a life there, some sort of strange and ethereal phenomenon we couldn't name. This was it. Indians are rude. You would never think that while you're there, because apart from the obvious assholes, people are very warm, generous, and deferential in conversation. But here's the twist: beyond the intimate context, in the wider social arena, Indian people just don't give a fuck about the people around them. Playing old Bollywood soundtracks into the dead of night (and there is no volume but full volume), using communal places as rubbish disposal, pushing to the head of any nascent queue and instigating a mob atmosphere. The list goes on. In a nutshell, no thought is giving to the effects of one's actions on others.

I make this long, harsh criticism of Indian manners for two reasons. One, it has at long last crystallized in my mind and needed outlet. Two, I wish to applaud the contrasting Sri Lankan attitudes, and the positive effect it appears to have on the entire country. For instance, everywhere I have seen in Sri Lanka, even the poor outskirts of the big city which in India would be a hellish slum, has been generally more prosperous and well-ordered than India, despite a comparative dearth of resources.  Money here seems to go to making things actually work right, creating and improving infrastructure and doing so in a way that is genuinely useful to people.

My curiosity was piqued and I went on asking about Indian people. "Why don't you like Indians?" I asked one man, a gardener. "Indian people are crazy! We are only like that at a cricket match!" (Sri Lankans do love their cricket). So, having established that standard Indian levels of madness constitute peak insanity here, I couldn't help pressing on. "And what about Indians at cricket matches?". "Friend," the gardener replied, "this you can not even imagine."

So I knew I would be getting along well here. Anywhere where the people think India is crazy cannot itself be utterly insane, at least not in the same way. I was deeply reassured to know that any of the absurdity I am guaranteed to find on my way will at least be a little more mellow. I'm in the mood for mellow. After great feats, a man needs his rest.

Colombo is not mellow. Colombo is about as laid-back as you could ask for any 3,000,000+ Asian city to be, but that is not saying much. After several days out of the hospital, mostly spent tossing about in my bed, sweating up a stink, and reading ridiculous thrillers about Nazis, I set out on my first day of exploring Colombo's "sights" (as opposed to the approximately half-dozen unaesthetic suburbs I had ventured to so far). I quickly realized my first day exploring the wonders of Colombo would also be the only day.

I started out with the "worst". I headed to the Pettah bazaar neighborhood, which is reputed as the most crowded and teeming commercial district on the island, and is supposedly one of those excitingly cluttered and vibrant places. What I found was indeed hopefully the teemiest place in Sri Lanka, but there was absolutely nothing to set it apart from the central bazaar in any modern, industrialized Indian city save for a marked improvement in English spelling. So much for Colombo's characterful bazaar district. Next I wandered over to the historical heart of the city, the "Fort" neighborhood, which is now Sri Lanka's little baby version of Lower Manhattan, with its few soaring financial towers, heavily guarded government baking agencies, and a few streets of slightly pretentious eateries and cafes catering to people with belts and ties. Like Lower Manhattan, there also isn't a whole lot to do, but the strange sight of soldiers guarding the side-alleys behind curtains of razor-wire adds a touch of the local. I also picked out the spot- it's hard to miss- where the Standard Chartered Bank, now a windowless and fortified-looking little structure, gaily advertises that "We're Here To Stay". Well, the building looks empty, which is a bit ironic given that all the other business that fled the neighborhood in panic seem to returned first. The thing that made them abandon the entire area for over a decade was, by the way, an enormous truck bomb that blew the shit out the Standard Chartered Bank and killed hundreds of people.

Thence I turned south to Galle Face Green, the pride of the city, Colombo's seaside park by its old colonial government buildings. I've seen better. For starters, "Green" is a bit generous. Let us just say that a lawn one lay there and is currently being attempted. The sea breeze is nice, but Colombo stretches along the sea for mile after mile, so really it's a long way to come for that. You can however get a pretty decent view of the towers in Fort and the endless, soulless ribbon of middling glass office buildings that run down the coast until they fade in the distance. One curious thing about the park was that all the couples (and it was mostly couples) were carrying umbrellas on a sunny day. Why, I wondered, was this necessary? Do Sri Lankans share the Indian obsession with pale skin and need umbrellas to protect lovely ladies from the sun's cruel rays? Are umbrellas themselves some sort of symbol of romance? I thought it might be this as countless pairs of romancers sat on benches with umbrellas unfolded  over their heads. Then I saw it... in the distance a large umbrella lowered diagonally, completely obscuring the holders' uppers bodies, leaving only a pale of male legs and a pair of female legs leaning over at a telltale angle, revealing without a doubt that umbrellas are for making out. And then I saw it over and over. Yup, in Sri Lanka you cannot put your tongue in another person's mouth, no matter how obviously and publicly you do so, unless you've got at hand an umbrella. I may have to consider replacing my rain jacket.

And that is all there is to say of Colombo, unless any of you know a fabulous and obscure word I don't which means both busy and bland. I've seen more than enough of Sri Lanka's biggest city, and there is one obvious way to proceed: Going to Sri Lanka's second-largest city.

'Til next time...
-GFB

Welcome To Resplendent Fucking Lanka

 The first thing I saw in Sri Lanka was a large blue sign that read:

POSSESSION OF ILLEGAL DRUGS

CARRIES DEATH PENALTY

Some five minutes later I saw the sign

WELCOME TO SRI LANKA

ENJOY YOUR STAY

They sure do know how to greet people.

It has been a week since I left India, and I have to tell you, Sri Lanka is... different. I haven't seen a cow in days and not one person has even suggested that I should try their fabulous goat meat curry. When you order chicken here, you receive.... chicken. Not some thick bowl of hot slop with an anatomically impossible amount of chicken bones within, but actual, tender pieces of spiced chicken. Rather than say, run over my foot while parking, rickshaw drivers here sometimes actually slow down to let pedestrians cross busy traffic. Whereas in northern India it at first took me about three weeks to get a local girl to so much as say hello, in Sri Lanka I walked away with some digits within 24 hours. In the central bazaar of Colombo, policemen ensure that drivers, cart-pushing coolies, and everyone else stay in their lanes of traffic, and seem to take it personally when some asshole forces them to unfuck a traffic jam. The soldiers patrolling every other corner of downtown with their AK's are just delighted to stop their rounds and chat you up, and as yet not one of the approximately 80,000 people who've asked me where I'm from have tried to use that as a way to lure me into a souvenir shop.

And, ladies and gentlemen, they serve beef.

Now, one would suspect I'm finding things much on the up? Wrong. Maybe I would be, if Sri Lanka wasn't so enthusiastically responding to India's demands that I suffer a miserable and/or unlikely death overseas.

Attempted murder #1, and the main reason I've spent so long in Colombo is related to visiting the doctor and being whisked off to the hospital for "acute gastroenteritis". Good. I've already dealt with fucking dysentery on this trip once and giardiasis twice, so it's nice to mix things up a bit.

Attempted murder #2: walking out of the hospital in a half-conscious haze, going a few blocks, and then discovering a blind man was accompanying me, I lost what little concentration I had, and almost got hit (again) by a bus. This wouldn't have been half as maddening if there wasn't also a blind man present who apparently avoids buses with much greater aplomb.

So, Sri Lanka, I see how it is. You want to throw down the glove as well? Fine. If it's a battle you want it's a battle you have. If I may offer a word.... don't bring a knife to a gun fight, and don't bring gastroenteritis and public transportation to a pimp juice showdown.

IT. IS. ON.

The End?

Well, so ends my account of the Andaman Islands, and yes, so too ends my account of India. I've been thinking about what to say in this post for a long time. Do I try and sum up some inner wisdom I've gained? Do I try to encapsulate the Indian spirit in a few paragraphs of cheeky prose? Do I just say "Fuck all y'all! I'm GFB! Peace!" ? Do I concoct some elaborate bookending narrative. I started and stopped on a few different conceits for Ghostface Buddha's Last Post From India over the past few weeks, only to find that they were all too limited... I wanted to write everything. "Everything" wasn't happening. Some of it felt redundant. I already wrote my summary of the Indian experience. I've already expounded all the critical observations I have to share. On the other hand, I had about twenty closing lines of various types, some of them good, some of them massively inadequate, and all of them jostling in my mind to clinch that single moment at the bottom of this post. Then, just last night as I pondered my fading Indian moments in a shabby Chennai hotel block, it hit me: I don't have to settle on just one. So, my friends, here are not one, but several endings to GFB's Indian odyssey. It's like a DVD! Alternate endings.... that is, if the "endings" are really endings...

....................................................

My neck cracked as I hunched over the map, its wrinkled and watersplotched surface straining to reveal a sign. I needed one desperately. "God damn.... I've been everywhere in this dump" I muttered to myself. I scanned the printed Asian names with the eye of a batty old woman looking over a middle-school yearbook with a magnifying glass, trying to determine which snotty-nosed little shit she had seen in the back of the Hendersons' yard taunting the cats. Rajkot: seen it. Uttarkashi: been there. Tambaram: the name rings a bell. I despaired of finding a new place to roam, when suddenly the low afternoon sun glinting off the mirror of a rickshaw blasted through my window like the very laser engraver God himself used to score the tragically lost fine print on the Ten Commandments. A wisp of smoke began rising from the corner of the page, and there in the massive expanses beyond the Himalayas I caught sight of a single word, a mere five characters of striking bold text in length.

C......H.......I.......N........A

I froze. A sudden sense of certainty held me. I did not feel seized or taken. Rather, this pure, uninhibited knowledge swelled from within. Regaining my senses, I glanced back down at the map, where China lay beckoning, curling a long, opium-stained fingernail towards me, sensually reciting the many industrial virtues of the People's Republic, and all was clear.

"Well, fuck that shit. PEACE"

...................................................

India does not want me to leave. I've decided half the people just desperately want me to stay, and the other half want to detain me here as a form of punishment. I imagine the divide runs straight down the gender line. In any case, it was a man who tried to fuck me over at the Chennai airport. Now, I am willing to admit I was cutting things a bit close with a lateish arrival to the international departures lobby, but what followed was inexcusable.

Up walks some fancy-looking idiot from Kingfisher Airlines, informing me that he can not allow me to claim my boarding pass. "Oh, and why not?" I rightly wondered. He told me that I was late. I felt that in India of all places, where people sometimes won't even get onto an empty bus until three times its capacity try to board it in motion as it roars out of the station, getting to the airport an hour before the flight out to be fine. But no. Nooooooooooo. I was there only fifty minutes early, and ticketing closes an hour before departure.

"Sir, it is 12:00. Ticketing closed at 11:50"

I realized this was no time to express my immediate reaction, which was "So fucking what?" and instead tried to feign surprise and outrage, and while the outrage was genuine, the feigned surprise I fear was overshadowed by the boiling hot tones of contempt I felt dribbling out of my speech. This man believed I was trying to be special. I thought he was being a tool. I attempted reasoning. "Yes, sir, I understand, you cannot keep a plane waiting for one man, but there is almost an hour left. The plane is there. I simply find it unreasonable you do not allow me to try and reach my flight, even if I must be rushed." That, of course, is how airports work in sensible places, but this is India, and India has Indian beaurocracy, and The Rules Are The Rules. I even tried philosophizing, getting him to appreciate the reason the rules are in place (to discourage tardiness and delays), and how they applied to the situation, but found it was impossible to do so without making blistering remarks about the Indian timekeeping psyche and bit my lip.("Well in some countries we have the sense to time our own arrival at airports, for ur own sake, and staff try to help when we face the disaster of missing a flight rather than beating us over the head with a stopwatch and a clown noses, making us sit on our hands while the jungle slowly reclaims the terminal until vines clog the customs desk and monkeys are to be found fornicating in the luggage scanners, all because 'ticketing closes at 11:50' ")

Somehow I prevailed upon him to just take my damn luggage after having him lecture me like a schoolboy turning in a late essay. "Do you think it's fair, sir? Do you think all these people who were here before should have come now instead?" My silence was burning me, but the visions of having to deal with some other dunce at the Immigration ministry in a few days to explain why I'd overstayed my visa kept the rage barely contained inside.

Now, unbeknownst to me, but certainly known to Chickenshit over here, the flight I was aiming for was delayed. The plane was not even in India yet when he was trying to send me away for tardiness. That hypocritical, lying, half-wit weasel shagger....

But I was to have my revenge. Oh yes, sir.

He led me to where my boarding pass was to be printed and started discussing something with his assistant, looking much concerned about seating arrangements. The assistant seemed to find a solution immediately, but he looked deeply pained. Finally, because The Rules Are The Rules, he was forced to surrender.

"Sir, because you are late there is a seating assignment problem, and we must accommodate you in... First Class."

Oh, you mean the First Class where the delectable stewardesses assume I'm a First Class paying customer and treat me to all the enormous seats, silly perks and gourmet cuisine received by the legitimate bigwigs? That First Class? BWAAAAHAHAHHAHAHHA

Nice try, India. You almost got me good there.

Hey, India......

SUCK
MY
DICK

PEACE
......................................

"Hey, cows" I said.

"Moooooooooooooooo?" 280 million cretinous mounds of ambling fertilizer factories asked in unison.

"Guess what?"

The pitiable cheesebeasts hazarded a guess. "Muuuoo?"

 "Nope.....what I was going to say was...... I WIN. FUCK ALL Y'ALL. PEACE."

......................................

The time had come at last. Girlface Buddha and I faced off in the Chennai airport. My flight was finally being called for boarding. Her flight back to the northwest left in another three hours. After many travails, shared joys, and shared miseries, it might now be our final parting. No more hobbling down Himalayan slopes in the snow together. No more coordinating pincer-strike blitzkriegs against sari-nibbling insects in jungle huts together. No more clambering down muddy mountainsides to retrieve luggage launched from bouncing jeep roofs together. I was leaving more behind than a beautiful country and its miscreant cattle.

I almost didn't mention this because it's a wee bit personal, but y'all might have got confused if Girlface suddenly diappeared from the pages of this blog. But like I said....endings might not be endings, and all I can say is there is a chance we shall all be hearing from her again. And since endings might not be endings, it bears repeating what many have said before: that an ending is just the bit before a new beginning.

And it is with that thought that I would like to announce a certain "new beginning".

Ladies and gentlemen, you are now reading the very first lines of....

Ghostface Buddha: Sri Lanka

SUCK
MY
DICK

PEACE 

Quickie On The Beach

Looking back on the time I spent on our final stop in the Andaman Islands, namely Havelock Island, it seems that not much happened and there isn't that much to tell. So, you guessed it: it's time for another Quickie, to keep the bonds of affection and attraction between us fresh, albeit perhaps devoid of meaningful content.

Havelock Island is the most touristy of the islands. It's small but has several nice beaches, a bunch of beach hut resorts, and places to book boats for scuba trips and the like. It's in a group of small islands called Ritchie's Archipelago, which is nice, because it means many of the beaches look across perfectly smooth, turquoise, lagoon-like waters to unspoilt jungle islands just a short way away. There's also a good patch of jungle in the undeveloped parts of the island. As a place with actual tourist facilites, unlike some Andamans I could name, Havelock is meant to be an easy place to sit around and chill.

Of course, that would be durng the tourist season. When Girlface and I arrived we found that the majority of restaurants, for instance, if they weren't owned by the family next door, would inevitably have no more than three ingredients available with which to prepare meals. At one place I asked for some chicken noodles and was told "Sorry, sir, we have no chicken. Is not the season." In reply I said "You'd better not be trying to tell me it's not the chicken season. Throttle a bird."

At another place I asked for my fish, boneless, as was offered on the menu. "Sorry sir..." the waiter began, "... we do not have the sliced fish available. Whole fish only." I took a long moment to ponder if this man was as much a fool as he sounded,  or if he had ever heard of cutting things with knives, then suggested "Oh, well then, you should ask the fisherman to catch you a sliced fish."

One day I cycled across the width of the island to see Radhanagar beach, reputedly the finest in all of India. Well, you certainly do have to a damn long way to visit it. As for most beautiful in India? I think not. Perhaps the impending monsoon clouds of doom that soon drenched me as I pounded the bike furiously back through the jungle had a negative effect on the color of the ocean and the lighting on the sand. In any case, I could name several beaches in the Andamans, even on Havelock itself, that I find finer.

One day we also bicycled south into the jungle to visit the government's Elephant Training Camp. After following a trail through the coastal forest for some time, we came across a small, primitive camp where two grubby-looking men were lying around, with no traces of elephants to be seen. "There are no elephants?" I asked. "Elephant no" was the answer. It didn't occur to me to ask him if was enjoying the government salary he was receiving for not training any elephants.

Anyways, I must be off. I have a plane to catch. There will be some Big News soon. But first I need to kill about a trillion mosquitoes. There will be no hostages.

Li'l Andaman

Returned from the rainy North Andaman, Girlface Buddha and I faced exactly what we did not want: 3 days in Port Blair, the most boring place in the entire Indian Ocean, during an incessant rainy shitfest. Worst of all, we arrived on a Sunday, and Port Blair is so dedicated to inanity that there was a hell of a lot of nothing to do. The only way we maintained our sanity was by checking into a hotel with cable TV. We remained glued to Star Movies, by far the best English-language channel on Indian TV because it shows an incredibly random selection of Hollywood films. It is Girlface Buddha's commendable verdict that Face-Off is one of the best movies ever made, and for the next week she wouldn't stop talking about it, delving deep into the social and philosophical quandaries raised by the possibility of waking up to find your face replaced by that of either Nicolas Cage or John Travolta. This, I feel, is infinitely more pressing than the over-examined issue of how, metaphysically speaking, Vishnu becomes Krishna, or for that matter, a fish.

The main reason we were stuck in Port Blair so long, aside from being unable to buy a boat ticket on a Sunday, was the petty spitefulness of Captain Tool, master of the merchant vessel MV Dering. It takes a special type of pathological misanthropy to seriously contemplate the sort of douchebaggery committed by this scuttle-fucking mariner. When we arrived at the jetty at the ripe hour of 6a.m., in the rain of course, Captain Whalesplooge had apparently decided that in order to facilitate the most obnoxiously punctual departure in Indian seafaring history, he would withdraw the gangway long before leaving and not allow last-minute passengers to board. Girlface, a couple locals, and I all looked on in puppy-eyed dismay and tiger-eyed outrage as this stupid-hatted, waveriding chucklefuck refused to allow the gangway to be put back in place, which would have required nothing more than having the flunky with the forklift move the bridge two feet to the right and lower one end. As we stood there gaping, too loaded with baggage to shake our fists, our squid-buggering nemesis pulled a fresh prawn out of his crotch, bit its head off, and sailed into the mist. I will not budge on the details of this story.

When we finally did get on a boat to Little Andaman, the MV Rani Changa  the next day, we quickly realized why the ticket for the seven-hour journey over open seas cost $0.55. It seems the Little Andaman route is served by the more "nobly oxidized" members of the shipping directorate's ferry fleet. The seats within were so awful I joined most of the other passengers in lying on the bare, somewhat crusty steel floor of the passenger hall, singing little songs in my head about not going to the bathroom until the ship was stable enough  to not shit sideways. After many hours of this, and one very strange dream wherein my college buddies and I rented a zany funhouse to live in, only to discover that it mysteriously rocked day and night ("Oh my GOD, it feels like a ship at sea!" I thought within my dream), we finally landed at the jetty of Hut Bay, the small strip of civilization on Little Andaman.

Little Andaman is the most isolated of the settled islands in the group, lying hundreds of kilometers from the other Andamans, and still almost entirely consisting of  a dense jungle which is home to the remnants othe reclusive Onge tribe. I never saw any Onge myself, but I can tell you that the Indian settlers of the island hail from all over South India, as evidenced by the great diversity of inscrutable alphabets found on their temples. Little Andaman was also one of the places that got utterly pounded by the 2004 tsunami. Behind the beach there are a few hundred yards of land now overgrown with weeds but filled with ruined concrete boardwalks, houseless foundations, and piles of toppled temple pillars. Behind those lie the new residences, a strip of shabby tin shacks. Further behind those lie the new neighborhoods where people are building proper homes. One notices that this quarter sits upon the closest hillside.

There aren't many tourists on Little Andaman ( a peek in the police register revealed I was the second in the month of August), but when there are, it is inevitable you run into each other because there are about three guesthouses and two eateries not crawling with vermin, and these are connected by the road... the road. Yup, Little Andaman has precisely one vehicular thoroughfare.

Anyways, after discovering all these titillating facts, Girlface and I went for a lengthy walk along the beach. Once you get past a kilometer or so of fishermen's rubbish and a prodigious amount of empty liquor bottles, the beach becomes a pristine arc of shining sand between the jungles, the palms, and the glistening blue sea. On the far end of the beach, where there is no village and no path nearby, the only things interrupting the silence are the lapping of waves on the shore, the calls of birds, occasional wandering cows, and one or two villagers scrounging for dry palm leaves. I got immediately to the business of something I haven't done for a very long time... lie my lazy ass on a sunny beach. It was magnificent. Girlface thought so too, as she demonstrated by dumping clumps of wet sand in my hair. For someone who lives in a state pretty much defined by its sandy composition, she found that substance surprisingly novel. It then occurred to me (because she told me) that she had never properly enjoyed a beach before. Indeed, the only time she had ever been to the ocean, not counting our monsoon-soaked adventures earlier in the week, was to Chowpatty Beach, a teeming wad of sand in the heart of Mumbai, the City That Never Stops Testing New Ringtones. Anyways, she loved the beach as well. And people say I don't do anything for the Indian people.

We awoke the next morning to the bizarre and harrowing screams of some of the islands endemic avian life. I swear, I haven't been driven from bed so rapidly by a cacophonous gaggle of randy birds in the morning since I lived by the Amsterdam zoo. We then went on another walk, this time out into the jungle to visit the island's much-trumpeted waterfall. I'll spare you an account of the jungle itself -imagine I said the word "lush" a lot- and go straight to the waterfall, which was utterly fantastic. In a green... lush.... opening in the forest, the waters of the local stream fall about 15 meters off a small cliff face into an idyllic shady pool. The only downside is the rumor of crocodiles about. I hate crocodiles. There are a great many deadly animals in this world, and the odds of being slain by them are generally slim, but crocodiles are just fucking evil. One second you're there, a second later you're gone in a flash, and twenty seconds later your ass is dead. The way I see it, crocodiles have been around for millions upon millions of years. They've had their day in the sun, and as a sort of Evolutionary Achievement Award, we should treat them now to an all-expenses paid dinner and afterparty at the Extinction Lounge. Fortunately, no crocodiles were about ( we were told the area right by the waterfall should be safe since crocs don't like it for some unspecified reason, which leaves me suspicious) and I waded out under one of the falls for one of the finest showers of my life.

One day, however, one must leave Little Andaman as one leaves all places, and in our case we were fated to sail overnight on a miserable, grungy shitcan... the vile MV Dering. How we were allowed to board I don't know. An oversight of its nefarious captain perhaps? I have never encountered such repeated nautical discomfiture at the hands of a single being. I mean, Poseidon is powerful and all, but unlike the master of the MV Dering, you have to actually blind his children before he stoops to using his power to be a dick about it. Seriously, to hell with boats. When this is all over I'm breaking into an antique shop in the night and drowning all their bottled ships in vodka. My Popov funnel shall feel the heat of battle once more! To arms!

Tao Te Bling

I.
The Way that can be told of is not an Unvarying Way:
The names that can be named are not unvarying names
The Way that is nameless some call Tao.
The Tao in truth is called Melvin;
It is Melvin that is nameless.

II.
It was from the Nameless which is neither Tao nor Melvin
    but more Melvin than Tao
    that Heaven and Earth sprang.
And it was Heaven whence came the real OG's.

III.
It is because everyone under Heaven recognizes beauty as beauty
    that the idea of ugliness exists.
It is because all know a Baller for what he is
    that there can be Haters who hate.
Just so, if every one recognized virtue as virtue
    this would merely open new gates of virtuelessness;
That is where the Baller comes in.
For truly, Hustle and Bitching grow out of one another...
Difficult and Easy balance one another...
High and Sober determine one another...
Husband and Wife test one another...
Wife and Floozie-On-The-Side complete one another...
Foreplay and After-Snuggle give sequence to one another.
Therefore the Baller relies on Actionless Activity,
     effortlessly doing what others say must be hard,
     and is, but he makes look easy.
The Baller carries on wordless teaching:
     Balling.

IV.
Pour a tequila flask  to the very brim
And you will wish you had stopped in time.
Polish a pinky ring to its very finest
And you will find it soon grows dull.
When stacks of Franklins fill your hoarding-hall
They can no longer be made to rain.
Women and liquor breed carelessness;
That brings babies in its train. 
Before the deed is done, withdraw!
Such is Heaven's Way.

V.
 As the heavy must be the foundation of the light,
     so idleness is lord and master of activity.
Truly, a man of consequence, though he travels all day,
    will not let himself be separated from his BlackBerry.
However magnificent is the corner-office view,
    he sits quiet and disconsolate.
How much so then,
    must a true Baller be lighter than those around him!
If he is heavy, he is naught but foundation,
     and the spirit is lost.
Best to be light;
Float as though borne by a palm leaf upon the ocean.
The ocean we call Sex
The palm leaf we call Drugs.

VI.
Can you keep the unquiet physical-soul from sleeping,
     hold fast to the Unity, and never quit it?
Can you, when concentrating your breath,
    pass a roadside inspection?
Can you wipe and cleanse your vision of the Mystery until you know
    where you were the night before?
Can you love the people and rule the land, yet not forget
    your cell phone at the bar?
Can you in opening and shutting the Heavenly Gates,
    find your pants thereafter?
Fueling your appetites, then feeding them;
Doing dumb shit, but not being made to lay claim to it;
Impairing your wits, but always having your wits about you;
Buck wildin', but having everything under control;
That is called the Mysterious Power.

VII.
In Tao the only motion is Balling;
The only quality, flava.
For although it is said all creatures under Heaven and Earth
     are the product of Melvin
We mislead you earlier:
Melvin itself is the product of Balling.
Balling produced Melvin behind a pool hall in Jacksonville, Florida.
Ask Melvin's mother.

Isles In Sea And Shadow

The Andaman Islands are a strange place. Perhaps this is true for many settler societies, which are populated just by whoever feels like coming. In the Andamans however, the general weirdness sneaks up on you. Port Bliar is a city that looks to be doing its utmost to be nondescript and in conformity with the bland provincial towns of the motherland, but soon after you leave the city and get into the hinterlands you begin to wonder just what the hell is going on.

There is one "major" tourist point in the archipelago: Havelock Island, which is by all accounts beautiful, reasonably convenient, and developed just enough for a few tranquil comforts. Needless to say, this is not where Girlface Buddha and I were going. We were heading instead for the northern end of North Andaman, which you may have guessed is the northernmost and least settled of the three "main" islands. Getting there was a tedious pre-dawn crawl up the spine of the islands on the territory's only "highway" the Andaman Trunk Road. In the early morning darkness we rumbled through the boring Tamil and Bengali villages in the region around Port Blair, then made a sudden turn onto the highway itself and into the jungle.

Let me just say that 12 hours on the Andaman Trunk Road reveals that it is not and has never been a "highway". For the entirety of its mind-numbing 300 kilometers it is naught but a single lane of asphalt winding in a most laborious fashion through the islands' small hills, usually with an all-obscuring wall of impenetrable jungle foliage on either side. From time to time the road widens beyond one lane, but these are merely waiting areas where you sit and admire the trees while waiting for a forest police checkpoint, a tribal reserve checkpoint, or a ferry across the inter-island channels. It is horrendously boring, yet still worth taking, because amidst the jungle and the isolation and the tedium you are occasionally reminded that you are passing through India's Twilight Zone, a chain of islands to which India has banished strange, strange things that don't fit into its own psychotic society. If India is a half-naked lunatic dancing on one leg, screeching mumbo-jumbo with a burning torch in one hand and a pink spotted umbrella in the other, the Andaman Islands are a set of deep eyes lurking in the bushes and a distant, haunting laugh drifting on the winds.

For hours we rolled along our little road-channel cut into the teeming, dripping rainforest and there was nothing particularly unusual to report apart from the prominent mustaches on the women across the aisle from me, who were either members of the same pantheistic cult we encountered on Ross Island or were Christian nuns. I didn't see any crosses, so I assumed the former. Then, after a pair of checkpoints we entered into the Jarawa tribal reserve.

The Jarawa are on of the indigenous tribes of the Andamans, a stone-age people of obscure origins who populate parts of the jungle on South and Middle Andaman, where those few who survive carry on living as they have for millenia, and periodically burst into violence against those who encroach on their lands and their way of life. This is what the checkpoints are for: keeping out thoughtless developers, loggers, and other provocateurs while maintaining the only road link to the far-flung settlements on the northern islands. A massive sign at the entrance of the reserve laid out the rules for vehicles passing through: we were to travel in approved convoys only, photographing "natives" was stringently forbidden, and we were bidden in very vague but commanding terms to avoid all interactions with the Jarawa whatsoever. The Jarawa are known to hang out by the road sometimes, and this reportedly often degenerates into a degrading spectacle of camera-happy foreign tourists and the open jeering and other antics of Indian visitors. We didn't expect to see much, if anything, of the Jarawa as we passed through. After a short time, however I glimpsed a group of people ahead on the road, and as the bus diligently roared on by I saw that they were indeed Jarawa. They were dark, almost pitch black in skin, with a rough rather than glistening texture. The one man I got a good look at was shirtless, with a necklace of leaves, and with two large, ghostly patches of white paint in the shape of leaves under his dark eyes. Next to him a younger Jarawa raised a wooden club above his head in a gesture that said in any language "Keep that bus moving." "So," I thought to myself, "that was my one view of the Jarawa, and I won't soon forget it."

In thinking that was the end of our interactions with the Jarawa, I was as wrong as it was possible to be. Only a few minutes after this first incident another group of Jarawa awaited ahead of us. This time they blocked the road and brought us to a stop. Before anything could be done they forced their way aboard the bus and amid a chaos of shouting between the conductors, passengers, and aboriginals, got themselves free passage. I smiled inwardly at this, proof that common sense is widespread among the peoples of the Earth and that the Jarawa do not need the art of metallurgy or any other trapping of civilization to know that taking the bus beats the hell out of walking. The group consisted of a man, a woman, and a multitude of children aged about two to ten. None of them wore shirts. The men and children all wore faded cotton gym shorts such as those I used to wear as a boy, while the woman wore a short brown skirt made of a simple rectangle of brown cloth. They all had short, tightly curled black hair and white paint upon their bodies and faces, each in different pattern. Some had aggressive whorls beneath the eyes, others had their entire faces covered in a grid of white stripes. The mother had a radiating pattern of chaotic white strokes that extended even onto her hair, complementing the strong, sturdy woman's assertive attitude. Her belly seemed to be in the early months of pregnancy and her bare breasts hung freely as she settled on her perch on the arm of Girlface Buddha's seat. Though Girlface herself was only unsettled so far as to shift in her seat as much to my side as she could, this provoked an uproar among the crowd who were incensed to see this near-naked 'primitive' with her offending breasts almost in the face of a wholesome Hindu girl. I, of course, was not particularly disturbed, and was more occupied with that guilty American preoccupation of deliberately not staring at the woman while making a point of also not rudely staring away too much.

The furor, however, was so general that the woman was eventually made to move. This did no good as she instead sat on the arm of a seat belonging to another young Indian girl who actually was deeply upset by the circumstance and soon was cowering miserably by her auntie's side. The Jarawa woman, who had already been moved once for no good reason she could discern, thenceforth refused to budge an inch. Immediately behind her the cultists/nuns were clucking with disapproval and generally nosing about the whole affair while not deigning to touch or otherwise interfere themselves, which sealed in my mind that they were in fact evangelical Christian nuns. The Hindu girl and her relatives, on the other hand, were deep in the throes of a tittie-inspired psychological collapse, and had dramatically withdrawn from the world, focusing with all the intent imaginable on a small Hindu prayer book from which they were desperately repeating prayers and not lifting their eyes even for an instant.

The conductors at this point mostly had their hands full with the children, who aside from not being versed in the bus-riding etiquette of modern peoples, were also just generally being rambunctious young boys, shouting, hanging out the door, and so on. While this all unfolded, another group of Jarawa loomed on the road ahead. They seemed to have weapons and the two groups shouted back and forth as the bus approached. Then, obviously in great cheer and jest, but completely mind-blowing nonetheless, the group of shrieking Jarawa on the road proceeded to assail the sides of our bus with a barrage of stone-tipped spears. This stands above all other incidents as the craziest fucking thing that has ever happened to me on an Indian bus, blowing engine fires, landslides, and struggling livestock all out of the water.

At some point, the children all demanded to be let down and were ejected from the bus with great enthusiasm. I say "at some point" because only residents of this very jungle could possibly have any idea where they were. "Stop by the 17,938th tree on the left", they must have said, because there was no other distinguishing feature for miles. The man and woman remained aboard, and when at length we approached a police checkpoint they were made to crouch and conceal themselves behind piles of luggage, lest we all get in some kind of shit with the cops who are supposed to be keeping us apart. Finally, however, we came upon another group of Jarawa standing by the road with a sullen-looking cop standing guard over them. The conductors somehow compelled the Jarawa to disembark and the lonely policemen greeted them with the unmistakable look of a man standing in the jungle with an unused rifle and a gaggle of misbehaving aboriginals, slowly counting the days until his pension. As the woman rose from her perch, her entire little skirt carelessly slid down to her ankles, revealing all beneath. The bus was stunned into silence as the woman politely but slowly and without much concern lifted her skirt back up to where she wanted it. I however, thought it was fabulous, not for any prurient reason, but because it was simply the perfect finale -I hesitate to say "climax"- to the whole ridiculous episode.

We left the reserve and the Jarawa behind us and finally came to the crossing for Baratang Island. They tell you Baratang is a nice little island where you can go look at nature, but I will inform you that its sole purpose in the universe is to force the Andaman Trunk Road over a pair of ferries. Some people apparently look forwards to this part of the journey. I have said my piece before about people who romanticize travel by boat, but just let me add that you must be new to Asia indeed if the words "Indian ferry" conjure up for you any sort of magic. Apart from the fact that in the newspapers the words "Indian Ferry" are usually followed by the words "Sinks, Killing Dozens", I knew that this ferry trip was goint to entail a lot of standing around a smelly rustbucket in the hot sun with little thought given to the conveniences of shade or seating, and it was so. Then, courtesy of delightful Baratang Island, we were soon again on another ferry, making the crossing the Middle Andaman.

Middle Andaman sucks. End of story. It's big, it's boring, and the bland fields and lumber yards by the road only make you reminisce about the jungle and the lovely dragonfly you saw by palm frond #73,432.

Hours of Middle Andaman ensued, and then, by the grace of the Surveyor, we found that the roads on either side of the channel separating Middle Andaman from North Andaman were actually aligned with eachother, and therefore could be connected by a bridge.

North Andaman is for the most part as empty as can be. The bulk of the island is an impassable tropical wilderness, and after yet more winding through the forest we finally arrived in the small agricultural colonies at its northern end. We popped out of the canyons of green and into a land of small fields, where the brilliant yellow-green rice paddies sat shimmering after monsoon rains on the flatlands, and isles of jungle jotted out of every spot of steep ground. Buffaloes splashed freely among the fields and at intervals stooped figures were shin-deep in the paddies, weeding their modest crops and fetching tools from their bamboo-thatched houses. With great indifference our bus finally chugged to a halt in Diglipur, the main town of the north. Then, with equally great determination to the bus's indifference, Girlface and I got out of Diglipur, because it looked hopeless.

While the town itself was pathetic and grubby, the people to me looked fascinating. They had a look about them I certainly did not expect. Many of them seemed to hail from odd corners of Asia, and I was not wring. A great many refugees have ended up here, one of the few areas of India where there is yet unsettled arable land. Many were Bengalis, as evidenced by the names of the towns... Durgapur, Kalipur, Kalighat. Someone clearly missed their Mother-god. The faces of others spoke of more distant lands, and sure enough many told me they were Nepalis, Burmese, Indonesian, and even a number of people who said they were from the various oppressed hill-tribes of northern Burma.

We eventually settled ourselves in the coastal village of Kalipur, where we rented a bamboo hut from a cheery Tamil woman of apparently Pentecostal Christian bent. Her entire household, which were of the curious Asian hodgepodge I described, were also Christians and said that were not Catholics, but of the "Hoely Espeereet" type of Christian. This, I learned, meant that they listened to praise music and watche Tamil-language evangelical TV at nearly all hours of the day and night. Girlface and I spent four days in the hut, sometimes going out to the immaculate, undeveloped beach where some isolated mangroves backed onto a highly incongruous row of pine trees and the jungle hung over the mountains around the bay casting dark shadows even when the monsoon clouds were lifted. It rained much of the time, and I mean it really, really rained. We spent many hours huddled in the hut listening to the water pound on the roof as if each drop was a soldier in a wet, furious army told to seize our drying laundry no matter the cost.

At night of the second day of rains, the torrent faded to a patter, and over the dripping we heard a wailing man moving about the grounds. We couldn't see him but his voice moved to and fro in an ecstatic frenzy in an unknown tongue that bespoke some strange shamanic ritual. The blinds of the family's home were drawn and I almost didn't want to know what was going on within. Then, piercing the night came the cries of "Hallelujah! Hallelujah!" I swear, I will never see a Southern Baptist minister speaking in tongues and flailing about at the pulpit again without thinking of the night I was mesmerized by a hidden Tamil Christian singer. I tell you, this place is eery even from the most harmless things.

I slept fitfully. Perhaps odd Christian worship was still going on and the cries slipping into my half-conscious mind. I dreamt of magic and spells and animistic conjurations. Awaking to Girlface's prodding, I saw what she was so intent on drawing my attention to: our bed full of dark, bean-shaped cocoons that had appeared in the night. What freakish insectoid form they were I do not know, but I do know this: whatever left them were heinous fucking bastards that ate into the stitching of my clothes, severed the cords of our hanging bags, and indeed assailed with a passion anything string-like in its shape. They ate right through and severed one side of my favorite pair of earphones. Mother. Fuckers. Days later, these vile demonspawn hatchlings are still appearing in our luggage in the most deep and unlikely places and we are disposing of them with the greatest malice. Even more have been annihilated by Girlface's wrath than my own. They really should not have fucked with her pink shawl, as several unborn generations have now discovered on their short-circuited lifecycle to and from the bowels of Hell.

But there are more rainstorms, more strange shadows, and more vile bugs in these islands, and we are going to go from end to end of this twilight archipelago and face them all. Really, seriously, they should not have fucked with her pink shawl.

The Gulag Archipelago

Port Blair is an ugly place. Not in an Indian the-streets-runneth-foul-eith-sewage kind of way, but more in a Latin American grungy sprawl of laid-back disorder kind of way. By Indian standards, Port Blair is tiny for a regional center -it only has 100,000 people or so, but it still seems excessive. I can't imagine what economic force keeops people there. As far as I can tell, the only things the Andaman & Nicobar Islands export are timber, coconuts, and anthropology studies.

Port Blair was founded by the British. There were of course other people here first, but -and you will be shocked to hear this- most of the native tribes have dwindled to the brink of extinction and now live on ill-secured "reserves" in the jungle. The population of the Andaman Islands consists now mostly of Tamil and Bengali immigrants who have made the settled areas of the islands, in the words of one proud fellow I spoke to, a "mini-India". Fortunately, mini-India does not display all the excesses of its mammoth sibling such as pulsing mobs, thumping Bollywood music, people indiscriminately lighting fireworks in the market, and general soul-rending poverty. There is, however, a thriving business in whiskey-steered rickshaws, 1:1 ratio of mobile phone service shops per capita, and -on an island chain whose endemic mammals consist only of shrews and bats- cows everywhere.

Girlface and I woke up somewhat late after our first night in Port Blair (the journey there was rather sleep-depriving) and were annoyed to find that the day was already half over. India is one of those countries that insists on lying entirely in one time zone, regardless of how much sense it makes. While this might be a feasible stretch of geographical reality for the bulk of India, the country has a lot of odd nooks. Look at a world time zone map, especially the area around Bangladesh, and tell me nobody in the government here is being obstinate. They do of course claim to have a good reason: India has only one time zone (and this one time zone is half an hour "off" the usual scheme) to reflect the fact that the "real" prime meridian has been fixed since ancient times in the holy city of Ujjain, predating the unsanctified Greenwich line by over a millenium. All this, however, would be mere trivia to me if it weren't for the fact that the Andamans are quite far away from India. The Andamans are are so much closer to Southeast Asia in fact that in certain parts of town you can still see bunkers built by the Japanese during World War II at the western extreme of their ill-fated island-hopping adventures. Anyways, the stubborn time zone conformity means that the sun goes down by about 5:30, giving the slobs in government offices a perfect excuse to shorten their business hours.

Fortunately half a day is all you need to see most of what Port Blair has to offer. It has never been a beacon of culture and refinement. In fact, the most notable part of its history was being a tropical British gulag. The British built it to be a penal colony, not the way Australia was (an exile for petty crooks, Welshmen, and other undesirables), but as an isolated torture camp for uppity brown people who had the nerve to resist the occupation of India. The Andamans were less New South Wales and more Guantanamo Bay. Pretty much all of Port Blair's "sights" are depressing. The worst of these is the "Cellular Jail" above the harbor. It is a horrendously ugly brick building from the early 20th century built on the tower-and-spokes design still common in American prisons today. The idea, it seems, was to keep hundreds of freedom fighters and political activists in solitary confinement, allowing them out only for their daily quota of being worked to death on crude menial labor. It's now a museum where you can go read about the prison and the Andamans' colonial history in general, which is not to speak of much since people who live in the vicinity of torture camps don't usually take to doing anything too exciting.

Far more pleasant was our visit to Ross Island, a little islet about a mile off shore. As we approached on the ferry I began to winder why the British had built their colonial administration center on Ross Island, a place so isolated from the people they were ruling, and realized I had answered my own question. Ross Island was also a prison camp but later settled into its role of being the place where white people lived, with a church, a tennis court, and all the other niceties of civilization which demonstrated how much God wanted Eden to look like Sussex. It seems however that He must have lost some kind of bet against Shiva, because an earthquake came along and destroyed it. Now Ross Island is a cool place to visit for the sight of the quintessential Victorian brickwork being swallowed by the jungle.

Things were a bit odd, however... a feeling we were to get throughtout the archipelago. For starters, most of the other tourists wandering around the isle were a group of white-robed Indian cultists with flowing cloaks and shining medals on their breasts, having quite a fabulous time in between the frequent monsoon bursts that sent them all scurrying into little cult-huddles in the picnic shelters by the jetty. By far the cultists' favorite feature of the island were the curious spotted deer that somebody must have imported from the mainland and left to wander in the jungle and ruins for purely aesthetic reasons. We passed many deer on the way to the lighthouse, watching them freeze the way deer do as we stared at them from beneath the massive trees we chose for our often-needed rain shelters.

Later, somehwere on our way from the lighthouse to the vine-strewn Presbyterian church we managed to stumble into the worst guarded Indian Navy base ever. We didn't even realize we were in it until we came out the main exit and found a sign that read "Coastal Battery Ross Island--Indian Navy Territory Restricted Area" and some puzzled coolies wondering how we got in. Though, to be fair, I'm the first person to actually arrive on this island with conquering intent since the Japanese. I just want the one little island. I'll strengthen the defenses a bit, install a jacuzzi, fix the volleyball net, and maybe add an artificial volcano with a giant mind-control beacon and an army of bikini-wearing ninja guards. Y'know, the shit Ghostface needs.

Return Of The Dynamic Duo

(Nothing Dynamic Happens)

Ghostface Buddha's girlfriend, Girlface Buddha, was at first skeptical when I suggest that we go to some islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean during the monsoon, the time of year during which said ocean is being dumped onto India in great cosmic buckets by splashhappy gods. Every culture has gods responsible for inclement weather, but Indian gods are extremely numerous and often possess a multitude of limbs, so the Hindu pantheon can move a hell of a lot of buckets. Anyways, Girlface Buddha believed that the idea of going to the Andaman Islands during the wet season was "probably stupid", minus the "probably" (she is not one to shy from calling me a fool). I made no effort to deny this, which was fortunate, because we are in the Andaman Islands right now, we are soaking wet, and the reasonable conclusion is that coming here was indeed stupid.

Before getting drenched here, however, we had to first get drenched in a variety of other Indian jurisdictions. We got drenched in Rajasthan going to the bus station, and we got drenched in Gujarat stopping for dinner. We even got drenched in the Union Territory of Daman and Diu, for fuck's sake, because we mistakenly believed the bus had stopped in Daman for us to get breakfast. And finally, we crossed the border into Maharashtra to get drenched in the famously wet megalopolis of Mumbai.

Though we found the whole ordeal as boring as it was damp, everyone else along the route took a great interest in us. When Girlface and I were walking around the Himalayas with plenty of space and not ostentatiously acting like a couple, people are usually too busy on their pilgrimages to notice. They just assumed for the moment they saw us that we were walking adjacent to eachother by some accident since everyone is walking the same way anyhow. We only got that occasional locked-in judgmental stare of the sort that makes you feel something weighing down on your shoulders like a particularly overweight and contemptuous cat. When, however you are a foreign man getting off a bus with a sari-clad Indian girl in a crowded Mumbai street and there is no doubt about the nature of your acquaintance, the obese and haughty cat on the shoulder is replaced by the thousand burning glares of moralizing and intensely jealous hyenas. Interracial relationships are one of those things that can be a bit ticklish in many parts of the world. I don't know what to reccommend for other people finding themselves in analogous situations. The Ghostface Buddha solution, which I don't particularly reccommed to anyone, is to first actually imagine them as hyenas, and then imagine a big poof of smoke and all of the hyenas on the street suddenly being transformed into the pokemon Psyduck

We came to Mumbai for reasons of economy, sparing hundreds of dollars by riding a terrible, leaky skeeper bus down the west coast to catch a plane to the distant east coast, whence to catch another cheap plane to the even more distant Andaman Islands. These were, in fact, the first flights I have taken since landing in Delhi so long ago and hauling my sorry ass across this entire subcontinent by road and rail ever since. In the northern reaches of Mumbai's mega-"suburbs" we tumbled off the bus and into a rain-battered asphalt gulch of highway flyovers and Mumbai squalor near the domestic airport and rushed into the first hotel we could find without gleaming bronze stars by the name and a Raj-era throwback coolie in a red coat and silly hat waiting at the door. Girlface hates Mumbai and I was in no mood to deal with the place, so we passed the entirety of our 22-hour stay in India's "most dynamic city" in a 13'x15' hotel room. Anyways, it was raining, not the sort of epic downfall for which Mumbai is known, but an oppressive bout of precipitation nonetheless. The news of the day (we watched a lot of cable TV) was a malaria epidemic sweeping the city. The relentless rain was combining with Mumbai's claustrophobic conditions and India's near-mystical ability to generate festering bodies of stagnant water, creating nightmare conditions for anyone trying to control the spread of virus-carrying mosquitoes.

On the other hand, Raj Thackeray, a leader of Maharashtra's worrisomely popular Shiv Sena party (who are about one failed artist away from being the Maratha Nazis), declared that the source of the problem was actually much easier to deal with. Malaria he said, is "...caused by people from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar." He went on to elaborate further the theme that North Indians cause malaria, which is about the 937th reason he's concocted for expelling them from Mumbai. I usually find Indian politics intensely boring because no matter what ideology a group purports, with the occasional exception of the Commies, any action or statement they take has nothing to do with beliefs of any kind or any policy they will subsequently enact. It's 99& hamfisted electoral politics where even for the out-there loonies (revolutionary socialists, ethnic separatists, genocidal right-wing maniacs, international jihadists... the works), the means have long since become an end in themselves, where political activity has become the domain of party machines, massive corruption, and the shameless distribution of spoils. Above all politics has become about the narcissistic self-interest, the outlandish greed, and the gaseous inflation of the blimplike politicians whose mugging, dirigible faces taunt a billion or so honest people from every billboard, wall, and low-hanging wire in the country.

So I guess that unexpected little outburst just became GFB's definitive statement on Indian politics. Before I got onto that I was going to say that I was surprised to see myself actually paying to the details of political stories for the first time in months. First I watched this Raj Thackeray thing with horrified fascination because I was bewildered how a guy, who admittedly says a great deal of things that are incredibly stupid if you give them a moment's thought, had said something so overwhelmingly idiotic that I had to take many, many moments of thought to get my head around just how stupid it was. After the whole malaria debacle we flicked to CNN India, which leans a little towards sensationalism and promised that the rest of the evening would be spent on a live expose of the Shocking and Exclusive variety. And, by God, it was actually a shocking exclusive. For two hours we watched as CNN India busted a half-dozen state-level politicians of multiple political parties (and implicating many others) brazenly selling the votes that determine the delegations to the Indian equivalent of the Senate, on tape. This was followed by a bunch of sensationalist crap, which happened to include among it such actual gold as the Election Commissioner's jaw dropping on live TV, the chairman of the Congress Party losing his shit, a senator being directly accused on air of having gained his office by the same corrupt methods, CNN immediately adding praise of itself to the "news" ticker, a politician waxing philosopical and quoting from ancient Sanskrit texts, a state legislator selling his vote on hidden camera while his shirtless man-tits flopped about the room, and a member of the BJP being a decent person. The CNN reporters sounded like they were only a sliver of hesitation away from announcing that Mahatma Gandhi himself was about to descend from heaven, little round spectacles misted by tears, to woefully denouce the state of Indian democracy before the entire nation. It was riveting.

Much less riveting was waking up at 4am to go to the airport, fly to Chennai, and get the connecting flight to the Andaman Islands. Flying over the ocean is never interesting, unless you have a squadron of Japanese Zeroes on your tail, and even then it helps to have a failing propellor to keep you awake if you haven't had your coffee in the morning. Since none of this happened to us, I will skip recounting anything about the flight except to say that Kingfisher Airlines is utterly shameless about how it hires female crew members, and that for an airline based in India it should really have much better call centers.

So, finally, we touched down in the Andaman & Nicobar (Andaman-Nicobarese?) capital of Port Blair, across the Indian Ocean in the middle of nowhere, closer to Malaysia than we were to Delhi. It was raining outside: big, fat drops falling slowly, seemingly having rolled off the sides of the clouds as if they were soft, wet marbles rolling of celestial coffee tables. We trudged around all afternoon attending to the mundane matters that pester the visitor upon arriving to provincial centers. From one errand (I had gone alone) I returned to the hotel also carrying a handful of brilliant aqua-blue brochures of the Andamans' paradise beaches and unspoilt tropical islets under a spotless sky. Girlface gave them all a cursory flip-through, discarded each one with a toss vaguely in the direction of our sopping laundry, and Told Me So.

"I told you this was going to be stupid" is how she put it.

She went on: "I know, I know, we agreed for stupid and I like your stupid trips. Is all OK. But I must say, really, that this is stupid." Her reassurances had the desired effect on my psyche, allowing me to believe for one more day that just because you call something stupid in advance, you are somehow a wiser person for having done so when you then go and act on the stupid idea regardless. It is a soothing belief, like a coconut-scented cream to be rubbed on the stressed inner aches of the mind when everything goes to shit exactly like you knew it would.

We then established our plans for the next few days. Today, for instance, we went around visiting the local sights of Port Blair, and tommorow, of course, we are waking up at 3a.m. for our first real adventure in the Andaman Islands. Obviously, since we are going tommorow I can't yet tell you how it turned out, but when Girlface and I made the plan I felt it neccesary to say one thing.

"This one might actually be really, really stupid."

Damn The Monsoon... Full Speed Ahead!

I landed in India last September with a contract to write about tourist attractions in India and a massive plan to see hundreds of such places by the end of August. By the end of March I quit my job, and by the middle of July I had seen everything on my grand itinerary and more. I knew I would have time to kill anywhere I liked, and my newfound leisure came to me just in time for the annual 'southwest' monsoon, which has been described as "perhaps the most dramatic recurring weather phenomenon on Earth." It is a meteorological battle, and the carnage is of continent-consuming scale. The antagonists in this bellum ad eluvies are the Indian Ocean, the scorching heat of India, and the Himalaya mountains. It isn't clear which of these comes out the winner, but the loser is always non-marine lifeforms. Looking up my trusty and wrinkled map of India, I set my course from the Himalayan foothills to the arid edge of the desert in Rajasthan. Unlike Ladakh, Rajasthan actually does get affected by the monsoon, but I reasoned that if the monsoon was anything to worry about in that state they would actually have water in their holy lakes more than twice a decade. Conveniently, this is also the region where Ghostface Buddha's Indian lair is located, enabling me to relax amongst my Indian friends, including Rajasthan's most notable resident, Girlface Buddha.

I first, however, had to pass through Delhi for the sixth or seventh time this year. I have seen Delhi now at just about every possible time of year and let me tell you this: in the autumn it is a tourist-swarmed pile of shit; in the winter it is a foggy, frigid pile of shit; in the spring it is a dusty, searing hot pile of shit; and in the summer it is a sweltering, monsoon-stew pile of shit. (But it's really interesting!...once). Delhi was made no more pleasant or sensible by the frenzied construction efforts anticipating this year's Commonwealth Games, a sort of sad, anachronistic pseudo-Olympics that mostly serves as a way for British athletes to compete against impoverished but talented African and Caribbean opponents without the pesky Yanks and Chinese gobbling up all the remaining medals. In the case of the CWG '10, as they are known here, it is also almost certainly going to be one of the great disasters in sporting history and an enormous embarrassment to the government and people of India. In short, Delhi is comically unprepared, the management is probably corrupt, the new venues are a testament to shoddy Indian building practices, and the miserably botched "beautification" efforts in Delhi's tourist areas have had the truly astonishing effect of making them even filthier and unnavigable than they were already. On the other hand, maybe they'll pull it all off in the nick of time. We'll see in October.

As soon as I could I got on an overnight train deep into Rajasthan. When the sun rose and I could make out the scenery I was amazed to behold something I had never seen before in that state: the color green. Yes, if you go to Rajasthan sometime between June and August you can actually see plants not looking like they've just emerged from a Pyrrhic victory in a death-struggle against a camel. I moved back into the GhostLair to rest on the laurels from my Himalayan campaign and hide in its semi-arid bubble from the summer rains inundating the rest of India. It didn't work.

I spent a lot of time "working in the cyber cafe", which is what I told my hosts when I was actually going over to Girlface Buddha's house to watch TV and trap her small cousins on shelves in the unplugged refrigerator. One day, when I actually was 'working' (i.e. typing a GFB post) in a cybercafe, I noticed an ominous darkening outside. The monsoon was clearly on its way. The air was suffused with energy. You could feel the thunderstorm coming. Even the cows joined the city residents in prematurely concluding their business (in the case of cows: standing, pooping) and turning for home with a an anxious briskness of pace. I figured I only had an hour or two to finish up and scurry home before the deluge. Actually, I had five minutes.

The monsoon struck with the subtlety of a rhinoceros carcass being launched over the city walls in a siege. In moments the street was blurred by the light-refracting torrent of rain. Rivers tumbled down the temple steps. Storefronts became like ancient caves concealed behind waterfalls, where the intrepid treasure hunter would go looking for hidden gods only to find chains of dangling paan baggies and jars of cigarette lighters. I finished the post I was typing, and seeing that the rains would not soon relent, I forded out into the slushy brown aqueduct where the temple lane had once been. By the time I had jogged and splashed my way home, I received nothing but a lot of odd stares, numerous attempts to sell me extortionately priced umbrellas, and an eye infection for my troubles.

I thenceforth adhered to a policy of going nowhere more than 700 yards from my or Girlface's houses when there were any clouds out whatsoever, and no more than 400 yards if the clouds were a bit on the dark side. I thus comfortably spent most of the rest of my two-week stay in one haveli or the other watching sheets of rain fall into the courtyards and ducking between drain spouts on the way between the sitting rooms and the kitchens. A recurring nuisance was the entrance of desperate cows taking shelter from the rains, often for hours at a time, in the front room of my house, where they would stand dripping and mooing until they felt like going home, wherever that was. Needless to say I would have ejected them with great swiftness and prejudice back into the rains if I wasn't forbidden from doing so by my Hindu hosts. On the other hand, a similar compassionate line of reasoning prevented Girlface's parents from ejecting me into the streets to go home, so I guess that balances things a little.

The rains would often start in the morning and continue until dusk, so I had great reserves of time to waste on things like teaching my host's seven-year-old son how to hit the girls next door with paper airplanes, throwing bad mangoes at bats, and becoming distressingly familiar with the cast and plots of multiple Hindi-language soap operas. When the alternative is walking through murky, road obscuring waters where you know there's a giant heap of sticky animal shit lurking like a harbor mine every five paces, domesticity becomes surprisingly engaging.

Now, friends, let me tell you some things about the future. The Ghostface Buddha Hellraising Ticket (my Indian visa) expires in August, so I was not going to waste my last weeks in this country watching midday reruns of Jhansi ki Rani that even I've already seen. I made two momentous decisions for the future of the Ghostface Buddha endeavor.

1) To spend the month of August on some cockamamie adventure in a far-flung corner of India, monsoon be damned.

2) That just because my Indian visa expires doesn't mean I have to then make myself useful. The Indian government has effectively given me that timeless instruction to malingering deadbeats everywhere, "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here."

I shall elaborate on #2 at greater length later but for now #1 is what concerns us. For various reasons I had been doing some reading on India's most remote Union Territory, a place I had no plan of visiting until recently, and I was suddenly hit by a flash of my irrepressible brilliance.

"Hey Girlface," I said "would you like to join me on a trip to some remote tropical islands thousands of kilometers into the sea during the middle of the Indian Ocean monsoon?"

"Can we do something that isn't stupid?" She asked.

"Absolutely not."

"Well, OK."

Next time on GFB: Ghostface Buddha and Girlface go to... the Andaman Islands!