Amalgamated Quickies Division

When, due to circumstances beyond your control, you have nothing to offer but a quickie, you often risk leaving somebody disappointed. Therefore, I shall instead bang out three quickies in a single afternoon, an approach that many find more satisfying. This is not a metaphor. I am strictly talking about blogging. There are no quickies in other parts of my life at all. I can't even have quickies. You see, I'm impoteohgodtheshame

1. Two Trains to Gwalior

I passed through the famed fortress-city of Gwalior near Agra. In the fortress itself, which is quite ruined and empty, the second best part was being a gigantic nerd and hiring a guide to explain to me the engineering feats of the famous palace of the Tomar Rajputs, which was cooled and illuminated with an elaborate system of pipes and mirrors. I love elaborate systems of mirrors, and pretty much anything a geek can do in a middle-school science class. If it cleverly employs magnets, mirrors, or pendulums, you can bet I will be all over it. The best part was the nearly-vanished exterior ornamentation of the same palace, which still features many of its bright blue tiles, and crucially, an entire row of yellow tile duckies.

I then went down into the city and (among other things) visited the famous Raj-era palace of the Scindia Maratha kings. Many people go there to gawk at the dazzling displays of wealth, such as the world's two largest chandeliers. I personally found it most rewarding as a comic gallery of pomp and awful taste. The Scindias to this day are indisputably the most self-absorbed of all the Indian royal families, and THAT is a regal distinction.

I spent a long time in one hallway unsuccessfully trying to photograph the reactions of surprised Indian tourists who entered the passage to see a fabulously gaudy sculpture introducing the locals to the story of Leda and the swan. Invariably they stared for a moment, shuddered in comprehension, and tried to scoot their children away as quickly as possible. And they say Westerners have no appreciation for different cultures.

The most dramatic part of the Gwalior experience however, was the massive difference between the two trains I took through it. Some days before I passed through on a local train to Agra on a 'general ticket', on perhaps the busiest intercity rail line in India. It was like one of those documentaries they show you about the underdevelopment of the Third World, with every passenger myself included forming grotesque human jigsaws with their neighbours and young men hanging to the outside of the train. Family members stood on their luggage and on one another, as fathers held their children to keep them from spilling back off their sacks of luggage and into the open, stinking lavatories. One unfortunate vegetable-seller got trapped by the crowds in the carriage with us and couldn't get off the train for another 100km away from her home. For about 45 minutes I was balanced one on foot, held in place between two strangers' asses, doing my utmost not to slide the three inches over to the fresh pile of banana puke in the aisle.

Not particularly wishing to repeat this exact experience, and acknowledging that, yes, with some advance planning I can use "wealth" and spend more than $1.05 on a train ticket. From Agra back to visit Gwalior I booked the Shatabdi Intercity service. On these trains you get air-conditioning, a cushioned seat, and a free copy of the newspaper of your choice in a variety of languages. A well-dressed man with a silly red turban comes and serves you tea. We arrived in just a couple hours, just in time for me to finish my morning toast. Two fucking Indias.

2. Some Buddhist Shit

From Gwalior I got on a standard crappy night service south and jumped off in the wee hours at some smoky Central Indian town, and rubbed my eyes several times when I perceived there was a gigantic plaster gaping lion's mouth leading into a Durga temple immediately outside the station. By 5:30am I was in Sanchi, an eensy lil' village in the middle of Madhya Pradesh. On top of a small hill is a collection of ancient Buddhist ruins, including a fabulous stupa dating to the time of the mighty Buddhist emperor Ashoka. From the top of that hill it became abundantly clear why very few people from outside India are coming by to visit: it's in the middle of hundreds of miles of empty golden fields, and it was, of course, hot as fuck. However, in deference to the Buddhist inclination to the gentler things in life, the whole hilltop is kept as a lovely little park, and they have bunnies.

3. Place Could Use A Flooding

A typically ass-rumbling day of steaming buses across the summer-parched lowlands of western M.P. finally deposited me in otherworldy Mandu. Arriving in Mandu is sort of like going to an island surrounded by dry land while simultaneously travelling backwards in time (But all travelling in India is backwards! HA!). Mandu is a large plateau surrounded by wide, deep, and precipitous gorges that are crossed by only one narrow spindle of land. Obviously, this is a fabulous place for a fortified city, and so it was under a succession of Afghan kings who turned the entire place into a rich capital of their Central Indian trading kingdom and built themselves a bunch of pleasure palaces hanging on the edge of various picturesque, unassailable ravines. Now the plateau is still remote, and has degenerated into an isolated colony of primitive rural villages clustered in the vicinity of a tiny tourism and market sector. Everyone was amazed to see me here in the summer, when even they would rather be elsewhere. I was repeatedly told to either lock myself in my hotel room or find a large tree to get drunk under, and to return for touristic purposes during the rainy season, when Mandu allegedly acquires water and the color green.

I defied all such advice and promptly fell ill, though I personally blame the local restaurant staff who appeared to be improvising when I asked which items on the menu were "fresh, new, clean, or healthy". In any case, after an exhausting day bicycling around the plateau while the sun gods took a personal interest in me, I eventually had to flop at a chai stall near a distant palace. I noticed everywhere I went that not a single man, cow, chicken, or buffalo could be seen outside the shade, and all (especially the cows) wore an expression that clearly said "Fuck THIS. I am not leaving this tree. Bitches better bring me some food." Aside from your foolhardy narrator, the only beings crossing the baking ground between village loitering spots were the goats, because they are fucking stupid, and the constantly water-hauling village women, because they are oppressed.

Sick and exhausted, I spent another day accomplishing nothing but a torturous 1km breakfast expedition. I almost mustered the wherewithal to write a version of this very post, but was thwarted when I found the only computer within a 90-minute drive and saw that, just as the owner claimed, its feeble internet connection had recently been gnawed upon by desperate squirrels. I returned to my hotel, exotically located behind a disused saloon, and contemplated the shrivelled trees and the dramatic but now bone-dry ravines and I decided hey, what the hell, this could be the one place where being in a monsoon won't just suck, so I'll come back later.



Now, my friends, after yet another truly awful night on a bus (a night spent going nowhere because the fucking axle broke outside some hydration-estranged village in the middle of goddamn nowhere), I am taking my rest and recharging. What does the future hold, you ask? Well, let me tell you. While I lounge about doing nothing and hiding from the sun in my secret lair I am putting the details in for the next, culminating phase of this journey. Look at a map of India, up towards the top a bit. There's a geographical feature you may notice. This summer, Ghostface Buddha takes on the only objects in India that could possibly compare with him in overall eminence...THE HIMALAYAS.

4:20 Die Of Heat Stroke Every Day

On April 20th, 2010, in the tranquil village of Orchha, it was 115 goddamn degrees outside.

CHRIST ON A CRACKER. 115 DEGREES?!?!? IT'S FUCKING APRIL

Indian people wave at me from shops and say "Come in! Come in!" Then when I go in they dont even try to sell me things, they just say "Please, sir, don't be outside."

Orchha is a lovely place, truly one of the most beautiful and relaxing spots in all of lowland India. It's the abandoned capital of the erstwhile kings of the Bundelkhand, and now is little more than a minor pilgrimage village surrounded by scenic ruins crumbling in fields, on the riverside, and being swallowed by the dry forests. I haven't a clue how it's stayed so small and lovely when its epic palaces and temples and its not-that-remote location could easily put it the must-see list of India. Maybe it has something to do with it feeling hotter than drinking boiled chilli sauce from a flaming camel's ass.

I had arrived several days earlier, via a local train so dismally slow the peasants around me took to standing in the doorways and washing their turbans. The last few miles had to be covered by comically-overburdened rickshaws that reminded me that motor vehicles subjectively move twice as fast when you're standing tip-toed on the rear bumper.

As I wondered around the sleepy vegetable patches that now cover most of the fortified river island, I noticed that I had sweated through my shirt, through my backpack, and that this sweat on the far, outer side of my backpack straps had evaporated and left lines of salt and the sweaty frontiers. I felt a need to scratch and salt shook out of my arm hairs. I feel like a potato wedge. My forehead was the same, a sparkling white expanse of sodium chloride. My skull is apparently a salt flat. Pretty soon people are going to start testing rocket-powered cars on my face.

I defied the advice of my well-wishing Indian acquaintances, not only because ignoring sensible advice is my custom, but also because Orchha is just a wonderful place to explore regardless of the weather. After much effort, I found it: the perfect spot. I settled down to read in a breezy nook between swaying green bushes on the riverside in an unperturbed nature reserve directly across the river from empty farms and the nigh-perfectly photogenic memorials of the Bundela kings. I reclined in the shade and took to leisurely reading a collection of essays on modern India (chapter 1 summary: holy hell, Bihar is awful). After a couple hours I reluctantly turned in, because I had just finished my seventh liter of water for the day and felt that not needing to piss after consuming that quantity of fluid probably signalled some kind of impending medical emergency. I would have to be evacuated to a real city by rickshaw, and in a weak condition I would probably have to be tied to the roof. It was either that or die on the forest for my undiscovered corpse to become the local deers' salt-lick, so I shuffled back to my blissfully dark cell in the village.

It was about 111 degrees when these events transpired. The next day, I hiked out in the opposite direction from the village to see the abandoned Lakshmi temple and its fabulous Bundeli paintings. It was then that I checked the meteorological data in the newspaper and thought to myself "Dear God, and it's still only April. What day in April is it, by the way? Let's check the top of the newspaper....The 20th? Oh dear. I almost forgot." Suffice to say, on April 20th (for complicated reasons relating to electromagnetic currents and the counter-longitudinal azimuth of the pole star), it was of paramount importance that I go smoke some weed.

This presented a bit of a dilemma, as I had already budgeted the afternoon to visiting a palace in the village of Datia. Then it ocurred to me...what's the conflict? I hopped onto a bus right away. The palace at Datia is something of a fantasy castle, a ridiculously tall Rajput fortification that begins with several levels of pitch-black chambers at the bottom, passes up through a labyrinth of staircases, and climaxes in an almost Escher-esque courtyard with a gigantic keep in the center which can only be summited by navigating a series of hidden passages, balconies, flyover walkways, and hard-to-find, locked-up stairwells. Nobody comes to Datia, and in this heat, I was literally the only visitor in the logbook, so I had the citadel all to myself.

"But wait," you ask, "you said the stairs of the inner tower were locked up?" Well, they were locked up. The empty palace of Datia was the perfect place for me to combine my two favorite criminal offences, the second being breaking and entering. I actually have something of a history of breaking into castles. The most memorable such adventure culminated in a frenzied nighttime escape through the rain on a wooded hillside in a desperate bid to evade the Luxembourg police. But that didn't happen in India so it's besides the point. Anyways, it just so happened that one critical staircase tucked away within a giant stone pillar was sealed shut with nothing more than a metal door with a twisted metal wire holding it in place. The wire was too thick to untwist with my bare hands, so I began digging in my backpack for some kind of tool. For reasons long since forgotten, there was a toenail clipper at the bottom of my bag. I examined its filed edge and could positively feel the mischievousness glowing in my eyes, or maybe I was just high. In any case, if prison inmates can use a file to break out of jail bars in weeks or months, I could certainly get through a 1/8" cable in a an afternoon. All I needed was patience, and I had several lumps of it in a small plastic bag.

Finally, after what seemed simultaneously like aeons and moments, I had sawed through enough wire to snap it by brute force. I clambered into the forbidden stairs, completely failing to contain my giggles, and loosely eased the door into place behind me. Even in my hyper-alert state of paranoia, my main concern was that somebody's dog would come sniffing up after me, lured by the trail of salt I imagined stretching behind me like an edible, biscuit-seasoning version of Ariadne's thread.

So, for the second day in a row, I spent much of my day listlessly pretending to enrich myself in a tranquil spot marked by architectural beauty, and for a second day in a row I eventually retreated because I was as parched as a trout in a tumbleweed. Once again, I have had my way with the primitive defensive systems that just can't come close to keeping Ghostface Buddha out of a fucking castle. And no one shall ever know. Except you, I guess, or anyone who can read the cached draft of this post, like I guess anyone with a grudge against me and subpoena powers. What's that sound? Are those sirens? Shit...fuck....shit....where are my firebombs? IT'S TIME TO SMOKE SOME BACON.

Penises

Deep in the Bundelkhand lies a lonely airstrip that sees one or two planes landing every single day, in an area where the bus comes by almost as rarely. Bundelkhand is a dry, sparsely populated region of plains and craggy hills separating the north Indian plains from central India. It is known, above all, not for great riches or sacred places, but as a historical redoubt of "dacoity". A dacoit, it should be explained, is a member of a bandit gang. The Bundelkhand is a poor, empty expanse of scorching fields where you don't travel the roads at night. There is, however, a successfully operating airstrip just outside of a village called Khajuraho. But why? Three words: ancient stone vagina.

For some reason (which is as specific as the historians get), in the middle ages the kings of the Bundelkhand decided to build a temple city at the site of present-day Khajuraho, and adorned nearly all of these temples with large, intimately detailed sculptures of mind-bogglingly kinky sex. If you've ever wanted to see a sculpture depicting such details as the cleft between a bull's testicles as it sodomizes a nobleman, this is where it's at.

Your narrator, in his nigh godlike humility, disdains to travel within India by airplane and instead penetrated the Bundelkhand by train. As soon as I got on the platform in Varanasi I could tell something was amiss, namely the sleeper carriage in which I had booked a ticket was not attached to the train. A trio of foreign tourists wafting their precious ticket reservations got in the lonely sleeper car down the platform. The fools. I know Indian Railways to well for that, so I boarded a general-seating carriage at random and swung myself wildly into an unclaimed overhead luggage rack. Comfortable it was not, but as the trio of other tourists no doubt both envied and beheld in dismay, at least it was attached to the train when it pulled out of the station. No sandstone orgies for them.

After further ordeals which included a brief interlude trapped on the roof of a moving bus (fortunately, pounding on a bus ceiling has a certain universality in the message it conveys) I clambered off in the dusty assortment of hamlets that together comprise Khajuraho. Visiting Khajuraho is like being trapped on a desert island with your worst enemy's CD collection. First of all, it's hot and isolated enough to be a desert, and secondly the entire human population depends upon annoying the crap out of you or collecting the providential fallings of fruit. On my first day of touring I somehow amassed an entourage in my rickshaw, including the driver, some dude from my hotel who wanted me to teach him how to talk about Hindu architecture in Spanish, and a wrinkly old goatherd with three teeth and nothing better to do. We visited the lesser-known and more far-flung temples that day, and though it was certainly a curious experience ("How you say 'Vishnu ten avatar' in Spanish?"), there was a notable lack of ecstatic stone figures being spit-roasted by throbbing dick. In fact, before I saw a single erotic nude, I happened to see actual people sitting around naked.

I was wandering in a Jain temple and headed into the main shrine, entering quietly as I heard voices. I looked to the source of the noise and saw a young monastic pupil reading intently from a holy book while receiving instruction from a bald, middle-aged man who was not wearing any clothes. They looked at me with some curiosity, though probably less intensely than I was looking at them. I muttered a quick "...er, carry on." and was off, thinking it poor decorum to start taking photographs in a room with naked people in it.

Around the corner was a cluster of more ancient Jain temples, and I did as I do and snooped about. As I was admiring an image of the tirthankar Parsvanath, I heard someone beckon "Please, sit down." I peered into the ambulatory and sure enough there was a similar scene of a studious man about my age receiving instruction from a conspicuously bald and unclothed Degembara Jain monk. Accompanying them was a second monk, asleep in a dark corner of the temple with his head tilted back against a statue of an elephant and his old legs splayed open wide, a sight which brought to mind a caterpillar shuffling in the joint between two rotting branches of driftwood. The monk who invited me was more reserved. Indeed, from the various photographs I've seen in temples and now through personal observation, I must say that Jain monks are incredibly adept at sitting without revealing more than the layperson strictly needs to behold on the path to wisdom. We chatted for quite a while, and I soon found myself on the defensive as the monk repeatedly outdid me in measured nonchalance. "I like to travel simply; I don't need luxuries. Sleep in the luggage rack, whatever, no problem", I would be saying, trying to find some common ground in our outlooks. Then he would respond without giving a single hint of smugness or being a wiseass "I travel only on foot. No vehicle, no animal. I have no clothes. I only walk. Walking everywhere. It is not hard."

Talk progressed in due course to my diet, and I told him that in India I had experimented with strict Jain vegetarianism but had found it incompatible with my bodily needs, and had therefore resumed eating nonvegetarian food, usually eggs. He raised an eyebrow, and when a bald naked man raises an eyebrow the quizzical look is greatly magnified. "But eggs are not a vegetarian food..?" he said. "Well, no, like I was saying, I tried vegetarian food but found I need nonveg food for my health."

"Look at me" he began, choosing a poor moment to change the crossing of his legs. "I eat only fruit and vegetables and I am healthy" he said, running his hands over his naked, middle-aged paunch and down towards the dark, shadowed crease he had reestablished around his own fruits. "I do not eat even all vegetable. I do not take any food that kills or damages the plant. I must wait only for the fruit to fall to me, or to be plucked without harm. This is the holy way..." he said, as he gave his thigh another ill-timed stretch. "...it isn't hard."

This time I had reason to raise an eyebrow. "...Sure isn't."

For a long time after that we debated the philosophical and scientific points of chicken-egg fertilization to the point that there wasn't a single avenue left for me to be defeated in. I uncharacteristically refrained from asking "But which came first!?", yet found myself in no less of a logical quandary, as I was pretty sure I had talked myself into a position where I conceded that eating eggs was only ethical if the hen somehow consensually mated with a non-inseminating omelette-ovulation-provoking contraption. I had one more flash of inspiration but silenced myself when I remembered the Jain prohibition on alcohol, so getting the hen drunk wouldn't count. Finally, I had to say it. "Well, you must be right" I conceded.

"Yes," the monk said matter-of-factly "but come, we have sat and spoken long. Let us stand and part our ways." So he stood and I quickly followed, preferring to meet him eye-to-eye than eye-to-...eye. "It was a good talk" he said, and shook my hand. There was a rustle and the elderly second monk, now almost forgotten in his nook, mumbled "Goodbye", flipped his penis over onto his other leg, and went back to sleep.

I emerged into the light of day and returned to my neglected entourage. "Que tu fues hacendo?" my would-be Castillian compadre inquired. "Hablando con un monje sobre sus huevos" I responded. "Kya?" he asked in Hindi. "Forget about it."


That night I was threatened with physical violence by a jilted drug dealer who took my disinclination to purchase any marijuana from him as a personal affront, but really, what's new.

The next morning I slipped out without my spastically polyglot retinue and headed to the main enclosure of world-famously raunchy temples. Though the quantity of erotica was not as legendary as they would like you to think, it makes up for this deficiency through sheer imagination. The ancient Hindus were determined to make a science out of everything, as so to this day the Hindu rules of rituals, art, writing, logic, music, and yes, sex all carry the strict burden of scripture. Thus, musical composition is rigorously categorized into 85 or so "moods", which strictly define which notes and rhythms may be used in which contexts of key and subject, etc., leaving no possibility, however obscure, unexplored. The same goes with sex. The ancient attitude was roughly "Now, consider, if you were one man and one woman and one horse, and the man is to be in the foremost position with the woman underneath ...not that one should include a horse, obviously... but if you were to do so, the formal fuck-logics dictate that it would have to proceed as follows:..." Most of the erotic sculptures are a fairly benign assortment of differently-arranged couplings, foreplay, and my personal favorite, sexy maidens peeling themselves out of clinging dresses. There are however, some spectacular exceptions, including the infamous horse-sodomy niche, and a renowned panel of an upside-down man so mack that he has three wenches about him, two of whom he isn't even debauching, but is just allowing them to assist with the balance of his partner bouncing on top of his ludicrously-inverted frame. You know you're a real pimp when you keep two of your hoes just to have as scaffolding.

As mind-expanding as the acrobatic sculptures were, they were not even the most surreal part of my day. You see, I rose early in the morning thinking that this would earn me the day alone to enter and explore the temples unperturbed. I was wrong.

Friends, Ghostface Buddha is now literally a poster-boy for the Indian tourism industry.

I was walking to the compound's main gate and saw the guards ushering through a big herd of fat rich tourists without checking their tickets. Some younger, upscale pseudo-backpackers strolled by speaking French, and these the guards glanced over, inspeting them as one would a tangerine. I was baffled. As I walked to the ticket booth I could feel the same gazes bearing upon me, and was suddenly seized by a rifle-wielding guard. "Entrance is free today" he said, remembering to smile as he hauled me across the driveway. "Today celebrate world heritage." A portly Indian man with a mustache and a safari hat walked up and gave me a once-over. He burst into a grin. "You are perfect!" he beamed. I snapped out of my panic (I had been trying to remember what, if any, incriminating material was in my day-bag) and mustered "....Uhhh, yes?", then as my composure returned "Perfect, yes. Continue..."

"I am the Deputy Head Assistant Director of Archaeology for the Srivagayapanam sub-circle of Patna division of Archaeological Survey of India" he more or less said. "Today is world heritage. For the promotion of tourism, we take your picture." Two stupidly-grinning lackeys ran in behind me and held taut a suddenly-unfurled Hindi banner extolling the magnificence of India, and Indian world heritage. "We have many tourists here but we need best tourist. You are looking very good, sir." I smirked and tried to form a witty response, but was cut short when the rifle-hefting soldier magically produced a bouquet of pink flowers and thrust them into my hands before posing next to me and the cretinous grinning minions. "SMILE!!!" the head archaeologist shouted wildly, and a photographer popped out from behind him with the daft spring of a Whack-A-Mole. After the flash, the archaeologist spoke as I grinned for more photos, still holding the ridiculous bouquet. The photographer began taking video of us standing there, grinning like fools. And that is how Ghostface Buddha became the Khajuraho poster-boy for India's contribution to the World Heritage program.

When it was all said and done (essentially, when I succeeded in ridding myself of the bouquet), the archaeologist spoke again. "You are the very finest tourist, sir. We will put you on official items for the Khajuraho and the world heritage. India wants to show you. We are wanting more visitors like you."


Ohhhh ho ho.

Oh ho ho.

You have no idea.