A Post in Memorial: I Walked Around in the Mist Thinking a Lot

I continued hanging out with Patrick. Kiran was still up on the mountain and -hopefully - coming back down in a timely fashion, if altitude sickness and yetis hadn't got him first. I had nothing to do and was very much enjoying it. I visited Darjeeling's Top Tourist attractions a bit half-halfheartedly. I ate a lot of meat since I had grown to miss it in the mountains. I went for long, hilly walks to nowhere in particular. I failed to wake up early enough to go to Tiger Mountain.

I checked out of the Planter's Club at the earliest possible opportunity and booked myself into the more salubrious, if pricier, Shangri-La Regency, which did not have the ghosts of centuries past knocking about and a functional cable television, where I laid sprawled out on the bed and watched Indian intellectuals complain about the Commonwealth Games.

And I'm going to get these introspective posts about the nature of life and death out of the way in a chunk here, because I guess it seems right. Darjeeling was for me, a lot about wandering around on misty hills and ruminating - somewhat against my will - on existence. Looking back on it, almost a year on, it all seemed prescient, in light of what was waiting for me in Cambodia.

After I met Patrick, I met his traveling friend, a Dutch 27-year-old who used to be a competitive cyclist, a real athletic hot-shot. Bert was smart as hell, and he and KIran took to each other immediately, once Kiran actually arrived. They argued geo-politics and Patrick and I talked about packed-to-the-gills buses and hot days in India and what happens when you're trying to make a flight for the Congo. The four of us had dinner together. I'll talk about that later but right now I'll talk about this. Putting a food blog post in here doesn't quite seem right.

There's a cafe in Darjeeling you should find, or perhaps you won't avoid finding it, because far as we could tell it's the only place in town that stays open past 9:00 PM.



The design aesthetic is about what you'd get if your seventy-five year old maiden aunt with a proclivity for knick-knacks happened to be a Tibetan Buddhist monk: lacey things, images of Buddhist saints, lamps in awful taste with dangly things coming off of them and lots of Thangka paintings - there was a scent of incense and perhaps mothball in the air.

The menu, this being Darjeeling, featured nothing stronger than black tea and hot chocolate. I defaulted to hot chocolate in deference to the mist. I settled into a puce cushion. We talked about everything.

It is odd for me to write this now, to think that I would be reading (not much later) of Bert's suicide in January, only a week or so before my second Phnom Penh tragedy - that I will not talk about here, but maybe someday. I went online and noticed a sudden flurry of postings on his Facebook page, which is how death is announced nowadays.

His family had put up an obituary site and I went there and looked. I couldn't figure out how he'd died, since most of the postings were in Dutch. I got a Dutch friend to read a news report I found with his name in it. A suicide. No more details. None I'll ever get, probably. Don't want to pry further.

Had something in him already begun to become undone, despite how normal he was and how charming he was, and how he was telling us about his impending degree in sport's health? He was out here traveling, as many young people do who have some time and a bit of cash on their hands. Some of them are on holiday and that is all they are out for.

Some of them are both on holiday and also looking for something, a purpose, which is the category I like to think I fall into (and fall short of). And then there are the ones who are looking for something far more dire, a reason to root themselves to the earth - a trip that can turn into a farewell tour, I guess.

Did he find what he was looking for up in Sikkim and Darjeeling? Was it the failure to find (whatever it was) that drove him to kill himself? Or were the Himalayas nothing at all to him, a blip on the radar of a mind that had already begun to descend downwards and downwards, again?

Winston Churchill called depression the Black Dog. It follows you everywhere. Churchill strong-armed it, but that's luck, as much as strength. And many don't strong-arm it, let it take them away.

He was young and fit and ordered tea alongside us. He was very blonde and had freckles and was good looking, and spoke with only the faintest hint of a Dutch accent. We had breakfast with him and Patrick at Glenary's, and he complained about the quality of the baked beans.

I have forgotten where he was off to beyond Darjeeling, but the photos remain on his Facebook, which no one has aced out yet. These are things I did not anticipate in a pink-and-mauve Tibetan Buddhist cafe around 11:00 PM at night, when we had conversations we ought to have been having in a dirty bar.

Maybe that's the thing of travel alone,the particular quality - the wisdom that's imparted, the things you get left behind with, the people you meet who steer you along out of some sense of duty.

Bert is dead now, but I'll remember him and that surrealist Darjeeling tea-shop forever, and that provides a hint of comfort to me.

Things I Thought about in Darjeeling; Fortitious Meetings

Skull at the Darjeeling Planter's Club. The Raj; you know.

When I met Patrick; it was one of those moments that occurs to me occasionally when I travel alone, this particular quality of understanding. What do I call it? Kindred spirits is cliched and stupid. It is what happens when two people get to talking and realize (usually quite quickly) that they are very much the same, that their minds inhabit the same space and have walked around and sniffed around the same possibilities.

I took him to the Planter's Club because it was grand and horrible, and I thought he ought to see it. We ducked surreptitiously into what was the old club-room, which was hung with moth-eaten leopard and tiger skins, and engravings, and had a fireplace that was perhaps last lit in the 1960's.

The chairs looked as if they would dissolve into nothing if you sat into them, and were perhaps at one point a sort of off-magenta shade, and everything smelt of dust.

"I bet it was really happening, back in 1925," I said. "Emphasis on 1925."


George Mallory (back in better days)

"Shit, I can only imagine," he said, gazing around the room at the slowly-dying taxidermy, the ladies powder room in fading teal out-behind. It was a room where Orwell would have staged a scene from Burmese Days in, the sort of shit Kipling probably lived in.

George Leigh Mallory sat here, in one of these chairs, and maybe they made him a stiff drink. (Mallory, the doomed mountain climber, the dandy, who disappeared in an attempt on Everest in 1924, the one whose white and bleached corpse was found by Conrad Anker in 1999.)

He would have needed a drink, before he took off on his final journey, up to Everest and to that final oblivion. Patrick and I had less of a rendezvous with destiny ahead of us (to an extent), but we needed one too. No one was behind the bar, so we couldn't have a drink.

When was the last time they'd had someone behind the bar?

I walked with Patrick outside the bar room and down the outside corridors, which creaked and moaned a bit horribly in the evening-time, and by the heads of antelope mounted along them, and the library, which we could not get into at this time of night—and was almost certainly staffed by the ghost of tea planters.

I like to imagine them going over their ledgers around 4:00 AM in the darkest points of evening, ghostly specters wearing little visor caps and jodhpurs, and bemoaning how India has all gone to shit in the absence of their rule. (Debatable).

"That's the grand tour," I said, after we got back to the lobby of the Planter's Club. "Is there anywhere we could go to get a drink?"

"It's Darjeeling," he said. "There isn't." This was truth: It shuts down at eight, and then, the stray dogs take over.

We stood on the porch at the Darjeeling Planter's Club and looked down over the city, which had few lights in it and was begining to settle down for the night, nice and early, as it always down. Sir George Mallory's oxygen tanks were behind us.

"Yeah, it's nice talking to someone, who's actually been somewhere," he said.

" Most people where I'm from, they don't really travel. Or they do it wrong. I have this friend of mine. When he goes on vacations, he and his wife rent an apartment in France somewhere. The preppy kind of travel. Not like this. " He nodded his head out at Darjeeling, where there were stray dogs yapping out in the distance and the third-largest-mountain in the world hidden out in the mist somewhere, just something we could imagine, at this point.

"I don't know why I do it," I said, truthfully. "It's something we do in my family, it's just what we do."


Old Delhi bazaar.

We turned to Delhi. Every traveler who's been to India turns to Delhi and the black pit inside of it - we get around to what is I think that dark and eternal mystery inside Delhi, the smell of it, the twisted contortions of it, Old Delhi the only place that ever frightened my ass, and we both went there, in our conversations and in our memories. Delhi renders me a goddamn coward. Or, at least, it did.

"And how'd you find it?" I asked him. "Me, I picked up a big ass stick, and I wandered the bazaar, but that's about it." (Felt like a pussy too, but the boys all grabbing at my chest, you know, and how I was an alien from Planet Zarg there.)

"I played the black market in Delhi, for a while," he said. "In the 1970's. Supporting myself. We'd buy American goods from the diplomatic commisary and resell them to the Indians. It was a pretty good living. I was 22 years old. A real brat. I guess doing this now is sort of atonement. I must have broke every law on the book in India."

He was headed down to South India with Habitat for Humanity to build houses. A lot of us are atoning for something with travel somehow. I know I am. Nothing like a crime or some shit like that, just something intrinsic inside of me. Some of us are born with a sense, undeterminable and unidentifiable, that we must atone. Some turn to self-destruction; some seek out danger; some go on long and solitary trips and wonder if we'll ever get that final absolution. (And I think it never happens, and that is the sweetness and the sadness of it).

And I never played the Delhi black market but the idea of it makes my eyes shine, and makes me wish I could still play that game, that maybe I could if I had the balls. And if the game can even be played anymore, or if there are other games out there.

Can you do this stuff anymore? Or do you have to go to Libya and get yourself shot up ala-Chris Hondros, a warrior on the front-lines, bleeding out in an alley somewhere when your luck runs out? Is this how martial it has to be, to finally atone?(I think about this a lot - how far I have to go).

And we talked about blood, too, how we both just didn't seem to shy away from it, like it attracted it almost (dance of death, whatever, maybe this too is part of what makes us what we are, the kind of assholes we are). This was a full few months before I'd get my full real taste of death and what it meant, and stacked up bodies—the Cambodian bridge stampede of last November, which you may have forgotten about if you don't live in Cambodia, but that's how world events work — so I didn't even know what was coming for me, then. We never do.

Patrick and I talked about bull-fighting, because blood leads into bull fighting, and martial thoughts like that. I told him about that time my dad and I had been walking through a small Spanish town, and walked into a bar where they hung up little pale piglet carcasses by their snouts on meat-hooks for future roasting, and they were playing a bullfight on TV. There were five or six old Spanish farts in their with greying whiskers and they were smoking cigarettes, and they were all watching the fight intently, the bartender cleaning a glass absent-mindly and watching as the bull dripped blood from all the pinpricks in its back. My dad and I watched intently too. We couldn't tear ourselves away.

My mother appeared at the doorway at some point, following us down the alley. "Jesus, why are you watching that?" she said. My father and I found it hard to articulate, but all we knew is that we were interested, would stay interested.

Patrick knew why we had been watching.

"A real bull fight is a work of art," he told me. (When he'd been in Spain, when he'd wandered, when he'd taken a job at a Spanish guesthouse of some kind with a middle-aged lady who taught him the language, another story, another venture) "
"
" Not - these cheap Mexican jobs. Where nine guys can't kill the bull and they end up taking an ax to it. Not that. The Spanish stuff," he reiterated. "That's how to do it properly."

The bull with the points sticking out of it and all the bar men sitting there silently with the pig carcasses in the window,and how it shut me and my dad up along with all the rest of them, for that good ten minutes or so. I remembered that.

"And what about dog fighting?" I asked. "What's your stance on that."

"Yeah, dog fighting," he said, calling back the memory. He laughed.

" Everyone was into it back in the sixties. Well, certain types. Now, you can't even talk about it. I had this dog - her name was Molly - and she won me a lot of money," he said. "Bought her from a friend of mine. You know the type. Wifebeater, big arms, wife with a boob job, and a pit bull."

You can't even pretend to talk about dog fighting anymore but he did it anyway. (The pits and all the shouting and holding back your dog and game, how game your dog is, this is stuff I researched under the guise of my love of pit bulls, but also because it fascinates me. These are the things that are dying out.)

"We did all those gauche things," he said, a little wistfully. Atonement again.


Mallory's oxygen canisters.

We were leaning over the porch. I kept on wishing that George Mallory was hanging around the building somewhere, some little particles of him still in the air, and listening in. Not that he'd be interested maybe - he had that fucking mountain to scale, you know, that had invaded his brain - but maybe he'd have had a drink with us.

He walked up the mountain and never came down, and I've been dreaming about him since I was a kid, since I first heard about the re-discovery of his pale white body, after I looked at photos of him when he was young and fool-hardy (like me). I drink to George Mallory when no one is looking, to his contorted hands and pulled back, frozen lips on the cliffs up on Everest god-knows-where. (I wrote about him a while back, if you want to click that link).

I drink to him when he was young and handsome, and hung around with Robert Graves, and climbed and died because it wasn't like he had a choice.

George Mallory wrote an article on a successful climbing expedition to Switzerland's Mont Blanc, for a magazine.

It contained the rhetorical question: "Have we vanquished the enemy?"

Mallory replied, "None but ourselves."

(Why do we want to stare into the frozen and dead and whitened eyes of our idols? They'll bring us nothing, and tar us forever. But then again - I like the cycle, that of handsome youth and dead and stiffened corpse. it is inevitable. It is how it works.)


Streets of Darjeeling.

We kept on talking about travel because we couldn't get a drink and there was nothing else to do. Fog was moving in over the mostly-extinguished lights of the city. We were leaning over the railing, and everything was very quiet.

"My son doesn't have it, the travel thing," Patrick said. " When he graduated, I bought him an Eurail pass. He was going to go to Australia, but his buddy went to Europe, so he came too. It was only for six weeks or so, not too long. He got back. I asked him, "So, did you like Hamburg? Did you go to Italy?"
"No, no, I don't know about those places. There's some great cafes in Amsterdam though, man, great cafes."
Well, you get the idea. He spent six weeks in Europe in Amsterdam, smoking up. Face it, he just hasn't got it in him."

We laughed about that. You have it, you don't. You explore, you don't. You atone (some of us) and we find each other. I feel like a fool a lot of the time traveling, but I do it anyway.

We talked about love, and the people we had, and soon enough I found out that he was the second man traveling I had met in a month that had just lost a wife. "She was tall," as he described her to me in passing, to give me something to hold onto, and she liked to have adventures, like he did.

They lived together in Mexico for a while and attended the mata-cubra wrestling matches, and bet on them. She got pregnant in Mexico by accident and they had their son. That was how it goes. Not that this stopped them - they were in California but they kept on moving.

I didn't ask him what happened to her or why because I knew he'd tell me. They almost always do.

"It was cancer," he said (a brief emotional shrug of the shoulders, a twinge)."She got cancer and died last year. Now I'm traveling." This was the sum total offered at the time, and I didn't want to know more, or need to. She got cancer and she died.


Clocktower in Darjeeling.

I sit here writing this now and wonder why I am so attracted to these people who are traveling no just out of adventure, but also out of bereavement, to fill in a gap. When I met Patrick, in September of 2010, I was not in love and had a certain sense - a worrying one - that I never would be. I idolized T.E Lawrence, who, as they said, wandered the earth and never alit anywhere, who avoided all romantic relationships and (pretty much) all sexual ones as well. I liked D.H Lawrence, and I wished I had a man in my life, but I also felt that such a thing was pretty much doomed - as odd as I am - and if I could just work past it, the need for it, I'd be better off. To wander the earth and never alight.

Now I am in love, these days, the kind of love that I think I can with confidence call the Real Thing. I have this sense that I am going to be with this man for a very long time. Neither of like to speak in absolutes - we are scientists, him of the degree holding sort, me of the armchair variety - but we have certain visions of an extended future. I have to some extent alit, albeit in Cambodia, albeit living what is still a reasonably exotic life. But I've alit.

And when I think of the sharp love I feel for this extremely tall blonde man with steel-blue eyes (from Iowa, fixes bikes, tells long winded jokes about ice-fishermen, who-I-would-crawl-over-glass for ), I keep on thinking of Patrick wandering the world, because he's got no one left in his bed.

And I keep on imagining what I'll do when or if that's me, if Patrick's is also my future. Grieving, and thinking on it, and acutely aware of the loss (that cuts so fine, that penetrates your veins), but he has not yet pulled down all the blinds and receded into himself. He is on the move. He is volunteering for Habitat for Humanity. "It's an act of atonement," he told me. "I mean, I must have violated every law in India."

This is the final summation of love, maybe. To continue to be what you had been when the other is gone.

In a different fashion, and with that portion of yourself you had ceded (perhaps at first grudgingly) to the other missing, and aching in the night.

You grow used to the person you love there when you roll over, the scent of their hair, the way their breath sounds when they are shallowly breathing and when you yourself are staring at the ceiling, an affirmation of life. And then that affirmation is taken away, and what are you left with? (Mallory died. You will; too, and probably not as well.)

And I suppose you keep on walking anyway. There is nothing else.

Going Down to Tsokha, Why I Won't Climb Everest

We made another attempt on The View, this morning. Another early wake-up, another round of pulling on dampish boots in the dark and struggling out of sleeping bags and pushing up the hill. None of us expecting much, this time, although it wasn't raining outside. The clouds were coming over. I walked about halfway up the hill and the clouds were still there, and I wanted breakfast. I was demoralized. Kiran kept pushing upwards. I stayed about halfway up and debated about going all the way up, if I hadn't given up hope. Then, the whooping started. THEY'RE THERE THEYR'E THERE I could hear people yelling.



And there they were, the mountains, the View of Views. A whole 15 minutes of them, I guess. I heard the shouting from up the hill and got committed and then I started running (like a damned fool) right up the side of the hill through the thicket and missed the trail entirely, I just wanted to get up their and see. And I did, one way or another, crashing through all kinds of native vegetation, and I made it to the ridge and I looked. I had a lot of stickers in my pants but I didn't much care. And that was the view. The clouds closed again, and the weather closed in again. It looked like it could go eitherway, but I had made my call. I was going down, Kiran was staying.



Kiran lent me 1000 rupees, or around 25 dollars. We stood around as the porters loaded up the horses and got everything together for the journey to Goecha La. The mist and the general attitude of the thing reminded me of the Breaking of the Fellowship. I said something about this. Kiran laughed. At least we were both nerds. "We'll see each other in Darjeeling," I said, confidently. And we waved goodbye and headed in opposite directions. I went to meet the porter who was going down with me.



The porter and I regarded each other with polite interest. We were stuck with each other for the next couple of days. He was probably my age, thin and lanky and not much taller then me with long hair, like most Sherpa boys. He spoke no English and I spoke no Nepali: this was going to be a relationship built pretty much entirely upon walking.

I like to think I surprised him with how fast I moved but I probably didn't - but in any case, we kept up a good clip. We both had a single goal in mind, and that was Yuksom and the comforts (such as they were) of civil society. We wanted to get there as fast as possible and damn anything that got in our way.



The next couple of days would turn into a bit of a game between us, I guess. Kumar would choose the safest way to get up the trail or avoid a yak or cross a waterfall: the Sherpa kid would choose the fastest, and that was the way I liked best myself, a habit that (I could tell) drove Kumar ever forwards into madness. Kumar took the clearly defined and cut trail: We took switchbacks, hopping over roots and twisting our ankles just so to land on rocks in just the right way. We cut through lines of horses and cut slightly more delicately through lines of yaks. Mud was a minor annoyance and so was the occasional mist of rain. We trotted instead of walked, and people going uphill or downhill laughed at us and waved.



I stopped for a bit at the small shrine I'd walked to, dejected, in the rain the day before. The sun was coming out and the prayer flags had dried out and were blowing, just a little, in the sun. It was very beautiful and you could see the plains stretching out for God knows how far below. I turned around and took a few photographs of the mountains behind me, which looked gentle and almost European in the easing, morning light, projecting the illusion of pistes and sky shacks somewhere over the next horizon. (Maybe someday. But it will not be for a long time.)



We made Tsokha fast. It was, after all, pretty much all downhill. (Should I add here that I hate going downhill? Going uphill means you're pretty much grounded in one plain, it's easy to keep your balance, your knees don't jam up. It's you and your windpower, that's all, you against a welt of mud and slime. It's simple. Going downhill, especially in the shocking steepness of the Himalaya, requires a great deal of attention, flexibility, and coordination - you're jumping as much as you're walking, you're carefully gauging the weight of your pack and what your shoes can take, you're considering the relative slipperyness and pointiness of the rocks around you, all these things are matters of great releavance when going downhill. It tires my mind out. And my knees.)



Tsokha again, that little medieval village, and the rest-house again. It looked the same as we had left it, except the mud had dried up a little as the rain was not bad that day. I even had my own little cell to myself again, complete with all the empty beer bottles and the thing that approximated a mattress and a small, hopeful pin-up of a view of the mountain range. I laid out my things and debated what the rest of the day would look like it. It was only around noon.

The Indian men were laying out lunch on the lawn in front of the hut, and I wandered down to talk to them. I was technically to take my meals at one of the village's two habitations, or that was the arrangement I think Kumar had explained to me, but they were feeling friendly. "No, come sit with us," they said. "We have got lots of food."
They had freshly made papad and curries and daal and eggs and stir-fried spam (good at altitude) and a lot of of hot tea and coffee. We all ate voraciously, with our hands, as one does in India. It felt terribly civilized.



We went up to the little tea-shop after and drank chang, the region's beloved millet beer. It is drunk out of wood sections and is made of fermented bits of millet, as one would expect, and is drunk with a straw jammed to the bottom because the millet is still in there. It is intermittently topped up with lukewarm water out of a jug. It is not a drink for those with an aversion to dirty water.
"My, you made it fast," the Kashmiri man said. "No one should ever say a beautiful girl is not strong." They were from Pune and had brought a selection of regional snack mixes along, which we were all sharing.
"Yes, strong like Sherpa," Sanjay Sherpa said, grinning. I thought this was among the best compliments I had ever recieved.
"Sanjay saved my life, a couple of times," the Kashmiri man observed. "He did it on Everest, and he also did it on Annapurna." Sanjay demurred modestly, but he went on. "Yes, I was very tired and very cold, and had twisted my ankle. It was after I had summited Everest. He supported me, and got me down the mountain."

"Yes, he did," the oldest man said.
"But that was long ago, of course, when I was younger. Now, this is all Sanjay and I are up for. We have got fat." He said this in Nepali to the Sherpa too and he laughed long and hard. "We had our adventures."
"This is a pretty good adventure, even if you consider yourselves old men," I pointed out.
"I suppose so. Maybe you could try Everest sometime. You seem strong enough."
"Oh, no, I wouldn't do that," I said. "Even if I could, I don't think I'd want to."

(This was something I had debated often when I was younger, when I spent a lot of my free time reading books about mountaineering. The allure of people throwing themselves up against the unstoppable power of nature has never been lost on me. But you get older, you contextualize, you do your thinking. My mom and I were both avid watchers of that National Geographic show a couple of years back, which followed a group of people on a commercial Everest expedition.




I lost my taste for the thing then, I think. It was a bunch of people with a lot more money then sense (as in Into Thin Air), all on some sort of bizarre quest to test themselves against an inanimate object that didn't care about them, would eat them alive, and they would do this in front of the pleas of their loved ones and former-lives NOT to do it. They were immovable objects, and they didn't much care about anyone else around them, either - only getting to the top. Of course, I like dangerous things and I like living a (somewhat) more dangerous life then is the norm, but I'm not sure I'd pay 50,000 dollars for a canned chance at killing myself. If that makes any sense. Also, my mother would beat me to death.

A little after, the Dutch boys and the Pole showed up, having started a little later in the afternoon. In lieu of anything better to do, I sat with them and watched as they drank chang - I was trying to save my money, and did not partake - and we talked about nothing in particularly. The Pole was in high spirits. Somehow we got on the topic of Poland's notorious alcoholism. He did not confirm or deny. He noted: "I've only had vodka for breakfast once. When I was going to meet the former president of Poland, because I got an academic award. Apparently he was an alcoholic."

"Didn't most of your politicians, well, die in a plane crash last year?" I said.

"Well, this was the former-former president of Poland," he explained. "This one isn't dead."

"I see," I said.

"I met the man in his office, and it was quite early, and I hadn't eaten yet. 'You have done a good job,' he said. 'Have some vodka.' We did shots and talked some. I was very drunk with the former President of Poland and it was before breakfast."

I considered this. We all did. The Polish man, for his part, looked up conspiratorially from the chang, as if relating a dark secret. "Ahh, it's so good!" He repeated this action every five minutes or so. It was awfully endearing.



Dinner time rolled around. We were, to my chagrin, going to eat in the other shack in town, instead of the fierce chang-lady's house, the one who had an electric light powered by something or another. This was the shack that was occupied by a 14 year old boy and his dementia-affected grandmother. There may have been other family members in the picture around, but they were not in evidence. I was lumped in with the three boys, so we all filed into the small and smoky shack, and watched as the silent and somewhat startled looking 14 year old cooked us scrambled eggs and daal. I wished I could have just cooked since I am a better cook then the kid was, and I felt incredibly sorry for him. To be 14 years old in a medieval village, having to shoo your touched grandmother away from precipices, only a tabby cat and chickens and an occasional stream of trekkers to keep you company. It was a sad thought. The men were all drunk on chang and were not doing much thinking. I wished I had money for chang.

"We go down slow tomorrow," the Dutch guy said, sipping on his chang. "Maybe smoke a few joints in the woods, yeah?" He directed this at their guide, Bob the Sherpa. I thought of him as Bob the Stoner Sherpa because he was rarely without a joint, and was always inquiring if I wanted some whenever the conversation got quiet.

"Okay," Bob said, "We go down slow and smoke, that's cool." He was wearing pink pajama pants, and had the red eyes of the constantly stoned that I always see in my college friends. He had a Bob Marley t-shirt. Has weed overtaken chang as the young Sherpa's favorite past-time? It's not like it doesn't grow by the side of the road around here.

We adjourned to the chang lady's shack to hang out some. There were a few British people there, and I was happy to see another woman beside the chang lady in the general vicinity. We sat and talked about scuba-diving, for some reason, which seemed awfully incongrous at this altitude. Night-time was dark and bleak and muddy outside: I just wanted to sleep, mostly. I excused myself and flicked on my headlamp and tried to avoid the cow (out there in the darkness somewhere, with pointy horns) and got back to my little room.

The Indian men were having dinner inside the hikers shack when I walked in: they called me into the room. "We've got chicken," they said, laughing. They were referring to spam. It still tasted good. That was my second dinner. I sat with them for a while and listened to them talk about Indian politics (as is inevitable), and then I really did adjourn to my small room. It was quiet as hell outside, and less musty then Dzongri had been. At least I was getting somewhere.

A Day of Mourning in Cambodia

Interrupting this blog to ask you to keep the people of Cambodia in your thoughts this holiday week. I'm looking for a good charity for the victims - still haven't decided - but will post here once I do.

Yesterday's mourning ceremony was beautiful and cathartic. I'm glad I went.

I bought a lotus and some joss sticks. I don't know anything about Buddhist rituals, but I guess that didn't matter much. I imitated what other people did. I laid my lotuses on top of the other flowers, and I put my joss stick in the little sand jar. I burned my thumb on it.

I was in the middle of a line of Cambodians wearing white and black. None of us talking much. The bridge had an almost unearthly shine on it. A sunny day, hot and clear.



I signed the guestbook with something wholly inadequate. Couldn't think of anything better.

A woman with the government approached me ."Thank you for joining us," she told me. No need to thank me.

There was a line of food offerings. I had some oranges, and I laid them down in a row. I guess if I understand anything it's an offering of food, of sustenance for the next life, of unmoored souls.

The Landour Cemetery

I love old cemeteries. And an abandoned cemetery set among pine trees and swirling, ghostly mists? Even better. This is the Landour Cemetery. It's on the road around the hill. You pass by the Four Shops and keep on walking left until you see it below you. Reasonably easy. The gate is locked up with wire, but that's no real impediment.



Walk along the old brick walls on the right, there's a crumbled spot where it's easy to scramble through. I hope I don't have to add that if you choose to do this, you'd best be respectful.



Everyone in Landour knows the cemetery, but there is remarkably little written about it. Well, at least on the Internet. Most of the graves here are of British soldiers. They came up here to take the cure in the cool mountain air, after contracting various tropical diseases in the lowlands. Some of them didn't make it.



Ah, here we go! The Internet Archive contains a very old document, complete with inscriptions from the headstones here. You can barely read them, these days.

1828— BOLTON, G., Captain. Inscription :—Sacred to the
memory of Captain George Bolton, H. C.'s 2nd European Regiment,
who after some months of painful suffering departed this life on the
13th of June in the year of the Lord 1828, aged 40 His virtuous
and amiable disposition rendered him generally beloved in life and
lamented in death This memorial is expected by his afflicted widow
as the last earthly tribute of affection and respect to an indulgent
and affectionate husband. Appointed as a lieutenant in 1804, a captain
in 1818. He was born at Dinapore in 1788 and served in Java.

1830— GRAHAM, J. R., Captain. Lueriptinn. Sacred to the
memory of John Richard Graham, Esq., late a Captain of the 5th
Regiment of Bengal Light Cavalry. This monument is erected by
his brother officers as a mark of their esteem and regard for the
character of one universally beloved for his many good and amiable
qualities. He died on the 30th day of May A. D. 1830, aged 29 years.

He was appointed cadet in 1817, lieutenant in 1819, captain in 1829. He
was the son of J. Graham of Barrock Loige, born 1800, and a relative of Sir J.
Graham. Bart.



Sacred to the memory of Major William Blundell, XI Dragoons, who was killed by falling with his horse on the south side of the Landour Hill, on the 12th November 1834, aged 54 years.

"It is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation that Jesus Christ came into the world to save us. In Him alone is our hope of salvation for this our dear brother, whose kind and affectionate heart endeared him as a son and as a brother, and whose departure hence is severely felt, and deeply mourned by his family and by many friends."



And how did William Blundell die?


"... A house called Newlands, which has been struck and burnt three
times by fire. The hill is said to contain a quantity of iron which attracts the
electric fluid.... A short time ago as Major Blundell was going to that very
house, Newlands, by some accident, his guuth (hill-pony) fell over the precipice,
and they were both dashed to pieces." This tomb is not now traceable and is
reproduced from Fiihrer's List. In the B. 0. it reads " falling with his Gkoont."
The 11th Dragoons are the present 11th (Prince Albert's Own) Hussars, who
were in India from 1819 to 1838.

(Reference: Wanderings of a Pilgrim: In Search of the Picturesque. (?)

Wanderings of a Pilgrim being a fascinating looking book by one Fanny Parkes, who spent twenty four years wandering the far East and writing about it.

However, although the Archive list of inscriptions says this is the reference, I can find nothing of the sort in the text Still worth a read. So, the mystery remains - who first reported on the unfortunate accident of Major Blundell's passing?



1835- RAISES, S. M.. Mrs. Sacred to the memory of Sophia Mary Raikes, the fondly beloved wife of Charles Raikes of the Bengal Civil Service. She departed this life on the 16th of April 1835, in the 19th year of her age.



Sad stuff, for sure. But, as final resting places go - this isn't bad, not at all. It's hard to express how happy I am that I found these inscription and now know who some of these people were. I have a habit at graveyards of looking at headstones and thinking, "I am very sorry, and I am thinking about you, and although you have been dead for a hundred and fifty years, give or take, well, I am sorry still."

They may have been awful people. But I do not know that.

I picked up some biscuit wrappers, found my umbrella, and continued my walk.

Nightlife in Bangalore (Again

Bangalore is not the first locale to spring to mind when Partying in Asia is discussed. Okay, ladyboy-bars in Bangkok and full moon parties on Koh San Mui and Wanchai late-nights in Hong Kong and the endless flashing lights of Tokyo, this is a given, in these places you may get trashed and have your pants removed, be roofied, have a great time, tell all your mates. Whatever.

But Bangalore?

You must realize that Bangalore, to its great personal surprise, has come into money. Real money.

Bangalore fashioned itself the Silicon Valley of India somewhere in the nineties, and it is perhaps the primary benifacary of the gobs of money coming India's way, after the IT revolution. You know Bangalore even if you don't think you do. Bangalore is where you tech support calls get fielded when your computer farts out or your blow-dryer explodes, Bangalore is where that man suspiciously named "Mark" tells you in broken English that it is human error and they are not liable. Bangalore is where Westerners go to vent their frustration, the mental punching bag of the developed world, why-in-the-fuck-did-you-sell-me-this-thing. Half of Bangalore lives on Western time, and occupies the same time zones that we do, sleeping during the day and spending the night with their cheap plastic ear pieces in hand, listening to us swear at them about our irritated and incontinent vacumn cleaners. There is even literature surrounding the Call Center slaves - see the poorly written but culturally interesting "One Night at the Call Center" as an example.

The call center boys and girls are, of course, only the middle men, the pieces on the board. There is enormous money in Bangalore, ridiculous amounts of money. Software developers and land developers are drawn here, and so are major hoteliers and finance mavens and skeezy guys who want to Make You a Star, IT pros and network gods and Major Industrial CEOS, they've all taken up residence in the cities ever burgenoing, ever expanding skyscrapers and towers. Infosys is the known deity of Bangalore and its biggest company: the "campus," a little outside of town, has taken on the character of a city unto itself and a fine one at that, full of enormous fountains and creative landscaping.

Bangalore was not expecting this. No one was. Bangalore, before, was a sleepy garden city with a lackadaiscal attitude and a few mid-level Raj administrative centers. When IT and technology settled here, and began to transform it, Bangalore's infrastructure was in no way, shape, or form prepared. Considering the circumstances, it's held up remarkably well - better then Delhi - if you're able to ignore the hour long traffic jams at irrational hours of the day, the continual sound of honking horns from autorickshaws and motorbikes, the festering holes in the sidewalk. All things considered, it is the most pleasant major city in India. Bangalore is trying.

"Someday they'll finish the metro," Bangalore residents will tell you, pointing up at the faded cement snake that now looms over half of downtown, patrolled by bored-looking cops up above everyone else. "Someday we'll have a metro."

Yet I love Bangalore. Came of age here in a way. I guess everyone has a pivotal city, where they did a major part of their growing up, exposed some previously unknown or underutilized part of themselves. I had begun life as a somewhat tragically awkward dork with ADHD and an aggressive streak - I came to Bangalore at 19 as (apparantly) a Hot Girl with a penchant for getting myself invited to private parties. It was all shallow and vapid of course. I knew that then, as much as I know that now. (To some extent. This too a need of all intellectal types with a penchant for hedonism: to provide drinking and fucking in fancy clothes with an idealogical underpinning, a reason. We Were Living the Indian Financial Revolution!).

But still it was something different, a look at an India far removed from the filth and maggoty lepers of the Ghandian India, an India with money and confidence, that Knew that It Was Strong. My memories of those days are a bit conflicted - I was depressed and a bit self destructive, as is not uncommon with 19 year old putzes - but still I had a certain, New York-like sensation that anything was possible, that I really could stay here and find something approximating work, that I really could jet off to Dubai with five of my new best friends if the mood struck me.

Coming back to Bangalore was then almost intimidating. I knew I had to find a party because To Party was mostly what I did in Bangalore, the only real way of approaching it. Bangalore is no tourist city, after all. Nothing of much historical or artistic import happened here - there's nearby Mysore for that. It's a city designed for those who work there and those who live there, and if it serves them well, it hasn't got much on hand for the idle. Going to a party or two was going to have to be my job. I dreaded it, a little. I had come off two years in New Orleans and had settled into a pleasant lifestyle of low-budget house parties and low budget booze, of 3;00 AM bicycle rides through the Ninth Ward and standing covertly outside night clubs so as not to pay for them. Sparkly disco clubs, beautiful people, and talk of inordinate sums of money had fallen from my life, had mostly ceased to concern me. Why the hell was I back here? Why was I doing this shit again, when I'd obviously grown out of it?


I had known a guy in Bangalore. At the time there were two warring club-organizer types in town, who stuck to different hotels and clubs and possessed their own seperate marketing structures. They battled to see who could get the most attractive butts through the door on a given night, and they carried out this fight via Facebook, SMS, and irritating leaflets handed out at any restaurant, store, or mall deemed adequately hip-and-trendy. There were two layers to any night out in Bangalore, two barriers to cross. First you had to get on the guest list for any party worth a damn - this was usually executed via Facebook or SMS, and was not a particularly difficult procedure if you knew a guy. Extra points for being white, female, and/or not incredibly ugly (exceptions were made). Second was getting to an after party, because the after party was where all the magic actually happened, pool-side negotiations and covert ass grabs and the consumption of Hennessey, all that shit. There's a powerful conservative faction in Bangalore, and clubs are required by law to close up at 11:30. That's when everyone scrambles to tumble into luxury cars and find themselves an after party, a sort of game of musical chairs played with pretty people in comically tiny outfits and shoes. This usually required knowing a guy too, but exceptions could be made if you were charming or pathetic - and the after parties were the doorway to Knowing a Guy in the first place, really knowing a guy.

The hotel was one of the large corporate edifices in Bangalore, set a little outside of town and conveniently on the golf course. I adjusted my dress and worried some. Perhaps I had grown unspeakably hideous in the intervening years. My loose associations with Bangalore might have failed me - an absence of two years is a desperate eternity in club time, enough time to consign me to the museum, a veritable fossil. I paid up the rickshaw man - embarassing, since it looked like everyone else was pulling up in proper cars - and walked inside. Please god let there be someone I know, I thought to myself, please don't let me sit in the corner and tap my feet awkwardly to the bad music please please please.

Saw the Guy I Knew at the entrance, wearing an Ed Hardy shirt and doling out high-fives. He recognized me immediately. "Faaiinnee! You look just the same!" He slapped the guy with the clipboard (there's always a guy with a clipboard) on the shoulder. "Come on in, come on in." I was on the list: I was issued a stamp on my hand and a few handfuls of free drink coupons.

Everyone I met in Bangalore would tell me in tones of wonderment that I looked just the same and hadn't changed a bit. I wondered and still do if I should be offended by this, as if two years was actually meaningless. The dog died and I graduated from college and I made some new friends. That was two years.

The club room was nicely kitted out and designed, as they all are in Nouveau Bangalore. Dark mood lighting and patterns projected in white on the walls, shifting lights, a soundtrack of thumping and relatively generic house music, lots of people (and most of them women) dancing in the shuffling manner of those early to the party. (One thing about Indians, though - when they get going and are in the proper mental state, they can really dance, dance their brans out, put us Westerners to shame. When they feel like it). It was some sort of Ladies Night type event and they had middle-aged women in saris put up in the corner of the room, doing nail polish and mehndi temporary tattoos. Everyone was drinking Red Bull and Vodka, the power drink of Asia, everyone was eying delicately the cocktail snack armada (oh god will I get fat?). They had a teenaged boy wandering around in a sombrero and a Spanish vest, pouring tequila shots.

In other words, standard-issue Bangalore party fare, really. Another night on the subcontinent. I ordered a rum on the rocks and, as I had expected, stood there. I had to break into a conversation, obviously, and I had to do it fast before anyone noticed me and that I was alone, alone and uncool. I edged crab-like around the little clusters of talking people, listening carefully for something - where could I butt in? Where could I make my new best friends?

Aha. A bunch of youngsters from mostly the USA and Europe, standing over there in their party clothes and looking marginally confused, thinking the same thoughts I did when I first came here - This is India? This is India? I sidled up. I asked The Question, the one all foreigners ask each other.

"So. What are you doing in India?"

"We're with Infosys," one of them replied, a small and very pretty girl who looked Latina. "I'm from San Francisco, she's from New York, he's from France, he's from Nigeria, you know, all over. We're interning for a month or two."

"Fabulous," I said, in my Hi Let's Be Pals voice, "that's really cool." The Second Question. "Do you like India?"

A moment, pause. "It's...different then we expected," the New York girl said. "I mean, better and worse then we'd expected, I guess."

"We're on the Infosys campus, and it is very large. So we do not go to the city so much. It's about 30 minutes away, a long drive." The French guy.

"Ah, but India is interesting," the Nigerian guy said (clad in a Hawaiian shirt). "It is always so interesting."

That's the truth. We chatted for a while - at least I'd established myself with a couple of people. The music sped up and people began dancing less tentatively, the booze was sinking in. I danced with the Nigerian guy - who was pretty good - and the French guy too. I made the aquaintance of a hot and remarkably stoned looking Italian, who was working for a textiles company here. I chatted with a number of young Indian things in extremely tight clothing about the music and how much Justin Bieber sucked. It was raining outside, or had just stopped, and I followed the Infosys crowd to the patio as they smoked cigarettes, and we talked and watched the rain dripping off the banana leaf trees.

11:30; time for the club to clear out, time to shut it down before the cops came in, shouting and waving their bamboo sticks around. This just meant it was time to scramble for an after party. I don't think the Infosys kids knew that this was the game, that no one just *went home* at 11:30. But I was tired, sick of keeping it together. I wanted to go home and surf the internet in my underwear, take off my lipstick. I didn't search for an after party at all. I walked by the lobby and watched everyone else tip-toe in kitten heels to someone's car, but I didn't jump into the fray. I found a rickshaw outside the gates, and we sped home, splashing through endless puddles.

I did okay for not knowing anyone, I guess. When I was younger I viewed the nightlife thing as a competition, a sort of arcade game: how many people can I talk to, how many people can I charm, how many new friends/associates can I leave the evening with? I'd bounce from group to group hyperactively, I'd flash my big white American teeth, I'd cadge free drink after free drink, and flirt massively. That's what the party was for. It was fun.

Now, I don't know anymore. Maybe I got too accustomed to the cheapness in New Orleans, my friends. We'd sit outside on the porch in New Orleans and smoke cigars, swat at mosquitoes, bitch about supply-side economics and foreign warfare. We'd watch a lot of Youtube videos then jump on our bikes to the French Quarter, eat 1.00 truck tacos and stand at the doorways of clubs so they wouldn't charge us admission. You live in New Orleans, you begin to throw away glamour - like anyone ever looked good eating a crawfish. You begin to re-evaluate the notion of the Party, the notion of the competition. (The juxtaposition, too. Grinding poverty in New Orleans and India, and making merry right on top of the squalor, the horror. All of those memories). We spent too much time passing joints by the levee, obviously, the levee where the homeless men would emerge from the bushes and offer us some *real* good shit, where we'd go nuts at 3;00 AM and try to climb the parked barge, sit by our primal little fires and converse. I had been rendered smelly and bohemian. Ruined.

In the rickshaw, I was sad, a little, that it had stopped being fun. At least for now.

Maybe it would be again. And in any case - Bangalore was having fun, India was having fun. The great unwashed were still in the gutter, and the Common Wealth games were going to shit, and the Ayodah judgment was coming down and God knows what would happen, and the monsoon was going to last forever this year - but someone was having fun. Someone was sipping Red Bull and vodka and anticipating something better.

Old friends and charred meat, such is how i proceed

I met up with Saleem this night.

Saleem is the cousin of my friend Aneesa, the lovely woman who introduced me so perfectly to Mumbai two years ago, back in 2008. I was 19 and a bit of a drunk then, and so was Saleem, and we got along like a house on fire, chiding each other into ever-stupider feats of consuming Old Monk (a vile but cheap Indian rum) and spicy meat kebabs. Saleem and his family are Muslim, and he was (as I recall) forever figuring out ways to stay out late without attracting the ire of his parents, or figuring out a way to sneak back home, or figuring out how he could sneak out of going to the mosque in the morning, and all of this lent an aura of espionage to the affair. Saleem trying to be cool in the fashion of Indian youth and (surprisingly) mostly succeeding, a bit of swagger in his step, as we messed with each other, teased each other about pretty much everything. He was always concerned about me, in the fashion of the Indian male, and never quite certain that what I was doing or how I was conducting myself was wise.

"You're too brave," he'd tell me, as I walked out into traffic or snarled at a taxi driver again, "You're too brave." To which I'd smile and skip on down the street - so what, the Saudi sex slave traders hadn't got me yet, and Mumbai was filled with the lightness of being (to me), so what, and he'd follow behind.

Aneesa considering our meeting, before I arrived in Mumbai. "This is a bad idea, you know. My cousin loves Old Monk and partying, he's just like you." Sarcasm. Rarely or never have I had such fun. I hope he did too.


Shivaji train station.

I thought he was dead for a day or two after the Mumbai attacks. This is part of the inevitable post-tragedy scramble, for those who know someone caught in the maelstrom, the cloud that terror places over a place. He reappeared on Facebook, and I was very glad.

We met at the Woodsides - it was late, because he couldn't get off work until later then usual, and then the trains were snarled, as they always are in Mumbai.

He hadn't changed his appearance at all, and I guess neither had I. "You look the same," we both said to each other, and our voices were relieved.


The Taj hotel.

Our lives have both been startlingly successful, for a couple of loud-mouthed punks with an affinity for trash liquor and bad behavior. He has secured a good job doing recruiting work for IT companies, and enjoys what he does. I am legitimately employed in journalism, and moving to Cambodia. We have made something of ourselves, mostly.

The inevitable romance talk, what we have got, or what we had. Had in my case (approximate), briefly and extremely pleasantly, with large and unmovable barriers at the end of it - the finality imposed by I Am Moving to Cambodia and Not Coming Back.

Saleem discusses his girlfriend, who is Christian and Catholic, although apparently this does bother him. "Yes, with her - you're dating someone, and suddenly - well, you're together, it's very sudden." The look on his face is one of pure affection, and of wonderment at his own great good fortune. If I could photograph that and send it to her, she would appreciate it. Any thoughtful woman would,

He's hungry, though he says he's not as hungry as he thinks he ought to be. It's Ramadan, near the end of it, and he's become used to it. He explains why he's adhering to the rules, although he isn't exactly the most moral guy on the planet the rest of the year. "I feel like I'd better be extra good when it really matters," he says, his face contented. "Just to make up for the rest." No Old Monk tonight.

We eat at Bademiya, the outdoors kebab place located conveniently behind the Taj. It's a legendary place, and for good reason. There's packs of Mumbai youths sitting on their cars or their motorbikes and wolfing down large and greasy portions of ultra-thin roomali roti, boti kebab made of lamb chunks, spicy chicken parts and paneer curry and much much more.


Kebab guys.

I don't know how they function at Bademiya when it rains - doesn't it rain all the time? - but it's not raining right now, we can stand in the haze of smoke given off by the huge and ultra hot grills and order our food. "I remember this last time," I tell Saleem. "That was the first time I ever ate boti kebab, and now I know how to make it, I eat it all the time." Truth - it's impossible to get boti kebab worth eating in the USA. It's better to make your own, you and your recollections.


Bademiya chicken breast. Yum.

There's nowhere to sit, since we don't have a car or a motorbike, so we head back to the Sea Palace. The waitstaff are kind enough to look the other way when we tuck into our Outside Food. We order some roti out of a sense of pity. Once we finish the food - chicken and boti kebab and roti - we hunt around a bit for a bar nearby that will admit us. We do a few laps around the neighborhood talking, and finally end up at the rooftop bar next to the Sea Palace. We both order tea, after Saleem has a pointed argument with the waiter over the provenance of the iced tea.

Now time for the really inevitable discussion. November 2008. Not long after I left, that first time.

"I was headed to the Leopold Cafe that night, you know," he says. " My mom wanted me to do something, so I didn't go out, I was kind of pissed about it. And then all this stuff goes down."

"I spent two days in front of the television," I tell him, almost guiltily, because I wasn't there. "I couldn't turn it off, and it was Thanksgiving, but that wasn't important at all. I just remembered you guys, how often I went to the Leopold." Of course this was selfish. I spent those two days worried for Saleem and his family, but I also worried for myself, thought about how easy it would have been for me to go down in bullets at the Leopold, for me to be forced to crawl under a table and shelter myself, where just a minute before I had been sipping a trash whiskey and regarding my sketchbook with displeasure.

"All of us did," he says. "My family was stuck in our apartment for about two days, and we were just watching the TV too. We couldn't believe it was happening, you know?"

"But you're all right," I say.

"Yeah, I'm all right," he says, smiling. (Another personality trait we share. Laughing it all off).

I sip my nimbu-paani and think about near misses and about the iterations and twists of fate. A year ago my grandmother told me just about the same story, about when she had lived in Yugoslavia during the unpleasant years of the early 80s. "I was going to go to the produce market, where I always went, and then I decided to wait for a day. I needed to do some stuff at home. They of course decided to set a bomb there that day." As if this was regular stuff, but of course my grandmother, my grandparents, have always downplayed the great dangers and risks they have run, just another Tuesday and ho-hum, could someone please fix the dispose-all because it's clogged, you get the picture.

Both Saleem and my grandmother told these stories with an aura of surprising calm - though Saleem certainly wavered just a little more (I chalk it up to age, to experience and a certain incredible fierceness, my grandmother has plenty of both).

They tell these stories this way because they have to and because it is the only way to contextualize them. Something Saved You, something minor and stupid, that didn't even occur to you at the time. It was impossible to predict and nothing you could have controlled, and yet because of this you still draw breath, you still continue, you still wake up in the morning and do the same damn things you have done every day and will continue to do. Saleem and my grandmother both evaded the dangers inherent to a chaotic universe. I too have done so, to this point.

"These things do happen, of course," my grandmother said. "But you can't let it make you afraid. You'd be unable to get anything done, or go anywhere." Her meaning: there's luck, sometimes it holds and sometimes it doesn't, sometimes you're fucked and sometimes you aren't, there's nothing you can do about it, not a thing.

"You can't live in fear," Saleem and I agree over our tea. Two young people who have determined the universe. "You can't let Them make you live in fear."

The Leopold Cafe has preserved and framed the bullet hole in the mirror.

You go on, you reconstitute yourself. Maybe in water, for there is plenty of that here.

This is Mumbai, this is India's particular City of Dreams.

I go home that evening and I am thinking of two things. The first is the terrorist attacks, and how remarkable it is that such a pall doesn't really hang over the city, does not really hang over Saleem - they have picked themselves up and gone on, are Able to Talk About It, have relegated it to the past.

The second is more self involved. To meet Saleem is a strange thing, and a new thing for me. I am 22 years old and for the very first time I have felt (in confluence with another, my counterpart) the passage of time, the oncoming and slow but persistent encroachment of maturity. We'll never be that young again, we'll never be that stupid again, I think, remembering 2008 and Old Monk at the Taj.

I am 22 years old and have just had my first brush with eventuality - I think forward to five or ten years from now, and intersecting with Saleem again and again when I am in Mumbai, and the parallel continuing, advancing, and what it will turn into.

And I'm a little afraid. Not of the terrorists and maybe I should be, but of that, primarily that, of luck and how long it holds out.

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.

The India Readjustment Period (And How I Did It Anyway)

Bangalore Got Many Malls. and bikes.

I came back to India, and for the first day, I thought, "Why in the name of God am I here? What was I thinking?"

I am told this is not an unusual reaction from those who return to India. It is, as you can imagine, an even more common reaction from first-time travelers. A couple have (or so I am told) reached their hotel room, called up a nearby travel agency, and booked the first flight again. The cab ride through Old Delhi was more then enough for them. Jai Hind.

My reaction did not surprise me, of course. India is a slap in the face, a kick in the groin, a lascivious nudge on the sidewalk: India is something you cannot just step off the plane and wham-bam readjust yourself to. The experience is there, and the memory is there, of course. But they do not come on automatically, at the flick of a switch. To get these faculties back, the ability to Survive in India, that is a process and a matter of timing, a matter of patience.

You have to gain the ability to block out 89% of the sensory information you receive on a daily basis. You have to regain the ability to pay rapt, intense attention to the other 10%, because that is information that you will save you from being ripped off by rickshaw drivers, pillaged by gypsy children, and mowed down by Punjabi long-distance truckers. You have to regain situational blindness, the ability to un-see, the ability to look through and ignore and totally disregard most everyone you meet on the street - of particular import for the solitary female traveler. These are things that are possible, and instinctual if you have been before, but they are not easy, they are not easy to regain.


Abandoned house (and car) in Bangalore.

I was interested to find how guilty I was, how embarrassed I was simply to be seen there. I had just come from the ultra-modern paradise of Singapore, and before that, had spent two and a half weeks in the wealthy and incredibly quiet environs of Perth, Australia. And here I was in India, bypassing rabid rats and kids missing essential body-parts, and thinking to myself, "And I'm here to look at this, why? I'm not helping anybody. I'm not here to save anybody's life, console the sick, build schoolhouses, or feed the hungry from the largesse and generosity of the Mighty West. I am, all things said and done, on a holiday."

After all, those of us who reside in nice and quiet Western countries very rarely find ourselves questioning our presence, our existence, where we are and where choose to spend our time. We feel we have a right to be wherever we want, doing whatever we please: we exist in a state of extreme comfort. Even in a dangerous area in the USA - say, in my adopted home of New Orleans - I feel a certain amount of legitimacy. Someone may fuck with me, true, but they're fucking with me in a place we share, and in a culture we share, and makes me doubly indignant and pissed off if and when it happens. In India? There's a small twinge in the back of the mind. I'm an interloper. What if I deserve to get screwed over, for intruding, for staring, for ogling? What the hell am I doing here?

I had to learn how to cross the street, again. Crossing the street is by far the most nerve-wracking and personally distressing experience one is likely to have on a regular basis. Many third-world travelers like to say, with a tone of wonderment, "The traffic does look awful. But I've never seen anyone get hurt or killed. It must not be all that dangerous."

This is a classic logical fallacy.


The Bangalore palace grounds.

In fact, the traffic fatality rates are worse then you could possibly imagine. A person who crosses the street in India is playing live-action Frogger, and there are no extra lives. I relearned by crossing in packs - waiting for groups of people to gather, then shuffling across with them. Easy enough.

I had to learn how to look through people again. This behavior is considered incredibly rude and snobbish in the USA and in most parts of the Western World. It's basic survival as a foreign female in India. Men - be they horndogs, beggers, or touts - are not supposed to approach strange women in traditional Indian culture. It is perfectly within your rights to remind them of this on a regular basis. Same goes for female beggers and con-women as well. You've got to look right through them. Pretend they're not there. Don't even flick an eyelash. A lot of foreign travelers make the mistake of saying "No thank you" or "Well, not today," or even "Fuck off or I will kill you and your family." All of these phrases translate, in the Indian begger/tout/horn dog mind as, "Oh, please, would you follow me for the next mile and a half and refuse to leave me alone? Please please would you?"

This is also a bit like saying, "Oh, yes, I am indeed a walking ATM! So terribly clever of you to have noticed."

No, you have to look right through them. Thankfully, this comes easy to me. Everyone who knows me is aware that I'm something of a prodigy in the "ignoring stuff" department. Some of us are more talented then others, right?


Chaat corner I used to frequent, back in 2008.

The guilt, that was harder to shove away. I wasn't here for any reason, really, other then my own curiosity. Sure, I had a blog, and was doing some private research on Hampi and the Vijayanagara Dynasty. I was doing food blogging, and making an effort to seek out interesting local foods and food-sellers for the somewhat hazy benefit of the General Internet. But I wasn't there to fix anything or help anybody, like Tom. I was an ogler. Charity's never come naturally to me, anyway. I'm an observer and a speculator. I make comments, usually wry ones. I'll walk into any bug-fuck insane place and I'll wander through any bazaar and I'll eat anything put in front of me, but getting involved? Nah, that shit is scary.

So I walked down the street self-concious, for the first few days. People stare at you all the time in India, unabashed and astonished staring. I was in Bangalore - a generally gentle Southern city with a lot less edge then Northern hot-spots like Delhi or Agra - and people almost always left me alone. But the sensation of sticking out, of being so obviously The Other. That's hard to readjust to.

And it's necessary to experience. I think all white upper-middle class people from the USA or Britain or Australia (or any majority Caucasian country) have got to do something like this, just to have a little taste of what it's like to be the Freaky Minority of the week somewhere else.

I had a discussion about this with the lady who ran my homestay.

"Indians stare more then anyone else, and at everything, but especially at you guys, you white people. It's horrible. I don't know how you foreigners handle it, the constant staring, all that looking."

"To be honest I get to a point where I stop noticing it. It's just part of life in India. Sort of like feral dogs, sewage pits, and evil auto drivers. But I'm not sure Indians are the only people who stare."

"Would people stare at a foreigner like that in your city, in California?" she asked, obviously incredulous.

"Probably not. We have pretty much everything in California. Even the bad stuff. But, trust me. If a woman wearing a sari, like you, walked into a small town in a place like Nebraska...well, Nebraska, it's like...the Bihar of the USA, right? Middle of nowhere, backwards, empty, very few people. You'd get stared at all day long. People would point at you and giggle, and follow you around, and take photographs. You'd stand out like a sore thumb."

She was shocked. "Even in the USA, people would still do that?" She hadn't really thought about it, of course. For her, the USA was a cosmopolitan place, mostly defined by the hyperactively diverse opposite coasts. But there's that whole giant middle to consider. My Indian friends would be freaks from Planet Hind there. I'm the giant freak from Planet New Orleans here. Same, same, different different. It's good for both of us, I think, to get a little taste of it.

I'm writing this from Old Delhi, about three weeks later. Of course all that initial anxiety and worry and guilt went away. It took exactly five days - I was curious about how long it would take for the tension and uneasiness to melt away, if it would. I woke up on the fifth day, walked into the street, got into a shouting match with four rickshaw drivers until I met one who wasn't actively evil, bargained for a couple pineapples on the street, and ate a masala dosa with sambar at a local South Indian joint. Everyone in the place was staring rapt at the Pakistani Cricket scandal unfolding on the TV screen above us, including me, and I was drinking lots of local filter coffee, and it was raining just a little bit outside. I stopped noticing, for about an hour, that I was in India, and then I stepped outside, and remembered. And it was "Oh, okay. India. I can do this." And that was that.