Monkey See, Monkey Douche

Fun fact: everyone knows monkeys can do it doggystyle, but did you know that monkeys can do it doggystyle while breastfeeding a hanging baby? Gems of knowledge, gems of knowledge. The only good thing about my extended stay in Faizabad was my growing acquaintance with the 50-strong pack of monkeys that lives at the train station, apparently subsisting on discarded fruit and stolen family-size bags of Indian Cheetos. Though watching the antics of this pack was greatly amusing and partially redeemed the otherwise atrocious experiences I have with that train platform, their brethren down the highway were not so endearing...

I will concede that Faizabad has a very nice colossal mausoleum, but it is otherwise the Indian equivalent of Scranton, Pennsylvania, which is to say that you should never ever go there if your interests include fun. My real reason for being in Faizabad in the first place was to visit the nearby Hindu and Jain holy city of Ayodhya. By now I should really know better.

According to Jain legend, Ayodhya is where five of the tirthankaras were born, including the first, Adinath, who lived there in a mighty city of gold. Of course, this occured an incredibly long time ago as Adinath lived for a modest 593 quintillion years, which seems about right based on the amount of decay necessary to reduce Ayodhya from a golden city of gods to its current condition. Ayodhya is, of course, a dusty little city full of Hindu pilgrims and temple spires dotting the skyline. Most of all, it is completely overrun by monkeys to the point that priests may actually insist you bring your shoes inside the temple proper, lest they be stolen by Ayodhyan simian miscreants. When a stuck-up brahmin priest tells you to break the holy rules, you know there is a problem.

I toured the various temples and they were quite impressive, although the Golden Temple (not "the" Golden Temple, this is just what Indians understandably call any temple in their hometown that is full of gold) was closed. I was constantly implored to visit the temple of Rama, where Rama was supposedly born, but I declined as the temple is not ancient and dates only to 1992 when the mosque that previously occupied its location was conveniently misplaced amidst an angry Hindu mob. As a result of this, religious violence swept the country. I did get lured into one mediocre temple where apparently several people were killed in a bomb blast and ensuing gunfight a few years ago.

The building of the new temple was promoted by politicians of the BJP political party. The BJP, you see, is a powerful, militantly Christian nationalist party that wants to "take back" their country, idolizes the security forces, and lies in bed with big business and unrestricted industrial development that befouls the environment and enriches industrialists without really doing anything for the people, who still vote for them anyways because, hey, fuck Muslims. Oh, wait. Excuse me, I was talking about the Republican Party. The BJP is a militantly Hindu nationalist party...

Anyways I wanted nothing to do with this temple, which I hear sucks anyways, so I spent most of my time in the hilltop castle-like temple of Hanuman the monkey god. A word of advice to aspiring religious architects: if you simply must have a single ceremonial entrance and you reside in a country with more than a few hundred million people, said ceremonial entrance ought be more than six feet wide. Climbing the many steps up to the temple door I became engulfed in what could most accurately be called a throng. Thousands of pilgrims shoved their way up the ever-narrowing stairs and tunnel like sand through an hourglass until finally after a long period of mutual exchange of sweat and body odors, I was propelled through the final gate like a bull being released into the rodeo.The temple was like the inner courtyard of a castle, with numerous brightly colored shrines on the periphery and great lengths of Hindi or Sanskrit text adorning every wall. Though I can read a bit of Hindi I did not even try to decipher these writings, because to do so would be like trying to interpret the Old Testament with a first-grade education, and as I am not from Arkansas I am not inclined to attempt this. I hastily bolted for the side of the temple as the crowd swarmed the central shrine where a troupe of laborers presided over the scramble to perform worship. The scene resembled  the frantic trading of the New York Stock Exchange, except with more throwing of flowers at statues and the added urgency of believing that if the trade is not made you will earn the unholy disfavor of an extremely powerful and displeased monkey, like Diddy Kong wielding the Hammer of Thor. It would probably be unwise to fuck with this entity.

I for one did not see fit to engage in this flower donation because I appreciate not having my ribs crushed by hordes of little old ladies and men with sub-par porno mustaches. To hell with the monkey god I thought, I'm not dealing with this mayhem. Perhaps not coincidentally, I spent the next four days trapped in fucking Faizabad.

Next time I'm in a Hanuman temple I'm doing what I'm supposed to. I'm not getting this deity any more pissed at me than he is already. I've read Congo.

Faizabad

Fuck Faizabad.

My greatest wish is for a Faizabad-sized alien mothership to blow this place away a la Independence Day with a plasma cannon. No, I lie. My greatest wish is to get the fuck out of Faizabad. I returned to the train station to tell the ticket office that I wanted to trade an essentially worthless gamble "wait list" ticket for a useful ticket to "literally anywhere but here." When I got back to the prison-like Reservations Office, there were this time not one but two cows within, and they both pissed on the floor. This sums up my experience with Faizabad. I hated Faizabad even before I got stuck here, and now I am trapped in this shithole for another THREE DAYS. Fuck Faizabad for all eternity. Allow me to list just a few of Faizabad's numerous shortcomings as a center of human civilization:

Faizabad has the charm of a burnt pork rind.

Being in Faizabad is less adventurous than watching the 2am timeslot on QVC.

Faizabad has the topography of linoleum and the biodiversity of an Oklahoman prison cell.

Faizabad is less interesting than a Country Music Awards afterparty.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn could write a book about Faizabad called The Lameness Atoll, but this book would be boring.

If Faizabad were a woman it would audition for Rock of Love but not be cast.

200,000 people live in Faizabad, presumably by accident.

Faizabad is host to fewer worthwhile cultural events than Pripyat, Ukraine.

If Faizabad were a food it would be a bowl of salted lettuce

Faizabad is less memorable than the film Home Alone 3

Faizabad is as relevant as Shia LeBouef's views on professional lacrosse.

If Faizabad could cling to rocks, lichen would grow on it by mistake.

When one attempts to think about Faizabad, one's mind drifts instead to guessing the volume of empty buckets.

If Faizabad were a video game it would be the demo version of Windows Notepad.

If Faizabad hosted the Olympics, every athlete would compete in one event -Leaving- and the gold medal would be awarded to people for never fucking coming.

Happy Diwali, G's

I have left Varanasi and yet again my war against Indian livestock has moved to new soil. While waiting in line to get a train ticket the hell out of Faizabad (more on that later), I found myself in a typically dense line in a small cage-like enclosure they see fit to call the reservations office. About two hours into this almost meditative excercise in monotony,a great yelp erupted from the crowd and people began fleeing from their covetously guarded positions in line. I tried to discern the source of the commotion, and it became quite obvious. Not more than two feet behind me was a gigantic bull, which had found its way indoors and around through the door of the reservations office, and was determined to force its way through the mass of cueing customers. The customers wisely chose not to resist. Having caused such a stir, the longhorned monster was quite content to sit in the corner of the office and swat flies with its tail. Always,fucking cows.

Diwali is a month of good luck and festivals. At its climax is a Festival of Lights, which includes formal rituals and more importantly, fireworks. As such the occasion is much loved by Indian children who spend at least a week prior randomly detonating firecrackers, and is equally despised by Indian monkeys, who have no idea what's coming. There is no creature capable of greater athleticism than an urban monkey fleeing a cataclysm. From a Varanasi rooftop I was treated to a 360-degree panorama of colorful explosions that went on for hours. Indian fireworks are spectacularly cheap and unsafe, so the locals amass sizeable arsenals which they launch gleefully well into the night. There is an added element of excitement as projectiles may misfire in any direction at any moment, periodically sending volatile mixtures of gunpowder and chemically-treated birdshit rocketing ever so gracefully into, say, a third-storey balcony.

The kids, whose enchantment with fireworks knows no bounds, buy firecrackers by the sackful. They have also discovered that the safest and most convenient way to light them is by standing them upright in a cow turd. This is usually fine, until someone misjudges the potency of the explosive and the situation becomes utterly catastrophic, most of all for the children themselves who take no heed of the great distances being rapidly covered by their elders, and are surprisingly slothful for people who know they've just set a bomb in a pile of wet shit. Serves them right.

My last day in Varanasi tied up a lot of loose ends. I finally bought some clothes I've been pretending to waffle on for days to score a better discount. I attended a fire ceremony at the ghats and paid my respects to my favorite saddhus.

I met a guy who calls himself a Truth Speaker, who took me on a tour of the Varanasi underworld. He showed me where the false holy men lurk to count the money they begged from naive pilgrims and buy opium, the stair-alley where a guru was murdered for speaking out against the desecration of sacred river fisheries, and past the boat where a prostitute he particulatly disliked ("nobody likes this family" he alleged) lures customers for illicit contacts on the holy river. Though I had suspected much of what he told me I was glad to see a side of the city most of the tourists don't. Finally he took me into the actual underworld of the city, where an ancient shrine to Vishnu was concealed 25 feet underground through a twisting passage hidden in an alley I doubt I could ever find again.

I'm back on the road. Mo' trains, mo' towns, mo' fireworks at 3am. Farewells can be bittersweet. Some can be sweet. I ran into my shoulder-fondling freakshow one last time. Upon telling him of my immenent departure I saw the last glimmer of hope fade from his eyes as he ungrasped my hostage hands and dissolved into mist, whispering "no ten rupees...". Then he was gone.