The Red Fort And Other Historical Learnings

The Red Fort is Delhi's most distnctive immensity. In that it is, indeed, goddamn enormous. The gigantic red sandstone strecture completely dominates Old Delhi, set as it is conveniently across the street from the Jama Masjid. The Red Fort and the Jama Masjid were both commisioned and erected by Shah Jahan - the man otherwise known as The Guy Who Built the Taj Mahal - and the face of Northern India today is defined by his remarkable good taste.

I somehow managed not to actually go inside the Red Fort on my last trip. And it looked like the same was going to happen this time, too. It's a classic scenario: a massive, beloved tourist attraction that you never quite find the time to go to. And you use a wide variety of excuses to justify it. It'll take a long time. It's hot in there. The admission is expensive.

Then, I cleverly left my debit card in a restaurant. I'd been meeting with a charming old friend from Bangalore, we'd had a couple of drinks, we'd had a lovely time, I had (characteristically) got distracted by some amusing twist in the conversation when the check came - bam. The night before I left on an early train to Amritsar.

I discovered this at 5:30 in the morning, when I woke up to go to the train station. Whoops. Needless to say, I wasn't getting on that train until I found my damn card. Thankfully, Providence (or something) came through for me. The properitor of Defense Colony's Angels in the Kitchen had, upon finding the card, immediately put it in a lock box and had been waiting for me to call. What a mensch. His restaurant has excellent fusion cuisine, a lovely ambience, and an alluring spread of desserts. You should eat there post-haste when you are in Delhi.

So, I got my card at noon, I missed my train, I was stuck in Delhi for one more day with no idea what to do. I got online post-haste and booked a train ticket up to Dehradun, with the intent of returning to the charming Raj-era hill station of Mussorie as a stop-gap measure. There were actually seats available on the train. So far, so good. My blood pressure had spent the entire evening at a level usually experienced immediately prior to a fatal cardiac event. I had to go do something with my day. So: Time to See the Damn Red Fort.

I hailed a taxi and we dutifully made the rather long drive down to Old Delhi and the Fort Area. Halfway there, the formally blue and reasonably welcoming skies entirely erupted. It was apocalyptic rain, the kind only India can really dish out - it felt like that shit would hammer through the car walls and drown us all. Everyone on the street was running crazily for shelter. "Well, uh, we're here," the driver said. I had, of course, not thought to bring an umbrella. I had a brief internal debate: Do I go back to the hotel and not see the Red Fort once again, rendering myself a member of the Crappiest Tourists in Human History society? Or do I man up, square my shoulders, and completely and utterly soak myself in the interest of culture?

I got out of the taxi. Was soaked to the bone in roughly 2.5 seconds, maybe less. I marched over to the ticket counter anyway, where about 60 tourists were huddled under a leaky awning, standing in ankle-deep water. (Delhi and drainage? Hah, don't make me laugh). I sloshed on through and bought my ticket. I was going to see the damn Red Fort if it killed me. I walked through the gates.


A lovely pavilion in the inner compound.

It's hard to express how shockingly huge the Red Fort is. And this becomes an incredibly good thing. If you pay the price of admission to the Fort, you see, you've got an immense, controlled, and quite clean green space pretty much to yourself (in the off season), a place of remarkable serenity and relaxation in the middle of Delhi, one of the planet's bigger clusterfuck metropolises. The rain finally slackened off, to a refreshing drizzle, and I strolled down the path through the former British army barracks inside, headed to the Indian Independence museum within to wait out the last gasp of the rain. It was really quite lovely.



The Independence Museum does do a reasonably through job of explaining the long march of India's freedom from its colonial captors. Indians are very fond of demonstrative dioramas in their museums, which always amuse the snot out of me. Not that the subject matter is amusing at all. This depicts the brutal Jalianwalla Bagh Massacre in the 1919 Punjab. Punjabis, spurred to protest by Ghandi, began to demonstrate throughout the region - especially active in Amritsar. British official General Brigadier Dyer was put in control of the city, and he quickly began to use harsh methods to bring the demonstrators to heel, including random arrests and a total ban on all gatherings. On that fateful April day, a large number of Punjabis gathered at a protest meeting- unaware of the anti-meeting law - and were suddenly confronted by Dyer and his men. The British troops without warning began to indiscriminately fire into the peaceful - and shocked - crowd. Almost a thousand people died. An excellent article on the massacre is here.

Dyer, for his part, wasn't exactly repentant. In his own words:

"I fired and continued to fire till the crowd dispersed, and I considered that this is the least amount of firing which would produce the necessary moral and widespread effect, it was my duty to produce if I was to justify my action. If more troops had been at hand the casualties would have been greater in proportion. It was no longer a question of merely dispersing the crowd, but one of producing a sufficient moral effect from a military point of view, not only on those who were present, but more specifically throughout the Punjab. There could be no question of undue severity...(report to the General Staff Division on 25 August 1919)"

Interestingly enough, Micheal O Dwyer, the official who approved the action, was assassinated by a Sikh -one Udham Singh - in 1940 (Dyer having already kicked off).

I had not been aware that a significant Indian independence movement existed among Indian Americans (mostly Punjabis) in the early 1900s. Pretty cool story, that. Check out the Ghadar Movement here. The Ghadarites published journals and newsletters extolling Indian independence, but were tragically (and often fatally) repressed by the British.


The Mughals were very keen on water features. You would be too if you lived in the hell that is April in Delhi.

On to the main attraction, the Red For itself. Well, if I could find it. it's really easy to get lost in the countless paths of the Red Fort. There's usually helpful soldiers carrying fearsome looking weaponry to give you directions, but these directions (as it turns out) are usually wrong. I ended up walking over a small green bridge that connected two parts of the fort to one another - now divided by a highway.



A train was going by under me, a coal train. For a moment, I had ab brief and utterly surreal feeling that I was standing on a railway bridge somewhere in North Carolina and that a hobo carrying a ruck-sack and a banjo might manifest magically out of the bushes. Thankfully, the feeling passed.



I turned myself around and finally found myself in the main fort complex - in other words, the old stomping grounds of the Great Mughals themselves. It's an incredibly beautiful place, full of graceful Mughal architecture - and what architecture style really tops it? - and old British buildings, water-features and garden areas. Sadly, the Fort is poorly maintained, and little to no restoration or reconstruction work has been done. This place could be reasonably easily restored to its former majesty...but I suppose the 15 USD or so entry fee isn't going into the upkeep of this superb piece of human history. Can't say I'm shocked. The actual living quarters of the



This is the Moti Masjid or the Pearl Mosque, erected by the hyperactively religious Emperor Aurangzeb. Aurangzeb did not share the rather relaxed and hippie-ish religious notions of his forefathers, and imposed a new era of strict Muslim rule on India. To his detriment: his disinterest in tolerating minor Indian cultural elements like, I don't know, Hinduism, ended up diminishing the influence and popular support that the Mughal Empire had previously enjoyed.



At least the rather dreary and startlingly uncharismatic Aurangzeb could appreciate a decent building, as evidenced by the graceful Masjid. (Aurangzeb is also the guy who deposed and locked up his father - Shah Jahan - in the Agra Red Fort, allowing him the smallish dignity of being able to view his Taj Mahal from across the river. Whatta mensch).



The Hamman, or Royal Baths, are definitely the crown jewel of the Red Fort Complex. This incredibly ornate and lovely white marble structures are where the Mughals abluted, shot the shit, and consorted with their armada of concubines in their off time (and being a Mughal emperor, hey, it was off time whenever the hell they felt like it!). Official business was supposedly conducted here on a regular basis.


Like every tourist attraction in India, the Fort is perennially full of roving packs of bored teenage boys. I find myself wanting to yell GO AWAY AND GET A JOB whenever they hit on me, though doubt this would really achieve much.

This strikes me as a bit awkward - being naked in a royal bath with your boss and a couple of concubines - but I guess cultural norms change. Fast. The complex and highly advanced water system sprayed both hot and cold water, and basins of rose-scented liquid were thoughtfully set out for the sweaty. It is nice to know that the Mughals probably smelled pretty good.



Built in a similar style, the Diwan-i-Khas was the Emperor's personal quarters and also served as an official receiving room (presumably for folks who didn't warrant a full rub-down and a toe tickle by some Kashmiri babe). This is the place where the iconic Peacock Throne of the Mughals sat- and is the place where the great Persian warrior Nadir Shah took it in 1739. There really was an artificial river that ran through the holy baths and this area, nicknamed (somewhat grandly) the Nahar-i-Bihisht or the River of Heavenly Peace.



These rooms were used and abused by the British after the exile of the Last Mughal, Bahadur Shah II after the Delhi Mutiny - soliders were quartered here and doubtless had boozy drinking parties and other carryings-on in what were formerly sacred and incredibly closeted environs. As is the case with all successful invading parties, isn't it?




There's a small museum kept up in the sadly shabbily-maintained Mumtaz Mahal, the old residence of Shah Jahan's beloved wife.



Mughal armor.


The Diwan-I-Am was the spot where the Emperor engaged in public activities of state. Inaugurations and other show piece events happened here - as evidenced by the epic and imposing scale of the building. It's hard to imagine, but the building was originally coated in burnished white plaster, and was trimmed with real gold. If you were inordinately lucky, you might get invited here for a state event, doubtless involving elephants and other awesome things.



I ambled back outside the Fort now. What a pleasant respite from the constant sensory fist-to-your-face assault that is day to day Delhi. A tourist outside the gates was being shaken down for money after foolishly photographing some charming local boys. Rickshaw drivers were calling at me from behind the metal security-gates, as soon as I emerged. The sky was electric blue and the weather almost cool, post-rain, and the Fort was redder then I'd ever seen it before. Such is life, such is life. If there be a paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this....

Delhi: The India International Center, Sikkim and Asbestos Poisoning

When I stay in Delhi I stay at the India International Center. Sheila and her daughter, Deepa, are members. I stay on because I'm a Guest.

The Center is one of India's pre-eminent gathering points for intellectuals, scholars, and creatives. It was founded in 1958 and inaugurated in 1962 by the great Nehru himself. The architecture style is aggressively 1960's, all cement, terraces, and reflecting pools in extremely random places. I have a weird affection for aggressive 1960's architecture, possibly because I have a weird affection for the 1960's themselves. When I stay at the center, I always get a feeling that I have regressed in time, that I am in the midst of an earlier and more confusing era. 1960's India: The Green Revolution. Indira Ghandi and Nehru in the top seat. The Non-Aligned movement. Mass exodus of Western kids with too much free time to Ganges holy cities. Yes, those was the days. The Center remembers them. Possibly still is livin them. (However, the place, to its credit, does offer free wifi).

The Center mostly holds events. Carnatic music events. Poetry readings. Political forums and discussions on issues like Kashmir, global warming, and nuclear proliferation. Famous writers and thinkers. Food events showcasing regional cuisine. There's always the vague strain of sitar music or independent Icelandic film coming from the auditorium. Ex-pats like the place too.

The Center has a nice library that is usually full of elderly people researching great and important things. Checking Facebook on the free computers in there feels perverse. Using the Facebook Thingiemub in a room full of people checking the backstory of the Ayodah verdict, or researching Tamil art, or developing green-develoment policy. Me concerned about what my friend drank last night at her house party. I'm often a bit ashamed at the Center. There's always cars with police escorts pulling, disgorging people that are extremely important. I never know who they are. I'm not sure if I should ask. The Center always has some kind of Event going on. I like these Events because they usually involve free and fairly elaborate spreads of food. I can slip in, smile and nod and evade pointed questions, and slip out with a free cup of tea and a samosa. (Benefitting off the largesse of Indian political leaders I can't be bothered to know about. Ah, youth).

The Center is staffed, used, and patronized by almost exclusively people over 60. This is always a bit awkward for me. I try not to play my music too loud in my room at night. There's an elderly Sikh couple next door who seem to be in town for some sort of conference. They leave their shoes outside the room. I think they subsist entirely on room service. God knows what would happen if I disturb them. They're probably working on a plan for the Economic Salvation of India, or something. And here I am sitting in my hotel room with no pants on at night, reading web comics. The first time I stayed here I was 19 and was desperate to enjoy Delhi's nightlife, or what there is of it. I snuck out of the Center at night a couple times. Not really snuck out - no one stopped me - but the gate was closed, and the guards gave me looks of subcontinental disapproval as I walked out with handbag and heels. Scandalous.

The on-site restaurant is also old-fashioned, like everything here. It's in a big, airy atrium sort of room, and has a simple menu. Indian and Western food. Cheap prices, since elderly people enjoy nothing more then complaining about how expensive everything is getting. (A surreal experience for a Westerner: listening to an Indian person of a certain age complain about how outrageously expensive India has become. You look down at your two dollar feast of a dinner and think, Huh.) I like to order aloo gobi and chicken tikka and watch the people around me. Something about highly educated Indian women in highly elaborate saris - they strike me as perhaps the most fearsome group among the intellectuals here. A highly educated Indian woman? Not to be trifled with. The onsite bar is where the old intellectuals go to discuss geopolitics over glasses of Scotch whiskey on the rocks. The Indian upper-class really, really love whiskey. I do, too. Maybe one day I will join their geriatric and intellectually earnest ranks. Debating the trajectory of history until I die of a liver ailment. There's worse ways of going.



The Center abuts Lodhi Gardens, which is by far my favorite place in Delhi. It's a large and well maintained park, set apart by the ruins of the forcibly ejected Lodhi Dynasty in the center of them. The ruins are beautiful and the park is large - there's even a jogging trail, a rare commodity indeed in India. Not that anyone can run very far on a hot Delhi day. You'll lose half your body weight in sweat. I tried it - I know. I apologize to any innocent old people that were offended by the wave of stink that accompanied me when I came back to the Center. Just as an aside.

Anyhow. I left the International Center that morning and headed out, out into the muggy vastness of Delhi. Delhi is large, terrifically large, and it's hard to get a sense of that unless you go out of the central area. The Center is in the area near Lodhi Gardens, the diplomat's domain. It's green and grassy, and there isn't much traffic. There's embassies everywhere, and plenty of foreigners ambling around the nearby Khan Market shopping area, buying Pop-Tarts and Honey Bunches of Oats at inflated prices. It's not really Delhi up here. Maybe not really India. I saw a blonde girl in a mini-skirt and a tank top walking her golden retriever on the sidewalk near Lodhi Gardens one day. That sort of thing might cause a civil riot in other parts of Delhi. Here? Well, eh. (I envied her. I miss wearing my regular, slatternly clothes so very much when I'm in India).



I needed to pay a visit to the Sikkimese mission in Delhi, mostly. I was going to Sikkim. There's a swell website called IndiaMike.com. It specializes in traveler tips about India, and also hosts an extremely popular online forum. I put up a message on the Seeking Traveling Partners bit, and got a reply from one Kiran. (Shockingly enough, he's Indian!) He wanted to go to Sikkim. I had no real idea where or what Sikkim was, but the fact that it was obscure immediately attracted me. Some Google work indicated that Sikkim was a once-independent kingdom in the Himalayas, in between Nepal and Bhutan. It joined India as a semi-autonomous region in the 1970's - by demand of its own people - and now functions as a scenic, natural, and relatively little visited Shangri-La substitute. Most pleasingly - unlike Nepal - Sikkim hasn't experienced much in the way of sectarian violence in recent memory.

It sounded good to me. I sent him a message and told him I'd go. We set about working out logistics. Of course, traveling (as a single female) with some random guy I met on the Internet is, technically, a lousy idea. But I'm a child of the Internet. All my friends were online during a brief and intensely embarrassing period of my teenage years. I met quite a few of them in real life, and none of them had murdered me, dismembered me, and dressed my mutilated body up in a fluorescent pink fursuit. I figured that odds were good that Kiran would also be a relatively normal specimen. Anyway, dude had a blog dealing (among other things) in the philosophical ramifications of the Internet, a Facebook page with lots of pretty pictures of hiking in the Swiss mountains, and was going for a PHD at a top French university. I figured: if he was sociopath, at least the conversation would be interesting. Kiran turned out to be the best traveling partner this pain-in-the-ass geek could have asked for. The Internet, as is usual, came through.

To enter Sikkim, you need to get a pass first, or what they call an Inner Line Permit. This is because Sikkim just so happen to share a border with Chinese-controlled Tibet, and India and China have got issues with one another, just some little tiny ones not super worthy of notice here. Foreigners aren't allowed anywhere near the border with China in Sikkim, and you're not likely to score a pass if you blithely amble up and start talking about your journalism career. (The place is also crawling with Tibetan refugees, which always makes China a little antsy). Thankfully, getting an Inner Line Permit is quite easy, and pleasingly, free. If you've planned far enough in advance, you can get one stamped in your passport when you get your Indian visa. If not, you can either get one at the border in Sikkim, or, conversely, visit the Sikkimese consulate in Delhi.

The Sikkimese consulate was located conveniently near to the US embassy. It's always good to know where that is, in case your vacation turns into a hellish orgy of violence and horror and maybe you need to decamp in a black helicopter peppered with gunshot. Just in case. (I watched the Killing Fields one time too many this summer). The US embassy is a massive building - I think. You can't see it at all because of all the barbed wire. Somehow I'm not surprised.

The Sikkimese building, in stark opposition to the American monolith, looked small and twee from the outside. Just like the country itself, as I'd soon find out. I went inside and was confronted with a massive, bright white puff of what appeared to be asbestos dust. There was no one around. I finally accosted a guy in a tie from around the corner. "Is this thing open?" I said.
"Construction going on. But, open." he said. "You come to get visa? Go upstairs."



I went upstairs. Three flights of stairs. The asbestos smoke got thicker and thicker. I could hear drilling coming from somewhere, but couldn't determine the source. My eyes were watering. "Upstairs," I realized, had been an extremely vague term, and the smoke was now so thick that I couldn't see anything more then a foot or two in front of me. I wondered if I was going to have to stumble blindly downstairs again. Maybe I would be wandering the goddamned Sikkimese consulate building until I died. Which would come relatively quickly, what with the asbestos. Suddenly, a scrawny boy holding a tea jug emerged out of the mist, looking as surprised to see me as I was to see him. "Visa?" I asked.
"Okay okay!" he said. "Up stairs!" He pointed to a small flight of stairs. I went up. Sure enough, there was the visa office. It was thankfully plated in glass and had only a little asbestos smoke in there. I walked in and asked for a Sikkimese entry pass. The process took roughly five minutes and was free. I even got travel brouchures and free tea. Of course, the issue remained of getting back *down* the goddamned stairs. I headed out to the porch for a moment or two to get some air. And took a couple of photos. You can't really see it here, but Delhi's downtown skyscrapers are delightfully post-apocalyptic and decaying. Oh, Delhi.

So. I was going to Sikkim. Had my Inner-Line Permit. We had intentions of going trekking, one way or another of course, and I was going to have to buy some outdoors equipment- but pretty much game-set-match, off we went to the Roof of the World. Or at least spitting distance. I may suffer asbestos poisoning symptoms later in life, but, hey, I had my damn permit.

Gujarati Thali and Yet More Rain

The Chor Bazaar, being damp.

I had earlier that day made a desperate and completely unsuccessful attempt at visiting the Chor or "Thieves" Bazaar in Mumbai. It is supposed to be a fascinating, colorful, and slightly maddening place, full of little shops of pilfered antiques and people who might pick your pocket, the sort of thing one wants to experience while at a bazaar in a weird old Indian city. It was pissing down rain of course, the warmish pee-scented rain that Mumbai excels at, but I decided I was going to ignore the rain, I was going to join Mumbai's intrepid and hungry millions and go out and have a look. Surely Mumbaikers, accustomed to the wet, would be out in force at the Chor Bazaar regardless of the weather. I hailed a taxi. "The Chor Bazaar," I told him confidently.

He regarded me over his luxurious Marastha mustache. "As you wish, madame," he said. Idiot, he was doubtless thinking, as he fiddled with his malfunctioning and sorely needed windshield wiper.

I got there and of course, it was totally empty. A few people in colorful outfits crouched under their stalls with ponchos over their heads and resigned expressions on their faces. An occasional auto-rickshaw splashed by, tossing mud up into the air. "Why the fuck are you here?" everyone seemed to be saying to me. This was a good question, but I popped open my umbrella and walked down the street anyway. Maybe I could walk myself into something interesting. Getting lost? Not a problem - there was always a taxi, eventually.

This was a swell plan until my shoe broke. I was left standing beside the road in a considerably sized puddle, standing on one foot and trying not to think about the detritus in the water that swirled around my feet. But this was Mumbai - a cab was inevitable. Or so I thought. The rain had driven seemingly the entire city into the tender embrace of its cabbies, and all the cabs that came by were full. I waited, damp and hungry and in a remarkably pissed off mood, for about twenty minutes until an empty cab finally sailed by.

I got the cab to drop me off at the Sea Palace and hobbled inside to sulk for a bit, at least until lunch time. On the wrought-iron fence around the hotel, I spotted an immense object that resembled a sea-shell: it was in fact a freakishly enormous snail.

I gleefully unstuck the beast, palmed it, and took it inside. I am fairly certain the hotel staff noticed that I was taking a freakishly large snail up to my room, but were probably too shocked to make any sort of comment. I don't recall a No Snail clause in the sign on the wall, so it was probably perfectly all right in legal terms.



Then we had a gigantic cephalopod photoshoot.



Work it, baby. I am getting a brand new camera - Canon Eos 550 - in a few days and am drooling with anticipation over how much better macro shots of things like snails will look with that puppy in hand. That's your nerd public announcement of the day.

For lunch, I decided to hunt down one of Mumbai's signature food stuffs. I was going to find myself a Gujarati thali.

India, like the USA, is deeply susceptible to the allure of the All You Can Eat. However, India and Indians aren't overburdened with buffets - something that may come as a shock to Americans who have never encountered Indian food outside of a steam-table. In India, all-you-can-eat manifests itself in the thali, a steel plate filled with small portions of various curries. There's a profusion of places to get Gujarati thali in Mumbai. I decided on Samrat - it was both highly reccomended and reasonably close to Colaba. I didn't want to have to swim there.


Thali plate prior to filling.

I decided to try the Gujarati thali at the famous Samrat restaurant, in Churchgate. Samrat is an old, respected, and enormous place, with seating for over 200 and a cake and gelato shop attached to it. The interior is aggressively air conditioned, kitted out in the hip colors of 1975 (like many Mumbai landmakrs) and is very clean. The oldish and profusely moustached wait-staff possess that endlessly amusing, slightly snobby old-school Mumbai appeal. Pretty much everyone here gets the Gujarati thali, a mixed plate offering an assortment of traditional foodstuffs from the Gujarat region.

There's three universals with Gujarati thali. The first is that it is almost always vegetarian, in keeping with Gujurat's Hindu heritage. The second is that it is always remarkably sweet, usually flavored with plenty of jaggery. The water in dry and hot Gujarat is rather salty, and the locals believe the sugar counteracts the saline content. The sweetness of the Gujarati thali attracts the disdain of some hardcore foodies. Me - I think it's quite pleasant in moderation. Third: there's going to be plenty of it. A typical Gujarati thali joint keeps three or four servers with pots of food circulating around the eating area, ready to top off your array of little steel bowls (whether you need it or not). Come hungry.



Samrat has got the thali thing down to a science and the plate, once filled up, is truly a delightful sight. Gujaratis love whole wheat breads, and there's papad, roti, and the Gujarati's trademark wheat bhakri bread. There's a large portion of a dry vegetable curry (shaak) made with bitter melon, eggplant, carrot, and onion. The white stuff is kadhi, made with curds, gram flour, chili ginger paste, coriander, and the ever-present jaggery. It's remarkably refreshing in the heat. The spongy looking item on the right is a sweet dhokla, made of fermented chickpeas and served in a sweet curd sauce. It tastes considerably nicer then it sounds. The round ball is a kachori, a baked item filled with a stuffing of what tasted like sweet potato and peanut. The result was India's delectable answer to a peanut butter cookie. These things are dangerous.



There's a large portion of a dry vegetable curry (shaak) made with bitter melon, eggplant, carrot, and onion. The tomato dish is a sweet-and-sour curry, followed by a curry with stewed peas, and the usual chole, or chickpeas.



Gujarati thali demands a variety of condiments. There's mint chutney, sweet tamarind imli, the classic sweet peach chutney, mango pickle, and chili sauce. Some thali places will also bring you ketchup if you're into that kind of thing. (Indians really love ketchup).

Thali consumed to the extent possible - the waiters act a bit downtrodden if you refuse their endless refills - I headed outside again. Still raining. Still would be.

Mumbai: Mondegars, Wifi, Beggars and Morality, the usual

Boats in the harbor.

I stayed at the Sea Palace hotel, again. It's on Apollo Bunder, about two blocks down from the Taj, and has the great advantage of being located right along the sea and near enough to Colaba, but not near enough that the tourists-and-hooker contagion of Colaba actually carries over. It's 3000 rupees a night which is very profligate by 22 year old punk standards *but* Mumbai budget lodging is not exactly what you'd call salubrious. Nightmarish actually. Bed bugs are the least of your problems - hookers and horny guys attempting to beat down the door are apparently the other occupational hazards. Can't say I'm thrilled. First time I came to Mumbai, I was going to stay at a hotel very near the Sea Palace, which turned out to be the kind of scuzzy-ass accommodation so deeply beloved by European backpackers with creative piercings and Saudi sex-slave traders the world over.

I was prepared to make the best of it, but as soon as my friends came to collect me, they demanded that I move out immediately. "That place is horrible! It was all over the paper last year - some Saudi drug dealers were running it - you have to get out of there"! So I decamped to the Sea Palace. The primary attribute of the Palace is that it is sort of quiet and no one knocks on my door at night wondering if I would like a date. There's a mossy scent in the air and insofar as I can determine no one ever cleans the rooms, but the AC (importantly) is Arctic-level chilly. The entire facility is done up in 1973 pastels, which I always found a bit comforting.


Cafe Mondegar's art, as done by the beloved Goan cartoonist Mario Miranda. He is fabulous.

Colaba, is of course, the tourist-backpacker central of Mumbai. However, having been in backpacker ghettos in places other then India - it's not such a bad offender. There's plenty of 100% legitimate Mumbaikers prowling around here, and the cafes and restaurants are usually packed with young Indians with similar hipster ambitions as their Western counterparts. The Leopold Cafe is of course Ground Zero for that kind of shit (as was perhaps previously mentioned). The food and the booze are overpriced. For my money, I prefer the Mondegar a little further down. The cartoon art on the walls is fantastic, and the staff seem a bit more friendly.


More of Miranda's work, as seen on the Mondegar walls. Good, good stuff.

I spent that first day walking around Mumbai and feeling inordinately pleased to be there. I love Mumbai, down to its filthy and slightly disreputable heart, and I derive great pleasure from wandering the streets and dodging the taxi-cabs that want to pick me up, for to the Indian mass-pysche, apparently, no white person walks on the street *by choice*.



A friend of mine described Mumbai as London on acid: this is a bit approximate, but gets at the spirit of the thing. I think of it more as, say, the demented love child of London and Miami with a bit of a stimulant problem. The architecture is glorious here, England as viewed through an aspirant and highly Indian filter - everything has pillars and spires and soaring granite and has a patina of age and mold on it. Everything in Mumbai is slightly moldy and slightly damp, everything that is older then a couple of months is growing or has grown a considerable covering of lichen, everything is sliding or sinking into the sea. If the British intended to be here for a long time, they picked the wrong place. Mumbai is capable of regenerating itself, but I doubt anything can last *that* long in this climate - this is not the dry museum-air of Dehi, this is organic, the swamp.

I ended up spending that first evening lurking at the Woodsides, lured there by the promise of free Wifi. There were a lot of attractive and fit young Mumbaikers standing around the bar and talking about their scintillating and culturally signifigant jobs in IT or whatever all around me. The bar was atmospherically lit, and as the name promised, decked out entirely in wood. I ordered a Royal Challenge and set up shop. The wifi, to my great pleasure, actually worked. (To find functioning wifi overseas is miraculous, albeit a miraculous event that has become more and more common in this day and age. It is almost a pity that wifi has become so vastly easy to access, even in the strangest of places, to say nothing of phone network based internet connectivity.


Hellaciously Raj statue as seen in downtown Mumbai, near the museum.

I have of late sat in a bumping and body-odor filled share jeep heading out from Sikkim to Darjeeling, passing through the misty tea plantations of the Raj: I briefly called my mother to let her know I was alive, and also had my Gmail account updated. From 17,000 feet in a jeep, looking over the edge of a precipice, thinking I might die: someone wanted to ask me where was good to eat in New Orleans because they liked my blog and Slow Food was having an event in Sacramento and did I want to purchase a ticket, and Tulane wants my goddamn library book back, and I am going to plummet over the edge of a Sikkimese precipice and die in a horrendous inferno of twisted metal and screaming children and Dutch tourists, my Iphone melted to a hockey puck beneath me.

I made a friend at the bar, which is what often happens when you're alone in an Indian city and run into another foreigner. Charles Assaf from Canada, now working in something involving computers in Mumbai and really, really liking it. He had, many years ago, begun a site called The Steak Guys devoted to reviewing good places to consume cow the world over. The irony of his move to Mumbai is noted. It is always deeply refreshing to me to meet other foreigners who actually like India and find it both pleasurable and interesting (albeit in the manner of "challenging" movies in languages you don't understand starring unattractive people, or food products that involve minor feats of hand-eye-coordination to consume, or well, you get the point, India requires some *effort* to parse out...) We spent some time discussing Mumbai and the impending world domination of the Internet, which is what I always seem to discuss with people when I say I have got a blog. Especially people who have got a blog themselves. Give his a look, it's rather good.

The weather was good that night, with only a few bursts of warm rain to keep the gutters running and the taxi drivers predatory. (The rain in Mumbai is always extremely warm and a bit odiferous - to make the piss reference is a bit uncouth, but it is there). The shop keepers who line the street all the way down had put the plastic wrap up over their wares of knock off purses and t-shirts with offensive phrases on them. They cried out HELLO MADAME to me when I walked by but in a half assed fashion. It was getting late and I had not trained them yet, they were not familar with me.

A few nights later, coming back from Woodsides around 1:00 AM or so, I would be confronted with one of The Mumbai Scams as discussed in detail on India Mike.com. Me padding down the dripping column of shops quickly and intently, for it was later then I liked to be out in Mumbai alone - I was remembering the time when an incoherently drunk and thankfully extremely clumsy man had followed me down the street for a good 15 minutes, plaintively asking me to cross over to *his* side of the road so I could Get To Know Him Better. Something like that. A young guy around my age is lounging in an alleyway with a woman and a baby. I walk by and the woman lazily nods to him: he shrugs, stretches a bit cat-like and shoulders the baby, and begins to follow me. He tugs at my sleeve. "Milk for baby! Baby hungry, madame, you buy milk for baby."

It's a scam. Apparently they take you into a shop that's in on the fix, and you are instructed to buy a large carton of instant milk for a ridiculously inflated price - something around 5000 rupees. Once the earmarked sentimental mook pays up, the conman and the shopkeeper merrily split the profits. The kid gets nothing other then a chapati and a slightly less forceful daily smack across the face then usual - the lot of Indian beggar children. It's a hard life.

It was dark, the street was quiet and slimy and rather profoundly creepy, and the man followed me, wouldn't give up. I ignore all beggars, just look right through them - that's what my Indian friends have taught me to do. It generally works pretty well, but this guy was insistent, and I was the only person on the street so why the hell not? I got enraged, really enraged, which is unusual for me. I wanted desperately, really desperately, to punch the man in the face, to go at him with the nearest bamboo stick, to pulverize him into jelly.

The kid irritated me even more because it was the only thing standing the way of this fantastic and delicious fantasy of violence. I couldn't even roar FUCK OFF YOU FUCKING CUNT YOU DOG FUCKING CUNT - usually effective - because of the kid, the damn kid, he had put a cultural veil of protection over himself, he had outsmarted me. I hated both of them utterly.

(Here is where nobility and idealism about poverty in the third world in relation to my own (relative) ostentatious wealth falls apart, on a smelly street in Colaba at two in the morning, right exactly here.)

I admit right here that I hate kids.

India is a terrible place in one sense for those who hate kids, because India will make you hate them twelve times more then you already did. It's the way in which beggars and the poor use kids around here, especially in tourist areas, as cute, insistent, and un-punchable avatars. Street kids in India are almost always under the sway of some sort of begging master or pimp, who deftly extracts every rupee from their grubby little hands and thumps them if they don't cough up. Even the really little kids, as in this case -this particular child was covered in dirt and, apparently totally used to the routine, was limp, inert, and seemed blissfully asleep in a bean-bag like fashion in the guy's arms. Pissed me off all the more that some innocent little squirt was being carted about on a trash-strewn Mumbai street in the service of a renowned scam, a scam that has been going on for twenty years - possibly the man himself was once this limp and smelly child, and had grown up to take part in the glorious and eternal cycle.

"These people want to be poor," some of my Indian friends have said, in reference to the career beggars. "They can't be bothered to do anything else."

I don't know.

I didn't buy any milk.

Mumbai Redux (Lots of Reduxes)

The Taj Hotel. More on that later.

Oh, Mumbai.

Hard to write about Mumbai for me, mainly because so many people more competent then myself have done so before. Mumbai is my favorite city in India, that's for sure, but it's also a Grade A bitch, with horrible weather, extremely strange people, and infrastructure that could test the patience of any deity. I made the oh-so-clever decision to come to Mumbai in the middle of India's worst monsoon in 20 or so years. Of course, the day I flew into Mumbai, the weather was superb. Clear and sunny, brilliant blue skies, not too hot by Mumbai's generally hellish standards. Hah. Pissed down rain for the next four days I was there. But such is the nature of Mumbai. Perhaps more so then any other place I've been, Mumbai does whatever the hell it feels like doing, and you are left with no option other then shutting up and going along with it. It's a nice feeling, though, having the sense that control is out of your hands, that Mumbai has sucked you into its eternally-spiraling drain. I know I'll live here someday. Mumbai has a sort of magnet in it, for me.

I always think of Mumbai as the Miami of India. Same deco architecutre, same filth, same sense of tropical decay and tropical ambition rolled into one. Having spent the past couple years in New Orleans, I see NOLA in Mumbai too - something about the energy, the pervading sense of fish, the cosmopolitan and delightfully threatening nature of the states. All three cities are cities of corruption and not particularly well concealed crime, dissolution, and unadulterated sin and nastiness. To a certain personality, all this is delightful and invigorating. I haven't read Shantaram, by the way. I have this habit of refusing to read books everyone tells me I must read. Real sorry.


The Gateway of India. Britain's "We're real sorry" gift. Pretty much.

I first came to Mumbai two years ago. I'd met this great woman at my internship in Bangalore, by the name of Aneesa. She had grown up in London but her family hailed from Mumbai, and she went back often. We became good friends, and she invited me to come down to Mumbai and hang out with her, since she was headed there after her internship was over and all. I thought this was a swell idea and promptly booked myself a flight to Mumbai. I remember getting out of the airport, mostly, the swell of stink and humidity that smacked me in the face rather like a wet towel. It reminded me of Florida. I realized in that moment that me and Mumbai would probably get along just fine. (The taxi ride that morning - past block after block of crumbling tenements, set along marshes that actually rose up sewage stink from the water, and every other house has got a blue tarp in place of a roof, and there's kids climbing up the metal fence to the airport terminal. Just Mumbai, this is how it is. Ocean drive and the semi-fantastical sight of the mosque on the water (only accessible at low tide), the rickety rides at Chowpatty, and people promenading in the evening along the water, slowly and decisively making their way home, or to wherever the hell people in Mumbai went in the evenings. (Maybe better not to ask).



Anyhow. Had a great time. I met my evil Indian counterpart there. Aneesa's cousin, Saleem, happened to be my age and similarily inclined to late night larceny, preferably in luxury hotels and executed with great prejudice. Aneesa, Saleem, and her incredibly amiable sisters and I wandered around the city and ate a lot of kebabs. A lot of memories of long and slightly damp cab rides out to Bandra, and eating mostly hygenic kebabs from a series of street-side stops, and hopping from bar after bar in the evening to avoid the ever impending chop of Closing Time. We ended up in the bar at the Taj Hotel one evening at 4:00 AM, the only place still open in Colaba. Ordered a plate of french fries and terrorized the wait staff for we had all had more Old Monk then was perhaps advisable in civil society. I stole two pots of ketchup, which sit on my dresser in my room in California. Ketchup is symbolic.

Sometimes they couldn't come out in the evening and so I'd go to the Cafe Leopald, or the Mondegar, one of the two, and then I'd try to do literary shit. I was 19 then and was sure I wanted to be a writer, and doubly sure that a large percentage of writing involved looking serious while hunched over a notebook in an appropriately atmospheric place. God Knows Leopald and Mondegar provide ideal venues for that kind of activity - they attract everything that crawls and skulks in Mumbai, although admittedly the largest percentage of patrons are mere aspirants like myself. I'd order some crap red wine and draw pictures or jot down half-baked and (to myself) very deep and authoritative opinions on the stuff I saw around me. I'd overhear discussions at the tables nearby. They almost always were between European tourists, and concerned where one might find really psychedelic drugs in the cities confines. Nothing too juicy. No white slavery scams to unfold.

You remember the Mumbai attacks. That of course occured in November, not all that long after I returned from India (finally) in May. Right during Thanksgiving. Everyone's in the kitchen, including extended family, fixing up the turkey and I'm glued to the television screen. The image of those black crows flying over the smoking hulk of the building, the fat kid with the machine gun and the mildly shy smirk captured on the surveillance camera, all the details of carpets pulpy with blood. The Leopold Cafe was especially affecting - I kept on thinking of myself trying to be literary, eminently teenaged, sitting at one of those tables, and catching a bullet through my weedy chest for my pains. Somehow it was as if my ambition had rendered me guilty, eminently killable in the eyes of this terrorist organization. A terrifying thought.

I was worried about Saleem - I couldn't reach him on Facebook. He reappeared three days later, to my great relief. He'd intended to hit up Leopold that night but something or other kept him at home. Pretty much everyone in Mumbai ended up at home for these three days and doing what I did - sitting around in a sweaty circle glued to their television. Eating out of their fridges and hoarding their water because it was too damn scary to go outside. Military operations where you live and camoflauged jeeps rumbling by and doubtless a sense of horrible anarchy. Again, this reminded me of Katrina, the paralells, the horror and the sense of everything spiraling fearfully out of control. We all remember the incredible and unexpected (or maybe a little expected) inability of the Indian police and military to actually fix the thing, to take these guys away. The terrorists held out for a long time, a really long time. Sometimes it seemed like they might stay holed up there forever.

That's a dark note.

I came back to Mumbai for two parallel reasons then. I was chasing down being 19 and literary and a bit of a drunk, albeit a reasonably happy one. I was also chasing down the terrorist attacks in a sense of equally literary voyeurism. Had the city changed at all? Could you smell it in the air? Did bloodstains and powder burns still persist on the streets? What did people remember, and what would they be willing to tell me if I (subtly) inquired?

This is perhaps what worries me most about Cambodia, or what is impending. To work in journalism in Cambodia is to work in an environment defined by a horrible trauma. It is of paramount importance that I develop the ability to do this - to talk to people about the nightmarish things that have happened to them in such a way that (somehow) both gets them to open up and does not offend them, piss them off, or make them conclude I am an exploitative idiot. It's a fine line. Going to have to toe it.

Lalbagh Gardens: Greenhouses, Feral Dogs, Somewhat Relaxing

Lalbagh Gardens is one of Bangalore's green centers, and it is also a source of sanity for a large proportion of the area's people. Lalbagh has stands of flowers, a surprisingly mostly-clean lake, an old English greenhouse, and a general air of orderly greenery that is sorely needed in the traffic-choked heart of the city. It is also Bangalore's supreme make out point, giving the young and amorous of the city a chance to wander through the grass, hold each other's hands, and maybe even kiss surreptitiously if no one's looking. It's hard to be an Indian teenager.



A nice enough temple near Lalbagh. If someone could tell me what this kind of structure is generally called, I'd be most grateful.

Tipu Sultan can be credited for Lalbagh. Like many Muslim rulers, Tipu was inordinately fond of gardens and flowers. His father, Hyder Ali, began Lalbagh, but it was Tipu who finished it off, designating it as a protected place in the midst of the at-the-time mid sized town. Bangalore grew around Lalbagh, and the English appreciated it too: they erected the classic-style greenhouse in the park's center.



There is a very big rock in the middle of Lalbagh. It's one of the highest spots in Bangalore, and accords decent views of the cities admittedly not super-prepossessing skyline. If you look the other way, there's a (usually smoking) trash heap. Well, you know. India.



There really are an unusual amount of bird species in Lalbagh, which is impressive for a very urban center. Then again, birds seem to have adapted remarkably well to India's urban localities - you see immense vultures and remarkably pretty little green parrots feeding off trash (or bodies, in the vultures case), perching in people's somewhat emaciated looking backyard trees, and generally going about their business.



I usually avoid stray dogs in India - I'm not too keen on getting rabies - but the dogs in Lalbagh are generally extremely friendly and thus hard to ignore. I recall a torrid but sadly brief love affair with the friendliest stray dog ever here, a few years back. I hope she's still around. The paucity of stray dogs in the USA often shocks Indians. "But where do the dogs go? What do they do all day?" they ask. Well. We usually just give them lots of Puppy Prozac....


Indians love to eat cucumber with chili and salt on them.



Indians like to venerate trees. This is no exception. Indeed, the Peepul is of course the Bodhi tree under which the Buddha himself sat. King Ashoka's son and daughter are said to have brought clippings of the original Bodhi Tree (in Bihar) to Sri Lanka, preserving it after the original died.



The English style greenhouse, one of many Raj-era nods to the Homeland. The greenhouse is of course totally out of sorts with the rest of Bangalore, but I think it functions well as a metaphor. The English wanted to replicate their homeland, their climate, and their foliage wherever they went. It was for this reason that they built up the cool weather and intensely Anglo hillstations in Mussorie, Darjeeling, and Shimla. It was why they stubbornly refused (mostly) to adopt native dress, sticking to wool and cotton clothing that proved uncomfortable and downright dangerous in the Indian heat. They brought over their food, they brought over their language, and they brought over their modes of etiquette and their mail system and thousands of other things beside. (They also brought over some thrilling new venereal diseases, but let's not get into that). The greenhouse stands for all this: it is a glass house made to enclose delicate Continental flowers, it is a contained ecosystem with no relation to the immense and seething India all around it, it is controlled and orderly and gentle. Or was.



Now, of course, the Indians have got it. It is not used for much, although there was a swiftly rotting Independence Day flower arrangement stuck inside this go-round.


Riotous tropical flowers.

Lalbagh also has a considerable amount of cultivated flower species - exotic and local- that are maintained by a small army of dedicated gardeners. It's nice to wander around the rows of flowers and attempt to ID what they are.



The other big attraction of Lalbagh is its lake. It's quite a lovely lake, especially consdering that it is located inside a park in a major Indian city. If one overlooks the occasional patch of suspicious and trash-related bubbles, it's possible to imagine one is somewhere else entirely. There's a surprising number of storks, herons, and other wading birds here.


I love India's occasionally worrisome efforts at public art.

There's a rose garden in Lalbagh, but you can't go inside it. Mustn't pick them. At least you can walk on (or roll on, or play on, or eat) the grass here. I spent a summer in Beijing, once, and grew desperate for the sight of a tiny patch of grass in that grey and highly polluted city.



I went to one of the former Imperial parks and managed to find myself a tiny, table-sized spot of grass, the only one I had come across for weeks. I promptly sat down on it and opened a book. Two minutes later, a young and apologetic looking park attendant came by, and shooed me off. "It's not for sitting on," he explained, "just looking." I could have cried.

But that is beside the point. There is grass here, and it is good.



Lovely and glossy black millipedes in the heart of the park.

The Bangalore City Market, The "Real" India,

The Bangalore City Market (some of it).

So. In a Facebook controversy of sorts, I had been accused (fairly gently) of doing India too plush this time, of avoiding the Real India. Now, the Real India concept is one that I find vastly irritating, mainly because it seems to escape the lips of everyone in the West who has been to India, is thinking of going to India, or has ever even vaguely noticed the base existence of India.

I took the Real India question to a number of Indian friends of mine. My Indian friends, I hasten to add, are definitely not what you might define as salt-of-the-earth types. They're uniformly well educated, hold down good jobs (or have done so in the past) and have generally traveled at least somewhat, either nationally or internationally. No, these are not the people of Mumbai hovels, Calcutta orphanages, or Bihar's baking and miserable plains. However, all of them, every single one, took serious umbrage to the notion of a "real" India.


Apples for sale at the market.

As a friend of mine observed: "Why do Westerners think the Real India is something out of Slumdog Millionaire? What, am I not a real Indian because I have a BA and I don't live in a hut? Where the hell do you people get these ideas?"


Flowers at the market.

I suppose it's wrapped up in the Western, educated notion of Authenticity Tourism. In other words, we want to get away from the beaten track and tour-buses sort of travel and get at something real, touch the heart or the soul of a country in a fashion closed off to the average and lazy-minded tourist. This is, I think, a noble goal. But I also think that this goal causes some Westerners to point-blank dismiss all that is not gritty, difficult, and mildly disturbing about India (or any developing country) as "not real" enough for them. As I overheard while in Sikkim, a little-known and incredibly attractive and well-maintained area of India: "Yeah, I mean, I like it here...but it's so Westernized. So clean."

The Sikkimese had better knock that civic pride and prosperity shit off if they want to draw the Western bohemian tourist set, apparently. Maybe they should import some starving children and leprosy-ridden beggers from nearby Calcutta to jazz the place up.

This notion that a clean, safe, and functional place is somehow "false" is, to put it plainly, a load of hooey. And highly offensive to the Inspiring Native People to boot, who are often extremely proud of what they've achieved in just those areas of cleanliness, safety, and functionality.

Think of it this way. When you receive friends from overseas or out of state, do you immediately drive them to the nearest ghetto-area (and there are plenty, even in the USA) to show them the "real" America because your nice house and interesting neighborhood somehow lack "authenticity"? Somehow, I doubt it.

Now, I think that a tourist should take it upon themselves to get out of the "nice" areas and officially sanctioned tourist areas. Slum tourism is a sticky moral issue in my book, but it seems to work for some. Volunteering is another popular, if somewhat controversial, way of getting at a reality not accessible at the immediate surface. These are things that are good. But they are not the only things.

I refuse to buy that you are somehow being a decadent and ignorant Westerner if you occasionally skew towards the "nice" end of the tourist spectrum, even in developing countries. If staying in a safe hotel that is refreshingly bed-bug free and avoiding cheapie night-buses is a flagrant denial of the Real India on my part, then, well, I suppose I am guilty as charged. To quote Anthony Bourdain, I guess I am a mere tourist and not a traveler.

Another surprisingly uniform thought emerged from my Indian friends.


Dried fruit cart.

"There's no such thing as a single India. You can't define a Real Indian, or even a stereotypical India. India is a bunch of different things mashed together, more so then anywhere else." In other words, there is no Real India (just like there is no Real America) and you are out of luck if you intend to find it somewhere untouched and off the tourist-track. There is no real India, and the notion will set off a fiery and impassioned debate if put to a group of Indians pretty much anywhere.

That is one blanket stereotype about Indians that is 100% true. They are incredibly argumentative).

But anyway. I was feeling guilty about this Real India thing, and so I decided to go out and have a look at the closest thing wealthy Bangalore offers to the Real India of tourist and literary fame. I headed to the Bangalore City Market.


The market building.

The City Market is technically located inside an ornate and lattice work-ridden building in the center of town. This is not actually the case, because the Market is an enormous and tentacle-bearing organism, an organism that has spilled out of its original surroundings (if it was ever contained by them) and has grabbed at most of the neighborhood nearby.


The City Market is nearish to Lalbagh Gardens, but it is easy enough to tell when you're almost there: the automobile and hardware shops increase in numbers, a lot of signs in Arabic and people in white robes appear, and the number of free-roaming cattle and women carrying stuff on their heads increases exponentially. Congratulations, you've made it to the Market.

I like the Market for a few reasons.


Pomegranates at the market.

The first is that the Market clears up a number about mysteries about the operation of Bangalore as a mostly-functional civic unit. The Market is, to put it simply, where most stuff comes from.



Ever wonder where your neighborhood fruit guy gets his stuff? (yes, the one who shouts about fruit while wheeling about his cart at 6 in the morning, turning your thoughts to murder, that guy.)



Why, of course, he goes to the local pineapple wholesaler, who crouches spider-like in the middle of what looks like a pineapple massacre, and sells his stuff to all comers. There's other Guys for all manner of other fruits: bananas, melons, pomegranates, apples, custard apple, guava, you name it, it's here. Don't ask where it came from.




Many restuarants in Bangalore serve their thalis on banana leaves. Paan sellers also use smaller leaves to wrap their mildly narcotic goodies up in. Well, this is where they get them. From this lady. Let's pretend they are given a good chemical bath before coming to the table. (That's a good one).



I am endlessly fascinated by these enormous cones of spices and sandal-paste. I have no idea how they are made or how they manage to stand up like that, without losing their structural integrity. If someone can tell me how this is done, I'd be very grateful.



Ever wonder where the endless, endless buckets and mounds and bags of flowers used for puja come from? Well, here. The Central Market may be better termed the Flower Market, for that is the good that now dominates the entire central area of the building.



It's an absolutely magical sort of place - the corriders are small and incredibly crowded, and you squeeze through as if conveyed by an outside force, shoved along in the crush of bodies, past stall after stall of fresh and heavily scented flowers. The flowers mask the usual India scent of body-odoer and cattle dung, or at least they mix it up and turn it into something more roundly appealing.



The boys at the stalls shout when you go by and hand you armfuls of roses and marigolds: I am totally inept at tucking them behind my ear in the demure fashion of the South Indian girls, but I do them the honor of trying.



The flowers are everywhere being fashioned into garlands, piled into immense structures, or crushed into the ground by the millipede-like churn of a thousand almost conjoined feet. You come in and out of the flower trading area very quickly mainly because you are not able to stop moving, not unless you find something sturdy to hold onto, an anchor in the sea of chlorophyll.




The first time I came here, I was somewhat terminally stoned. The combined effect of the flowers color and scent and the constant movement of the selling arena was, well, psychedelic. You might want to try it. It's not like half of the sellers aren't stoned themselves, you know.




The flower market's best aspect is from above. If you walk up the stairs, you'll find yourself with a fantastic view of the action below. Great photo ops. You tourist, you.



A lot of people in India like it when you take their photo. You have to be careful about this - it's often a scam involving pay-per-snap moolah in touristy areas - but is usually an entirely authentic request in places like the Market. This old lady just wanted to see what she looked like these days. Like this. There was some gesturing in broken English and Hindi afterwards. I recall that I got a marigold out of the deal. Life goes on.



There's quite a few restaurant supply stalls up here. If you ever wondered where you might acquire a karahi big enough to cook a reasonably-sized person in, well, here you are. Not that anyone would ever want to do that.



The Mosque near here. This and Commercial Street are the more "Muslim" parts of town, which is apparent enough judging by signage and what people on the street are wearing. I was in Bangalore at about the height of Ramadan, which meant the faithful were taking especial pains to play by the rules.



India is defined by its street-side food sellers, isn't it? What a shame that us Westerners are advised to stay away from the street-stands, for fear of stomach bugs and possible death. Tragically, the warnings are extremely sensible. But what tasty looking stuff is on offer.