Damn The Monsoon... Full Speed Ahead!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Absolutely not."

"Well, OK."

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