Bovis TYRANNIS

How many people fit on a blip on the map in India? In the case of Mathura,over 300,000. Today I was resolved to get somewhere even more "miniscule" so I hopped on a bus to tiny Vrindavan and its 60,000 inhabitants. I do mean that I hopped on the bus. There is no such thing as a bus stop here. The vehicle comes to a full halt only at the termini, leaving a steady stream of passengers jumping on and off at any moment. As we pulled into Vrindavam traffic was brought to a crawl by the digging of a massive ditch across which merchants still tried to peddle their wares, presumably offering to throw the goods across or to deliver them via a bag on a long stick. We saw here a typically Indian dilemma...four men attempting to maneauver a 45-foot lead pipe through heavy traffic by strapping it to a tricycle.

Vrindavan, an extremely popular pilgrimage site due to its association with the marriage of Krishna and Rama is somehow even more pious than Mathura. A majority of people on the street are half-naked pilgrim saddhus and the gall of the city's cows is the greatest I have seen yet. In addition to the many liberties taken by cows elsewhere, those in Vrindavan have adapted to outright confrontation with their human peons.

As I sat on a vacant stoop preparing to eat a lunch of rotis and dahl, I saw one of these bovine holier-than-thous making a beeline towards me. It stopped a foot or less from me, taking an extreme interest in my roti and then in my goodie-bag. I produced a dish of dahl, which drove the beast even closer to the verge of daylight robbery. The cow thrust its face withni inches of mine, staring me in the eyes with its snout at my lunch. I tried to resist but it loomed closer and closer until we touched brows. There was no way out...I was held prisoner by a docile but imposing behemoth five times my size, surrounded by religious zealots who considered it sacred and wielded heavy-looking sticks. In desperation I tossed my dahl away. It dribbled down the pavement as a rather bemused cow attempted to lick it up, granting me the precious inches needed to make my escape.

In a town of infirm beggars, veiled widows, and religious mendicants I was the most pathetic creature to be found. For the first time in my life I had succumbed to a mugging, and I had been mugged by a cow.

Resigned to eating plain rotis as I toured the various shrines, I made another discovery. Vrindavan, as everyone was eager to tell me, is the global headquarters of ISKCON. From this acronym I envisioned a cabal of smartly-dressed Indian government officials in a nuclear command bunker with Modernist-inspired elephants carved into a lead blast door, ready to bomb Pakistan into the stone age in a contest over silly mustaches. In fact ISKCON stands for the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, or as we call them, the Hare Krishnas. Sure enough, as one walks closer and closer to the Hare Krishna compound there is an increasing density of bizarrely multinational monks wandering aimlessly about with their hands clasped. They earned their common name for the frequency with which they say "Hare Krishna", their response to nearly all external stimuli, which they utter ceaselessly and inscutably like some sort of neo-Hindu Pokemon (attacks: New Age Orientalism, 15 culture damage; Praise Krishna, +25 social interaction resistance).

The guidebooks all concur that Vrindavan is dusty, giving me my first chance to make a radical mark on the travel guide world. Vrindavan is not dusty. It is muddy. Lonely Planet can suck a fat one.

I began to suspect that everyone in Vrindavan was either a nutjob or a fanatic (a purely philosophical distinction in my book anyways). Then things got really, really weird and confirmed this suspicion. A young devotee about my age approached me. We made the customary small talk until he said to me "You like poking? You want poking Indian?" The tone of his voice revealed he was not referring to a Facebook poke. I laughed. Repressed societies invariably create pervs, and in India one of the ways this expresses itself is by a prurient interest in how we foreigners get our thangs in action. "If you want poke Indian we can go." Oh great, I thought, it's hardly been a week and I've befriended my first Indian pimp. Why always with the pimps? I was very mistaken. My grin disappeared when when he leant over and whispered in my ear "We go to my room. Poke now. Please." Oh dear. Oh my.

Some two hours after being propositioned for anal sex by a monk I was back in Mathura. I hailed an auto-rickshaw to take me home in an increadingly fierce rain. The streets flooded and the entire city huddled in raised doorways looking at the rain in awe. Every other word I heard was "paani", water, followed by some incredulous-sounding remark. Even for Indians, this was some crazy shit. The waters surged down the streets until they were too deep for even the cycle-rickshaws to ply through, their pedals submerged by the torrent. My driver boldly pushed ahead until with great drama the auto-rickshaw stalled in its tracks and water flowed over into the cabin. As we bailed out the rickshaw tipped with our weight. It was afloat in the street. Not my rickshaw, not my problem, I figured as I forged on alone through the streets. Hundreds of Indians waved and shouted at me in English as I waded through the now knee-deep deluge. Their shouts were a mixture of admiration and ridicule. Aaaaaahhhhhhh, I thought, just like home.

note: it has been made known to me by persons with nothing better to do that the proper genus name for cows is bos not bovis and that they belong to the family bovinae. Blow me.

ACTUAL CORRECTION: I would like to correct the egregious error of writing that Krishna married Rama. This is quite impossible. First of all, Krishna and Rama are characters in different epic tale. Secondly, they are both incarnations of Vishnu. And finally, they are both male. Rama was married to Sita.

In The Kingdom of Bovis Rex

As I write this (in my notebook) I am sitting along the ghats (river steps) by the side of the sacred Yamuna river in the Hindu holy city of Mathura, surrounded by an army of monkeys, one of whom just stole a silver trumpet from a hapless member of a red-coated marching band and absconded with it into a tree. A baby monkey just did a backflip in midair to beat its siblings to a cookie thrown by an orange-robed, dreadlocked pilgrim. The marching band is doing its utmost to restore its dignity as they have just noticed the arrival of about 25 teenage girls. Baby monkeys can jump at least 7 feet and accurately land on an area the size of a toddler's head. It takes about 9 people to eject a grown monkey from a ceremonial river boat. I know all these things because watching them happen is my job. My life is awesome, and I haven't even started to write what I sat down here to write about.

I left Delhi at an ungodly hour this morning bound for the mythical forests of Braj, the realm in which the blue-skinned superbaby Krishna fought evil princes and lifted mountains with his finger while still having time to steal girls' clothes while they bathed. Krishna, one of the most popular incarnations of Vishnu was allegedly born here in Mathura and the city is overwhelmed by the trappings of Hindu holiness. The most impressive site I visited was the fiercely contested complex where Muslim and Hindu places of worship faced eachother over a heavily guarded prison-like wall, vying for control over the ancient site whose foundations contain the simple dark stone slab on which Krishna was born. It's not much to look at, but it matters enough that the army has a permanent garrison to maintain order. Of course the forests of Braj aren't so mythical these days, replaced by endless farms on the plains with villages tightly packed every few kilometers around a decrepit factory. The train ride was comfortable but unsettling.
note: Here I have excised a lengthy passage about the train ride that largely dealt with the appaling poverty alongside the tracks. It is truly horrendous and merits inclusion in a more thoughtful and, frankly, better-written piece on that subject rather than inclusion in this more comedic post

My first impression of Mathura was its bazaar, a long stretch of utter madness which after just a week in India I already feel all too familiar with. Though swarming, the city has a much more human scale than Delhi, affording one the oppurtunity to enjoy such sights as the intricate ritual interplay of boats and cloth on the river. The city can be crossed on foot and no grand roads clog the air with fumes. I marveled that this hectic place could be but a blip on the map of Northern India.

I went outside to write because the power keeps shutting off. Though mostly the fault of ramshackle infrastructure, I have beheld that it is at least partially the fault of monkeys, who use the power lines as their personal footpaths, occasionally knocking something loose to spark to the ground, prompting witnesses to throw their hands in exasperation as a local shopkeeper pokes his head out, rolls his eyes, and sighs as he goes to fetch a ladder because it is his turn again to fix up after the damn monkeys. The inhabitants of Mathura must be forbidden to harm monkeys (as I believe most Hindus are) because otherwise the adorable little bastards would all be dead after all the mischief they get into.

Try as they might, the monkeys will never rule this place. Sovereignty was long ago unconditionally and perpetually ceded to the cows.

I was passing through a narrow walkway at the side of the bazaar when I suddenly felt two hard objects pushing against the rear of my thighs. I turned to see a white humpnecked cow with its horns leveled at my posterior. The cow surged forwards, pushing me down the street upon its horns. It raised its head, lifting me off my heels so that I had to quickly tiptoe to maintain pace and balance and avoid being flipped...or worse. I felt a most unpleasant sensation. As the cow's horns pressed into my thighs I could feel those organs usually located between my thighs being pushed forcefully into my abdomen by the cow's head, my precious jewels coming to a most cursed equilibrium nestled between the beast's eyes. There is no knowledge on this Earth so terrible as the realization that one's scrotum can feel a cow blink. For five more yards I was gripped with fear, initially out of the obvious concern for the wellbeing of my manhood, but then even more I feared what the crowd might do to me, for I was essentially teabagging the physical manifestation of God.

The cows of Mathura defy man with impunity. Roaming the city by the thousands, they amble brazenly through open doors and into stairwells, making their way to landings and even balconies where they sit smug and indolent, knowing that they sit where they sit and everyone can just deal with it. Bovis Rex, King of the Streets.

Cows rule everything around me
C.R.E.A.M
Get the money
Rupee rupee bill y'all