Return Of The Dynamic Duo

(Nothing Dynamic Happens)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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