Tales From The Elephant Stable

My peregrinations through the southern portion of Rajasthan have become inexorably intertwined with my acquaintance and friendship with a clan of Rajasthani guesthouse owners. My tale is of their making.

My journey began, as it often does, with a ridiculously slow bus ride. "Sir," concerned Ajmeris would tell me "I am afraid the government bus is not suitable for you." Personally, I consider the government bus barely suitable for carbon-based lifeforms, but I felt even more strongly about leaving Ajmer. This bus in particular was about one stiff breeze away from collapsing into a pile of metal sheets. As we bounced down the pothole-rife pseudohighway towards Bundi the windows rattled against their fittings, luggage thumped from being hurled into the steel roof, and patches of ill-painted tin flapped against the holes in the fuselage they were meant to conceal. We faced the usual array of vehicular and animal obstacles, which by now I regard with indifference. My composure was shook however when we encountered the artillery brigade.

Coming down the highway in the opposite direction was what appeared to be an entire regiment of semi-motorized artillery, and the army trucks pulling the guns were not going to move to the side for any reason. In our lane we looked out on a gauntlet of oncoming vehicles who charged directly towards us trying to pass the army units with reckless haste, probably out of their understandable uneasiness about driving directly behind a howitzer. I now know what a quark in a particle accelerator feels like. Before our bus smashed any of these vehicles and momentarily revealed great secrets about the origin of the universe however, a blare of horns and a dramatic last-second swerve would send the lesser vehicle deep within the military formation, its bonnet slipping perilously beneath the barrel of a cannon.

Nonetheless it was a remarkably boring journey. A succession of nondescript towns and indistinguishable bus stands punctuated the expanses of scrub and brown dust. As we drew nearer and nearer to the southeastern corner of Rajasthan, things began to change. Long bridges traversed wide, dried-up riverbeds. The land became more lively. This region is the most fertile part of Rajasthan, though this is akin to calling Staten Island the most pristinely natural part of New York City. These large channels are called "perennial" rivers, meaning "In theory, in most years, there is supposed to be some water in here somewhere at some point." I started seeing rectangular patches of low green plants amidst the dust, with people walking about attending to them. Shameless acts of agriculture were being perpetrated in broad daylight.

We got to Bundi well after dark. I had no hotel. This was somewhat troubling as I knew nothing more than "the hotels are generally near the palace", so I took to the potentially difficult task of finding the palace in the old city under darkness. Five seconds later, I saw a colossal palace on the lower reaches of the hill, floodlit against the night sky. My infallible plans succeed again. In the neighborhood of the palace I began my quest to find cheap lodging. A man on a motorbike stopped to offer me directions to a guesthouse, as countless have before him, spending their days getting paid to lure travelers into overpriced filth boxes. Then he said "rooms are in royal elephant stable part of palace, 200 rupees." This is how I met Raj.

Raj was not a commission-wallah but in fact the owner of a guesthouse which was, true to his word, in the former royal elephant stables. A large metal gate closed off the compound. I sign said "guesthouse in elephant stables. garden restaurant. chill-out place." 'Chill-out place' is usually Indian code for "feel free to roll a joint on the roof", and I figured that Raj couldn't be all bad, but I remained skeptical. I struggled to open the gate and Raj showed me the simple trick required to unlatch it. "I am always closing the gate. Otherwise cows coming in. I do not like these cows." I then resolved immediately to stay at the elephant stable.

It was a modest place. The "garden restaurant" was a metal table in a large outdoor enclosure where Raj's wife served nightly the most delicious vegetarian thalis I have yet to find in India. A young English couple were busy painting the door of their room blue, because Raj and they were feeling artsy. I approved fully of my surroundings. My companions at the guesthouse besides the punkish couple were one Australian and a Walloon who has apparently spent the last ten years motorcycling around southern Asia and spoke excellent Hindi. Mark my words, this is the first and the last time I shall be bested at anything by a Belgian.

Bundi is a small town full of beautiful old buildings and friendly people. It was the royal capital of one of the minor Rajput states, and has yet to attract a great number of visitors, which helps it keep its uncommercial charm. Little cupolas dot the green hillsides as watchtowers and the majestic palace, topped by a jumble of domes, seems to nailed perfectly into the side of the mountain, not like a building erected from ground up but like a sculpture hung from a wall.

My first excursion was to see a famous step-well. It was closed, and I tried to nudge-nudge, wink-wink the guards into opening it for me. It turns out they couldn't because they weren't the actual guards, but just lazy police officers enjoying some shade. They escorted me across town to another well and some temples, then saw me off with a smile. Even the cops in Bundi are nice. It defies belief.

My time in Bundi, and also here in Udaipur, has taken on a lethargic quality. I recently received a much-desired compliment. "You're almost Indian..." a friend said to my delight, then continued "...you work day and night without weekends and hardly make a cent of profit." Damn. While I am far from actually being reduced to Indian levels of poverty - my 'labor' consists of brainstorming bad jokes about the architecture of 16th-century palaces - my friend had a point. I've been traveling thousands of miles and written hundreds of pages and haven't taken a day off in two months, so I'm now giving myself the luxury of occasionally spending a whole day accomplishing nothing. Sometimes I feel an odd solidarity with the uniformed staff at Rajasthan's hilltop forts. We both belong to the select group of people who wake up and say "fuuuuuuucccccckkkkk I don't want to climb up to that castle" more than one day a week.

While Bundi is mostly free of hassle, it is impossible to escape people offering to take you on a tour to the nearby waterfalls, which they consider the most majestic natural beauty and certainly you good sir would not mind a modest fee no large price to go there. I forcefully declined all offers. This was Rajasthan. Though they were unanimous in their admiration of this waterfall I had to remember that around here they would probably be amazed by water overflowing from the bathroom sink.

Life in the elephant stables was tranquil. Campfires by night, idle lingering by day. From time to time we would see a pack of monkeys invade the tree nearby and advance upon the family laundry. We would then hear a sound like *cchhhhhkkk-cchhooooookkk* as Raj's multi-talented wife loaded a shotgun with nonlethal nuisance spikes, burst out of the kitchen still in her crimson sari,and started blasting away at the tree, usually only rustling the leaves but sometimes causing a screech and a much louder rustling of leaves. She would then make a smug noise in the direction of the tree, sling the shotgun over her silk-clad shoulder, smile at us, and return to her kitchen. My enchantment with the family Raj grew ever deeper.

In Bundi there are some nice little temples. Outside of these temples are a variety of large, obnoxoious cows. Many of these cows were covered in tinsel, because.... OK I have no idea. One, apparently more special cow had red painted horns and a crude silver chain around its neck. This had the unfortunate effect of making it look like it had just gored a textile merchant in a dark alley and then lecherously snatched the jewellery from his wife's bosom.

I talked to Raj a lot. It was impossible not to, it's just too much fun. In an unusually sensible converstaion he told me he had been granted the elephant stables after a visit to the Maharao of Bundi. I feel sad for the Maharao of Bundi. He lived in the old royal palace all the way until Independence and then gave it up and locked it away to be overrun by bats. He opened it recently in his old age, resigned to leaving his small ancestral kingdom without an heir, the last of his line. Whereas other Rajput kings, like the Maharajas of Jodhpur boast on about the future of their lineage, I found the Bundi royals' a more sympathetic tale. I then visited the palace, which was quite lovely. It was beautiful and decidely less militaristic than others I've seen lately. It had that delicate charm of neglect from being shut up and darkened for 50 years, but on its opening revealed to the public the exquisite and subtle paintings that adorn its interior. From the palace I began climbing to the fort, only to find myself poking my way through thorn bushes and then suddenly surrounded by a large pack of Hanuman monkeys which were none too happy to see me. I photographed them with a mutual unease, then made my way home at sundown.

The next day I returned for a second attempt on the summit. A young boy stopped me and demanded I purchase a stick from him to scare off the monkeys. "A stick is most necessary" he insisted. Oh, I see, it's necessary. This word also means nothing in India. He popped into his shop then emerged with the floppiest, sorriest branch I have ever seen and I told him as much. He returned again with a rusty steel pipe. I accepted this bargain, and spent much of my time at the fort (where I was completely unmolested by the extremely frightened Rhesus monkeys there) regaling gullible tourists with tales of my cage-fighting days and then suddenly swinging my pipe and demanding middling sums of currency (all in jest, my friends).

One day I resolved to rent a bicycle and go riding in the countryside. The only problem was getting to the countryside from the city center in Indian traffic. The Belgian motorcyclist gave me advice. "You must do like meditation. You see only things bigger than your self. All things smaller than your bike become invisible." I tested this theory. Sure enough, with great focus I became able to see between the chaos of the street, adeptly avoiding tuk-tuks and cars in a zenlike bliss, unburdened by worrying about smaller beings, which parted before me as I had circumspectly stepped aside from a thousand vehicles before.

Then I rode, zenlike, headlong into a baby-carrying pedestrian.

Just outside town is a small lakeside palace where Rudyard Kipling wrote much of his most famous work. I had writing to do and it was a peaceful spot. But something stopped me. I then recalled what Kipling had written of Bundi's palace, of Jodhpur's palace, of Amber's palace, and a number of locations I have yet to visit. Each was an equally vague description that attributed its construction to giants, a divine force, or some sort of magical alignment of stones "...rather than the work of Man." Aside from being lazy, often misinformed, and generally a degenerate imperialist swine, Rudyard Kipling was also, I realized, a one-note hack.

Let me say this unequivocally: Ghostface Buddha is a better writer than Rudyard Kipling, and if he wants to challenge me on this account, he can step to me in the street. Rudyard Kipling, you a bitch. Come face me if you think you literary enough.

I'm in Udaipur now. Raj told me his cousin has a guesthouse here and that I should try staying there. He gave me a business card. On the front was his cousin's name and the contact info of the guesthouse. On the reverse I was informed the guesthouse offered lessons in the didgeridoo. "Raj," I said "your family is magic", and made my way to the bus.

Goat. Brain. Curry.

I read the menu. I was about to order the palak paneer, chunks of unfermented cheese in a mildly spiced spinach sauce. Then I saw it. There was 'Brain Curry', and there was no backing down. "Excuse me," I asked "what is the Brain Curry?"

The waiter shrugged, then attempted to jolt his memory and hesitantly described "It is a gravy, made first with tomato sauce and some masalas." Fabulous, we've determined that the dish falls within the broad parameters in which hundreds of barely-related meals are called 'curry'.

"No, I mean the 'brain'. What is it?" He shrugged again, curled his lips and shook his head. A great mystery, no doubt. "The BRAIN" I said, smacking upon my own in frustration. "Is this thing?" I asked impatiently, cradling my cranium, shaking my skull with my hands to draw his fleeting attentions thence. "This thing we are supposed to have in our heads?!" I sputtered as his eyes glazed over yet again.

He missed the insult. "Oh yes, is brain!" he recovered, eyes bright with pride.

I concealed my exasperation to speak with the utmost clarity. "OK then, I'll have the brains."

"You are wanting brain curry?" he asked, eyes squinting askance.

I thrust my arms out over the table and groaned "Braaaaaiiiiinnnnssss", then set my stare upon him in anticipation of his next witless remark. It was to the point.

"Brain curry?"
"YES...and a chai."
"Chai? You want Indian tea?"

You have to be fucking kidding me.

By this point the rest of the staff was taking some interest in my dining. I was the only customer, an odd foreigner with a pile of stained notebooks asking to be fed brains. The manager and other waiters, all Punjabis, took frequent breaks from listening to their unusually tolerable pop music to watch me scrawl in my notes. Sometimes they even ventured over to my table to read over my shoulder, only to be thwarted by my poor penmanship and the oblique manner in which I typically malign Indian cities. After a considerable wait, my Rajasthani waiter arrived with my chai.

Though I may as well have asked a blind Cambodian orphan in semaphore, I queried "Excuse me, from which animal is the brain?" He did not comprehend. I decided to break it down into multiple-choice. "The animal: is it sheep brain? Goat brain? ...Chicken?" This was still too much. I rephrased the question as a true-or-false. "The brain: mutton?"

"Yes sir! Mutton!"

Mutton is one of those English words, like possible, that Indian culture has somehow endowed with ambiguity. Its meaning is more or less "could be sheep, but I'd wager on goat." This was Ajmer. I've walked its streets. The mutton was definitely goat.

After further delay, a small metal dish was brought to my table. This made sense. I could not expect goat brain to be very large, because goats are fucking idiots. The dish was filled in a light brown slop. Roughly half of North Indian cuisine consists of various substances - chicken, cheese, potatoes, peas, ping-pong balls, refrigerator magnets - drowned in a brownish slop. I tasted the sauce first. It was curry. Everything is curry. Curry is an almost Orwellian word. Curry is the apex of the disassociation of language from meaning. All one knows is that there will be sauce and there will be spices. In India this is as redundant as calling a dish "banana fruit" or "bread food". A curry of eggplant here bears no relation to a curry of eggplant there, yet there is no name to distinguish these; there is just Eggplant Curry. Indian Restaurant menus, with their meticulously categorized offerings and minuscule gradations of price, are but a mockery of a gastronomical order, an ancient-ciphered hieroglyphic codex to be vainly examined by the gourmand. As a Mesoamerican scholar might say "This cryptic frieze is only known to be of Olmec origin" so too did I ponder "Indeed, this is a curry."

As I delicately sipped quarter-spoonfuls of this concoction, the Punjabis huddled in conspiracy around their audio system. They switched CD's and the melody became familiar. I thought little of it. Punjabis are generally the most internationally-minded of the Indian peoples; these men simply seemed to have a broader taste in pop music. I took my fork and pierced a small, nondescript chunk of yellow matter from within the depths of the curry. I took a moment to savor it but it remained unremarkable. I poked around my tray and began to suspect I had been given paneer curry in a kind and secretive act of Sikh hospitality, the contemporary American tune chosen specifically to ease my mind.

Disappointed and unsure how to proceed, I resolved to finish my meal in dignity. I forked a larger bite and directed it into my mouth. It was definitely brain. As I began to chew it squished palpably against my tongue, not oozing with juices, but merely soft and compressible like certain types of shellfish or other non-muscular animal organs I've tried. The texture, though unexpected, was unobjectionable. I had expected a more rubbery experience. The flavor was not too bad either, almost bland. I found I needed to coat bites with curry to make them more flavorful.

The truly disconcerting part of the meal was not its flavor or texture but its movement in the mouth. With each motion of the tongue and grinding of the molars it became more and more clear I was feasting on brains. As the brain piece tumbled in my mouth it began to unfold. Though I had not seen them, the intricate tucks and folds instantly recognizable as the anatomy of the mammalian brain began to unravel between my cheeks, flopping behind my gums, unfurling themselves like a damp carpet onto my taste buds. One by one my teeth tore apart the distinct nooks of the goat's mind. With one bite I severed its critical thoughts ("goat!"); with the next its uncanny sense for clambering upon rocks. I squashed and ground the matter and neurons that taught it to move in herds, to fear the stick ("biiiiiig stick"), and to leap on hind legs for bashing skulls.

At last, pressing a paste of cerebral cortex to my cheek with my tongue, I recognized the music. "I want to make love right now na na... Wish we hadn't broke up right now na na". I was eating goat brains to Akon. The Punjabis watched from the stereo console with shit-eating grins. This was an elaborate mockery, a pantomime of cross-cultural ridicule.

Piece by piece the brain disappeared into my undeterred oral cavity. A large mound protruded from the cream. I rolled it with my fork. It was a single chunk of brain and as sauce dribbled off from its underside it revealed to my eyes the curled labyrinth of snaking and spiraling brainflesh on my plate as clearly as in a textbook or a pickled jar. As I began my lengthy chewing of this specimen I wondered "To what extent do goats have memories?" Months among the Hindus stirred in me strange questions. Am I consuming the mind of a conscious being? Has this goat's soul been reborn or is it waiting for me to finish the last of its physical shell? Will my grisly devouring of its brain earn it some karmic reward, a lift from animaldom to perhaps being a humble street-sweeper or rural peasant? Is there some newborn baby across India unaware that I have pieces of its former consciousness stuck between my incisors?

The brain was almost gone and Akon wailed "You're so beaaauuuutiful...so damn beautifuuuu-ulll". Another Akon hit. The Punjabis' mirth at my expense was to extend to an entire Akon album.

The food could have been worse, and I was actually beginning to enjoy the relative restraint of auto-tuned R&B after months of screeched Hindi gibberish over too-fast basslines, cheap digital simulations of jangly Indian bells and stringed instruments, and poorly Orientalized euro-synth keyboards. Then, all of a sudden Akon's soothing robotic drone gave way to the frantic ostentation and outrageous lyricism of the hip-hop guest verse."... I'ma spend them grands but after you undress, not like a hooker but more like a princess". The pin on my cultivated self-restraint in the face of absurdity was pulled and I exploded in laughter, spewing curry all over my plate. The Punjabis rushed to my side, fearing the brain had done me in. I still rocked with laughter as a dabbed clumsily about with a napkin. "I'm all right, I'm all right" I reassured them, "it is because I laugh at the song. He is funny man." The Punjabis nodded and returned to their station. They rewound the track to hear the verse again. They were determined to understand it, as Punjabis consider themselves to be very funny men.

The brain was gone and I slurped at the last of the curry, cleansing my palate with mineral water and buttered bread. The Punjabis, now occupied with a large ledger and several calculators doing their daily accounting, left me to admire my conquests and rest upon my laurels. Sipping water, cooling myself from the heat of victorious battle in this gastronomic Coliseum, I was treated to the voices of the Empire's finest musicians. Almost as a tribute to a worthy foe, Akon sung "She's so dangerouuuusss, that girl's so dangeroouuuuuu-usss".

Dangerous? Danger? Bitch, please. My name is Ghostface Killah Gautama Buddha Maximus; Cow-Slapper of the West and Commander of the Army of the Just; a son in the Cobras' Lair and a brother in the Killers' Manse; and I will eat of Danger and shit of Victory, in this life and the next.

Return To The 300 Temples (The Dirty Version)

News story of the day: a study has revealed that prisoners in the jails of Tamil Nadu state almost all gain weight in prison where they are given a balanced and nutritious diet. It's official: living in India is worse than living in an Indian prison.

Quote of the day: "Our cities are the dirtiest in the world. If there is a Nobel Prize for dirt and filth, India would get it." - Jairam Ramesh, Minister of the Environment, my homie.

Moving on from Jodhpur my nexy destination was Bundi, located far away in the corner of Rajasthan. The direct bus was a 10-hour slog and I had little desire to spend an entire day confined within one of these four-wheeled slaughter cans. So, I decided to instead risk dismemberment on two separate 5-hour bus rides over two days. I was to transfer in Ajmer and stay a night again in that fetid hole, where, if you will recall, my most vivid mermories were of lying on a hospital table and receiving a series of unidentified IV's labeled in coded shorthand and languages in other alphabets.

I was somewhat uneasy about returning to Ajmer. I do after all have a stalker who resides there. He has called me several times over the past month, showing that my ice-cold shoulder has done nothing to chill the heat of his passionate pursuit. I therefore studiously avoided my old haunts, which included the only affordable sanitary hotel in town. The result was that I stayed in an overpriced and scum-infested flophouse and navigated the city through a collection of bazaars and back streets that got me comically lost every time I stepped out the door. The hotel was simply atrocious, as they tend to be in Ajmer, charging the price I would usually pay at a respectable guesthouse for a room that did not even have a shower and was graced by only half a coat of paint. The manager was a sour cow of a woman who demanded I pay many spurious charges on my account and clearly was less concerned with earning the hotel money than in making me lose it.

After settling my business in this glorified beetle-hostel and making the necessary inquiries around town for my escape to Bundi, I set off for an afternoon in Pushkar. This of course involved a bus ride over a geological formation known as Snake Mountain, whose winding, switchbacked mountain road seemed custom-built for sending the bus's already questionable crude steel gearshift into morbid throes and convulsions on the uphill, and turning the bus into a careening ten-tonne bobsled on the downhill. Bicyclists swerved off the road at our coming; monkeys scattered down the rocks.

Last time I was in Pushkar I caught only a brief glimpse, in the full swing of its absurd religious festival. I passed through quickly on my way to the epic camel market, not knowing that my dehydrated delirium was but a precursor to my bout with complete biological deconstruction that would render me unable to see the rest of the fair. I do recall that it was a tourist-infested madhouse full of religious loonies, freaks, priests, and esoteric street performers. I expected that this return would see a more tranquil side of Pushkar, a small town in the desery with countless temples, an air of devotion, and joyful groups of pilgrims.

When I got off the bus I was immediately accosted by three drug dealers cackling while they offered me hashish and opium, clearly breaking the cardinal rule of pushing. ("Don't get high on your own supply." Act like you know something.) Though the hordes were gone and the insanity had greatly diminished, I did not find Pushkar a very pleasing place. Though it is said to be the 2nd-most pilgrimed place in the world, beating out Rome and only losing to Mecca, the environment was unquestionably one dominated by the dollars of secular foreign tourists. Though many reverential pilgrims were there, the holy atmosphere was unimpressive. Pushkar, they boast, has over 300 temples. Big. Deal. This isn't like saying a city has 300 churches or mosques. In the Hindu world any town worth naming has at least a couple dozen if not a couple hundred temples for myriad sects and deities. many of the temples ring its "lake", a cavity formerly occupied by a sacred lake. Brahma would have done well not to create the world and convene the universe's deities around a body of water in a place where it routinely goes years without raining. Around this dusty hole are a number of very holy ghats, including the one where Brahma himself bathed, the one where Vishnu incarnated himself as a boar (don't ask me why), and the one where Mahatma Gandhi's ashes were sprinkled after his murder. The temples aren't much to look at, except the Vishnu temple which looks magnificent from outside but won't let you in.

Pushkar has a Brahma temple, one of the only Brahma temples in the entire world because according to legend his pissed-off wife cursed him and decreed that he would never be worshiped anywhere but Pushkar. Strangely, though he is one of the "big three" along with Shiva and Vishnu, pretty much nobody bothers worshiping him that much. Whether this is because there are no Brahma temples around or vice versa is very much a chicken-and-egg question. I went to the Brahma temple - essentially the one and only temple to the creator of the universe - and found it quite mediocre. Hinduism is a very strange, self-admittedly a profoundly disorganized religion that nonetheless seeks to stringently organize the whole of society while leaving its own practice open to an infinite triage of devotional priorities, personal needs, and popular favorites.

Pushkar is a weird place, where donkeys are painted pink, camels are adorned in feathers, and the cows think nothing of outright thuggery, mimicing the priests and saddhus who get up in your face and plead "baaaabuu, baaabu, money for food" as if you can't see their half-clad potbellies jiggling to and fro like those of their bovine co-extortionists.

The most dominant presence in town though are the tourists, not the waddling Americans or the platoons of culturally oblivious retired French people who look like they've just stumbled tank-topped and floppy-hatted out of a baguette shop in Cannes, but legions of equally oblivious backpackers. These throngs of contemporary pseudo-bohemians, found in concentrated colonies throughout India, are catered to by a plethora of merchants dealing in pashmina shawls, Om t-shirts, sloppily-printed baggy trousers, and a slew of other hippie-shit "Indian" goods that no Indian has ever worn but can be traced around the Subcontinent like uranium waste deposits by a Geiger meter upon the bodies of Israeli, Spanish, Chilean, Australian, American, French, and other neo-hippies who've traded patchouli oil for iPods and "environmentally freindly" canteens that they fill with bottled water. Hot spots of this activity such as Pushkar and Delhi's Pahar Ganj are veritable Chernobyls emitting toxic levels of self-absorption from "alternative travelers" who believe that they and their kind alone are truly immersing themselves in India. I good-naturedly but dryly told a group of Israeli girls who looked like extras from a straight-to-DVD Jerry Garcia biopic that if they really wanted to be Indian they should either go all the way and buy saris or just score some sequined jeans and sew randomly-chosen numbers to fake Ed Hardy shirts. They were nonplussed and proceeded to talk amongst themselves in Hebrew for the remainder of dinner.

As they talked a pair of incredibly stoned men straight out of a Hell's Angels rally drove by on monstrous motorcycles with Vishnu tridents affixed to the rear, and for a moment - just for a moment - Pushkar had me impressed.

CORRECTION: The world was not created at Pushkar, it is merely a very sacred creation of Brahma, the Creator, who created the rest of the world elsewhere.

Tata Roulette And The Bus Of Death

I take a lot of day trips. Firstly because I like to get a change of scenery and visit places off the beaten track, and secondly because I enjoy the lengthy bus rides which combine an excursion into the tranquility of the Indian countryside with a near-constant risk of violent death.

The title of this post is misleading. There is no one single Bus Of Death. Each and every bus is a rolling box perfectly equipped for mass homicide. Where the rear-view mirror should say "Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear", it instead reflects a haunting message that reads "redrum...REDRUM." You could just take two and a half hours of barely-edited footage from an Indian bus and title it "Saw VII: Kota to Indore". This is especially true of routes along secondary highways, which are usually about one and a half lanes wide are are trafficked not only by the customary ramshackle slew of motor vehicles but also by creaking bullock-carts and plodding pregnant cows which need to be overtaken, resulting in a continuous game of Chicken with oncoming trucks and buses that is usually resolved in a blare of horns in a matter of only feet or inches.

Fearing that my delicate foreign senses would be offended by the cramped conditions in the main compartment, conductors usually invite me to sit on the bench in the driver's cabin. I happily accept their offers and relax in the space and safety of what I've come to think of endearingly as the "forward-firing ejector seat." The bus to Osiyan had an even more special feature: a large metal platform in the cabin that served no discernable purpose and pressed uncomfortably against my legs. I was grateful though for this minor discomfort as the edge of the platform would do a fabulous job of dispossessing me of my feet and my shins, which would otherwise become flailing hindrances to my projectile motion through the front window.

India is one of those many countries that is so accustomed to not having the capacity to solve problems that addressing problems without in any way solving them has become part of the national culture. It would be poor form to do nothing, so things are sometimes done that are worse than nothing at all. For instance, when there is a dangerous obstacle on the shoulder of the road causing a narrow space unsafe to pass in, local people helpfully mark these obstacles by placing piles of rocks in the road itself. If this were a country with landmines they would be marked off by spike strips.

Trucks and buses in India always have an idol on the dashboard, surrounded by small posters of Vishnu, Krishna, and so on stuck to the windshield. The idol is often a local town god you've never heard of, covered in beads and wreaths of flowers. Stepping onto this bus I saw the idol was Ganesh. You don't want to be on a bus devoted to Ganesh.

Ganesh is the elephant-headed god of luck, and is perhaps the most popularly worshiped of the Hindu gods. In a country so overpopulated that a person's skills or goods are almost guaranteed to be redundant, it is no surprise people perceive simple luck as the key to success. People who are especially devoted to Ganesh are dangerous: they believe they are favored by Chance. This obviates the need for Skill, Foresight, Acumen, and Caution.

So I saw this idol to Ganesh and I knew instantly our driver was consciously putting our lives in the hands of Fate. We were to play a game of Russian Roulette where the bullet would be a Tata truck and the revolver reloaded every minute. Fate, aided by the iron-willed determination of our driver in the face of oncoming traffic, granted us a heart-pounding but rapid passage to Osiyan.

Osiyan itself was not nearly as exciting as getting there. It's a smallish town out in the desert notable mostly for the age rather than the grandeur of its temples. I was excited to see a collection of 8th and 9th century temples mostly intact. The first, a large Hindu edifice to a god also worshiped by the Jains sat high on a raised platform. A local trader, who had nothing better to do because he lives in Osiyan, took it upon himself to give me a tour complete with a religious education.

Never put too much stock in a religious man's explanation of other people's religions. He strongly insisted that Jainism is a branch of Hinduism, while Jains are quick to assert that they're more like Buddhists ("but different religion!" they always add). The trader, whose name was Sarim, provided proof of his argument by stating that Jains worship five Hindu gods (one was Lakshmi, I forget the other four). "Well, five out of thirty million sounds like a pretty big difference" I quipped. "Just one is enough!" he replied.

The temple was interesting if not opulent, with a pleasant use of mirrors inside and ancient carvings outside. We went out on the roof and Sarim directed me immediately to the Kama Sutra carvings, which is what Indian men assume foreign tourists will find most interesting. Though this is frequently correct, it is a textbook case of projection if there ever was one. However, the erotic sculptures had all been defaced...literally. Armies in the 11th and 17th centuries under the commands of Mohamed of Ghazni and the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, respectively, had chiseled the faces off in keeping with the Muslim prohibition on the depiction of recognizable human figures. "The Heretics," as Sarim had thus far exclusively referred to Muslims, "they smash the heads". The result was a bizarre montage of figures in explicit acts of coitus, naked bodies and huge genitalia fully intact, though they had been gruesomely decapitated and were fornicating under the watch of other faceless, multi-limbed semi-human monsters and celestial entities. Little did I know that the people of ancient Rajasthan were avid readers of Japanese comics.

Sarim giddily honked on a pair of sandstone breasts, then ran his finger over the missing face and his expression turned dour. "It is always these Muhammad peoples" he muttered. "No fine works these Heretics."

We then went to the Jain Mahavira temple, which I was enthused about because Mahavira, the Buddha figure of Jainism, is the one part of the religion that seems to to be grounded on planet Earth and his teachings form the backbone of Jain ideology. This temple too was ancient and its main idol was a magnificent statue of Mahavira made of sand and milk and encased in gold 2000 years ago (and irritatingly off-limits to photography). There was a group of Gujarati Jain pilgrims in the temple, playing music and praying in copper crowns and cloth masks while the resident monks made formal offerings. I went to the back of the temple to peruse a montage of the life of Mahavira, which I expected to be a welcome relief from tales of 5-million year old tirthankaras. It was of course more complicated, as in addition to the life of Mahavira himself it mostly detailed the fantastical lives of the previous incarnations of his soul over the aeons, which found their coda in Mahavira's mortal life, attainment of ultimate truth, and ascension into the heavens.

Next I popped quickly over to some minor old temples and discovered why few people come to see Osiyan.: the age of the temples does not make them any less small and unremarkable. I also saw a deep, lushly-planted baori (step-well) and made my way back to the bus stand, where I was quite surprised to see a pair of peacocks chilling on the roof of a pharmacy. I had assumed that peacocks were like psychedelic turkeys or little blue emus, a bird only in the Linnaean sense of the word, but it turn out the bastards actually have some spring and can hop and flap their way up to a rooftop in only one or two steps. I eagerly wished to travel seven years into my past so that I could be smaller, kinap a peacock, take it to the top of a tall temple, and hang-glide Zelda-style about town as it squawks and flaps madly to carry me to obscure ledges filled with treasure. Then I realized that seven years ago I was sixteen and much the same size I am today so I was forced to discard this dream into the same sentimental rubbish bin as my scheme to travel India on a motorbike with a pet monkey poking out of my backpack.

my bus back to Jodhpur departed at sundown. I noted that the idol on the dash seemed to be a female fertility goddess. Good, I thought, the driver must be a family man. He wants to live. Above the idol was a row of colored lights that turned on periodically and sometimes began to flash rapidly. Seeing my interest (there was nothing else to look at in the dark except the lights of oncoming trucks) he explained that it was attached to a radar gun and the lights signaled the presence of an object directly ahead while the flashing indicated the speed at which a frontal collision was becoming imminent. I watched this device anxiously for much of the two-hour trip, and observed its frantic flashing in the face of a stream of approaching headlights. It was only late in the journey that I thought to count the cycles of flashes and time the intervals between their flashing, when I determined that the lights were actually just on a set pattern and were merely the typical bright crap that Indians like to decorate with. I felt foolish for believing him, but it was a convincing joke - collisions are imminent all the damn time. "Ha ha yes, is one pattern!" he laughed after I jovially accused him of his deceit.

Ha ha indeed. It's funny because every 45 seconds we almost died.

Blue City Blues

My woman done left me
My caaaaamel toooo
The buuuus ride was bumpy
The buuuu-uuusss ride was long
The laandscaaape was saaandy
The skyyyyy was bright bright blue
Crossed the desert to Jodhpur
And now I've got those Blue City blues

Got lost in the ooooold tooown
A big mess of..... ALLeyways
No street signs I found
I triieeeed, OH I tried to steer by buildings
But they're AAALLLLL painted BLUE
Oh sweet LAAWD can you help me
I got them Blue City blues

I sit on a roof
A-waitin' for food
I look at them taaallll boxy houses
And I said to the Lord "LORD I must be dreaming
  I must be losing my mi-ind
 I see THOUUSSSANDS of giant Lego bricks
 Grey, cream, and BLUUUEEEE
And a huge stone FORT them ol' Raaajputs built
To give me Blue City blues"

I walked to the FOOOOORRRRTT
But got lost a-gaaiii-aaiin
A gay Indian begged me to just FUCK HIM then and there
But I ain't got no friends a-nowhere
All I've got....OHHHHH ALL I"VE GOT
Is them Blue City blues.

Hey lovely lady, I see you over there looking at the sky. You've got the blues in you too. Let me just play you a little tune. I ain't got no saxophone. Sold it for spiced tea and opium. Makes the pain go away. So I'll just sing you my melody...goes a little something like this...

AAAaaaaabbwwaaada bwwaadaa bweee boom. 
Aaaabwaadda bwadda bweee-eeeee. Baddabadaba baabba.
Aaaabweeeeda bwaaada bweeee.
Baaa daaa daaaa
BWAAAAAAAABAAADAABAAABWWAAABA
Aaabwaaadabwaddabwee

Oh, OH sweeet MAAAmaaaa
Why don't you just.... sliiiiiide on next to me
I'll make you QUEEN of MY KINGdom
Take you to my paaaaa-lace
Ha, well it's a musical palace, baby, just a little guesthouse
Small, but easy on the eyes...just like you
OOooohhh come in to my CAStle
 And end our Blue City blues
Come in to my AAaaarmmss
And ennnd my blue-ball'ed blues

Now baby you just lie there, real comfortable-like, while I rub in this lotion, tell you a story about Jodhpur.

You see, sugar, Jodhpur was built in the middle ages as a new capital for the most powerful of the Rajput kingdoms, Marwar, the Land of Death. Makes your spine tingle. Mmmmmmm....speaking of spines, your back is so smooth, honey. Let me massage that sweet caramel. Now, the Maharaja Jodh Singh founded Jodhpur and built a massive castle on the sheer cliffs above the city. Four hundred feet over the walled city, the hundred-foot walls encase palaces, reservoirs, and garrisons, making it an impregnable citadel for over six hundred years. When you get to the gates on foot, the walls there are twice as high. There's an audio tour and...sugar don't fall asleep, let me tell you about the audio tour. The audio tour is spectacular, a tour de force in historical narration enlivened by quotes from Kipling, spoken recollections by the present Maharaja and his family, trumpet fanfares, larger-than-life anecdotes, and a narrator who delivers his lines with near-Biblical drama..."The Meherengarh fort stands as the ultimate symbol of military strength and honor. Its halls and ramparts ring with the echoes of history and legend. In all the centuries no cannon has breached its walls...no elephant has ever battered through its gates."

There's a palace inside, a masterfully decorated tribute to pleasure, refinement, and power. It's the way a man should be for his woman, strong but gentle. You've got some tension built up in those shoulders. Baby you need that strong and gentle touch. Nod your head if that feels good. I knew you would. The palace walls soar mightily, while the lattice windows are carved as delicately as the lace in your bra....*Snap* You won't be needing that.

Somewhere along the way the Maharajas built a new palace. You can see it there, the graceful giant on the hill across town, lit up for all to marvel at on this breezy night. The blue city lies nestled, sprawling between these hills, a million people under their watchful gaze. Within the old city the many-floored homes and workshops form shadowy, blue-edged canyons, with the flow of humanity cutting between its walls like water slicing through ancient gorges. You'll see the new palace is far outside the walls. It has no weapons of any kind. Maybe it's a sign of hope, that we can all live together the way we should, no more killing, no more fighting our brothers. Baby, you feel what I'm saying? We need to make love, not war.

Oohh foooooooxxxy woman
My heart's aching for you, woman
Life, life it's been treatin' me so bad but you're smellin' so damn good
Let's loosen up that belt there
Run my hands on that beeee-hiiiiind 
Gonna unFASTEN that skkkiiiiirt now
See what I can fiiiind...
Blue panties between your legs now?
Just...gonna...TAKE these.....foooorrrr my piece of mind
Oh baby your sooooft skin
It don't neeeed no cotton blues
Just MOOOVE with me sweeeetheeaart
And put an end to my....Blue City blues 

India Haiku, Vol. 2

edit: forgot to type some, added them.

Vast India,
home to one billion souls;
A touch excessive

Is this a street,
market, barn, or sewer?
All of the above.

Child, I am deeply
aggrieved you lack candy. No, I
don't have ten Euro.

A veiled woman
walks up broken stairs, bowl
of bricks on head

Rudyard Kipling,
greatest observer of India.
Nah, he a bitch.

Solar-powered
desert vehicles; I dream...
No more camels.

Retired Frenchmen:
leave India. Take your wives.
Go drown in brie.

I witnessed it
with my own eyes: four goats
tied to moped

Oh Rajasthan!
After countless centuries,
still mostly sand

Sixty rupees?
Taj Mahal snow globe, with leak?
Thanks but no thanks.

Baa baa black sheep
Have you any wool? If not,
I'm eating you

In the desert
a nose twitch, strong now, a sneeze.
Gross clumps of sand

Attention rapt,
I turn. She offers bangles.
I misheard.

Personal space,
hygiene, silence, and Reason,
I miss you

Hey good lookin',
what's your spicy cookin'?
Oh, sounds dreadful.

Cutting through smog,
scent of incense...correction:
opium

Hey girl, your six
yard sari could be our
six yard bedsheet.

Hold up, did you
see that? That just happened.
What the fuck.

PHOTOS and other news

Big news, people. Ghostface Buddha now has a photo gallery!

The gallery is a Flickr account, linked at the very top right-hand side of this page, where you can also quickly check if there have been any updates, and admire a single image that will sit there for an arbitrary period of time, hinting at what wonders lie beyond the hyperlink.

Alas, due to many misfortunes large and small, the majority of the photographs from the month of October have been irretrievably lost, most tragically those of the Pushkar Camel Fair, but also from most of Uttar Pradesh except those salvaged from Facebook. I have however been stepping up on the photography of late and hopefully this trend will continue. The gallery now contains rescued images from the Varanasi area as well as increasing numbers of photographs from the last few weeks in Rajasthan. [edit: many of the places of which photos were lost have been revisited, and photos are now in the gallery, with the exceptions of Mathura, Vrindavan, Faizabad (oh no), and Ayodhya. -GFB]

I have captioned some but not all of the images. I have tried to be basically informative and occasionally witty, but there is only so much you can say about pictures of sunsets or whatever so I haven't been too fastidious about explaining everything...."this is a picture of the same throne room....viewed from the other side!"

For those of you not familiar with Flickr, it is a fairly versatile and elegant photo storage mechanism that allows much higher quality and better organizaton than hosting directly on this blog would permit. The main "snag" you might encounter when browsing the gallery is that unlike other photo sharing sites you are likely familiar with *cough*Facebook, clicking on an image will not skip directly ahead to the next in the batch. Instead you will see in a box to the right two thumbnails of the images before and after the one you are currently viewing. Should you so desire, it is possible to view higher-quality versions of the image than the default one displayed by clicking on the teeny upper button that says "All Sizes", which is also where you need to go if for whatever reason you wish to save a photo to your computer.


In other blog-related news, as the audience of this site has grown somewhat broader than I anticipated and as the right-hand side of the site was becoming increasingly clustered with the proliferation of archive links, etc., I have been working on a basic site navigator bar you will see above, that will allow you to jump around the page more easily. This may or may not be working completely correctly yet (because I haven't written my own HTML in about seven years). I've also tweaked some of the colors and content to make things slightly more readable.

OK that's about it. Enjoy the photos. I'll be coming back with a post about Jodhpur as soon as I finish up the last three articles I'm supposed to have done for work. I have to find something valuable and informative to say about riding camels that isn't just bitching about how they smell. It's going to be a long night.

Out Of The Sand, Into The Sandcastle

After three days roaming a shadeless desert without sunscreen, the only burn I have is a friction burn on my thighs from the ceaseless agitation of my loins against camel back, leaving my skin in those regions feeling like I slid down a rope too fast in gym class. I swear upon the names of the ~1,000,000 Hindu gods that I will never ride a camel again until they devise a way to mount a cushioned gyroscope to the saddle.

Around the time we approached the outskirts of Jaisalmer at breakneck speed, passing the common sights of an urban periphery such as high-voltage power lines, military police checkpoints, and random piles of cinderblocks our driver loaded a ghastly-looking, heavily-scratched Indian pop CD depicting on its face two Rajasthani puppets dancing while a silhouetted caravan of camels crossed in the background. As this digital monstrosity began to play, I thought about how far civilization and technology have come from the days of wandering in the desert to produce such a device, and as the disembodied puppet voice wailed cacophonously over the same abominable Indian drum machine used in every Hindi pop song since 1973, I looked out the window, saw a pair of fat tourists taking digital photographs of a pig sifting for banana peels in a pile of spare rickshaw motor parts, and concluded that Progress is a lie.

Jaisalmer, a teeming metropolis of noise and commerce to the villagers who flock here for work and trade, is in fact a charming and fairly relaxing Indian city. Excuse me, an Indian squirrel just stole the last bite of my honey sandwich. Guess whose species is going on the nemeses list.

Anyways, Jaisalmer is a quaint medieval desert town of 65,000 people pretty much in the middle of nowhere that depends largely on its convenient location for an Indian Air Force base from which to carpet-bomb Pakistani soldiers guarding their half of the sand. Rising from the center of the old city is Jaisalmer's fort, also known as the Golden City because it is constructed entirely of yellow sandstone. It is actually closer in color and texture to the cheese filling in a Ritz Bitz cracker, and looks like it has been crumbling because people have been justifiably scraping bits off to go with their popcorn. In fact the fort is crumbling primarily because of poor conservation but also because the Maharawals of Jaisalmer, being Rajput kings, spent centuries getting in wars which Jaisalmer tended to lose. It's no surprise that they lost. Their kingdom consisted of some 100 tiny villages in what even they admit is a "sandy waste" and a capital city that had a population of 7,000...in the year 1900. During their epic defeats of the middle ages in which the soldiers of the fort ended up resorting to mass suicide their army probably consisted on 17 dudes sharing a camel and a bunch of scarecrows. In the palace armory, along with the usual assortment of swords, shields, daggers, and ungainly firearms, is an example of a warrior's bow and arrow...from the early 20th century. Dynastic war fail.

In any case, despite Jaisalmer's historical ineptitude it is very beautiful. As it is located in a part of the country boasting neither "inhabitants" nor "resources", it is spared most of the unpleasant effects of modernity that plague other Indian cities. The fort stands out on the hilltop against the pristine, cloudless sky like the gods' own sandcastle, and from below you can just make out traces of the bustling life within. The fort is not just a monument but part of the city, with thousands of people living within its old servant homes. A short climb up through the many winding gates leads into the heart of the city, where the Maharawal's palace hangs overhead, looking over a tight maze of narrow streets, crumbling mansions, and ancient homes and temples. Homes and shops are built into the sandstone bastions, with restaurant kitchens sometimes built around 14th-century cannons sticking out the window and fabric shops with holes in the roof from long-ago sieges.

At one corner of the fort is a claustrophobic labyrinth of seven Jain temples. I knew this was going to be good. When I got there I discovered that somewhere along the way, due to crowded conditions within the fort, the Hindus and Jains decided to share the temples. The result, which combines the Jain penchant for obsessively ornate carving on every available surface with the Hindu penchant for images of wacky deities, is astounding. Connected to each other by barely-noticeable passages and twisting staircases, each of the temples contains a dazzling array of carved art, where hundreds of marble and gold statues of calmly seated Jain tirthankaras rest in shrines adorned in intricate scenes of Hindu gods with varying numbers of body parts belonging to different species playing music, dancing, carrying animals, and having sex. In the midst of all this, as Jain priests make offerings of holy paste in their inner sanctums, Hindu priests only feet away offer incense to their gods and circle about counting hanging bats on the sculptures as a measure of good fortune. Revealing an unusual familiarity with Jain and Hindu mythology (for a tourist), I was invited deeper into this shadowy warren of the gods where foreigners are rarely led and had the meanings of each of the multitude of statues explained to me in excessive and mind-boggling detail. I left baffled but satisfied.

Back out on the streets I reveled in the atmosphere of Jaisalmer. Not only can you happily breathe the actual atmosphere, but the ambiance is quintessentially Indian, almost a parody of itself. A platoon of poorly-mustached soldiers, half named Singh, attempted to maneuver a broken-down army truck while groups of splendidly-mustached old desert men in pink and orange turbans sat around drinking chai, only to briefly restore the engine and have it fail again when they were forced to stop by a barricade of contentedly digesting cows sitting in the shade beneath the last fort gate. Walking down the street, the merchants tried with all their energies to entice me to their shops. A wild-eyed dealer of arts and antiques gesticulated feverishly and implored "FEAST YOUR EYES, YES, FEAST YOUR EYES ON THIS CAVE OF WONDERS, THE FINEST ANTIQUES IN ALL THE INDIA, FOR YOUR VERY SELF THIS DAY." A massive-grinned man with a metal pot balanced on his head followed me through the alleys playing a Rajasthani violin and enthusiastically saying "yes, very nice" at random intervals before unleashing a hyperactive and unmelodious burst of sound from his instrument and then suddenly shifting back into song.

I climbed into one of the bastions to eat at a restaurant that offered Tibeto-Mexican fusion cuisine. It was not good.

Finally, after a visit to the Maharawal's equally sand-colored palace I descended to the lower old city and sat on a rooftop, dreaming wistfully of the desert and gazing into the sky...

How many hump-backed livestock change?
Why are camels so deranged?
Where were you when we were getting high?
Clumsily walking through the sand
Moving slower than Gondwanaland
Where were you when we were getting high?
Someday you will find me
Caught beneath a sand dune
In a camel-spit supernova in the sky
Someday you will find me
Caught beneath a sand dune
In a camel-spit supernova
A camel-spit supernova in the sky

Operation Desert Smackdown

A Camel Odyssey


I recant everything I have said previously about being in the middle of nowhere. I have now truly been in the middle of goddamn nowhere, and in the desolate wastes of the Thar Desert I struck the greatest blow yet against the Cow menace. From Bikaner I made my way to the city of Jaisalmer, a famously picturesque medieval desert town pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Having no desire to join legions of idiot tourists at the popular sand dunes near town, I planned a more dramatic excursion. Three days into the depths of the desert on the back of a camel. The starting point would be 50 km beyond Jaisalmer, well into the restricted military zone containing the deserts near the Pakistan border. Having secured the proper "permits" from a villager's brother in the military police, we left early in the morning. I kept a journal throughout the trip, scrawling them clumsily as I bounced atop my camel. The following is a tale of grandeur and toil, beauty and pain, man and camel. This is what happened.

Day 1

The group is me, 3 Indians, and 2 Swedes. Between us we have four camels. The foreigners each ride one while the guides walk and a young boy steers the auxiliary camel. We're all wearing turbans, though we non-Indians can't tie them properly to save our lives. The Swedes are hellbent on learning how, and spend the whole time tying and retying their ridiculously bright and oversized turbans. The guide calls them both Turban Man. He doesn't have a name for me. He says my turban is small and ugly. The jeep ride out to the starting point was an adventure itself. At some point the driver simply decides roads are for sissies and veers off into the desert. After some time we meet the camels and guides. I have no idea how this rendezvous was arranged. It must have been something like "go past the sand and meet us by the other sand at 9am", because there is no other way to describe the surroundings and the driver had to honk every time he saw a camel in the hopes that he found the right people.

The Thar Desert is a vast expanse of sand and shrubs. We ride the camels for hours. Sand. Shrubs. Sand. Shrubs. Indistinguishable emptiness. Every couple hours we see a settlement, maybe three or four grass hats and a herd of goats. The animal life here consists of scattered herds, plus camels, flies, sand beetles, and some very skinny cows. These cows live in a country where they can idle up to a restaurant and have food shoved directly into their mouths and yet they've wandered out into a barren sandpit. They deserve to be skinny.

I've given the camels names. There is Dudley, the hungry camel; Bonzo, the lazy camel; Hieronymus the angry camel; and Chad, who is just Chad.The Swedes ride Dudley and Chad while the boy handles Hieronymus. Bonzo is my steed.

More hours pass. The blazing sun moves slowly through the sky. Nothing is spoken. There is nothing to say. There's sand. There's shrubs. I'm beginning to think that 3 days on a camel is about 2 days, 23 hours, and 30 minutes more than I need to spend on or around camels. I also think my tailbone will never recover.

We stop for lunch. Spiced cauliflower. I'm starving and my hips are sore from straddling Bonzo. While we sit the camels are sent to feed. To prevent them from running off, the guides do exactly what I'd do: tie the camel's feet together so they hobble off like a bunch of buffoons to inspect some shrubs. Bonzo is picky, he'll only eat from a bag. No, actually he is just lazy and expects his food to be brought to him. Dudley is a glutton. Every chance he gets he slips out from the formation to munch on tiny desert leaves, to the great consternation of the Swede whom he drags through the bushes. Lunch is cooked on a wood fire. Finding dry firewood is not a problem.

Bonzo is so lazy it's ridiculous. The guide keeps a cane which he uses exclusively for threatening Bonzo to pick up the pace.

More hours on Bonzo. I don't think I'll ever be able to have children.

Hieronymus is being a pissy little bitch. He's pure ego. He's the youngest of the camels and thinks he's fucking special. He moans and groans whenever told to do anything and just general makes a huge ruckus whenever he's unhappy, which is all the time. Dudley is the id, a swirling mass of instinct and uncontrolled desires. Twice now he's bolted away, sprinting to a shrub that particularly caught his eye. Bonzo is the superego. He represses everything into an unnaturally civil behavior, making him the most agreeable but also making him useless. You can tell he's hurting inside. The camel within him yearns to come out. Chad is just Chad, nothing, a void. He does not lose himself in the harmonious balance of the Yin and the Yang, but in their mutual nullification.

Camels fart all the time. Bonzo farts the most. He passes more wind than Aeolus. Bonzo's farts are silent and merciless.

We've stopped to water the camels at a village well. The village is 12 buildings. Our guide tells us this is the last village...the last village in India. Stretching before us is a dune sea, where not even shrubs dot the slowly shifting sands. From here it's nothing but sand all the way to the Pak border with distant, forlorn Indian and Pakistani army posts being the only trace of humanity for a hundred kilometers.

Hearing the splash of water, a single cow ambles up. He is a fat, long-horned beast. Then another cow walks out of the village, and then a small herd. This herd and the penultimate cow escape my attentions, for I have had a dramatic realization. I am in the last village in India, and beyond me is a waterless and plant-less land where no cow could ever survive and as far as the eye can see none venture. This cow before me, standing out away from the village, is the last cow in all of India. The guides and the village children begin angrily chasing away the herd, who clearly have designs upon their well-water, but the single, motionless Final Cow is let be. In the commotion I seize my moment. With nobody watching I turn the back of my hand and in the names of Honor and Justice, pimp-slap the cow right across the face. In a futile defense he turns the other cheek. A costly error. Again I back-hand him heartily, regretting only that I bear not a jeweled ring with which to leave my mark. The last cow in India turns and flees.

The glory of victory shines upon me.

We pass the village to the dune sea. We make camp at its edge. There is sand, but then there's sand: this is sand. Dinner is dahl and potatoes with rice. After nightfall we realize we have let the camels wander a bit far and we don't really know where they are. We find Bonzo right away. He's sitting in the same damn spot he sat in three hours ago. However, the other three are somewhere out in the darkness, within whatever range a wobbling camel can cover in three hours. The head guide walks up to me by the campfire and says "Give me flashlight, we look after camels." I consider the prospect of leaving the warmth of the fire to scour the night for camels and immediately turn to the Swedes, place my finger on my nose and declare "Shotties not looking for the camels." The gesture is not understood.

Camel Man decides we would be useless searching in the desert anyways. He barks some orders in Marwari. At some point in the night, Work Man and Aladdin find the camels.

Day 2

Yesterday was sand and shrubs. Today is just sand, sand, and sand. The night was frigid, awful. The Swedes, being Swedes, wore expensive thermal underwear and expedition sweaters to bed, yet awoke complaining of the horrid night. I, with my rather unsophisticated layering strategy of wearing two t-shirts to compensate for my lack of socks, felt I had the moral high ground. And that was the only thing I felt because I certainly couldn't feel my extremities.

Through listening to the guides I have learned that they were not joking about their names. The main guy, who we call Camel Man, is really named Baba. The second guide, who the Swedes and I secretly call Work Man because he does all the real work, is actually called Allaa, and the young boy is really named Aladdin. It's too good to be true. The Swedes have named the camels too, and they align perfectly with my own judgments. They call them Hungry Camel, Lazy Camel, and Angry Camel. They have no name for Chad, because there is nothing worth saying about him.

We ride off, yet again spending hours traversing empty sand. The dunes are beautiful but they are slippery and treacherous. We discover Chad's Swedish name: Clumsy Camel. Bonzo, though surefooted, is remarkably reluctant to climb piles of sand, providing yet more proof to my theory that he is a self-loathing camel in denial of his true self. Chad is tied to Bonzo so he will follow a better path and slip less. It doesn't help. He just slips and yanks Bonzo which causes a deep rumbling in Bonzo's gut. I prepare for the worst, and I receive it.

We make our way back out of the dune sea and towards the shrubs. We pass through a larger village, which seemed to hold a few hundred people. A flock of children follow us around squealing "chocolate! rupees! rupees!" and demanding that we take photos of them. Camel Man tells us we will be crossing a lot of desert and spending the night at a small set of sand dunes closer to civilization and popular with the semi-adventurous tier of tourists. He promises us "There coming English girls, you can do boom boom." I am holding Camel Man to account for this promise.

Lunch today is a mysterious dish Camel Man calls "Vegetable". It's a spiced vegetable, though we are at a loss to guess which. Work Man is becoming familiar to us as a blue-clad dot in the distance, which is where we usually see him, having been sent to tromp across the desert carrying buckets of water and piles of firewood while Camel Man sits around and cooks unnameable vegetables.

Just so you know, going to the bathroom in the desert is, surprisingly, a thousand times better than going in the woods. Mind the sand.

Sometimes I look up and think I see something strange on the horizon. No, it's just the silhouette of a shrub.

We reach the other dunes at sundown. A Japanese couple and their guides arrive and join our party because they work for the same camel owner and know that Baba/Camel Man is the best cook. He treats us to dahl and potatoes with rice. We're noticing a pattern. Their camels are led away because they are just spending the night and have a jeep rescuing them in the morning. Finally a Jeep arrives and a Japanese woman gets out. She is married to the Japanese couple's guide. There are no English girls, let alone any boom boom. The Swedes and I decide it is for the best. It would have been awkward around the camels.

The night is not as cold, probably because I put on every single garment I brought. Three t-shirts, two pairs of pants and copious underwear, but no socks. I'm also wearing my pathetic turban which I've wrapped tightly around my Muslim prayer cap, a hidden layer of extra warmth on my head. Camel Man thinks this is one of the strangest things he has ever seen. He asks me what to call this turban. I call it the Barack Obama Secret Muslim. One of the Swedes gets it, the Japanese are puzzled, and the Indians just laugh "Obama! Obama!" The Swedes and I make camp strategically behind a large dune and a bush sheltered from the wind at least. We still awake chilly, and of course sandy.

Day 3

The Japanese are evacuated by Jeep. We look at our camels, sigh, and apologize to our groins one more time.

Perhaps sensing that we tired of passing through sand and shrubs, and even of sand and sand, Camel Man led us instead on a novel day of navigating sand and rocks. When emptiness gets old, the thinking was, trade in for some desolation. We're getting closer and closer to actual civilization. We can see comm towers on the horizon, though after hours of riding towards them we see that they sit in another featureless cement village, though now they have electricity (but not running water).

Hours, hours, hours of sand and rocks.

Aladdin and his mount Hieronymus dissapear for some time. They come back carrying a large, unrecognized vegetable. Lunch is definitely going to be "Vegetable."

Finally we stop beneath a line of trees, the only ones we've seen for hours. Just beyond them is a road. We eat more Vegetable and wait. The camels were tied and left to feed. We were jokingly urged to say goodbye to our camels; we would ride them no more. I turned to Bonzo and said "So long you big doofus." It was not the last I saw of him. Dudley, Chad, and Hieronymus wobbled off to eat. Lazy fucking Bonzo just sat there.

Finally as we watched the progression of the afternoon sun we heard the roar of a Jeep engine, accompanied by the unmistakable sound of the Vengaboys. Civilization.

Two Words: Rat Temple

Rat Temple. Exactly what it sounds like. I have known for some time, since before I even got to India, that one day I would come here, and I held this knowledge with a combination of dread and masochistic pleasure. Yesterday, I went to the rat temple, and it was....well, read on.

I am currently writing this in the middle of goddamn nowhere, the village of Kolayat to be precise, a place so uneventful that directly asking any local person to tell me something interesting about Kolayat results in stares and silence.

Several days ago from a mountaintop temple in the village of Galta outside Jaipur, I was watching several of the 4000-odd monkeys at the temple complex jump into one of the cascading pools in the narrow ravine when I had a revelation that surprisingly had nothing to do with being surrounded by 4000 monkeys: the sky should not be brown. Jaipur is disgusting so I booked a train ticket to the rarely-visited desert city of Bikaner, which is also disgusting.


The train was 2nd-class only, which I knew meant absolutely no effort would be expended to make the service efficient or remotely timely, and that I was effectively sentencing myself to an indefinite period aboard an insalubrious rattletrap. The train was initially cramped and unpleasant but became spacious as more and more people had the good sense to go no further on this sand-filled rolling litterbox to nowhere. On the way we passed the Sambhar Salt Lake, which like all Rajasthani lakes is a misnomer and should just be called Sambhar: Your One-Stop Emporium For Salt And Sand. We stopped at a village called Salt City, whose livelihood was clearly the single industry of isolating salt from giant piles of sand. I felt the strange urge to get off the train and talk to the salt de-sanders about their lot in life but feared that if I entered Salt City I would never be allowed to leave.

Finally, late at night, after many moments of excitement ("Look, more shrubs!"), we got to the city of Bikaner, which is hot, dry, smelly, slightly sleazy, and generally unpleasing to the eye, but for some reason I really like it. It has a sort of Wild West atmosphere, being made of half a million people maintaining a tenuous connection to the rest of civilization on the fringes of the habitable world. Nothing grows in the arid wastes around town but camel feed. Two narrow highways crossed by the bulky and florid Tata trucks provide the only lifeline for supplies from the outside world. From the edge of the city nearly every good is still transported into and across town in great wobbling heaps on camel-drawn carts. People move by motorbike, but Bikaner's famously strong camels dragging their gargantuan loads steadily through the bustle of the city is still very much the way of life in a place where electricity and the motor engine have given the people a new energy. Throughout Bikaner there is not the sense of a chaotic decline into 21st-century poverty so prevalent elsewhere in India. Here the chaos is invigorating, a promise of modernity for a town that for centuries was defined by its stark isolation.

The first place I visited in Bikaner was its famous fort, which did not look that strong but has never been conquered. At some point even the Rajputs would have to stop and ask themselves just how many lives they were willing to throw away over Bikaner. It also helped that even on the Rajput scale the Rajas of Bikaner were absurdly bellicose. As if repeatedly and bloodily smashing Mughal invasions wasn't enough, the Rajas of Bikaner were so fond of warfare that they actually volunteered their forces to British service in World War I and their armory proudly displays German machine guns captured on the Western Front. As if this wasn't martial enough, the centerpiece of the grand hall is a fully-constructed biplane, as the British could think of no more fitting gift to the Raja (who is shown in full military splendor attending the Treaty of Versailles) than the then-epitome of mechanized warfare.  The palace within the fort was quite beautiful, and of course open to the public because the Raja now lives in a more modern palace across town. Most of the Rajput Rajas these days live in their dynasties' 20th-century palaces due to changing royal tastes and advances in domestic technology. You can run air-conditioning and plasma-screen TV's in a rewired palace from 1920 but not on an intricate system of feathers and pulleys.

The next day I went to two of the strangest temples I think I shall ever see. The first was the Rat Temple. Catching a bus across the desert, I ventured to the town of Deshnok where in the confines of its infamous temple the reincarnated souls of dead members of the storyteller caste shielded from the Lord of Death by a medieval Hindu saint receive sanctuary in the bodies of holy rats. Though not as bad as it could be, given the possibility of a swarming sea of rats, it is still a foul and vile place. As it is a Hindu temple, you must enter barefoot, and as it is full of unseemly numbers of rats it is also full of unseemly amounts of rat poop. The air is stale with dry rat shit and there is the constant motion of small darting rats which teem from every nook and cranny. Sometimes they dash right at you and in your evasive motions you must take great care not to step on one, because this would entail purchasing a golden rat idol to make amends, and because it would be fucking disgusting.

It is considered extremely lucky for a rat to run across your feet, and I'd be damned if I was going to lug my ass all the way across the desert to this shithole and not participate. As the rats are not especially accommodating, some measure of connivance is required to entice the rats over your feet rather than around them. What you should do is stand in a narrow space directly between a large group of hungry-looking rats and a large mound of something edible, then close your eyes and wait.

Actually, no. Don't ever do this. If you do, go immediately back to your home and develop a serious hallucinatory drug habit, because that is the only way you will ever be able to dream about anything else again.

Returning to Bikaner I went straight into the walled old city, a medieval labyrinth of old painted mansions and outdoor public gambling in which I promptly got extremely lost. It was in these wanderings that I stumbled across what I shall now coin as the Butter Temple. There is a large and beautiful Jain temple in Bikaner and the jolly priest (Jains tend to be jolly) was most pleased to tell me about its art and history. Evidently, the temple predates the city and was built for unclear reasons in an empty wasteland without a drop of water, making it impossible to mix the cement. So in lieu of water they mixed the cement with some 40,000kg of butter. How they had this much butter handy but no water eludes me almost as much as what could possess anybody to contemplate mixing cement with butter. To this day when it gets particularly hot, butter and grease seep up through the floor. It was just hot enough for some butter and grease to be coating the passage to the rear of the main shrine. Needless to say this was a much more pleasant, though no less bizarre, barefoot experience than the Rat Temple and it left me with the desire to put cupcake batter on my feet and lie in the sun until I have the world's most delicious ankle socks.

Today I came to Kolayat, a village so lifeless I was warned against coming. It is a very peaceful place. To my great shock, the lake even has water and water-lilies in it. I wandered around the village for some hours, crossing to its far side and the edge of the desert, from which point there was literally no human life for hundreds of miles and across the Pakistani border. At this fringe of civilization is a public high school, and as I stood there attempting to bask in the emptiness of it all, I was instead the object of ridicule for about 50 yabbering ninth-graders. I feel this says something profound about humanity.

There are two types of people in Kolayat: regular people who are bored out of their minds, and holy people who are stoned out of their minds. Both desperately seek your company and both will transmit their condition to you in a very short period of time. I will leave you to guess which type of person I chose to spend more time with. So here I am in Kolayat, writing verrrryyyyy slowly and sloppily in my notebook, trying to gain some sort of truth out of the inanity of it all, and having deep thoughts about reincarnation, rats, and purified butter. Like seriously, where did all that butter come from?

Pink City? More Like Stink City

I am on a personal quest to tell the world with well-reasoned arguments why Jaipur is the most overrated city in India. It is the third most popular tourist destination in India, though I completely fail to see why. Though I have no issue with it ensnaring its legions of rich, fat, waddling oafs, I consider it my duty to prevent decent people from being deceived by the vast amounts of falsehood perpetuated by the travel industry. This quest shall resume momentarily, but I put it on hold for a day-trip to somewhere actually enjoyable.

I caught a public bus to the town of Amber. Knowing that the bus would become excessively crowded, the conductor actively encourages early-mounting passengers to climb through a small opening in the plexiglass and crowd into the driver's cab. This affords excellent views through the wide front window,and thanks to the density of bus traffic on what is not quite a two-lane highway it also serves as a highly convenient and quick means of transferring between buses in the event of a head-on collision. I continue to take public buses because I have computed that my life is in fact worth no more than the fare of 7 rupees, a sum comparable to what one might find in the crusty leave-a-penny tray at Wendy's.

When we got to Amber I was rewarded to a spectacular view of a massive stone palace crawling up the ridge with a fort high above it. Amber was previously the capital of this kingdom until the Rajas built Jaipur in the 1700's. I imagine they must have relocated for the same reason Indian TV continues to show Indian rap videos: some people just hate culture. Below the palace are several pleasure gardens sitting like islands in a placid lake. Oh, did I say "lake"? I meant "big-ass hole full of dust". Rajasthan has no water anymore. My personal army of turbaned serfs carries water in steel urns from the Himalayas so that I don't have to flush my toilet with goat milk.

I climbed up and went within the palace complex, which was incredible. The Raja's private quarters in particular were superb, being a finely carved patio-like structure adorned with mosaics of silver and mirrored glass. From atop its walls and turrets were great views of the valley and town below, but I was not even near the top. No, the fort is of course strategically located atop the tallest, steepest, most barren, heaven-forsaken upthrust of rocks and dirt for miles around. Nevertheless I made the ascent, not least because I had a free entrance coupon. The fort itself was unremarkable and I was treated to a truly unenlightening tour of its famous cannon foundry by a strange man who knew relatively little about cannon-forging but was quite enthusiastic in the brief tap-dance he gave after each "explanation". The fort's saving grace is that it contains Jaivana, the world's largest wheeled cannon, a behemoth twice the height of a man, requiring 100kg of gunpowder to fire and allegedly boasting a range of 35km. The various Rajput principalities were notoriously belligerent, but this is just spiteful. In an age before explosive shells, this would really just serve to completely ruin one person's day at a time.

The fort's other saving grace is an attribute it shares with any semi-abandoned building in India: it is overrun with monkeys. However these are not the same monkeys one sees everywhere in the Ganges region, which I believe are called rhesus macaques. These are big, long-tailed monkeys with fur the color of unwashed rice and wizened black faces. Though they spend much of their time sitting around and holding their feet, they also like to sprint after eachother, galloping headlong through swinging iron gates and scattering packs of simultaneously amused and terrified schoolchildren. Monkeys are the universal entertainers. Everyone likes monkeys. If we were serious about promoting cross-cultural understanding we would unleash packs of monkeys in the United Nations General Assembly. These monkeys, though sometimes moved to excitement, are much more laid-back and seemingly introspective. Whereas a rhesus macaque's general demeanor expresses a desire to do a backflip and throw a tambourine at a baby, the large black-faced monkeys look as though they should be blowing rings off a fat blunt and saying "You know what's really real, man? Being a monkey."

My explorations complete, I descended the hill and once again jogged to hop into a moving bus. I found myself taken yet again into the heart of Jaipur, the "Pink City". Let me tell you about Jaipur. The first time I came to the Pink City I was actually excited. The rarely-effusive guidebooks I consult spoke wonders of the sprawling, vibrant bazaars and the uniform pink paint of the vast old city. This is bullshit of the first order. First of all, the paint is now applied only to the facades on heavily-trafficked streets in a blatant ploy to retain the city's moniker. Worse, the paint is of very low quality and is not even pink. Too cheap to spring for real pink paint, the city has purchased vast quantities of an orangey-pink slop that many of you may recognize as the color of that one awful crayon in the pack that always managed to stay twice as long as the others. Based on the haphazard application of the color, its greasy appearance, and the ease with which it seems to wipe off, I would surmise that the city is in fact painted with this very crayon. As for the bazaars, claimed to be "some of the finest in all of Asia", this is just false. Though it is certainly possible to buy just about any saleable good at a shop here including some very fine textiles and jewellery, the bazaars are most emphatically not "vibrant". The large divided roads that pass through it carry an incessant traffic of cars and city buses, stripping the orange-slopped shops of what little charm they may have had, while foot traffic between merchants is impeded by the ubiquitous fleets of parked motorcycles.

Having perused the bazaars to my satisfaction I proceeded to the historical sights. I began with Jaipur's "architectural masterpiece" the Hawa Mahal, or Palace of Winds, so named for its hundreds of lattice windows. The Palace of Winds ain't shit. The famed latticework is uninspired and generally sloppy, while its interior decor is as moving as a heap of peat. I scoff at the Palace of Winds. The City Palace, a complex housing the Raja of Jaipur, is a little better but outrageously overpriced. Though the silly-turbaned servants mug amiably for tourists and the grand hall is grand, one cannot help but notice that the current Raja is keeping all the best parts for himself, the looming seven-storey palace in which he resides being strictly off-limits and ringed by very serious-looking armed guards. You can however see two gargantuan silver water urns which according to Guinness are the largest silver objects in the world. You can also marvel at palace decor composed largely of geometric patterns made out of weapons, because as I've mentioned, the Rajasthani kingdoms were belligerent as hell.

By far the best sight in Jaipur is the Jantar Mantar, a walled garden of collossal stone astronomical instruments designed by the Raja who built Jaipur, some of which are truly bizarre and ingenious and cannot be seen in any other observatory. If the words "azimuth" and "declination" get your pants wet, or if the phrase "massive gnomon" gives you a massive gnomon, this is the place for you. For the unscientific it is still highly enjoyable, because even if like me you have little desire to compute the hour angles of celestial bodies, it is still a garden of very large and very strange things.

It's time to return to my cushy hotel. Sure, the bathroom soap may be called Mysore Rose, which sounds like the after-effect if I were victimized in a late-night encounter with rohypnol and an oboe, but I have hot water and cable TV. Time for some motherfucking cricket.

Broken Wheels and Broken Hearts

My life frequently resembles a bad Indian movie. This is what happens when you go to India. Of late however it has also resembled a bad Hollywood movie, involving a stalker and culminating in a gratuitous mountainside Jeep accident.

Some time ago I joked about having a masseur-stalker. I now have an actual stalker. When I was seriously ill a charming young man aided me greatly in navigating the farce that is the Indian hospital system, expending great time and energy and asking nothing in return. Out of gratitude, I hung out with him and his friends just a bit as I was still quite weak. Then he started calling me. Then he started calling me a lot. I grew increasingly suspicious as he would drunkenly say that I was a "beautiful person", attempt to liquor me up, and then offer drunken motorcycle rides to other parts of town for mysterious purposes. He started showing up outside my hotel and waiting for me to venture out for food. He then offered to join me in my trip to Jaipur, over 130km away. This would not do. I connived to leave without his knowledge, lying about my date and train of departure. His calls kept coming. Then came the texts. They grew more and more desperate, from this:

"If luck is a raindrop i send u showers, if hope is a minute i give you hours, if hapiness is a leaf i give you trees & if u need a frnd u'll always hve me"

to this:

"you cal me now"

I am very glad to be alone in Jaipur.

Ajmer, when not spent vomiting or in the company of a deranged lunatic, is actually quite nice. Its two main claims to fame are 1)being close to Pushkar, which is why tourists come here, and 2) being the holiest Muslim city in India, which is why Indians come here. Both Hindus and Muslims agree (this is in itself remarkable) that Ajmer is precisely 1/7th as holy as Mecca. Taking readings around town on my saintometer, I was able to confirm that the town emits exactly 142.86millimeccas per square meter. The town's holiness derives from the tomb of a medieval Sufi saint. The tomb complex is quite nice,  lots of marble and such, but a bit of a letdown for being the holiest Muslim site in India.

I actually started my tour of Ajmer at the Red Jain temple. I was prepared for the typical Jain madness, expecting ancient paintings of nude holy men being embraced by elephants while being irradiated by lotus flowers and such....but this was something else. Denied access to the main temple, I was led around back to the subsidiary hall. Let me tell you, this is some subsidiary hall. Turns out it was commissioned by a 19th-century emerald mogul who could apparently  afford to  have built an entire miniature city covered in gold leaf. The hall, about the size of a volleyball court, was covered in mirrors and just completely filled with gold. 350 kilograms of gold leaf on a model of the golden city of Ayodhya while a procession of deities rode by the temples on golden elephants and tigers while various other deities hung from the ceiling in flying swan- and tiger-boats also coated with gold leaf and ringed with emeralds. I turned to the priest and asked "so where are the monkeys?". He was confused. "I've been to Ayodhya. There's definitely more monkeys and less 10-storey golden temples." He was both pleased to hear I had schlepped to Ayodhya and annoyed at my criticism. "This is before Aurangzeb time. Artist's imagining."

The man has a point. From a touristic point of view the iconoclastic fanatic Mughal emperor Aurangzeb was one of the biggest pricks in recorded history. Almost any religious monument in northern India bears a plaque saying something to the effect of "Though the temple dates to the 7th  century, the current edifice was built only in 1823, replacing the building destroyed by the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb 40 years earlier." For a bit of delicious irony I wandered out to the edge of town where there lies a crumbling, ruined mosque whose ornate Arabic calligraphy carvings now serve as a roost for a flock of pigeons. A cursory examination of the interior reveals all too clearly that the mosque literally was just built out of gigantic pieces of Hindu and Jain temples, but has since itself fallen into disrepair. A handful of devoted individuals continue to use the site of the mosque, and a group of old men do an admirable job of barking at women and making them pray over by the side of the mosque where they belong, and a less admirable job of preventing Ajmer's oversized goats from fucking on the tombs.

The next day I decided to climb a mountain and see a fort. A word of advice: if ever you decide to climb a mountain first ascertain that said mountain is not located in a desert. Nevertheless I foolishly proceeded up the ancient stone path to the summit for some two hours. Along the way I stopped at what was apparently a magic stone based on the number of people kissing it, and at the summit enjoyed my hard-earned vistas. At the top is a filthy village surrounding another dargah, dedicated to a later Muslim saint who did all kinds of crazy shit, his exploits recorded in scholarly article I posted yesterday. It was a great day. Nothing had gone wrong. I went around the village and got in a "taxi" (i.e. jeep-bus) with an Indian family and started our descent down the winding single-lane mountain road. That's when the wheel fell off.

To be precise, the axle broke and the entire Jeep nose-dived into the pavement, scraping a deep groove in the asphalt for some 15 feet and leaving the front-left wheel disconnected from the vehicle and leaning outwards from the wheel-well at a 45-degree angle, a decent 2km walk uphill in the afternoon sun to civilization. So basically the fucking wheel fell off. During the ensuing lengthy wait for an empty Jeep to pick us up I used my meager Hindi to befriend the Indian family, with the exception of the old patriarch, who erroneously assumed that this was God's punishment to me for not making a charitable donation at the dargah.

I had made my charitable donation. And besides, God doesn't punish me. India does.

I Demand Justice

Today I have two special gifts for you: two articles I wrote for work that I am allowed to share with the public...because my employers refused to accept them. I find this mystifying as I don't even have an editor and the vast majority of my professional writing is swill. I fail to see why these don't pass the bar. Here is the first

1.)

How To Cross A Busy Indian Street

You kind of just do.

This represents the sum of human knowledge on a very important subject. Their rejection of my work stings like a wound rubbed with salt. I take comfort only in knowing that many a great writer and artist was not acknowledged in their time. I can hope still for my posthumous anthology.

The second article, representing a great deal of time spent typing, is even more exhaustively researched. I don't know how a man can make an honest living if his labors are not rewarded

2.)

 A Brief History About Hazrat Meeran Sb. Khing Sawar (R.A.)

The old name of Ajmer was Ajaymeroo. At that time the king was Raja Rai Pithora. In his kingdom there was a famous magician known as jadoogar Jaipal who was Rajguru of the Fort & was a proudy & cruel. In order to spread his famousness he used to set magic light daily. That magic light was seen from far & far distance. That magic light was also seen by Hazrat Roshan Ali Darvesh in Bukhara. Hazrat Roshan Ali Darvesh knew by his spiritual power the magic light was burn by Jadoogar in his proudness. This was not tolerated by him & made up his mind immediately to proceed India. He came to Ajmer and setteled at Ghoogra Ghati situated at Ajmer.


His maditation to Almighty God & miracle spread soon on every common man & Raja. One day a famous wreslter named Samant passed through his meditation place. He saw a strange that crowd of people were listening to his preaching silently. The wrestler threatened Darvesh not to do so. Darvesh said to wrestler that to disturb Darvesh is bad. You mind your own business. On hearing this the wrestler attacked on Darvesh by sword soon after a sparkel of Dhooni of Darvesh went to Samant, Samant saw miracle and run away. Next day the place of Dhooni was changed near to common way. In the mean time a Goojri (Milk Seller) who used to carry curd to Raja's Kitchen passed away. Roshan Ali Darvesh asked goojri what you are carrying, she said it is curd for Raja's Kitchen, Roshan Ali Darvesh asked her what are you getting for it, Goojri said Two Ashrafiyan (Gold Coins) Darvesh asked what is special in curd for which Two coins you are getting. She said it is a tasteful curd. Darvesh took that curd for Two Coins. Darvesh tasted that curd & found it sour. So Darvesh returned curd to Goojri along with two coins. Goojri was gready and carried curd to Raja's Kitchen, By seeing the print of finger in curd it was established that curd is not pure. This news spread over & reached upto Raja. Goojri described the whole story of tasting curd by Darvesh. Hearing the story Raja got angry badly and order his police to present Darvesh before him. Raja ordered his Police to kill Darvesh. But Tara Bai the daughter of Raja who was expert in Astrology said to Raja that killing of Darvesh may cause the destruction of Kingdom. So Raja left his idea to kill Darvesh on the advice of Tara Bai and as a punishment he ordered to cut the finger of Darvesh with which he tasted curd.  Darvesh returned to his place Darvesh returned to his place Ghoogra Ghati and buried his finger. Even today tomb of finger is still there. Hence Darvesh left Ajmer proceeded towards Madeena & reached to Roza-e-Mubarak of Rasool-e-Khuda. He described the cruelty of Raja. Faryad of Darvesh was accepted. He saw in dream and was direcetd to bring the matter before Meeran Sahib at Masshad & He will help you. At the same time Hazrat Meeran Sahib saw a dream to help Darvesh. So when Darvesh reached to Meeran Sb. at Mashhad The Marriage of Merran Sb. was being celebrated. He was in bridgroom dress, Darvesh presented himself before Meeran Sb. Meeran Sb. was already in the knowledge of arrival of Darvesh. Meeran Sb. also knew the MASHLEHATE Khunda vandi. So Meeran Sahib left his marriage and proceeded towards India. in his bridgroom dress and took the people with him in the way.


It is said by Abu Tayyab that when Meeran Sb. intended to proceed towards India. Sultan Mehmood Gaznavi send me a Message that Meeran Sb. has proceeded to India, for great Jehad so you Alakh Khan go at once to help him with great Lashkar. It is clear that Meeran Sb. was in Mehmood Gaznavi Period.


Devotees of Islam forwarded to India from a Balakh Bukhara Multan & Sindh with great courage under the guidance of Shahbuddin Bhole Alakh Khan and reached the destination Boodha Pushkar, where no water was available, the time of namaz was near at that time so ne threw "Neza" on the earth, water came out of the earth, and Ghazian-e-Islam did wazoo and offered prayers. After that they came to Ajmer and stayed at Anasagar Place where sodagars at that time used to get horses of different kinds. When this lashkar stayed there people thought them as sodagars group. When Raja came to know their arrival. He sent his two sons to know the facts. The saw a Horse Khing whom they liked too much and asked to purchase the horse. Meeran Sb. said that this horse is for my riding & not to sale. They said that we like this horse only on their repeated request Meeran Sb. said that you can purchase the horse procided you fill the depth by money caused by the hit of horse leg that will be horse price. Hearing this they got pleased and told the whole story to their father (Raja). Raja also got pleased and gave them too much money. But when Horse hit the earth it made too much big depth, the whole money was gone in it but the depth was not filled. Raja's sons got too much worried. The 2nd. condition was put before them by Meera Sb. that this horse is head (Sardar) of horses if the horse comes back to me from you then I will not give the horse back to you. Raja's son accepted the condition & they took the horse. They tied the horse firmly at their Astabal. But the horse came back to Meeran Sb. at mid night. In the morning Raja's son saw that the Horse Khing is not in astabal and many other horses in astabal are lying dead, and many other horses incapable. Raja got annoyed much & came to meeran Sb. & argued much. Meeran Sb. gave him the refrence of condition fixed between him and Raja's son. Raja was not satisfied and attacked on Meeran Sb. with huge lashkar. In the reply Merran Sb. faced the assault (Attack) & with the blessings of Allah Pak got the glorious victory. Meeran Sb. when he reached near fort He with all his forces offered Namaz-e-Zohar.

At the mean time Jadoogar Jaipal Jogi got the chance of throwing a big stone of the Hill on Meeran Sb.  He was busy in praying. Stone of the hill continued to moving on his head. After prayer as he started Dua He saw the hill stone moving around his head. He (Meeran Sb.) addressed to hill stone if you hace come with the order of Rasool & Allah Pak you are welcome & if you are sent by Jadoogar better you stop there. A voice from stone came Huzoor I have been thrown by Jadoogar but I am helpless & want help. So Huzoor Meeran Sb. gave help to stone by two fingers and also said to his horse to help stonse with knww moving stone stopped, till today the stone is in the way of Taragarh. This stone is known as Adhar Silla, Jadoo ka pathar. Today also the print of two fingers & driving stick horse knee is seen in the stone. Most of the devotees used to come & visit Taragarh & get their heart filled with joy.


With great courage the forces of Meeran Sb. Attacked on enemy with the the result enemy disheartened & began to hide & to run. When enemies found themselves helpless they close the door of Fort and started to throw "Teer" on Lashkar. But Lashkar-e-Islam went on going ahead & ahead with slogan "Allah-O-Akbar" Jadoogar did the hight of hill twice by Magic. Huzoor Meeran Sahib's Horse Khing "Tap" at Hill. The Taragarh Hill which was made twice in hight by magic was reduced half with Qudrat-e-Elahi & thus lashkar got entered in the fort & the fort was captured. In the mean time there was a time of Zohar Namaz. Namaz was got started. The enemies availed this chance they got united & attacked again and they succeeded to kill Huzoor Syed Meeran Hussain along with his fellow men during the Namaz time.

"INNA LILLA-E-WA INNA ELE-HE-RAJEOON"

My employers are philistines.