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November Journal

In which I observe comical relishment in foulness, almost die, and escape to Japan

November 4th, 2005 Mamallapuram
    I’ve been entrenched in Mamallapuram, which is the least miserable place I’ve found so far in this sordid country. So many mosquitos though. A few days ago I got up about dawn and decided to walk along the beach. Dawn walk on the beach, right? No problem. When I got down there, I saw a long line of men squatting at the edge of the sea, looking out at the sunrise. Others were spaced along the wide beach. I walked towards the beach, then realized that every one of these men was in the process of shitting. The sealine was covered in fresh piles of human excrement, washing into the sea. Ah, the morning shit on the beach. I cannot believe the foulness of these people. Even many animals have the decency to bury their waste. I mean, if you are going to take a dump on a heavily used public beach…jeeze.

November 8th, 2005 Mamalapuram
    There has been unremitting, torrential rain for the past 4-5 days here. Fortunately, we are too close to the sea for flooding, but other cities around are swimming in sewage, as described in vivid local newspaper accounts. I’ve got some weird disease, and have been delirious and feverish, but I went to the doctor and got some meds, which should help. Repetitive, defective thoughts keep circling through my mind. I thought maybe I had malaria.

November 12th, 2005 Mamallapuram
    The meds had no effect, and I was sent to the hospital for 2 ½ days. Only after several days of continuous intravenous antibiotics was I somewhat recovered. It still feels weird to be able to walk around again, and my head still feels fuzzy. Something weird whenever I move my head or eyes.

November 15th, 2005 Kolkata
    Back in Kolkata via a 29 hour one minute 35 second train ride. I am still marveling at my newfound abilities to walk and move my head without feeling dizzy. Basically, I almost died. A local newspaper contained a lengthy story about how a woman’s eye was eaten by “big black ants” while she lay in hospital. It is interesting to note the abysses of incompetence that can be plumbed here.


    I still can’t get used to how people eat with their hands here. The food is all a bunch of mush, so they get really dirty when they eat, then have to queue up to wash off. Walking into a restaurant and seeing a bunch of adults eating rice and vegetable slurry with their hands feels like visiting the ward for the severely retarded during feeding time. Funny thing is, while they are using their hands to mush up the slurry into balls, they often use a spoon to distribute the mush from its original bowl. More relishment in foulness. I never considered myself to be anything like a neat freak, but staying in India has pointed out to me the boundaries of my own tolerance for disorder and filth, and given me an extensive tour through what lies on the other side. I just CANNOT DEAL with shitting on the street, ok? Please let me go somewhere where people don’t do that. Please let me go somewhere where it doesn’t constantly smell like shit and rotting corpses. Somewhere without huge festering mounds of trash and shit lining the street. Somewhere without tripodal diseased hairless pink bleeding pregnant dogs with green tapeworms hanging out of their mouths. V.S. Naipul frequently mentions the Indian ability to NOT SEE. How else could you live here? In the letters sections of the newspapers, I sometimes see these sad letters like







Dear Sir,
There is a four-meter deep waterlogged pile of human shit, plastic bags and rat corpses along a three-block section of Apeervashwarmeenkasitheravandu Street, Pallapullnam sub-district where I reside. Why doesn’t the government do something about this?
Sincerely, Sri Smt. Kumariasamasundarischwarmavanarama

Dear Sir,
There is a one-meter deep pothole filled with sewage, betel sputum and dog piss on Thiruparvatnashwarmashambollharma Street near Chirrupellavaranasswarma Avenue, in Putnapustularaputi District. Many schoolchildren have fallen in and died, and autorickshaws frequently crash there. How can the authorities permit such an outrage to continue?
Sincerely, Sri Sri Srivarrnapuramshwarri

Dear Sir,
In a desperate, last attempt to satisfy the hunger pangs of the parasitic worms that fill their entire digestive tracts to overflowing green writhing masses of putrefaction, the local pack of hairless corpse-dogs has emerged from the mountainous encrustation of enfungated human sewage in which they are accustomed to reside, and besieged me in my home, where I attempt to drive them from the crib of my cleft-lipped, hydrocephalic conjoined granddaughters using my recalled and partially melted prosthetic leg. When will the authorities help us?
Sincerely, etc…

Such letters always end up with a plea for help from Authority. No one writes to say “Let’s stop throwing trash in the street.” Of course we all throw trash in the street. It’s just that the Authorities don’t pick it up like they should. They have the beggar’s mindset which loudly laments a problem, but will never stand up and do anything about it, only hoping for aid from someone “higher.” Sloth and parasitism are the two rotted pylons on which Indian society sinks into disease and squalor. I think in many other countries, if the streets weren’t being kept clean, local businesses and neighborhood associations would get together and help. I can’t imagine Americans or Europeans lying around on heaps of their own trash and shit, moaning for their elected authorities to come and rescue them.







November 16th, 2005 Kolkata
    Only two more days here in the land of the foul. I spent the day doing a few last-minute errands and solving crossword puzzles. Lots of funny stories in the paper recently. In one incident, Maoist rebels took over a town and freed 600 people from jail. When the police chief was suspended because of the incident, all cops in the area went on strike. Headlining all the English papers was the story of a woman whose eye was eaten by ants while she lay in hospital. Locals then stormed the hospital and beat up the staff. Americans prefer litigation. Anyway, this is exactly the sort of thing the papers here love. Also, residents of a slum slated for clearance were arming themselves for resistance.

Don’t come to me with no petition
Fool come to me with ammunition-Lynch Mob

The squatter’s battle plan was detailed in the article as follows-

 “The last eviction drive by police and the railways on March 2 had to be called off after it was reported that squatters had gathered huge quantities of arms and ammunition in their shanties…The first layer of defense would comprise die-hard women of the ‘suicide brigade.’ Elderly males and children would form the second layer and the able-bodied male members will be part of the last layer of resistance, sources in the committee revealed.”

Whether this women and children first battle plan is an attempt at pathos or the result of cowardice is unclear. Perhaps the former, for the Indians seem to be very prone to emotional appeals. I’ve seen grown, full-bearded men crying on the street. When I walk by their shops, merchants call out, sounding as if they will die of grief, humiliation and starvation right then on the spot unless I come in and have a look. Either that or they try the remarkably unsuccessful guilt method – Why you not come my shop? Perhaps this public crying is another one of archaic remnants preserved in India, like leprosy and eunuchs. People are always bursting into tears in 19th century novels, like Dostoevsky or Dickens.


    The worst beggars on the trains are the Hijras or eunuchs. I’m not sure what exactly they are, but I’ve read that some undergo, voluntarily or otherwise, a frightening back-alley procedure. Some might be gay or intersex people. They subsist by being paid to go away. Everyone gives them money, which they demand as if it was owed with interest. I guess that they operate on the theory that anyone different from the norm must be a beggar. After living in India for seven weeks, I’ve started to develop an instinctive avoidance of anyone who looks at all ill or disabled. I cross the street to avoid anyone with a limp, a crutch, an infant, or even anyone who looks unusually skinny.
    On the other hand, I did read an inspiring story in the paper today about a totally blind Muslim Indian. First he memorized the entire Koran, then learned to repair TVs and radios by touch. Incredibly, he taught himself electronic repair by trial and error and now owns his own TV repair shop. Blind people sometimes amaze me. There was also a sad tale of another Muslim Indian who was mute from birth. He went to some meeting in 1980, got lost, and spent the next 25 years living in a mosque, because he couldn’t tell anyone where he was from. One of his fellow villagers recently recognized him, and he is now re-united with his wife and son!

    Anyways, so many things seem stuck in that late 1940’s postcolonial timewarp here in India. It was the same in Cairo, but less so. Here it’s not only the lettering, graphic design, and language that’s from the late 1940’s, but all the cars and streetcars too. Seeing all these bulbous 1940’s taxis and vintage trolleys trundling around I felt like I was on the set of a movie today. It feels like being in the late 40’s with a few intrusions like television and the internet creeping in somehow through a leakage in time. Look at the design of the fireworks package on the opposite page. The artist isn’t trying to be retro-chic, that’s just still how they design things here. It’s as if they think modern is how things looked when the Brits decamped. Today I bought a brilliant poster on the street, depicting the daily habits of “The Ideal Boy” which looks like it might be from the 1930’s or 40’s, although it was freshly printed. You can see the same phenomenon manifested in the matchboxes I’ve glues into the back of this journal. The green and yellow “Cheetah Fight” matches in particular just scream 1947 like nothing I’ve ever seen. Art Chantry might meet his match in Calcutta. Looking through the piles of yellowed old magazines in the bookshops, I’ve seen Indian detective and superhero comics executed in perfect early 50’s style. A few artists in the West have painstakingly mastered these retro styles, but in India there appears to be an unbroken tradition back to the original artists. What if the Brits had left India in the 1890’s? Would everything in India still have that fin de siecle art nouveau look?






    I’ve started to get quite excited about visiting Japan. It’s never been a place I’ve been interested in at all, but now that I’m thinking more about it, it seems quite fascinating, especially its history. When most nations, such as China and India, realized that Western technology was superior to their own, they just submitted to being colonized. But Japan, like an elegant guest arriving at a dinner party to find he has worn the wrong clothes, discretely slipped behind a curtain to emerge a few years later as a fully industrialized world power. It’s like they reverse-engineered our entire civilization. No other nation has even attempted something like that. Also, I’m hoping I might encounter a few things I bitterly miss about the, um, civilized world, like decent beer and Western music. It’s weird to have gone for so long without having heard any Western music. Sometimes an odd song like the Rolling Stone’s Jumping Jack Flash will pop randomly into my head and almost reduce me to tears. If by chance I somehow hear a little snippet of something like Hendrix or Sabbath, it just sounds SO DAMN GOOD, like no matter what Eastern civilization has come up with, those first few bars utterly blow it all away.

















November 20th, 2005 Iwaki Railroad Station, Japan
    O my. M first impressions of Japan have been extremely grim, to say the least. Arriving after about 13 hours of flying and waiting, I was detained by the Japanese police for six hours. Those Nazi morons were convinced my intestinal tract was crammed with condoms full of Heroin. They forced me to sign a form consenting to being X-rayed, then drove me to a weird hospital in the middle of nowhere where I was irradiated, before at long last giving me back my passport and ticket, long after I had any hope of reaching my destination. Thus because of these Nazi gook thugs I was forced to sleep on the street in a cardboard box like a bum. There are no budget hotels in Tokyo. I’ve never endured such protracted humiliating bullshit. These five cops dissected every item in my luggage two times and kept asking me if I was carrying any narcotics. They had an extensive set of laminated photographs of a vast panoply of drugs, including magic mushrooms and innumerable forms of opiates. Again and again they made me look through it. After the cops had gone through my things twice they made me sit in a blank interrogation chamber for 3 hours without telling me anything. They threatened to take me to court if I did not consent to being X-rayed. At last at 11pm they sent me off on a train to Tokyo.
    Weirdly, back in India, on my way to the Kolkata airport, the taxi driver smoked something that was apparently heroin. I wondered if the Japs had some sort of device that could detect a residue about me. By the way, that taxi ride really epitomized for me why India is hopelessly far behind China in development. Although the airport was only a few miles outside of downtown Kolkata, the taxi ride took well over an hour. The entire trip was a slow, stop-and-go crawl through black, smoky slums, overflowing with a ludicrous excess of humanity. Huge piles of burning trash and truant goats blocked the street. Although China has its share of overpopulation and pollution, their urban highways and infrastructure are generally superb.
    Anyways, when I got off of the train in Tokyo, I noted lots of very elegantly dressed, extremely drunk people staggering around. I paid 1,200 Yuan, or Yen, rather, to lock my bags in a steel cabinet and then set out to walk the streets all night. Everything seemed very opulent, clean, and efficient. Weird racks of super-glossy fashion magazines stood alone on empty corners. I ate some sushi and a weird salad from elaborate plastic containers, and drank a beer. Two weird things were immediately noticeable. First, pedestrians on a totally empty street will actually wait for the walk signal before crossing. There is something profoundly disturbing about a group of people waiting for the light to change on a silent, empty street, with no cars visible in either direction. In a way, that’s even more disturbing than some sort of mass fascist indoctrination rally. The other amazing thing was how neat and organized the homeless people were. Their cardboard boxes were so crisp and tightly folded together that they seemed to be part of the surrounding glass and steel civic engineering. There were a lot of these anal homeless people about, with their flip-flops neatly set outside their boxes. I wandered around some more and encountered some whores and a package of boiled squid tentacles. At about 3AM I found a stack of neatly folded cardboard boxes next to one of the geometrically engineered homeless camps. I believe my own efforts at constructing a cardboard shanty were poor and weak, compared to the palatial, cuboidal installations of my fellow bums. As I lay inside, I felt sure all would recognize the abortive, unevolved efforts of a rank gaijin. I got about an hour of sleep before it got really cold, and I had to get up and walk around to warm up. I carefully folded by boxes and returned them to the stack.
    The other people awake at this hour were exhibiting extreme difficulties in maintaining the vertical positions to which the evolutionary process had adapted them. At 5 I released my bags and managed to buy a ticket to Iwaki, where my friend lives. The sun rose as the train traveled North along the sea. It smelled like fall when the train doors opened, a strange temperate scent. The land looks a little like the Pacific NW, with big green conifers growing right beside the sea, and hills and modern houses. Very Frank Lloyd Wright. Now I’m sitting in the sun by the station, waiting for my friend to come find me.

November 24th, Narita Japan
    It’s noon here at Japan’s Narita airport, where I’m waiting for my flight back to the US of A. I passed a relaxing four days visiting my friend in Iwaki. He met me at the station and took me out to an amazing lunch. This marked the start of a series of delicious repasts. The place my friend lives is a huge suburb that looks a lot like an American one. I was surprised to see how similar Japan looks to the states- lots of cars, strip malls, 7-11s and concrete. However, if you look closely, everything is quite alien. It’s also SO clean and quiet. I think I saw one piece of trash on the ground my whole time here. No one stares at me at all, even less than they do in the states! Excruciating politeness prevails. In fact, I think I gave far more stares than I received, while looking at the carefully crafted hipster fashions on display. Everyone dresses so cool here. All the schoolgirls wear miniskirts, and the boys nautical looking uniforms. The amount of paving here is incredible. In general, everything seems so clean, polite and perfect that I want to take a dump on the street and go on a drunken rampage.
    We went on a bike ride to a nearby forest to watch the sun set from an observation platform. We drank beers and talked about everything. It was so nice to hang out with someone who spoke my exact dialect. It sounded like there are some odd similarities and differences between China and Japan. Similarities- 1. An overwhelming concern with face and appearance. 2. Great tolerance of loud noises, blinking lights and blaring announcements. 3. Students clean their own school. Pretty much everything else is totally opposite, especially in terms of politeness. Everything in China is fast, direct, and no-nonsense, while in Japan all interactions are buried under layers of ritual politeness and subtlety. The next day I rode my bike alone down to the ocean, where I was overjoyed to see the famous tetrapods. What? You don’t know about the tetrapods? Well, over 80% of Japan’s coastline is covered with giant concrete tetrapods, looking something like anti-tank barriers, or giant dog food pellets, or some monstrous art installation. They are supposed to prevent erosion, but actually cause it. They are the result of corrupt, nepotistic dealings between the government and local concrete companies. They serve only to waste excess public money in useless construction projects. Each one is about two meters square, and infinite millions of them are piled in endless drifts along the coastline. They might well be considered staggeringly ugly, but it’s quite surreal to climb around on them, something like being trapped in a pixellated video game.
    Later I had some of the best sushi ever. It was in a whole different class from anything I’d had in the states. Rich, oily sashimi that dissolves in your mouth. The best was big, orange salmon eggs. I also tried the notorious uni, or sea-urchin roe. It was intriguing and faintly nasty, like a warm tide pool. The next night we went to a special seafood store in a mall and got some scallops and a few big chunks of red, sashimi grade fish. While most things in Japan are a bit more expensive than in the states, the seafood is much cheaper, and is of an incredibly high quality. Seeing this selection of cheap, ultra-dank seafood actually made me want to live in Japan, at least momentarily. We had an excellent dinner of scallops, fish, mushrooms, cauliflowers and snowpeas. And beer from 1000ml cans.
    I was quite surprised to notice how much people say to you when you buy something here. They say like about ten elaborate sentences to you whenever you buy something. Apparently, most of this is ritual politeness phraseology. Also when you walk into a restaurant, the employees make a big deal and hail you like an old friend. I expected more shyness and reserve. It was quite weird and refreshing to come from India, a totally and hopelessly foul 3rd world miasmic pit, to Japan, which is noticeably more 1st world than the USA. It is also odd to visit a non-European country that seems richer and more advanced than the states. Japan seems much cleaner, more polite, and competently organized than anywhere else I’ve been. Where else do public toilets have heated seats and ten different computerized bidet functions? It’s certainly possible to make a lot of money teaching here, but I don’t think I could endure the tidiness and uptightness. I require at least marginal squalor and decay in order to feel at home.
    I can’t believe I’m going back to the states. Already, as I sit waiting in the Tokyo airport, I can hear a few anticipatory harsh, braying, nasal American accents, discoursing on inane topics. I’ve been away 10 months and twelve days. Not very long, but I feel less American than ever. Yet it’s never quite possible to feel at home as a backpacking vagrant cosmopolitan either. I certainly miss American music, and that feeling of subtle, anarchic cultural chaos that is boiling there. I wonder what will be new in the states. The first time when I came back in ’92, everyone was wearing baseball caps. In ’04 everything was low-carb this and that. At any rate, all the pages of my passport are now filled up with stamps, and I consider that a sign I should go home and remain busy there for a while.

November 25th, 2005 Eugene Oregon, USA
    Being back in the states is so weird. Imagine a place filled with thousands of people who speak the exact same dialect as you do! Everyone is from different ethnic groups. It’s so obvious that this is a place populated by random immigrants from everywhere, all living together. The class differences here are also way more distinct than I remember. The poor people talk in a sort of Western drawl, smoke tobacco, go to church, and talk about sports and relationships. The upper class discourses on such esoteric topics as P. K. Dick, Tom Brown, and the Mandelbrot set. It’s such a shock to loose my status as an alien.
    Another odd thing about the states that took me a while to realize- there is always some sort of mechanical or electrical vibration here, whether from the central heating or cooling, or the computers or fluorescent lights. Buzzing streetlamps and the inescapable roar of traffic. China and India were certainly very noisy, but they didn’t have this constant, pervasive vibration in the background.
    And finally, a list of some of my favorite nostalgia-inducing Americanisms that I’ve recently heard:
1.    Naht-uh!
2.    Well, shit!
3.    Ahmunnah…
4.    I’m fixing to…
5.    Whadahmanna do isammana…

The End.


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