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!

All Eyez On Me / Bus Stop Of The Living Dead

Having been in the state of Gujarat for a little over 24 hours, I feel I am now qualified to identify the primary difference between it and Rajasthan: while public transportation in Rajasthan seems specifically designed to kill me, Gujarat's public transport takes the more subtle approach of making me want to kill myself.

I was at Mt. Abu bus station, where a white-robed Brahma Kumaris cultist was loitering, using her excellent English to distribute patently false information about bus schedules out of Mt. Abu. So began my day. The ticket salesman was little better. I walked up to his window and said "I'd like a ticket to Palanpur." . "There is bus in eight minutes, yellow bus coming" he replied. "Excellent, one ticket please," I said, expecting to be sold a ticket. "One minute sir," he replied, and turned his attention to a paper bowl of spiced chickpeas siting on his desk. I stood, waiting. He noticed me still standing there."Five minutes, sir, five minutes." Let me get this straight, my bus is leaving now in four minutes and I am to wait five minutes so that this man can finish his peas before selling me a ticket. This is the level of customer service you can expect from Indian government enterprises that offer its employees no prospect of collecting baksheesh.

After five minutes he wiped his mouth, turned to me, and did not sell me a ticket but said, "This green bus here leaves in ten minutes, you buy ticket at that booth."

"How were the peas?" I asked with exaggerated enthusiasm
"Not peas, dal," he said.
"Dal was good?"
"Yes, very good."
"Glad to hear it," I said, clapping, and walked to the green bus. It left in twenty minutes.

The man sitting behind me on the bus was a German professor on sabbatical. I found out some 14 hours later that his name was Jens. It would be. Turns out he also was making the lengthy journey to Bhuj. Usually I have a policy against just talking to the other Westerners I meet on the bus, as I feel that is probably a little racist, and because most tourists I meet are dreadfully boring. It's rarely two minutes before they ask some variant of "Have you been to Agra yet? Isn't the Taj Mahal amazing?" I made an exception on this occasion though as we were both embarking blindly on a 500-kilometer trip through a state with a different language and potentially requiring up to 5 distinct bus transfers, for which we had not a single timetable, and could result in us being stranded in a desert in the wee hours of the night. It was wise to join forces. Though a valuable resource, I soon found his company tiresome, and his terribly German attitude towards disorder almost impossible to placate.

The bus's first stop was at the town of Abu Road. Here the bus stopped in the station for almost an hour before continuing. After this hour, and after the passengers had all squeezed in, the bus started its engine, rolled forwards, and made a left turn directly into the repair yard. Fully loaded with waiting passengers, the bus rolled over a repair pit and workers began hammering on the fuselage and performing maintenance on the gearbox. I heard an electrical humming and saw flashes of light. Though I am mostly inured now to the Indian way of doing things, the realization of what was happening almost made my head explode.

Allow me to make abundantly clear how terribly conceived Indian bus services are: after an hour idle at the station, when all the passengers were finally on the bus, at this very time, and not before, when, let me repeat, the bus was sitting idle for an hour, it was scheduled for the bus to undergo some welding.

We sat and they welded. I spoke to the Indian next to me. "Good thing we didn't miss the bus. We'd have to wait for them to build the next one." This remark was translated into Hindi and spread like wildfire, much to the consternation of the conductor who made his way to my seat to make a very stiff apology. A brief argument about the (in my view) absurdity of the situation ensued and I let slip a number of profanities which made me seem much angrier than I actually was, and resulted in most of the bus staring at me for the remainder of the hour-long ride to Palanpur. Being stared at was to become a recurring feature of the day.

We crossed the border into Gujarat and arrived at Palanpur. I noticed immediately that Gujarat was different from Rajasthan. While Rajasthan has a reputation for general backwardness, Gujarat is one of the most prosperous parts of India. Even in this rather anonymous town the buildings had a bit of a modern shine to them. The roads were superb. All day, even in the remote desert of Kutch, we traveled on divided highways that were almost up to Western standards. Everywhere were the signs of thriving industry, and though busy and chaotic, Gujarat seemed to be moving forwards faster than it was moving back.

Jens and I got off and began making inquiries on how to get to Bhuj. To our relief we discovered that in two hours a bus would take us all the way there, arriving late at night but requiring no transfers in forlorn desert villages. Jens went to buy food and I seated myself near the platform and waited. Huge mistake.

I busied myself attempting to learn Gujarati numbers and alphabet. Though quite similar to Hindi, some of the letters were completely foreign to me, and the numbers were essentially random squiggles. I figured them out, then sank into deep concentration memorizing them from the pages of my notebook. The space around me suddenly seemed full of shadows, and I looked up to discover that I was completely surrounded by a swarm of Indian men. I had about a two foot radius of personal space, beyond which were ranks upon ranks of gawking Gujaratis. Men in the back, five rows deep, stood on benches to get a better view. The faces of short men and children poked out from under the arms and between the torsos of people in the front rows. As usual, those closest to me were the wise-asses, and began asking me all sorts of questions. Hearing me speak caused the audience to grow even larger, until nearly the entire bus station, well over a hundred people were all engrossed in my answers and pressed in a tight circle around me like the audience of a cockfight, causing passersby to become curious as well, until I saw people leaving their business on the street to come see what was so interesting at the bus station. A bus station is the worst place to be a spectacle, because even when some people get bored or catch a bus and leave, there is always a constant stream of replacements.

Few of them spoke English, and my captive conversation with the jokers in front was constantly interrupted by heads forcing their way through the crowd to ask the few questions they could muster. "What is your country? Your name?" and so on, time after time. While most Indian men seem intent on prying into Westerners' sex lives, Gujaratis have another fascination: alcohol. Gujarat, despite its modernity, is a dry state. The only reason Gujarat being trapped in 1919 isn't completely appalling is because the rest of India is trapped in about 1873. Anyways, the predictable result of alcohol being completely forbidden is that everyone seems to be obsessed with it. I have long held that Prohibition is a sure way to pervert the soul. "You are liking English wine?" they kept asking. 'English wine' in India means 'liquor'. It took me a while at first to learn this, and I was initially confused by the number of English Wine Shops I saw around, figuring that only Indians with their self-defeating obsession with all things English would be the only people on Earth capable of swallowing the swill wine produced in England. Then I realized this meant not English wine, but actually Indian whiskey, which I have refused to personally sample, but am told by other travelers is just as bad.

I tried to at least make the attention useful. The more helpful among them offered me travel information which I knew to be misinformed. I tried to steer them into teaching me some basics of the Gujarati language. "You don't speak Gujarati?" They asked, perplexed. "No, I speak Spanish and English. I also am learning some Hindi."

"Hindi language but not Gujarati?" The crowd grew more and more puzzled and made a great stir. "Why don't you speak Gujarati?" they asked in all seriousness. The ever-growing and encroaching crowd had begun to stress me. I had already been a spectacle for over an hour and had gracefully responded to the constant barrage of uninvited interrogation but this was too much.

"BECAUSE NOBODY SPEAKS GUJARATI" I snapped "EVEN INDIAN PEOPLE DON'T SPEAK GUJARATI. DO YOU SPEAK FUCKING NORWEGIAN? NO, AND I DON'T SPEAK GUJARATI. WHY SHOULD I? WHO THE FUCK LEARNS GUJARATI?"
Taken rather aback, "Indian people do speak Gujarati" they insisted.
"No, only you people speak Gujarati, because you are from Gujarat."
One person volunteered "Every Indian person I am knowing speaks Gujarati. Very few people in India speaking full Hindi."
I just grasped my head in my hands.

I assure you, dear reader, that everything in this post, including what I am about to relate, actually happened and has not been the least bit embellished.

The situation I was sitting in was like being in the eye of a hurricane, I thought. My own mostly calm demeanor only served to highlight the great tempest around me. At least I have my two feet of empty space, I thought, though I neglected to consider the consequences of having what I thought was the benefit of open air above me. As I mentioned, there were over a hundred people forming rings around me, rendering me not unlike a bulls-eye, which I was about to become. As I responded to some inane question or another (I believe it may have been from some smartass trying to be funny by asking if I shave my pubic hair), I noticed a chunky yellow something appear on my backpack. I looked up just in time to see a group of birds in the ceiling fan above me, and a second lump of bird shit fall directly onto my shoulder.

If a bird had shat on me, I would have been annoyed, but to have a bird shit on me and only me at this moment as I was surrounded by a hundred other viable targets tipped me over the edge. Struggling to contain my fury, I got up, and made my way over to Jens (who had returned largely unnoticed due to the attention centered on me) to consult about our escape. We had another hour to endure. The crowd followed me, and Jens proved less capable of coping than I was. He started gesticulating at at the crowd with his hands. "Please open ze window", he pleaded while making a parting gesture. "OPEN ZE WINDOW PLEASE". Two or three Indians would grasp his meaning and oblige, only to have the gap filled by others in a matter or moments. "WINDOW. HELLO. YES. ZE WINDOW OPEN. OPEN WINDOW." I just started laughing at Jens and at how hopeless it was as I also began to seriously question if I could take another hour of this myself without completely cracking.

Just then a man in a sweater barged his way through the crowd and identified himself as being in charge, and ordered us to follow him. At first I thought he was another person trying to help us with mistaken information, but Jens immediately followed. I slowly gathered my luggage and followed as well. Ahead of me I saw Jens in a small office down a dark hallway, and two Indian men pushing a crowd of gawking Indians out the door. They held it a sliver open, and began shouting at me to come as well, waving urgently as I noticed the crowd slowly start to regroup, focus, and shuffle in my direction. I know this scene. I have watched many zombie movies, and this is the part where I have to fight my way into the door at the last second without getting bitten, lest my erstwhile companions give me up for lost and board the door shut, leaving me to my fate among the living dead. As soon as I squeezed my pack through the entrance, the station master and his deputies dead-bolted the door shut. This seemed to finally deter the crowd, who figured they would see no more of us before their buses came.

The station master apologized profusely and offered us the most services and comfort he could muster, placing phone calls around Gujarat and ordering bus conductors and ticket officials across the state to see to it personally that we had a comfortable ride to Bhuj. One deputy braved the zombies to bring us chai. A few undead gathered behind the station to gaze at us through the barred window, but I felt secure in the knowledge that they couldn't get in and would easily be repulsed by a sharp metal object through the brain if they started trying to pull the bars out.

When our bus finally arrived in the afternoon, the entire station staff assembled to form a protective cordon and escort us out of the station master's office. The one image that flashed through my mind now was not from a zombie movie, but rather the infamous photo of Lee Harvey Oswald under police escort from the Dallas police station. I scanned about nervously for an Indian Jack Ruby.

They were waiting for us but we were successfully loaded onto the bus, where two men were guarding spaces for us to sit and place our luggage. Finally, I thought, now all we have to do is sit for eight hours until we get there. If only this were so.

For most of the eight hours I did actually just sit there. There were no close brushes with death, as the wide, well-paved, divided Gujarati highways were quite safe. The exception was whenever the bus needed to make a right turn. Indian bus drivers have not yet come to terms with the concept of highway exit ramps and underpasses. "Exit on the left? But we are turning right," they say to themselves, bringing the bus to a halt not at the actual exit but at a gap in the highway divider and steering the bus carefully through the narrow space so that they might drive headlong the wrong way through traffic on the expressway until they can exit on the right and go the wrong way down the on-ramp. Nevertheless, the ride was generally quite boring and very long. The terrain grew flatter and flatter, sandier and sandier, and I questioned why I was choosing to go into a desert again. We carried on well through the night.

There was a man on the bus with a serious physical abnormality. He was extremely short, not quite a dwarf, but only chest-high, and he walked with great difficulty. He also had a strange squinting expression from his tiny, recessed eyes which I took to be evidence of some genetic disorder. At about 8 o'clock, he began stumbling up the bus aisle and seated himself next to me. He settled a bit, then spoke to me in English. "I am one hundred percent blind" was the first thing he said. Then how did he find me??? Good God, I thought, he can find white people by scent. He then asked the first two customary questions (where are you from? what's your name?) before rolling up his trousers. My goodness. This man - a kind and gentle man, I must say - this man's soul may have been created by Almighty God, but his legs were created by M.C. Escher. They looked more like question marks than limbs. He spoke his fifth sentence "thirty six fractures." Jesus fucking Christ. By now the entire bus was staring aghast as the foreigner and the 'freak' spoke to each other. I did my utmost to be gracious and friendly while the man's young helper (a relative?) came over to take photographs of the two of us sitting together. Even the Indians clearly thought that something deeply strange was happening and looked on, literally with their mouths hanging, as I held a pleasant conversation with this friendly man as he wiggled his crooked legs about, very glad that he was too blind to see that I was deeply nervous about my own conduct as everyone watched. More photographs were taken and one passenger took it upon himself to translate our conversation for the rest of the bus. There was much whispering and I believe that ultimately people were impressed by my handling of the situation, and were especially relieved that I discussed his legs to the man's satisfaction until he rolled his trousers back down.

Eventually, the blind man exhausted his English and we couldn't talk any more. He began fumbling with his phone, turned the volume all the way up, and began playing a song. As a blind man perhaps he had greater developed his hearing and enjoyed music a lot I thought. The song sounded very Indian until I recognized it was Western, Danish in fact. This song is the most popular Western song in India because if the lyrics (which the Indians seem to enjoy greatly) were in Hindi it would be indistinguishable sonically from mainstream Hindi pop. That song (and remember, I have sworn I am not making any of this up) was Barbie Girl.

Though he had lost interest, nobody else had, and the rest of the bus continued to stare at me for a long time, perhaps to see how I would react at having the cripple continue to sit next to me for an extended period playing Barbie Girl. Eventually, most of them turned away, leaving only a very attractive girl in the seat ahead and across from me continuing to shamelessly stare. Very well, I thought, two can play that game. Me and the girl stared directly at each other for over three hours.

I don't think I've ever been so sexually frustrated in my entire life, and yes, I do remember middle school.

Late, late at night we suddenly came across a huge number of Tata trucks coming the other way out of the desert. A few minutes later I realized we were stopping by Kandla, which despite being in the middle of a wasteland is the busiest port in India. At the station we picked up an entire work shift of men in woolen hats and sweaters, with fat guts but muscular arms, dignified graying mustaches and weary eyes. They were, and could only be, dockworkers; stevedores. I too was tired and desperately wanted to get off the bus. I figured I could easily book a room in one of its many hotels and finish my trip in the morning. Then I saw the hotels, with their shoddy construction along the highway and neon signs advertising names like "The Grand" and "Hotel Flamingo", the sort of places that, if entered, I would leave the next morning with guilt and a rash.

The rest of the ride was punctuated by dark and dreary towns in the desert where the working men of Kandla made their abodes amongst piles of concrete blocks and a handful of chai stalls catering to workers going to and from the port every day. Finally we arrived in Bhuj at I forget what ungodly hour, and I learned that Jens was named Jens (not Hanselkraut, as I had been secretly thinking of him), and after some dispute between ourselves and then with an incompetent rickshaw-wallah we settled on a guesthouse. We booked rooms. I was hungry and tired, so much so that I willingly agreed to pay 42 rupees for five slices of bread and a package of sliced 'American' cheese from the hotel fridge. The rooms (to be fair, they cost about $2.15 a night) were like prison cells, but I was happy to accept. I locked myself in and slept in my solitary prison, nobody watching.

I Did It All For The Nakki

I have crossed the fine state of Rajasthan from corner to corner, and it is time for this, like all good things, to come to an end. I am on my last stop of this Rajasthani tour, a stone's throw from the Gujarati border in the hill station of Mount Abu.

A "hill station" is a mostly British creation, the idea being to escape the scorching heat of summer by retreating to resorts at higher elevations. I also suspect that the British quite liked an excuse to build nostalgic little English colonies in the hills. Also the fact that there tended to be a small native population and just one mountain road leading up probably aided greatly in the regulation of municipal melanin levels.

Mt. Abu however has a much longer history as a site of pilgrimages. It is a predictable place to be considered special, as the gargantuan mass of rock on which Mt. Abu (which is more of a plateau) sits juts sharply out of the surrounding plains, reaching several high and dramatic peaks. It was these shrines that I came to see. Most visitors however come for the cool, fresh air and romantic ambiance. It is a traditional getaway for Rajasthani and Gujarati honeymooners, and now increasing numbers of unmarried couples, as Gujarati men profess enthusiastically (and without any solicitation to do so) that taking a girl here for a pleasant romantic weekend is the best way to get laid. There are also large numbers of Jain pilgrims, and some Hindu pilgrims as well. These pious pilgrimages reach a climax during the peak hill station season, which I am sure is purely a coincidence.

Desipte the locals' priorities, I visited the center of Mt. Abu's tourist appeal quite late in my visit. I made it down to the edge of Lake Nakki, a small lake filled with paddle-boats shaped like swans and similar hokey contrivances that lend the area the feeling of a second-rate state park. This impression is reinforced by the profusion of ice-cream stands, cheesy lakeside diners, picnicking families, embarrassed dating couples, swarms of schoolchildren with uniforms straight out of the Where's Waldo? School of Art and Design, and awful music. At one such ice cream stand a man bearing an uncanny resemblance to Saddam Hussein pumped Indian techno, which at first was a forgivable stab at emulating Eurotrash beach music, but just couldn't go the full length of a song without suddenly introducing wailing Hindi voices and the atonal eructations of unidentified brass instruments.

The shrines I found considerably more appealing, though the majority of the well-known ones prohibit photography. Gahhh.The first I went to was the Adhar Devi temple, located up a very long mountainside staircase, as I found out so is every other temple on Mt. Abu. Entering the temple door, you soon find yourself surrounded by the mountain in a narrow crevasse coated in white paint. At the entrance to the shrine itself you are forced to scramble under a ludicrously low-hanging rock and into a cave where there is a striking idol of Durga, the demon-slaying queen bitch of the Hindu pantheon.

From there I proceeded across the plateau to a village called Achalgarh, where there are numerous little temples. Climbing high up the mountainside out of the misguided belief that I was supposed to go that way, I reached the summit and found that it was essentially abandoned, boasting only a handful of brick ruins overgrown with vines. My eye was suddenly caught by a tiny stone staircase leading down along a cliff face. I followed it cautiously past another ruin until at the end of it I saw a brick wall built into the mountainside and a single pair of shoes by the door. I poked inside and found myself in a complex of several small cave chambers, one with a lingam, the other with a large idol, with of candles and incense still burning. To the side of the idol were a pair of minuscule passageways leading into the pitch-black depths of the mountain, concealing unknown horrors or treasures. The owner of the shoes was nowhere to be seen but could not be far away, and the silent blackness gave no clue whether he was sound asleep deep within unseen passages or if he was watching my every move from the fringe of his inky lair. As I lingered and still no sign presented itself, this grew more and more unsettling and I left as quietly as I entered. You may laugh, but I know better than to take my chances explaining my intrusion in a foreign tongue to a zealous, lurking troglodyte.

Finally I made my way back to the main attraction, the Dilwara Jain temples, which are famed for their intricate carving. Above the entrance was a most foreboding sign:

"ENTRY OF LADIES IN MONTHLY COURSE STRICTLY PROHIBITED. OTHERWIS MAY SUFFER"

Jain temples have a bunch of odd restrictions which they enforce with varying amounts of zeal. They feel quite strongly about not allowing entry to menstruating women, but inspecting for this particular form of contraband is the one line they are not willing to cross in the name of temple sanctity. Thus the Dilwara temple authorities, as they themselves are powerless to enforce the restriction, merely warn women that they incur the risk of possible divine retribution for their transgression. I feel this is a reasonable compromise. Near the entrance, on a placard purporting to contain 'historical informations', it also says

"THESE TEMPLES SHINE AND SHINE ALMOST ALONE LIKE A BRIGHT STAR IN THE LONG GALAXY OF THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD..."

It had better be good.

Words cannot describe how intricately these pure marble temples are carved. The artists were paid proportionally to the mass of the chips and dust they produced whilst carving, and the result is impressive indeed. The most important of these temples, a thousand-year old structure commissioned by the Rajput king who then controlled Gujarat, is about the size of a basketball court. Every possible surface is carved in an almost absurd amount of detail. Columns, ceilings, walls, arches, everything is carved with increasingly fine and minute sculptures, almost like fractals composed of animals and deities. There are, at the very least, hundreds of thousands of carved figures in this one temple alone. I hesitate to say that there may be in excess of a million in the entire compound, though this seems plausible. In addition to the sculptures, the ceilings are spectacularly adorned with panels and domes, each displaying a unique form of the lotus flower, hanging in three-dimensional splendor from the roof, their geometry playing tricks with the light on the pale marble as you move beneath. In the many shrines within the temples are idols. The adornments outside are just sculpture. The idols, though less ornate, are equally amazing. Most of the tirthankara statues are made of impeccably polished marble with silver detailing and a jeweled "third eye" on their foreheads composed of a thumbnail-sized ruby surrounded by rings of diamonds. One of the lesser temples houses a colossal 8-foot tirthankara covered in gold.

OK, 'historical informations', fair enough.

I returned and paid my visit to the town of Mt. Abu, which is almost entirely comprised of hotels and shops catering thereto, then walked out to one of the scenic overlooks. I was trying to scope out where the honeymooners were hanging so that I might deliberately enter their midst and gather information with which to ridicule them in my writing, but they were so shy I felt bad about it. The place was peaceful, and I left them in peace. Peace. What an idea, I thought. Though festive by day, at night the air is still enough to be pierced by the cries of birds and insects. The incessant clamor of bells and horns and honking cars that shakes the unsleeping cities late at night was missing here. I then realized the single best thing about Mt. Abu, the source of its tranquility: everyone here is already married.

Oh, but if only that were true. Though there are no raucous marriage processions here, the rites of evolving Indian courtship smack you in the face. As you watch the sunglasses-wearing Indian men pedal their silly little boats with grim faces as their ladies gaze wistfully off at flocks of snow-white birds alighting upon rocks in the rippling waters of Lake Nakki, you can just see the furrows increasing in the mens' brows, a tally of the hours of such activities they've endured upon this mountain in pursuit of that most elusive of all Indian prey. And then the couples get out the boats, and the women wander off to shop for bangles. Then the men walk up to amiable-looking foreigners, and with much knee-slapping and graphic mimicry, irreverently gush about their chauvinistic ordeals, and you understand why they have to take their women on a vacation all the way up a fucking mountain to get any.

Off in the distance is Guru Sikhar, the highest point in Rajasthan. Though a dwarf by Indian standards, at 1,772 meters it is no anthill. It seemed only fitting to conclude my tour of Rajasthan with a hike to the top. One one side the hills fall sharply down to the barren Rajasthani plains. On the other side, barely visible a short way off through the evening haze, lies Gujarat, where my journey takes me next.

Rajasthan is mine, from its four corners and now from top to bottom. From the dusty smog-choked shithole of Jaipur in the East to the dusty, sandblown piles of dust and sand in the dusty, sandy West; from the dusty, frigid camel-barn called Bikaner in the North, to the dusty, lukewarm elephant stables of Bundi in the South; from the bottom of the emptiest lakes, to the top of the most comparatively un-dusty peaks, I am now the master of this land.

Maharajas,

y'all best step the fuck off.

Dodecapussy

Udaipur may be the only place besides Amsterdam where advertising the fact that your cafe has nightly "Octopussy shows" is not a cause for communal outcry. The city is perhaps best recognized as the setting of the cinematic masterpice Octopussy. I was determined to use the opportunity to compose and film a short, loosely-connected sequel called Dodecapussy, starring a cast of myself and 12 Mewari princesses, but as we shall see, Fate did not decree that the Maharaja of Mewar and I should be on good terms.

My introduction to Udaipur was not landing on an island filled with seductive maidens, but being dropped off in a dark alley to look for a man who looks like he would know how to play the didgeridoo. He found me in a courtyard rather helpless and showed me to my room. His name was Guddu. Guddu is the cousin of my homie Raj, and along with an incredibly confusing assortment of his extended family runs a nice guesthouse in the heart of Udaipur, a stone's throw from the massive City Palace. I approached with my usual skepticism. Guddu took me to the rooftop, where there was a chill-out open-air lounge with a pool table, a didgeridoo collection, cushions, and a shrine to Ganesh. Suitable, I thought to myself. Then I saw a poster of baby Krishna playing the flute. A poster of baby Krishna playing the flute partially covered by an Iron Maiden promo. There was no further debate.

I quickly came to know many of Guddu's relations. There was his wife Moniga and his seven-year old son Rajit, undisputed king of the pool table. There was his matronly mother-in-law who clearly was the power behind the throne but took a warm liking to me, and a grumpy father-in-law. The rest of the family tree was a mystery to me but it was impossible not to be aware of Jheeni, the adorable toddling girl whose silence broke predictably every morning with impassioned screams for her favorite relatives to attend to her. As a friend of the family, I was boarded in Rajit's bedroom, a source of considerable confusion to the numerous infants who kept wandering in.

Among the guests, who were always outnumbered by relatives, were two whom I befriended quickly, a cantankerous conspiracy-espousing Dane with frequently vocalized opinions regarding atheism, socialism, and the volume of Indian wedding celebrations; and a rotund, affable Dane who was formerly a practicing Hindu monk and is now attempting to open a heavy metal bar in Kathmandu. Joined by myself, Guddu, and prodigious amounts of charas, these characters held weighty discussions on faith, human nature, politics, and the future of India over a soundtrack of Iron Maiden classics. My stay in Udaipur repeatedly extended itself.

My first touristic stop was by neccesity the City Palace. This palace is the largest in Rajasthan and the second-largest in all of India, a country that takes its palace-building very seriously. It is composed of eleven large wings, and contains multiple historical museums and luxury hotels. Needless to say portions of it were very fine and I enjoyed it greatly. Leaving the palace I ran into a group of wealthy tourists. Udaipur, home of some of the most famous hotels in the world, is full of these types. I was clearly not fitting in to the clique I found myself in. They complained that the palace was too labyrinthine (which it was) and haphazardly designed, almost spitting when they proclaimed their distaste for its asymmetry, and segued into a huffy and mind-blowingly ignorant exposition of the aesthetic inferiority of the Orient. Never one to allow rich people to go unmolested, I interrupted "So I suppose you like that Palladian bullshit? Bitch, please" which drew rather startled reactions. Their stares, eyes shining bright through the shade cast by their Martha's Vineyard visors, grew only more bewildered as I delivered a blistering architectural treatise in which I compared the Rennaissance to a 9-year old child insisting on being breastfed by ancient Rome and made other criticisms which I immediately realized were a bit nonsensical but conveyed the spirit of what I was trying to say, which was that snobby rich pricks can go fuck themselves, preferably on another continent.

It's wedding season in India. The astrologers that encourage half of India to get married at the same time must be punished, because the proliferation of Indian marriages also proliferates Indian marching bands. These bands may be the worst musical ensembles on the face of the globe. Your high school marching band? Much better. Your middle school marching band? Still better. Some random assholes given an assortment of horns? As long as they stay out of the street, still better. Indian marching bands, which head the innumerable processions bringing city traffic to a standstill, are composed of three main elements: the Wagon, the Drums, and the Horns. The Wagon is a wheeled cart covered in ornamented sheets of tin, which carries electronic speakers blasting horrible unmelodic crap, apparently scoured from napkins found in the rubbish bins of drunken English military officers, at great volumes. Behind the cart follows a mobile generator, chugging along to power this infernal contraption. Both the generator and the Wagon are pushed slowly onwards by Indian men of all ages in dusty and outrageously ill-fitting marching band uniforms. The Drums are a group of drummers, who are quite capable of keeping a decent marching rhythm on their snares. Alas, tragically and incomprehensibly, this is rarely the same rhythm being blasted by the Wagon's subwoofers. Finally there is the Horns, a group of horn players who have apparently not learned how to play most of the songs. Though they occasionally join the drummers in performing with loud honks, they mostly remain silent, carrying their instruments purely for show while the Wagon produces all the actual "music." They are typically found in the front of the procession, frequently causing them to be awkwardly stranded ahead of the rest of the band as the Wagon tends to get stuck as traffic tries to pass around it, and the marching band it not actually trained in marching and nobody signals to the front that the rest of the band has stopped. From time to time the Horns surrender all pretense of being musicians, and are called upon to help push the Wagon uphill.

I hate Indian weddings. In fact, I rather dislike most things to do with Indian weddings. I told my Indian friends as much, and to my surprise they emphatically agreed. "Everybody hates these weddings. All these bands, all these fireworks. We are having to go to too many weddings. We are invited to weddings we do not know the people getting married. They like big wedding so cousins, brothers, friends invite their friends, we have to come. So much trouble for everybody. Just have wedding and finish, please." I then asked them if they would do the same at their weddings. "Well, yes" they responded.

This is why India never solves any of its problems.

I went on a thoroughly unedifying trip to Chittaurgarh and became rather glad that the Maharaja of Mewar got his ass kicked so bad he had to found Udaipur. Then as I made my way back to the guesthouse I discovered that the current Maharaja was hosting a wedding. After passing no less than five godawful marching bands on their way to commoners' nuptials I saw the preparations being made for the royal event. Men were hoisting timpanis onto a painted elephant. I spent the night indoors. Not that it helped.

After a tumultuous night of listening to the nearby royal festivities I took it upon myself to explore the lake. Udaipur is built on the edge of Lake Pichola, which not only contains water, but also contains two islands on which are built some very exotic palaces. The white-washed Lake Palace occupies its entire island and seems to float like a ship. This is the Palace from Octopussy, and guess what, the Maharaja now runs it as a ludicrously expensive hotel and you can't go in. I toured the lake by boat, grumbling at the Club Med types all around me. We did however land at Jag Mandir island, which is only mostly a luxury hotel run by the Maharaja, who out of love for his country and culture also allows any visitor to go to the cafe which serves 430-rupee sandwiches. Breaking away from the group, I slinked off to an off-limits part of the island, where (surprise) I found the detritus of yet another very expensive wedding. I spent some time hanging with the laborers whose job it was to carry away the acres of red carpeting, portable chandelier holders, and gold spray-painted pseudo-Greek plywood columns before I was brusquely ejected from the premises by a foreman who was none too happy to have an outsider witness the working man's efforts that make such extravagance possible. He probably also heard the part where I was half-jokingly fomenting insurrection against the higher castes.

I returned to the guesthouse to relax. As the Danes and I amused ourselves chatting with the children, one of Guddu's Indian friends literally brought a puppy over to play. This place is too good to be true.

The next day I made a mammoth tour of the southern Aravallis, traveling deep into the rural heart of the hills past farms where oxen still raised irrigation water in a wheel and women carried buffalo-sized piles of leafy green vegetables on their heads. The road was less than a full lane wide, and my driver, whose name I could not discern through his phlegmatic and mumbled Mewari, was a simple and shy man who somehow navigated this road without being forced off a cliff by herds of sheep. As we got even deeper into the hills the farms gave way to wilderness. Leopards were said to be around. I saw only apes. The Hanuman monkeys are so human in their behavior it is almost creepy. Kumbhalgarh and Ranakpur were both amazing.

Returning to Udaipur again I made my way to an old mansion that now houses a cultural museum, including a multi-room turban gallery. A turban gallery. I had to see it. Within this turban gallery, which to my satisfaction contained many fine turbans, was no other than the World's Largest Turban. I can die happy.

I am however, more likely to die in an Indian prison, as any one of the several netcafe owners who refused to print the requisite hundreds of copies of my gazette-sheet libeling the Maharaja --as among other things a pedophile, a financier of terrorism, and a werewolf-- could easily report me to the authorities.

Finally, after several more days of vegetation, it was time to leave. I said my goodbyes to Guddu and the Danes, to Rajit and Moniga and the smiling old matron. I conducted some quick business and went to retrieve my things from my room. As I left, the last thing I saw was little Jheeni riding a live tortoise along the balcony.

Udaipur will be missed.

Quickie (Dec. 2)

My inspection of the southern fringe of Rajasthan continues. This work is exhausting. From my base in Udaipur I travel hundreds of kilometers every day to see remote temples and forts then come back and write travel articles well into the night. Having for the short term exhausted my supply of complaints about bus travel, I shall refrain from repeating myself and further defaming popular deities.

As you know I'm also not supposed to repeat what I write for work, and contrary to popular belief I am not a bottomless pit of biting remarks about derelict castles. I have other things to dedicate my mind to as well, such as making friends, doing my historical research, planning my future itinerary, endearing myself to Indian women, and in general actually having a life. So in lieu of a joke comparing Chittaurgarh's breached ribbon-like walls to a desecrated chastity ring or whatever, please feel free to peruse the photos I have posted of Chittaurgarh, Khumbalgarh, Ranakpur, and Udaipur. I'll give a little info about each.

Chittaurgarh was formerly the most strategic fort in all of India. Then it had a bad spell of repeatedly falling and the Maharaja of Mewar built his new capital at Udaipur. Though massive (being about 5km in length), Chittaurgarh is mostly empty grass interspersed by the few buildings the Mughals didn't burn to the ground. Rather ironically its most famous surviving feature is the Tower of Victory. I scoff. I would say spare yourselves the visit unless you're a huge history buff.

Khumbalgarh, on the other hand, is a truly awesome fort located on such a remote and inhospitable hilltop that in 400 years of use it was held by enemy forces for a total of 48 hours. Located several hours' drive on a one-lane road up into the depths of the Aravalli mountains, its staggering 36 kilometers of walls are a gargantuan fuck-you to any army that humped its gear through the rugged wilderness to attack it. Within the massive fort are numerous Hindu and Jain temples, spectacular views, an impressive citadel, a couple villages, and abandoned land reclaimed by villagers for farming within the walls. Probably the best fort in all of Rajasthan, and I have been to a crapload of forts in Rajasthan.

Ranakpur is a remote Jain temple in a little valley separated from Khumbalgarh by some very nasty hills. Its fine carvings and beautifully balanced proportions make it probably also the finest temple I have seen in Rajasthan so far (or in India for that matter), and I have seen even more Rajasthani temples than Rajasthani forts. Go there.

I'll have more to say about Udaipur later. Right now I am quite busy in my quest to publicly slander the Maharaja of Mewar. Namaste.

Tales From The Elephant Stable

My peregrinations through the southern portion of Rajasthan have become inexorably intertwined with my acquaintance and friendship with a clan of Rajasthani guesthouse owners. My tale is of their making.

My journey began, as it often does, with a ridiculously slow bus ride. "Sir," concerned Ajmeris would tell me "I am afraid the government bus is not suitable for you." Personally, I consider the government bus barely suitable for carbon-based lifeforms, but I felt even more strongly about leaving Ajmer. This bus in particular was about one stiff breeze away from collapsing into a pile of metal sheets. As we bounced down the pothole-rife pseudohighway towards Bundi the windows rattled against their fittings, luggage thumped from being hurled into the steel roof, and patches of ill-painted tin flapped against the holes in the fuselage they were meant to conceal. We faced the usual array of vehicular and animal obstacles, which by now I regard with indifference. My composure was shook however when we encountered the artillery brigade.

Coming down the highway in the opposite direction was what appeared to be an entire regiment of semi-motorized artillery, and the army trucks pulling the guns were not going to move to the side for any reason. In our lane we looked out on a gauntlet of oncoming vehicles who charged directly towards us trying to pass the army units with reckless haste, probably out of their understandable uneasiness about driving directly behind a howitzer. I now know what a quark in a particle accelerator feels like. Before our bus smashed any of these vehicles and momentarily revealed great secrets about the origin of the universe however, a blare of horns and a dramatic last-second swerve would send the lesser vehicle deep within the military formation, its bonnet slipping perilously beneath the barrel of a cannon.

Nonetheless it was a remarkably boring journey. A succession of nondescript towns and indistinguishable bus stands punctuated the expanses of scrub and brown dust. As we drew nearer and nearer to the southeastern corner of Rajasthan, things began to change. Long bridges traversed wide, dried-up riverbeds. The land became more lively. This region is the most fertile part of Rajasthan, though this is akin to calling Staten Island the most pristinely natural part of New York City. These large channels are called "perennial" rivers, meaning "In theory, in most years, there is supposed to be some water in here somewhere at some point." I started seeing rectangular patches of low green plants amidst the dust, with people walking about attending to them. Shameless acts of agriculture were being perpetrated in broad daylight.

We got to Bundi well after dark. I had no hotel. This was somewhat troubling as I knew nothing more than "the hotels are generally near the palace", so I took to the potentially difficult task of finding the palace in the old city under darkness. Five seconds later, I saw a colossal palace on the lower reaches of the hill, floodlit against the night sky. My infallible plans succeed again. In the neighborhood of the palace I began my quest to find cheap lodging. A man on a motorbike stopped to offer me directions to a guesthouse, as countless have before him, spending their days getting paid to lure travelers into overpriced filth boxes. Then he said "rooms are in royal elephant stable part of palace, 200 rupees." This is how I met Raj.

Raj was not a commission-wallah but in fact the owner of a guesthouse which was, true to his word, in the former royal elephant stables. A large metal gate closed off the compound. I sign said "guesthouse in elephant stables. garden restaurant. chill-out place." 'Chill-out place' is usually Indian code for "feel free to roll a joint on the roof", and I figured that Raj couldn't be all bad, but I remained skeptical. I struggled to open the gate and Raj showed me the simple trick required to unlatch it. "I am always closing the gate. Otherwise cows coming in. I do not like these cows." I then resolved immediately to stay at the elephant stable.

It was a modest place. The "garden restaurant" was a metal table in a large outdoor enclosure where Raj's wife served nightly the most delicious vegetarian thalis I have yet to find in India. A young English couple were busy painting the door of their room blue, because Raj and they were feeling artsy. I approved fully of my surroundings. My companions at the guesthouse besides the punkish couple were one Australian and a Walloon who has apparently spent the last ten years motorcycling around southern Asia and spoke excellent Hindi. Mark my words, this is the first and the last time I shall be bested at anything by a Belgian.

Bundi is a small town full of beautiful old buildings and friendly people. It was the royal capital of one of the minor Rajput states, and has yet to attract a great number of visitors, which helps it keep its uncommercial charm. Little cupolas dot the green hillsides as watchtowers and the majestic palace, topped by a jumble of domes, seems to nailed perfectly into the side of the mountain, not like a building erected from ground up but like a sculpture hung from a wall.

My first excursion was to see a famous step-well. It was closed, and I tried to nudge-nudge, wink-wink the guards into opening it for me. It turns out they couldn't because they weren't the actual guards, but just lazy police officers enjoying some shade. They escorted me across town to another well and some temples, then saw me off with a smile. Even the cops in Bundi are nice. It defies belief.

My time in Bundi, and also here in Udaipur, has taken on a lethargic quality. I recently received a much-desired compliment. "You're almost Indian..." a friend said to my delight, then continued "...you work day and night without weekends and hardly make a cent of profit." Damn. While I am far from actually being reduced to Indian levels of poverty - my 'labor' consists of brainstorming bad jokes about the architecture of 16th-century palaces - my friend had a point. I've been traveling thousands of miles and written hundreds of pages and haven't taken a day off in two months, so I'm now giving myself the luxury of occasionally spending a whole day accomplishing nothing. Sometimes I feel an odd solidarity with the uniformed staff at Rajasthan's hilltop forts. We both belong to the select group of people who wake up and say "fuuuuuuucccccckkkkk I don't want to climb up to that castle" more than one day a week.

While Bundi is mostly free of hassle, it is impossible to escape people offering to take you on a tour to the nearby waterfalls, which they consider the most majestic natural beauty and certainly you good sir would not mind a modest fee no large price to go there. I forcefully declined all offers. This was Rajasthan. Though they were unanimous in their admiration of this waterfall I had to remember that around here they would probably be amazed by water overflowing from the bathroom sink.

Life in the elephant stables was tranquil. Campfires by night, idle lingering by day. From time to time we would see a pack of monkeys invade the tree nearby and advance upon the family laundry. We would then hear a sound like *cchhhhhkkk-cchhooooookkk* as Raj's multi-talented wife loaded a shotgun with nonlethal nuisance spikes, burst out of the kitchen still in her crimson sari,and started blasting away at the tree, usually only rustling the leaves but sometimes causing a screech and a much louder rustling of leaves. She would then make a smug noise in the direction of the tree, sling the shotgun over her silk-clad shoulder, smile at us, and return to her kitchen. My enchantment with the family Raj grew ever deeper.

In Bundi there are some nice little temples. Outside of these temples are a variety of large, obnoxoious cows. Many of these cows were covered in tinsel, because.... OK I have no idea. One, apparently more special cow had red painted horns and a crude silver chain around its neck. This had the unfortunate effect of making it look like it had just gored a textile merchant in a dark alley and then lecherously snatched the jewellery from his wife's bosom.

I talked to Raj a lot. It was impossible not to, it's just too much fun. In an unusually sensible converstaion he told me he had been granted the elephant stables after a visit to the Maharao of Bundi. I feel sad for the Maharao of Bundi. He lived in the old royal palace all the way until Independence and then gave it up and locked it away to be overrun by bats. He opened it recently in his old age, resigned to leaving his small ancestral kingdom without an heir, the last of his line. Whereas other Rajput kings, like the Maharajas of Jodhpur boast on about the future of their lineage, I found the Bundi royals' a more sympathetic tale. I then visited the palace, which was quite lovely. It was beautiful and decidely less militaristic than others I've seen lately. It had that delicate charm of neglect from being shut up and darkened for 50 years, but on its opening revealed to the public the exquisite and subtle paintings that adorn its interior. From the palace I began climbing to the fort, only to find myself poking my way through thorn bushes and then suddenly surrounded by a large pack of Hanuman monkeys which were none too happy to see me. I photographed them with a mutual unease, then made my way home at sundown.

The next day I returned for a second attempt on the summit. A young boy stopped me and demanded I purchase a stick from him to scare off the monkeys. "A stick is most necessary" he insisted. Oh, I see, it's necessary. This word also means nothing in India. He popped into his shop then emerged with the floppiest, sorriest branch I have ever seen and I told him as much. He returned again with a rusty steel pipe. I accepted this bargain, and spent much of my time at the fort (where I was completely unmolested by the extremely frightened Rhesus monkeys there) regaling gullible tourists with tales of my cage-fighting days and then suddenly swinging my pipe and demanding middling sums of currency (all in jest, my friends).

One day I resolved to rent a bicycle and go riding in the countryside. The only problem was getting to the countryside from the city center in Indian traffic. The Belgian motorcyclist gave me advice. "You must do like meditation. You see only things bigger than your self. All things smaller than your bike become invisible." I tested this theory. Sure enough, with great focus I became able to see between the chaos of the street, adeptly avoiding tuk-tuks and cars in a zenlike bliss, unburdened by worrying about smaller beings, which parted before me as I had circumspectly stepped aside from a thousand vehicles before.

Then I rode, zenlike, headlong into a baby-carrying pedestrian.

Just outside town is a small lakeside palace where Rudyard Kipling wrote much of his most famous work. I had writing to do and it was a peaceful spot. But something stopped me. I then recalled what Kipling had written of Bundi's palace, of Jodhpur's palace, of Amber's palace, and a number of locations I have yet to visit. Each was an equally vague description that attributed its construction to giants, a divine force, or some sort of magical alignment of stones "...rather than the work of Man." Aside from being lazy, often misinformed, and generally a degenerate imperialist swine, Rudyard Kipling was also, I realized, a one-note hack.

Let me say this unequivocally: Ghostface Buddha is a better writer than Rudyard Kipling, and if he wants to challenge me on this account, he can step to me in the street. Rudyard Kipling, you a bitch. Come face me if you think you literary enough.

I'm in Udaipur now. Raj told me his cousin has a guesthouse here and that I should try staying there. He gave me a business card. On the front was his cousin's name and the contact info of the guesthouse. On the reverse I was informed the guesthouse offered lessons in the didgeridoo. "Raj," I said "your family is magic", and made my way to the bus.

Goat. Brain. Curry.

I read the menu. I was about to order the palak paneer, chunks of unfermented cheese in a mildly spiced spinach sauce. Then I saw it. There was 'Brain Curry', and there was no backing down. "Excuse me," I asked "what is the Brain Curry?"

The waiter shrugged, then attempted to jolt his memory and hesitantly described "It is a gravy, made first with tomato sauce and some masalas." Fabulous, we've determined that the dish falls within the broad parameters in which hundreds of barely-related meals are called 'curry'.

"No, I mean the 'brain'. What is it?" He shrugged again, curled his lips and shook his head. A great mystery, no doubt. "The BRAIN" I said, smacking upon my own in frustration. "Is this thing?" I asked impatiently, cradling my cranium, shaking my skull with my hands to draw his fleeting attentions thence. "This thing we are supposed to have in our heads?!" I sputtered as his eyes glazed over yet again.

He missed the insult. "Oh yes, is brain!" he recovered, eyes bright with pride.

I concealed my exasperation to speak with the utmost clarity. "OK then, I'll have the brains."

"You are wanting brain curry?" he asked, eyes squinting askance.

I thrust my arms out over the table and groaned "Braaaaaiiiiinnnnssss", then set my stare upon him in anticipation of his next witless remark. It was to the point.

"Brain curry?"
"YES...and a chai."
"Chai? You want Indian tea?"

You have to be fucking kidding me.

By this point the rest of the staff was taking some interest in my dining. I was the only customer, an odd foreigner with a pile of stained notebooks asking to be fed brains. The manager and other waiters, all Punjabis, took frequent breaks from listening to their unusually tolerable pop music to watch me scrawl in my notes. Sometimes they even ventured over to my table to read over my shoulder, only to be thwarted by my poor penmanship and the oblique manner in which I typically malign Indian cities. After a considerable wait, my Rajasthani waiter arrived with my chai.

Though I may as well have asked a blind Cambodian orphan in semaphore, I queried "Excuse me, from which animal is the brain?" He did not comprehend. I decided to break it down into multiple-choice. "The animal: is it sheep brain? Goat brain? ...Chicken?" This was still too much. I rephrased the question as a true-or-false. "The brain: mutton?"

"Yes sir! Mutton!"

Mutton is one of those English words, like possible, that Indian culture has somehow endowed with ambiguity. Its meaning is more or less "could be sheep, but I'd wager on goat." This was Ajmer. I've walked its streets. The mutton was definitely goat.

After further delay, a small metal dish was brought to my table. This made sense. I could not expect goat brain to be very large, because goats are fucking idiots. The dish was filled in a light brown slop. Roughly half of North Indian cuisine consists of various substances - chicken, cheese, potatoes, peas, ping-pong balls, refrigerator magnets - drowned in a brownish slop. I tasted the sauce first. It was curry. Everything is curry. Curry is an almost Orwellian word. Curry is the apex of the disassociation of language from meaning. All one knows is that there will be sauce and there will be spices. In India this is as redundant as calling a dish "banana fruit" or "bread food". A curry of eggplant here bears no relation to a curry of eggplant there, yet there is no name to distinguish these; there is just Eggplant Curry. Indian Restaurant menus, with their meticulously categorized offerings and minuscule gradations of price, are but a mockery of a gastronomical order, an ancient-ciphered hieroglyphic codex to be vainly examined by the gourmand. As a Mesoamerican scholar might say "This cryptic frieze is only known to be of Olmec origin" so too did I ponder "Indeed, this is a curry."

As I delicately sipped quarter-spoonfuls of this concoction, the Punjabis huddled in conspiracy around their audio system. They switched CD's and the melody became familiar. I thought little of it. Punjabis are generally the most internationally-minded of the Indian peoples; these men simply seemed to have a broader taste in pop music. I took my fork and pierced a small, nondescript chunk of yellow matter from within the depths of the curry. I took a moment to savor it but it remained unremarkable. I poked around my tray and began to suspect I had been given paneer curry in a kind and secretive act of Sikh hospitality, the contemporary American tune chosen specifically to ease my mind.

Disappointed and unsure how to proceed, I resolved to finish my meal in dignity. I forked a larger bite and directed it into my mouth. It was definitely brain. As I began to chew it squished palpably against my tongue, not oozing with juices, but merely soft and compressible like certain types of shellfish or other non-muscular animal organs I've tried. The texture, though unexpected, was unobjectionable. I had expected a more rubbery experience. The flavor was not too bad either, almost bland. I found I needed to coat bites with curry to make them more flavorful.

The truly disconcerting part of the meal was not its flavor or texture but its movement in the mouth. With each motion of the tongue and grinding of the molars it became more and more clear I was feasting on brains. As the brain piece tumbled in my mouth it began to unfold. Though I had not seen them, the intricate tucks and folds instantly recognizable as the anatomy of the mammalian brain began to unravel between my cheeks, flopping behind my gums, unfurling themselves like a damp carpet onto my taste buds. One by one my teeth tore apart the distinct nooks of the goat's mind. With one bite I severed its critical thoughts ("goat!"); with the next its uncanny sense for clambering upon rocks. I squashed and ground the matter and neurons that taught it to move in herds, to fear the stick ("biiiiiig stick"), and to leap on hind legs for bashing skulls.

At last, pressing a paste of cerebral cortex to my cheek with my tongue, I recognized the music. "I want to make love right now na na... Wish we hadn't broke up right now na na". I was eating goat brains to Akon. The Punjabis watched from the stereo console with shit-eating grins. This was an elaborate mockery, a pantomime of cross-cultural ridicule.

Piece by piece the brain disappeared into my undeterred oral cavity. A large mound protruded from the cream. I rolled it with my fork. It was a single chunk of brain and as sauce dribbled off from its underside it revealed to my eyes the curled labyrinth of snaking and spiraling brainflesh on my plate as clearly as in a textbook or a pickled jar. As I began my lengthy chewing of this specimen I wondered "To what extent do goats have memories?" Months among the Hindus stirred in me strange questions. Am I consuming the mind of a conscious being? Has this goat's soul been reborn or is it waiting for me to finish the last of its physical shell? Will my grisly devouring of its brain earn it some karmic reward, a lift from animaldom to perhaps being a humble street-sweeper or rural peasant? Is there some newborn baby across India unaware that I have pieces of its former consciousness stuck between my incisors?

The brain was almost gone and Akon wailed "You're so beaaauuuutiful...so damn beautifuuuu-ulll". Another Akon hit. The Punjabis' mirth at my expense was to extend to an entire Akon album.

The food could have been worse, and I was actually beginning to enjoy the relative restraint of auto-tuned R&B after months of screeched Hindi gibberish over too-fast basslines, cheap digital simulations of jangly Indian bells and stringed instruments, and poorly Orientalized euro-synth keyboards. Then, all of a sudden Akon's soothing robotic drone gave way to the frantic ostentation and outrageous lyricism of the hip-hop guest verse."... I'ma spend them grands but after you undress, not like a hooker but more like a princess". The pin on my cultivated self-restraint in the face of absurdity was pulled and I exploded in laughter, spewing curry all over my plate. The Punjabis rushed to my side, fearing the brain had done me in. I still rocked with laughter as a dabbed clumsily about with a napkin. "I'm all right, I'm all right" I reassured them, "it is because I laugh at the song. He is funny man." The Punjabis nodded and returned to their station. They rewound the track to hear the verse again. They were determined to understand it, as Punjabis consider themselves to be very funny men.

The brain was gone and I slurped at the last of the curry, cleansing my palate with mineral water and buttered bread. The Punjabis, now occupied with a large ledger and several calculators doing their daily accounting, left me to admire my conquests and rest upon my laurels. Sipping water, cooling myself from the heat of victorious battle in this gastronomic Coliseum, I was treated to the voices of the Empire's finest musicians. Almost as a tribute to a worthy foe, Akon sung "She's so dangerouuuusss, that girl's so dangeroouuuuuu-usss".

Dangerous? Danger? Bitch, please. My name is Ghostface Killah Gautama Buddha Maximus; Cow-Slapper of the West and Commander of the Army of the Just; a son in the Cobras' Lair and a brother in the Killers' Manse; and I will eat of Danger and shit of Victory, in this life and the next.

Return To The 300 Temples (The Dirty Version)

News story of the day: a study has revealed that prisoners in the jails of Tamil Nadu state almost all gain weight in prison where they are given a balanced and nutritious diet. It's official: living in India is worse than living in an Indian prison.

Quote of the day: "Our cities are the dirtiest in the world. If there is a Nobel Prize for dirt and filth, India would get it." - Jairam Ramesh, Minister of the Environment, my homie.

Moving on from Jodhpur my nexy destination was Bundi, located far away in the corner of Rajasthan. The direct bus was a 10-hour slog and I had little desire to spend an entire day confined within one of these four-wheeled slaughter cans. So, I decided to instead risk dismemberment on two separate 5-hour bus rides over two days. I was to transfer in Ajmer and stay a night again in that fetid hole, where, if you will recall, my most vivid mermories were of lying on a hospital table and receiving a series of unidentified IV's labeled in coded shorthand and languages in other alphabets.

I was somewhat uneasy about returning to Ajmer. I do after all have a stalker who resides there. He has called me several times over the past month, showing that my ice-cold shoulder has done nothing to chill the heat of his passionate pursuit. I therefore studiously avoided my old haunts, which included the only affordable sanitary hotel in town. The result was that I stayed in an overpriced and scum-infested flophouse and navigated the city through a collection of bazaars and back streets that got me comically lost every time I stepped out the door. The hotel was simply atrocious, as they tend to be in Ajmer, charging the price I would usually pay at a respectable guesthouse for a room that did not even have a shower and was graced by only half a coat of paint. The manager was a sour cow of a woman who demanded I pay many spurious charges on my account and clearly was less concerned with earning the hotel money than in making me lose it.

After settling my business in this glorified beetle-hostel and making the necessary inquiries around town for my escape to Bundi, I set off for an afternoon in Pushkar. This of course involved a bus ride over a geological formation known as Snake Mountain, whose winding, switchbacked mountain road seemed custom-built for sending the bus's already questionable crude steel gearshift into morbid throes and convulsions on the uphill, and turning the bus into a careening ten-tonne bobsled on the downhill. Bicyclists swerved off the road at our coming; monkeys scattered down the rocks.

Last time I was in Pushkar I caught only a brief glimpse, in the full swing of its absurd religious festival. I passed through quickly on my way to the epic camel market, not knowing that my dehydrated delirium was but a precursor to my bout with complete biological deconstruction that would render me unable to see the rest of the fair. I do recall that it was a tourist-infested madhouse full of religious loonies, freaks, priests, and esoteric street performers. I expected that this return would see a more tranquil side of Pushkar, a small town in the desery with countless temples, an air of devotion, and joyful groups of pilgrims.

When I got off the bus I was immediately accosted by three drug dealers cackling while they offered me hashish and opium, clearly breaking the cardinal rule of pushing. ("Don't get high on your own supply." Act like you know something.) Though the hordes were gone and the insanity had greatly diminished, I did not find Pushkar a very pleasing place. Though it is said to be the 2nd-most pilgrimed place in the world, beating out Rome and only losing to Mecca, the environment was unquestionably one dominated by the dollars of secular foreign tourists. Though many reverential pilgrims were there, the holy atmosphere was unimpressive. Pushkar, they boast, has over 300 temples. Big. Deal. This isn't like saying a city has 300 churches or mosques. In the Hindu world any town worth naming has at least a couple dozen if not a couple hundred temples for myriad sects and deities. many of the temples ring its "lake", a cavity formerly occupied by a sacred lake. Brahma would have done well not to create the world and convene the universe's deities around a body of water in a place where it routinely goes years without raining. Around this dusty hole are a number of very holy ghats, including the one where Brahma himself bathed, the one where Vishnu incarnated himself as a boar (don't ask me why), and the one where Mahatma Gandhi's ashes were sprinkled after his murder. The temples aren't much to look at, except the Vishnu temple which looks magnificent from outside but won't let you in.

Pushkar has a Brahma temple, one of the only Brahma temples in the entire world because according to legend his pissed-off wife cursed him and decreed that he would never be worshiped anywhere but Pushkar. Strangely, though he is one of the "big three" along with Shiva and Vishnu, pretty much nobody bothers worshiping him that much. Whether this is because there are no Brahma temples around or vice versa is very much a chicken-and-egg question. I went to the Brahma temple - essentially the one and only temple to the creator of the universe - and found it quite mediocre. Hinduism is a very strange, self-admittedly a profoundly disorganized religion that nonetheless seeks to stringently organize the whole of society while leaving its own practice open to an infinite triage of devotional priorities, personal needs, and popular favorites.

Pushkar is a weird place, where donkeys are painted pink, camels are adorned in feathers, and the cows think nothing of outright thuggery, mimicing the priests and saddhus who get up in your face and plead "baaaabuu, baaabu, money for food" as if you can't see their half-clad potbellies jiggling to and fro like those of their bovine co-extortionists.

The most dominant presence in town though are the tourists, not the waddling Americans or the platoons of culturally oblivious retired French people who look like they've just stumbled tank-topped and floppy-hatted out of a baguette shop in Cannes, but legions of equally oblivious backpackers. These throngs of contemporary pseudo-bohemians, found in concentrated colonies throughout India, are catered to by a plethora of merchants dealing in pashmina shawls, Om t-shirts, sloppily-printed baggy trousers, and a slew of other hippie-shit "Indian" goods that no Indian has ever worn but can be traced around the Subcontinent like uranium waste deposits by a Geiger meter upon the bodies of Israeli, Spanish, Chilean, Australian, American, French, and other neo-hippies who've traded patchouli oil for iPods and "environmentally freindly" canteens that they fill with bottled water. Hot spots of this activity such as Pushkar and Delhi's Pahar Ganj are veritable Chernobyls emitting toxic levels of self-absorption from "alternative travelers" who believe that they and their kind alone are truly immersing themselves in India. I good-naturedly but dryly told a group of Israeli girls who looked like extras from a straight-to-DVD Jerry Garcia biopic that if they really wanted to be Indian they should either go all the way and buy saris or just score some sequined jeans and sew randomly-chosen numbers to fake Ed Hardy shirts. They were nonplussed and proceeded to talk amongst themselves in Hebrew for the remainder of dinner.

As they talked a pair of incredibly stoned men straight out of a Hell's Angels rally drove by on monstrous motorcycles with Vishnu tridents affixed to the rear, and for a moment - just for a moment - Pushkar had me impressed.

CORRECTION: The world was not created at Pushkar, it is merely a very sacred creation of Brahma, the Creator, who created the rest of the world elsewhere.

Tata Roulette And The Bus Of Death

I take a lot of day trips. Firstly because I like to get a change of scenery and visit places off the beaten track, and secondly because I enjoy the lengthy bus rides which combine an excursion into the tranquility of the Indian countryside with a near-constant risk of violent death.

The title of this post is misleading. There is no one single Bus Of Death. Each and every bus is a rolling box perfectly equipped for mass homicide. Where the rear-view mirror should say "Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear", it instead reflects a haunting message that reads "redrum...REDRUM." You could just take two and a half hours of barely-edited footage from an Indian bus and title it "Saw VII: Kota to Indore". This is especially true of routes along secondary highways, which are usually about one and a half lanes wide are are trafficked not only by the customary ramshackle slew of motor vehicles but also by creaking bullock-carts and plodding pregnant cows which need to be overtaken, resulting in a continuous game of Chicken with oncoming trucks and buses that is usually resolved in a blare of horns in a matter of only feet or inches.

Fearing that my delicate foreign senses would be offended by the cramped conditions in the main compartment, conductors usually invite me to sit on the bench in the driver's cabin. I happily accept their offers and relax in the space and safety of what I've come to think of endearingly as the "forward-firing ejector seat." The bus to Osiyan had an even more special feature: a large metal platform in the cabin that served no discernable purpose and pressed uncomfortably against my legs. I was grateful though for this minor discomfort as the edge of the platform would do a fabulous job of dispossessing me of my feet and my shins, which would otherwise become flailing hindrances to my projectile motion through the front window.

India is one of those many countries that is so accustomed to not having the capacity to solve problems that addressing problems without in any way solving them has become part of the national culture. It would be poor form to do nothing, so things are sometimes done that are worse than nothing at all. For instance, when there is a dangerous obstacle on the shoulder of the road causing a narrow space unsafe to pass in, local people helpfully mark these obstacles by placing piles of rocks in the road itself. If this were a country with landmines they would be marked off by spike strips.

Trucks and buses in India always have an idol on the dashboard, surrounded by small posters of Vishnu, Krishna, and so on stuck to the windshield. The idol is often a local town god you've never heard of, covered in beads and wreaths of flowers. Stepping onto this bus I saw the idol was Ganesh. You don't want to be on a bus devoted to Ganesh.

Ganesh is the elephant-headed god of luck, and is perhaps the most popularly worshiped of the Hindu gods. In a country so overpopulated that a person's skills or goods are almost guaranteed to be redundant, it is no surprise people perceive simple luck as the key to success. People who are especially devoted to Ganesh are dangerous: they believe they are favored by Chance. This obviates the need for Skill, Foresight, Acumen, and Caution.

So I saw this idol to Ganesh and I knew instantly our driver was consciously putting our lives in the hands of Fate. We were to play a game of Russian Roulette where the bullet would be a Tata truck and the revolver reloaded every minute. Fate, aided by the iron-willed determination of our driver in the face of oncoming traffic, granted us a heart-pounding but rapid passage to Osiyan.

Osiyan itself was not nearly as exciting as getting there. It's a smallish town out in the desert notable mostly for the age rather than the grandeur of its temples. I was excited to see a collection of 8th and 9th century temples mostly intact. The first, a large Hindu edifice to a god also worshiped by the Jains sat high on a raised platform. A local trader, who had nothing better to do because he lives in Osiyan, took it upon himself to give me a tour complete with a religious education.

Never put too much stock in a religious man's explanation of other people's religions. He strongly insisted that Jainism is a branch of Hinduism, while Jains are quick to assert that they're more like Buddhists ("but different religion!" they always add). The trader, whose name was Sarim, provided proof of his argument by stating that Jains worship five Hindu gods (one was Lakshmi, I forget the other four). "Well, five out of thirty million sounds like a pretty big difference" I quipped. "Just one is enough!" he replied.

The temple was interesting if not opulent, with a pleasant use of mirrors inside and ancient carvings outside. We went out on the roof and Sarim directed me immediately to the Kama Sutra carvings, which is what Indian men assume foreign tourists will find most interesting. Though this is frequently correct, it is a textbook case of projection if there ever was one. However, the erotic sculptures had all been defaced...literally. Armies in the 11th and 17th centuries under the commands of Mohamed of Ghazni and the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, respectively, had chiseled the faces off in keeping with the Muslim prohibition on the depiction of recognizable human figures. "The Heretics," as Sarim had thus far exclusively referred to Muslims, "they smash the heads". The result was a bizarre montage of figures in explicit acts of coitus, naked bodies and huge genitalia fully intact, though they had been gruesomely decapitated and were fornicating under the watch of other faceless, multi-limbed semi-human monsters and celestial entities. Little did I know that the people of ancient Rajasthan were avid readers of Japanese comics.

Sarim giddily honked on a pair of sandstone breasts, then ran his finger over the missing face and his expression turned dour. "It is always these Muhammad peoples" he muttered. "No fine works these Heretics."

We then went to the Jain Mahavira temple, which I was enthused about because Mahavira, the Buddha figure of Jainism, is the one part of the religion that seems to to be grounded on planet Earth and his teachings form the backbone of Jain ideology. This temple too was ancient and its main idol was a magnificent statue of Mahavira made of sand and milk and encased in gold 2000 years ago (and irritatingly off-limits to photography). There was a group of Gujarati Jain pilgrims in the temple, playing music and praying in copper crowns and cloth masks while the resident monks made formal offerings. I went to the back of the temple to peruse a montage of the life of Mahavira, which I expected to be a welcome relief from tales of 5-million year old tirthankaras. It was of course more complicated, as in addition to the life of Mahavira himself it mostly detailed the fantastical lives of the previous incarnations of his soul over the aeons, which found their coda in Mahavira's mortal life, attainment of ultimate truth, and ascension into the heavens.

Next I popped quickly over to some minor old temples and discovered why few people come to see Osiyan.: the age of the temples does not make them any less small and unremarkable. I also saw a deep, lushly-planted baori (step-well) and made my way back to the bus stand, where I was quite surprised to see a pair of peacocks chilling on the roof of a pharmacy. I had assumed that peacocks were like psychedelic turkeys or little blue emus, a bird only in the Linnaean sense of the word, but it turn out the bastards actually have some spring and can hop and flap their way up to a rooftop in only one or two steps. I eagerly wished to travel seven years into my past so that I could be smaller, kinap a peacock, take it to the top of a tall temple, and hang-glide Zelda-style about town as it squawks and flaps madly to carry me to obscure ledges filled with treasure. Then I realized that seven years ago I was sixteen and much the same size I am today so I was forced to discard this dream into the same sentimental rubbish bin as my scheme to travel India on a motorbike with a pet monkey poking out of my backpack.

my bus back to Jodhpur departed at sundown. I noted that the idol on the dash seemed to be a female fertility goddess. Good, I thought, the driver must be a family man. He wants to live. Above the idol was a row of colored lights that turned on periodically and sometimes began to flash rapidly. Seeing my interest (there was nothing else to look at in the dark except the lights of oncoming trucks) he explained that it was attached to a radar gun and the lights signaled the presence of an object directly ahead while the flashing indicated the speed at which a frontal collision was becoming imminent. I watched this device anxiously for much of the two-hour trip, and observed its frantic flashing in the face of a stream of approaching headlights. It was only late in the journey that I thought to count the cycles of flashes and time the intervals between their flashing, when I determined that the lights were actually just on a set pattern and were merely the typical bright crap that Indians like to decorate with. I felt foolish for believing him, but it was a convincing joke - collisions are imminent all the damn time. "Ha ha yes, is one pattern!" he laughed after I jovially accused him of his deceit.

Ha ha indeed. It's funny because every 45 seconds we almost died.

Blue City Blues

My woman done left me
My caaaaamel toooo
The buuuus ride was bumpy
The buuuu-uuusss ride was long
The laandscaaape was saaandy
The skyyyyy was bright bright blue
Crossed the desert to Jodhpur
And now I've got those Blue City blues

Got lost in the ooooold tooown
A big mess of..... ALLeyways
No street signs I found
I triieeeed, OH I tried to steer by buildings
But they're AAALLLLL painted BLUE
Oh sweet LAAWD can you help me
I got them Blue City blues

I sit on a roof
A-waitin' for food
I look at them taaallll boxy houses
And I said to the Lord "LORD I must be dreaming
  I must be losing my mi-ind
 I see THOUUSSSANDS of giant Lego bricks
 Grey, cream, and BLUUUEEEE
And a huge stone FORT them ol' Raaajputs built
To give me Blue City blues"

I walked to the FOOOOORRRRTT
But got lost a-gaaiii-aaiin
A gay Indian begged me to just FUCK HIM then and there
But I ain't got no friends a-nowhere
All I've got....OHHHHH ALL I"VE GOT
Is them Blue City blues.

Hey lovely lady, I see you over there looking at the sky. You've got the blues in you too. Let me just play you a little tune. I ain't got no saxophone. Sold it for spiced tea and opium. Makes the pain go away. So I'll just sing you my melody...goes a little something like this...

AAAaaaaabbwwaaada bwwaadaa bweee boom. 
Aaaabwaadda bwadda bweee-eeeee. Baddabadaba baabba.
Aaaabweeeeda bwaaada bweeee.
Baaa daaa daaaa
BWAAAAAAAABAAADAABAAABWWAAABA
Aaabwaaadabwaddabwee

Oh, OH sweeet MAAAmaaaa
Why don't you just.... sliiiiiide on next to me
I'll make you QUEEN of MY KINGdom
Take you to my paaaaa-lace
Ha, well it's a musical palace, baby, just a little guesthouse
Small, but easy on the eyes...just like you
OOooohhh come in to my CAStle
 And end our Blue City blues
Come in to my AAaaarmmss
And ennnd my blue-ball'ed blues

Now baby you just lie there, real comfortable-like, while I rub in this lotion, tell you a story about Jodhpur.

You see, sugar, Jodhpur was built in the middle ages as a new capital for the most powerful of the Rajput kingdoms, Marwar, the Land of Death. Makes your spine tingle. Mmmmmmm....speaking of spines, your back is so smooth, honey. Let me massage that sweet caramel. Now, the Maharaja Jodh Singh founded Jodhpur and built a massive castle on the sheer cliffs above the city. Four hundred feet over the walled city, the hundred-foot walls encase palaces, reservoirs, and garrisons, making it an impregnable citadel for over six hundred years. When you get to the gates on foot, the walls there are twice as high. There's an audio tour and...sugar don't fall asleep, let me tell you about the audio tour. The audio tour is spectacular, a tour de force in historical narration enlivened by quotes from Kipling, spoken recollections by the present Maharaja and his family, trumpet fanfares, larger-than-life anecdotes, and a narrator who delivers his lines with near-Biblical drama..."The Meherengarh fort stands as the ultimate symbol of military strength and honor. Its halls and ramparts ring with the echoes of history and legend. In all the centuries no cannon has breached its walls...no elephant has ever battered through its gates."

There's a palace inside, a masterfully decorated tribute to pleasure, refinement, and power. It's the way a man should be for his woman, strong but gentle. You've got some tension built up in those shoulders. Baby you need that strong and gentle touch. Nod your head if that feels good. I knew you would. The palace walls soar mightily, while the lattice windows are carved as delicately as the lace in your bra....*Snap* You won't be needing that.

Somewhere along the way the Maharajas built a new palace. You can see it there, the graceful giant on the hill across town, lit up for all to marvel at on this breezy night. The blue city lies nestled, sprawling between these hills, a million people under their watchful gaze. Within the old city the many-floored homes and workshops form shadowy, blue-edged canyons, with the flow of humanity cutting between its walls like water slicing through ancient gorges. You'll see the new palace is far outside the walls. It has no weapons of any kind. Maybe it's a sign of hope, that we can all live together the way we should, no more killing, no more fighting our brothers. Baby, you feel what I'm saying? We need to make love, not war.

Oohh foooooooxxxy woman
My heart's aching for you, woman
Life, life it's been treatin' me so bad but you're smellin' so damn good
Let's loosen up that belt there
Run my hands on that beeee-hiiiiind 
Gonna unFASTEN that skkkiiiiirt now
See what I can fiiiind...
Blue panties between your legs now?
Just...gonna...TAKE these.....foooorrrr my piece of mind
Oh baby your sooooft skin
It don't neeeed no cotton blues
Just MOOOVE with me sweeeetheeaart
And put an end to my....Blue City blues 

Out Of The Sand, Into The Sandcastle

After three days roaming a shadeless desert without sunscreen, the only burn I have is a friction burn on my thighs from the ceaseless agitation of my loins against camel back, leaving my skin in those regions feeling like I slid down a rope too fast in gym class. I swear upon the names of the ~1,000,000 Hindu gods that I will never ride a camel again until they devise a way to mount a cushioned gyroscope to the saddle.

Around the time we approached the outskirts of Jaisalmer at breakneck speed, passing the common sights of an urban periphery such as high-voltage power lines, military police checkpoints, and random piles of cinderblocks our driver loaded a ghastly-looking, heavily-scratched Indian pop CD depicting on its face two Rajasthani puppets dancing while a silhouetted caravan of camels crossed in the background. As this digital monstrosity began to play, I thought about how far civilization and technology have come from the days of wandering in the desert to produce such a device, and as the disembodied puppet voice wailed cacophonously over the same abominable Indian drum machine used in every Hindi pop song since 1973, I looked out the window, saw a pair of fat tourists taking digital photographs of a pig sifting for banana peels in a pile of spare rickshaw motor parts, and concluded that Progress is a lie.

Jaisalmer, a teeming metropolis of noise and commerce to the villagers who flock here for work and trade, is in fact a charming and fairly relaxing Indian city. Excuse me, an Indian squirrel just stole the last bite of my honey sandwich. Guess whose species is going on the nemeses list.

Anyways, Jaisalmer is a quaint medieval desert town of 65,000 people pretty much in the middle of nowhere that depends largely on its convenient location for an Indian Air Force base from which to carpet-bomb Pakistani soldiers guarding their half of the sand. Rising from the center of the old city is Jaisalmer's fort, also known as the Golden City because it is constructed entirely of yellow sandstone. It is actually closer in color and texture to the cheese filling in a Ritz Bitz cracker, and looks like it has been crumbling because people have been justifiably scraping bits off to go with their popcorn. In fact the fort is crumbling primarily because of poor conservation but also because the Maharawals of Jaisalmer, being Rajput kings, spent centuries getting in wars which Jaisalmer tended to lose. It's no surprise that they lost. Their kingdom consisted of some 100 tiny villages in what even they admit is a "sandy waste" and a capital city that had a population of 7,000...in the year 1900. During their epic defeats of the middle ages in which the soldiers of the fort ended up resorting to mass suicide their army probably consisted on 17 dudes sharing a camel and a bunch of scarecrows. In the palace armory, along with the usual assortment of swords, shields, daggers, and ungainly firearms, is an example of a warrior's bow and arrow...from the early 20th century. Dynastic war fail.

In any case, despite Jaisalmer's historical ineptitude it is very beautiful. As it is located in a part of the country boasting neither "inhabitants" nor "resources", it is spared most of the unpleasant effects of modernity that plague other Indian cities. The fort stands out on the hilltop against the pristine, cloudless sky like the gods' own sandcastle, and from below you can just make out traces of the bustling life within. The fort is not just a monument but part of the city, with thousands of people living within its old servant homes. A short climb up through the many winding gates leads into the heart of the city, where the Maharawal's palace hangs overhead, looking over a tight maze of narrow streets, crumbling mansions, and ancient homes and temples. Homes and shops are built into the sandstone bastions, with restaurant kitchens sometimes built around 14th-century cannons sticking out the window and fabric shops with holes in the roof from long-ago sieges.

At one corner of the fort is a claustrophobic labyrinth of seven Jain temples. I knew this was going to be good. When I got there I discovered that somewhere along the way, due to crowded conditions within the fort, the Hindus and Jains decided to share the temples. The result, which combines the Jain penchant for obsessively ornate carving on every available surface with the Hindu penchant for images of wacky deities, is astounding. Connected to each other by barely-noticeable passages and twisting staircases, each of the temples contains a dazzling array of carved art, where hundreds of marble and gold statues of calmly seated Jain tirthankaras rest in shrines adorned in intricate scenes of Hindu gods with varying numbers of body parts belonging to different species playing music, dancing, carrying animals, and having sex. In the midst of all this, as Jain priests make offerings of holy paste in their inner sanctums, Hindu priests only feet away offer incense to their gods and circle about counting hanging bats on the sculptures as a measure of good fortune. Revealing an unusual familiarity with Jain and Hindu mythology (for a tourist), I was invited deeper into this shadowy warren of the gods where foreigners are rarely led and had the meanings of each of the multitude of statues explained to me in excessive and mind-boggling detail. I left baffled but satisfied.

Back out on the streets I reveled in the atmosphere of Jaisalmer. Not only can you happily breathe the actual atmosphere, but the ambiance is quintessentially Indian, almost a parody of itself. A platoon of poorly-mustached soldiers, half named Singh, attempted to maneuver a broken-down army truck while groups of splendidly-mustached old desert men in pink and orange turbans sat around drinking chai, only to briefly restore the engine and have it fail again when they were forced to stop by a barricade of contentedly digesting cows sitting in the shade beneath the last fort gate. Walking down the street, the merchants tried with all their energies to entice me to their shops. A wild-eyed dealer of arts and antiques gesticulated feverishly and implored "FEAST YOUR EYES, YES, FEAST YOUR EYES ON THIS CAVE OF WONDERS, THE FINEST ANTIQUES IN ALL THE INDIA, FOR YOUR VERY SELF THIS DAY." A massive-grinned man with a metal pot balanced on his head followed me through the alleys playing a Rajasthani violin and enthusiastically saying "yes, very nice" at random intervals before unleashing a hyperactive and unmelodious burst of sound from his instrument and then suddenly shifting back into song.

I climbed into one of the bastions to eat at a restaurant that offered Tibeto-Mexican fusion cuisine. It was not good.

Finally, after a visit to the Maharawal's equally sand-colored palace I descended to the lower old city and sat on a rooftop, dreaming wistfully of the desert and gazing into the sky...

How many hump-backed livestock change?
Why are camels so deranged?
Where were you when we were getting high?
Clumsily walking through the sand
Moving slower than Gondwanaland
Where were you when we were getting high?
Someday you will find me
Caught beneath a sand dune
In a camel-spit supernova in the sky
Someday you will find me
Caught beneath a sand dune
In a camel-spit supernova
A camel-spit supernova in the sky