October Journal

In which I enter the Land of the Foul

October 1st, 2005 Sunauli Nepal
    This day I visited Lumbini, birthplace of the Lord Buddha, and moved 4km South to Sunauli, right on the Indian border. While it was warm in Katmandu, it is broiling hot and muggy here. There’s so much humidity that you can’t see very far, and the sun is reddish near the horizon. Sitting in the shade, I can feel the sweat pouring off of my body. The myriads of flies that cover all surfaces seem to enjoy it though. I begin to understand the Buddha’s maxim-All life is suffering- an idea I’d previously disputed. The power goes off and on every ten minutes in the evenings, as it did in Kodari, but this time I’m prepared with a candle, by whose light I began this sentence. In this climate, all mental processes grind to a luxuriant halt. Perhaps this explains the eternal draw of the Himalayas to generations of Indian sages and thinkers. There was really nothing to see at Lumbini, except for the brick foundations of a few temples, and a pillar erected by Ashoka, the great Buddhist emperor. These were enclosed by a very large park, miles across, which had Buddhist temples from various nations, most under construction, but looking ambitious. The Mahayanists and Theravadas were located of opposite sides of a long artificial lake. I lurched around all this in a stifling heat.
    In other news, a local sterculum, or garbage pile yielded me one of those serpent being pictures I’ve spent so long looking for. I’ll paste it in. Also, the matchbox collection seems to be burgeoning more and more, the further I get from China and its blighted aesthetic. I changed my Nepali Rupees for Indian ones. It’s odd that the Chinese and Indian currencies have pictures of Chairman Mao and Mahatma Gandhi respectively. Could you think of two characters more opposed in the moral sense? It’s like if Russian money still bore portraits of Stalin.
    I also found a mass of discarded photographs blowing around in a parking lot in Katmandu, which I paste in here.

October 2nd, 2005 Varanasi India
    Last night I slept about four hours and got up at dawn to cross into India. The first thing I noticed in India was a deep layer of plastic trash covering every surface as far as I could see. Actually, even before this, I noticed a parasitical rickshaw wallah who would not leave me alone until I started kicking his rickshaw quite hard. I noticed a huge white bus whose occupants claimed that it was going to Varanasi, but seeing how decrepit the bus was, I didn’t believe them. It was like a demented version of an American school bus, but with hard seats and cracked windows. Surely, it was only some local, short-route clunker. But the occupants were telling the truth. I had to wait five minutes for the next one. We drove about eight hours through flat rice lands to Varanasi. All along the way, huge old trees lined the road. Boys swam with massive black water buffalo in the rice water. People were taking craps everywhere. Men wore skirts. The atmosphere was warm and humid. Every surface, including all street signs, was covered with layered masses of election posters depicting frowning men with mustaches. Who would vote for a candidate whose poster covered up some useful directional sign? Lurid posters advertising movies were glued up everywhere too, covering all the commercial billboards, which must have originally advertised something else, now obscured behind gaudy depictions of plump young women in voluptuous contortions and enraged men covered in blood with bulging eyes, brandishing handguns. At one point, five men got on, dressed in bright orange, red and pink robes, carrying curious hollowed-out stringed instruments with numerous sympathetic strings. They also all bore lanterns and staves. They seem to all be travelers from the same cult. Around four, we pulled into Varanasi.

He who tries to give one an idea about god by mere book-learning is like the man who tries to give one an idea of Benares by means of a map. - Ramakrishna

Cremation fuel.

Varanasi, also called Benares or Kashi, is one of the most sacred places for Hindus. Those who die here achieve liberation, and it is a very auspicious place to be cremated. This happens in public, along the huge Ganges, which flows by town. According to my guide, the safe maximum for water to swim in is 500 fecal matter bacteria per 100ml. In Varanasi, the Ganges boasts 1.5 million per 100 ml! Of course, one must swim I and drink the sacred waters here. And that’s not even to mention the corpse content. The touts here are the most persistent and vexatious of anywhere I’ve ever been. I totally lost my cool today with one small tout who followed me around for about 20 minutes, despite my telling him to leave in increasingly strong and profound language. When he followed me into a hotel corridor, I spun around and grabbed him by the throat. I squeezed and threw him away. Incredibly, he still followed me after that, although at a distance. After that, I adopted the method of totally ignoring the touts and acting like they were speaking an unknown language to themselves. That method proved to be way more effective, but I have the feeling that before I leave India, I’ll be presented with the fully justified opportunity to punch someone in the face as hard as I can.
Despite the high ppm of fecal matter and touts, Varanasi seems to be a totally fascinating place from the little I’ve seen so far. In the old city, all the streets are too narrow for traffic, and almost for people. Enormous sacred cows lounge about luxuriantly in the passways and streets. These are really sacred animals that can do whatever they want. There are also lots of wild-looking sadhus, or wandering ascetics. At night, the city has a strange, dark, menacing feeling. Moving shadows lurk everywhere. Coming here from Nepal, I feel a distinct increase in what I can only call the REALNESS of the place. It’s the feeling that something very powerful, complex and ancient is going on here, something which is totally indifferent to me. The poverty has a sharper edge to it. In the countryside, these people are just growing their food, and that’s what they have to eat. Life in the West, or in affluent parts of China, seems to have a sort of synthetic quality to it, as if any problem could be solved, and you could always be airlifted to somewhere else. There is a feeling that, on a deep level, things are under control. Specialist doctors are available. Some sort of authority is keeping things running smoothly. All this give the place an almost dreamlike aura, as if in being there, you were not quite really there. But in places like Tibet or India, it’s clear that there are no real or competent authorities around, although there may be lots of soldiers. In such places one could really disappear.
On the bus, I got an Indian English-language newspaper to read. Although it was written in reasonably correct English, I found almost all the articles to be incomprehensible. The editors clearly assumed a vast body of localized knowledge in their readers, which I lacked. It reminded be a bit of the feeling of first reading an English newspaper in Britain. Also, the paper contained no real news, only notices of the engagements of diplomats and ministers, as well as predictable editorials, much like Egyptian papers. Here is a transcribed example:

ON THE basis of the documentary evidence which the police has been able to lay its hands on, following enquiry into the FIR lodged by students under sections 419 and 420 of the Indian Penal Code on August 31 and September 9 last, against the Vice-Chancellor and Registrar of the Allahabad Agricultural Institute-Deemed University (AAIDU), the police have leveled 10 more sections of the IPC against them. The IPC sections 191, 192, 193, 196, 197, 200, 466, 467, 468, and 474 have been recorded in the general diary of the Naini police on September 29 night.

A street scene in Varanasi.
I think this image captures the feel of India better than any of the others I took.

October 3rd, 2005 Varanasi
This morning and afternoon, I explored around the old city of Varanasi. Even for aficionados such as myself, the weirdness levels of this place can be almost too intense. The tiny alleys are crammed with cows, deformed beggars, Sadhus, and women in saris. Human and animal shit is everywhere. Huge trees burst out of small stone shrines on obscure corners. People eat slop off leaves. Corpse processions hurry to the riverside ghats. The bodies are wrapped in cloth and placed on big piles of wood, covered in ghee and spices, then lit from an ancient sacred flame. They seem small. The river is lined with holy ghats, which are stone stairs and temples leading into the water. In some spots, the huge, ornately decorated structures have sunk under their own weight into the water. An intricately carved stupa jutted from the water at an angle and served as a moorage for boats. Brahmans, with their sacred threads and tufts of hair, perform rituals involving leaves, rice, and small fires while their wives watched.
ghats

    After a shower break, I hit the streets again. I bought about 20 more Hindu goddess posters to add to my roll, at about 5-15 rupees each. At one point, walking back from a trip to the post office, I ran into an incredible human traffic jam. The cycle-rickshaws were all locked together, preventing the pedestrians from moving. This was on a fairly large main street too. Peering over the crowd, I could see gridlocked human bodies in all directions. I was trying to get out of the holy old city to a place where beer was available, but I just gave up.

October 4th, 2005 Varanasi
    This day I mailed some books and other crap back to my parent’s house. The Indian postal system deserves First Prize among world POs. Mailing five books, some maps and photos cost only 90 Rupees, less than 2 USD. I did have to sit around for nearly an hour in the sun, waiting while an interesting old man sewed up my packages and sealed them with wax, but the mailing itself took only about 3 minutes. Then I walked around Varanasi some more. I’ve been to cities where there is so much traffic that you can’t cross the street, but this is the first place I’ve been where it’s so crowded that you can’t even walk down the street sometimes.
    I’ve just now fulfilled a long-time aspiration of chewing betel nut. This mild narcotic turns one’s teeth red after years of use. It seems to have a very mild sedative/narcotic effect. It costs three rupees per dose, and comes in the form of all sorts of sweet and mushy stuff wrapped up in a leaf. It tastes like a combination of men’s hair tonic and candy.

sarnath

October 5th, 2005 Varanasi
    Today I visited Sarnath, or the deer park where the Buddha preached his first sermon. There was a huge crumbling brick stupa from the 5th century AD, which looked like a 45 slug. Also visible were the brick foundations of many monasteries and an Ashokan pillar. The museum contained some excellent statues found nearby, including one very serene image of the Buddha which seemed almost to move, and a group of four conjoined lions that originally topped a pillar from the 3rd century BC. All this is about 12 km from Varanasi. The ride out there in a little three-wheeled motor-rickshaw was incredible. I’ve never seen such congestion and traffic chaos. There seems to be somewhere between 10 and 100 times too many people for the facilities and roads.

October 6th, 2005 Satna
    This day I did a seven-hour train ride to Satna, on my way to visit Khajuraho and its notorious temple sculptures. The Indian railway system seemed decent enough. The carriages were a tad grungy and infested with roaches, but there was no Chinese music, hamdulillah. A procession of deformed beggars enlivened the trip by parading down the aisle. In the West, if you are born with a club foot, or cut off your hand, you just get a special shoe or a hook and get on with life. Here you hit pay dirt as a beggar. Thus charity induces parasitism.
    I could not prevent myself from causing a minor spectacle when checking into my hotel here tonight. First I waited ten minutes for an argument to finish, then filled out 27 different facts about myself, my nation, and my heritage in a huge book, then was compelled to reinscribe all the same information into another booklet. The clerk found some minor error with everything I’d written, and I had to re-inscribe it. After all this, he then pointed out a minute inaccuracy in what I’d written for time of check-in. I feigned shock, then failed to prevent myself from falling on the ground and mimicking an apoplectic fit. It was a very Dostoevskian moment, like when you know you are going to do something terribly embarrassing out of sheer perversity, but cannot stop yourself. After my fit, however, the clerk refrained from questioning any of the other inscriptions that I had made. Clearly, India is not like China, where you can fill out the forms with whatever nonsense you like. My favorites were: Purpose of Visit: Heroin Smuggling. Name: Incontinentia Buttox.
    Walking around Varanasi the parasitism is so intense. Beggars, hotel touts, money-changers, boatmen and rickshah-wallahs constantly besieged me like flies. I often feel like I am a water-table that everyone wants to tap. I am a natural process, a cycle of transformations, which others can see, and wish to exploit. But generally they cannot, for I ignore them utterly.

October 7th, 2005 Khajuraho couple

After an agonizing, mosquito-bitten night under a grinding ceiling fan in Satna, I got on a dawn bus to Kajuraho. This place is really in the middle of nowhere now, although it was once the center of a mighty empire. After fighting off minor touts, I found a hotel and then went to check out the famous temples. These proved to be absolutely awesome. Although relatively small, each temple was absolutely drenched in exquisite, ultra-erotic decoration. Untold languorous myriads of voluptuous divine maidens cavorted over every surface, fondling themselves, applying make-up, playing musical instruments, and of course fucking like mad. Brilliant smooth lizards and brisk chipmunks dashed across incredible gymnastic, orgiastic debaucheries. Despite going far beyond any X-rated film in enthusiasm and contortioned inventiveness, all the figures were sublimely elegant, calm, and poised, never crude. The Indian tourists seemed to find these sculptures at once fascinating and slightly amusing. Such would never get past the censors in India today, where even kissing in public is punishable by fines and imprisonment. I was quite overwhelmed by the architectural perfection and flaming eroticism of these temples. Certainly one of the most amazing structures I’ve ever encountered. Aside from the cavorting, voluptuous divine maidens, the temples also featured a very interesting sort of abstract decoration, especially on their spires and pinnacles, which reminded me somewhat of geometric Aztec or Mayan motifs. Aside from these man-made wonders, I also saw an enormous lizard, perhaps some kind of monitor. Excluding the tail, it was perhaps 3 or 4 feet long. It constantly flicked out its long, pink, forked tongue, and seemed to be rather cautious.
In a separate location was a group of excellent Jain temples. These were similar to the Hindu temples, but with a bit less sex, and even more sublime sculptures. Their central idols were jet black. I’ve long admired the ancient Jain religion, and was happy to enter their temple for the first time. OMG. I’m sitting on my balcony after sunset, observing the slender crescent moon, and the most humungous bat I’ve ever seen just flew by. I thought it was a hawk at first.

October 8th, 2005 Khajuraho
    This day I walked around in the countryside and explored the rest of the more remote temples. One ancient yogini temple seemed to be perfect for cyclopean, chthonic rites. Its amazing how well most of the sculptures have survived 1,000 years out in the open. Even the finest details like nose-tips and scepters are largely intact. It was also interesting to stroll about in the countryside. It actually looked somewhat African to me, with thatched huts, water buffalo, and naked, pot-bellied kids running about.
    I’ve been quite surprised at how regularly people here try to rip me of and cheat me. Almost every time I buy something, I am shortchanged. When I change money, there are a few hundreds missing. How much for one hour of internet? 30 rupees. But when I’m done he says 60. Of course, I always challenge these paltry subterfuges, and the culprits immediately back down, but they don’t seem at all embarrassed at having been caught flagrantly cheating and lying. I guess this is one of those parasitical, baksheesh-based cultures. It is certainly a type A country, where people comment on my facial hair, and there is never enough change. It is not as bad as Egypt in these respects, however. Of course, a lot of this no-change problem is based on baksheesh, which must always be in the correct small denomination. In such places, many times I want to visit some temple or shrine, or take a short taxi or rickshaw ride, but can’t for lack of the correct change, although I have a lot of money with me.

October 10th, 2005 Varanasi
    Yesterday featured an absolutely nightmarish 15½ hour bus-ride from Khajuraho to Varanasi. The corroded hulk of a bus crawled into every possible tedious detour and minor wayside village. It was stuffed with passengers and bulk cargo. Many people brought on sacks of concrete, huge truck parts, bundles of fabric, giant milk jugs, screaming infants and dying relatives who had to be carried. We sat in the sun for an hour and a half while a tire was patched. During this time, I observed that the best tires on the bus were completely bald, and that many had huge chunks of rubber bitten out. By the end of the trip I was feeling very ill and delirious. It’s amazing to me that people can live their whole lives in such filthy, frantic, overcrowded conditions.
    While on the bus, I read an interesting article by a Dalit (untouchable) columnist, which eloquently summed up a phenomenon that I’ve observed many times, but never heard stated so clearly. He said that Western and Asian merchants operate in two different ways. Asian merchants seek profit by maximizing the profit margin on each item sold, while Western merchants seek high turnover and lower profit margins. What this means in practical terms is that every time you go to buy something in this Asian system, the merchant basically tries to rip you off as hard as he can. The result is that the customer is unhappy, becomes less willing to buy things, and saves money instead. Thus the economy stagnates, and ultimately all parties are worse off, as less wealth is created. By contrast, Western merchants seek to please their customer, and not just by offers of tea, but by good prices. The high turnover in this system ultimately proves to be more profitable for the merchants, while the happier customers will spend more, leading to economic growth. I’ve noticed this contrast while living in Egypt and India, but not so much in China, so I think it’s more accurate to distinguish between 1st and 3rd world merchants than between Asian and Western ones. In essence, the 3rd world merchant kills the goose that lays golden eggs, by seeking a big immediate profit in the short term, but the merchant who seeks to please his customers ends up richer in the long term. The one system is essentially obstructionist, leading to stagnation, the other dynamic, leading to increased growth and unfolding.
khajuraho diary

    Interestingly, I have observed something like the same dichotomy expressing itself in other areas of cultural behavior. For example, contrast Western and Egyptian/Indian etiquette when faced with a situation like getting on a crowded bus, elevator, or subway car. In Egypt and India, everyone tries to cram into the elevator as soon as the door open, without letting out the passengers who want to get off. The result is a melee that takes a lot of time and energy to clear. On this last bus-ride, I noticed a similar dynamic in the motor traffic waiting at railroad crossings. On each side of the crossing, the drivers filled both lanes, both their own, and that of the oncoming traffic, in some kind of attempt to gain a slight positional advantage. The result was, that when the train passed and the gates opened, all drivers were faced with total gridlock. If the drivers had only waited in their proper lane, the traffic could have started to move much more rapidly, and the huge pointless traffic jam could have been averted. I think that at the core, this is the same phenomenon as the 3rd world merchant gleefully trying to rip off his customers. By seeking an immediate benefit at the expense of his fellows, the 3rd world citizen creates a situation in which obstruction and hindrance prevail, while opportunities for growth and progress are bypassed. There is a famous essay entitled The Tragedy of the Commons that details another aspect of this phenomenon. It explains how a resource held in common, such as a forest or pasture, will ultimately be destroyed by individuals each seeking their own benefit, unless it be regulated by some authority. I think, however, that an instituted authority is not always necessary. The examples of Western behavior at elevators and railroad crossings indicate that culture alone, independent of centralized enforcement, can lead to beneficial mass behavior, avoiding the tragedy of the commons.
    But as is usual, the distinction between these first and third world behaviors is more complex. The Dalit columnist brought up the distinction between Western and Asian merchants as part of his argument for allowing direct foreign investment in India by such multinationals as Walmart and Tesco. These corporations epitomize the 1st world marketing strategy of low profit margins and high turnover. Now as for myself, no amount of low prices could ever justify the total aesthetic horror and revolt consequent upon entry into a Walmart, and surely, slow death would be preferable to employment in such a wasteland. The initial, surrealist interest of the vast, vaulted, cathedral-like moundings of extruded plastic products soon withers under the buzzing glare of fluorescent tubes, the braying announcements that seek to whip up even greater frenzies of grotesque over-consumption of toxins, and the appalling and inescapable canned lite muzak. Furthermore, such megastores are frequently inaccessible to pedestrians, forcing customers to travel there encased inside their own mechanized pods, filled with explosive supercarcinogens, and weighing many times their occupant’s mass, which is often substantial. Acres and acres of land are paved over to accommodate these pods. Surely no locality could be more worthy of utter obliteration than a freshly extruded Walmart. Yet few seem to share these aesthetic quibbles. Furthermore, few recognize the much greater environmental impact of mass consumerism, compared to the obstructionist 3rd world business traditions. At one level, the 1st world custom seems to be based on a wider view of the dynamic, but on an even larger, or global scale, it becomes evident that the Western ideal of unlimited growth and expansion threatens to destroy the basic environmental systems on which our lives depend.

October 11th, 2005 Varanasi
    Social parasitism is being mirrored on the bacterial level. At least I’m not alone. Judging by the state of the local alleys, the holy cows are suffering too. Today is my second day of lying in bed and running to the bathroom every 25 minutes. I got some drugs this morning, which should help.
    About three hours after ingesting these, I felt able to venture more than 50 yards from the toilet, and eat something for the first time in a few days. When I got back to my hotel, I found it filled with dense, billowing smoke. The hotel family was all kneeling around an iron box filled with a large pile of burning wood and herbs. They were chanting incantations, and seemed absorbed in their ritual. It reminded me of a minor version of something out of the Rig Veda. I couldn’t believe they were burning this huge fire right inside the main hotel building. Elsewhere, this would be considered a disaster. Granted, all of the floors of the building are open steel grate, open at the top five floors up, but still. Other smoke-filled occurrences today included a visit to the cremation ghats. India is certainly the queen of total weirdness. Imagine returning to a super-8 motel in Nebraska to find it filled with dense clouds of acrid smoke while an extended family sat around chanting and feeding the fire for hours. Now, despite my ceiling fan, the smoke from the vedic ritual is starting to penetrate my room.

October 12th, 2005 Varanasi
    Here in Varanasi, I begin to understand the full force of the Shakespearian insult “You mangy cur!” Many of the street dogs here are suffering from the mange, and are missing big patches of their fur. They look truly miserable and horrific. At the cremation ghats lives one sad dog that is totally bald. It looks like a diseased bat out of hell, and is one of the most miserable and frightening beings I’ve ever encountered. I walked through the alleys this morning and watched people making their strange and largely vain attempts at a morning cleaning. They poured water and swept rubbish into piles. In one of these piles of sodden trash, betel sputum and shit I saw a small cat, totally waterlogged and lying on its side. Its legs were moving quickly still, like it was running. In its mind, it was already running towards the place it was going next. This whole town reeks of the fast lapse into death. I can smell it as soon as I step out. The angel of death presides here more overtly than anywhere I’ve ever seen. Everything seems to be rushing into the horrid gates of black death. Being a good and orthodox goth, I generally like such places, but here the feeling is too real and extreme. There’s no escape from it. Here I sense not just the universal decay that is transformation, but the death that is the end of something forever.
    This day I bought a train ticket to near Bodghaya, which is the spot where the Buddha achieved enlightenment. I’m quite excited to go. I also found a cardboard tube to house my ever-growing collection of Hindu devotional posters. I spent a good deal of time walking up and down, and back and forth across the face of Benares, observing the chaos. I’ve managed to relax a little bit about the touts and parasites, and can at least look at them and sometimes say no. Meanwhile, the Durga-puja festivities are increasing in extent and volume, while the Muslims meekly fast. I also went inside a weird sort of artificial palace behind the scaffolding demon pictured on the opposite page. It had more Durga goddesses and festivities inside.

October 13th, 2005 Bodhgaya
    This day I traveled to Bodhgaya, the spot where the Buddha achieved enlightenment. It’s a small village crowded with monks and pilgrims. On the spot in question is a huge 6th century stupa, surrounded by an Ashokan stone railing. Two huge Bodhi trees grow there (Ficus religiosa), scions of the Sri Lankan scion of the original tree. There were some very impressive monks there, sunk deep in meditation. There was one in particular who looked like he might have been getting close. He sat bolt upright with sunken eyes closed, and seemed to radiate a profound total calm that was almost fierce. I sat under the tree for a while, and observed my thoughts rampaging about for a while as per usual, like monkeys in a forest. My heart softened when I realized the immensity of what the meditators were trying to do. I felt I understood why meditation is frequently described in the tradition as Heroic.

October 14th, 2005 Bodhgaya
    This day I walked about 12 km to the cave where the Buddha practiced his starvational austerities before he discovered the middle way. The cave itself was small, cozy, and very hot. On my way back down from the cave, a man almost started to cry when I did not buy some biscuits from him. He kept tearfully yelling after me “Biscuit! Biscuit!” as I walked down the hill. There was something hilarious about the extreme plaintiveness of his tragicomic appeals, and I started laughing at him. He eventually broke down and started laughing too.
    It was fun wandering through the little fields, asking the way. Some of the villagers wore crazy face-paint. I never seem to find the established way to things, and always end up bushwhacking along some obscure local track. While walking, I came across a large detachment of heavily-armed soldiers from the Indian Army. Apparently, this region is quite infested with Naxalite or Maoist revolutionary bandits. The leader so the soldiers asked me where I was going and sent me along my way. When I re-crossed the dry riverbed on the way back, I came across some sort of market/mass picnic at the outskirts of Gaya. There I was amused to see pigs being cooked according to the following recipe:
1.    Put pig on ground.
2.    Build fire on pig.

October 15th, 2005 Kolkata
    This day I traveled by rail from Gaya to Kolkata. The ride from Bodhgaya to Gaya was endured clinging to the roof-rack of a three-wheeler. They offered to let me sit up front, but when they tried to squeeze a fourth person into a seat intended for one, I opted for the roof. Then a slow rickshaw ride to the station. My rickshaw peddler was an ancient man with tiny, shriveled limbs, but he didn’t try to rip me off. At the station, numerous emaciated persons lay sprawled all over the ground, hopefully only asleep. Indians seem to suffer from a sort of narcolepsy in railway stations, which causes them to collapse randomly in the middle of platforms and passways. The train was over two hours late coming in, so I had plenty of time to observe the station.
    The amount of filth was truly stupendous. I’m starting to get the feeling that Indians actually revel in squalor, self-abasement and deformity. Down in the place where the tracks were was a long lake of foul liquid, composed of urine, betel sputum, and stagnant water filled with plastic trash. Lots of people were down there, poking through the trash, or shortcutting to the next platform. I watched some very old guy down there trying to cross. He seemed to have some sort of tremulous neurological problem, and got stuck on the stepping-stones in the liquid, until someone helped him across. Whenever a train stopped, the passengers poured out of every opening on both sides. The whole place smelled like shit. Deformed beggars shambled, crawled and dragged themselves up and down the platforms. The two most popular deformities seem to be the ones where the legs are withered up, so you must walk on your knees and palms, then there’s the classic club-foot. Both are displayed with consummate relish. After 143 minutes of waiting, my observations were curtailed by the train’s untimely arrival. I found my berth, cleared it of luggage and sleeping children, and crawled up there.
    After 8 hours, we arrived in Kolkata. Indescribable chaos prevailed outside the station, but I eventually got a taxi across the river and found a hotel. It’s dark here, but Kolkata seems to have an archaic feel. The taxis are bulbous 1940’s style cars, and instead of cycle rickshaws, the rickshaws are pulled by barefoot men. Also, there are old-style streetcars. I observed these things while wandering around looking for a liquor store. In India, beer is only sold in special fortified shops. It is also very expensive (40-80 Rupees) and tastes truly horrible, even worse than American beer. It’s these last beer-related facts in particular that have led me to start to form the conclusion that quite possibly, India basically sucks. Other contributing factors are that people are liars, and basically every object in the entire sub-continent is directly contaminated with human shit. Almost too disgusting to mention or even think about is the fact that people here manually wipe the shit from their asses with their fingers. They don’t even use soap to wash their fingers afterwards. Their idea is that it’s all ok so long as you don’t use you left hand afterwards. Now it seems to me that this indicates an undisguised relishment in unnecessary foulness. Can’t you at least use a scrap of newspaper? In most Muslim countries, there is the same little spigot next to the toilet, but it has a hose attached to spray your ass clean, which has got to be the most sanitary way yet devised. Now don’t tell me you’re too poor to install a short length of hose. Furthermore, people shit everywhere indiscriminately like dogs. The enormous piles of rotting trash and excrement seem to be given an undue prominence in the intersections of streets. These are gathered up by hand (that is, by hand) and carted off. The bases of the culture seem to be sloth, parasitism, and corruption. Any popular tourist hotel or restaurant inevitably spawns numerous imitators with slightly different names. Instead of trying to make a good name for themselves, the new businesses shamelessly try and parasitize their predecessors. Have they no particle of self-respect? Are they 4 years old?
    The only redeeming fact is that all of this is so flagrantly overt, excessive and shameless that you just have to laugh. There is a point beyond which extreme inefficiency, filth, and squalor just become hilarious. Waiting in line three hours is merely annoying, but being rejected when you get to the front because your paper has a minute tear in it is actually funny. Seeing trash and shit everywhere is disgusting, but huge mounds right in the middle of town covered with flies, goats, hairless, pink dogs, bloated cows and hideous beggars vying to more wretchedly display their deformities and lesions-you can only laugh. And quite likely, the locals will laugh along with you.

October 16th, 2005 Kolkata
    This morning I visited the absolutely wonderful Indian Museum in Kolkata. It featured some of the most gloriously decayed, obsolete, faded, moth-eaten exhibits I’ve ever seen. I just love these old types of museums, with their lavish dark wood and glass cases, high ceilings, and aura of total, forgotten decay. It felt as if the museum had been locked up one day in 1946 and only opened again this morning. Many of the labels were totally obscured by deep layers of dust or corrosion. The stuffed animal’s fur was missing in patches. The vast hall of fossils rested under a deep layer of thick black dust. The whole place was a monument to death and decay. The processes of decay evident in the displays were often of greater interest than the displays themselves. Despite this, I did learn quite a lot about several totally archaic industrial products and processes. There was an extensive display about asbestos and asbestos products in the hall of minerals. Also, several strange electrical components from before the days of plastic, such as tubes and insulators made of weird types of mica and silica. Most fascinating of all was a very extensive display about a totally archaic product known as “lac,” as in lacquer or shellac. It’s sort of like a form of hard, shiny plastic, but it is made from these weird encrustations that form on tree branches, because this one type of insect is living there. I think I’ve actually seen these weird, shiny encrustations before. They were scraped off, ground up, and somehow made into things like vases and 78 rpm phonograph records. The display, which seemed to date from the last days of the Empire, featured small models of all the stages of the lac making process, including one of searching the worker’s clothes and pockets before they were allowed to leave the factory! Another display detailed the opium-making process, and included several huge and ancient lumps of opium behind thin and dusty glass. One of the reasons I love such places is that they seem to fulfill an old phantasy of mine, in which the world is abandoned by humans, and allowed to lapse gloriously, slowly, undisturbedly back into its original stillness.
    In the afternoon, I made a very long, torturous, confused trip to the Dakshineswar Kali temple in North Kolkata. This involved riding the Kolkata underground, various trains, and busses, on most of which I traveled too far, or in the wrong direction. After long wanderings, I finally made it to the temple around sunset. This is the temple where the great mystic saint, tantric hero and goddess-worshiper Ramakrishna was a priest. I’d been wanting to come to it for years. I took off my boots and waited in line with the other pilgrims, who were carrying offerings of flowers. Once inside the temple, I queued up to see the goddess herself. A small permanent riot was happening in front of her image, heavily draped in brilliant garlands. Priests behind a barricade snatched the offerings and threw them on the ground before the black and red idol. A priest gave me a handful of flowers. Once outside, I watched the beautiful moon rise, nearly full. I bought some souvenirs, such as a desktop photo of Kali, and four cool pendants featuring Kali, Ramakrishna, and his wife Seradevi. I had to wait over an hour for the local train back to the metro line. Meanwhile, I watched fireflies and the moon. All this was in keeping with my experience that in India, every train is at least one hour late. It’s four out of four so far. V.S. Naipul says somewhere that Indians have an incredible capacity for idleness. And indeed while some people here do work damn hard, it’s also true that everywhere I look, huge crowds of people are laying around, doing nothing.

relative qualities

October 17th, 2005 Kolkata
    Today I bought plane tickets back to Portland OR, USA, and also to visit the parents over Christmas. I arranged to stay in Japan for about four days to visit an old friend who is teaching English there. I’m guessing that the culture shock from going to Japan from India will be even greater than going back to the states.
    While in China and India, I’ve had occasion to meditate on the strange differences in the qualities of goods available. In the USA, there is a certain range of quality available for anything you buy, from high to low. Now, one of the challenges of living in a 3rd world nation is internalizing the fact that there are whole, vast, sub-basements of quality far below anything you could find in the first world. For instance, who would even think of making a pair of pants with fake pockets and the buttons attached WITH GLUE? Yet buying a pair of pants in China, I just assumed that the pockets would be pockets, and that the buttons would be sewn on, not attached with FREAKING GLUE so that they came off the first time you touched them. In India, the situation is even more extreme, and it can be difficult to even find something useable. In China, at least the mosquito coils didn’t crumble to dust as soon as you took them out of their box. Here anything you put into a plastic bag immediately falls out through the bottom onto the street. Water leaks out of the seals on bottled water. Everything seems to be a mere theatrical representation of what it purports to be, a sort of dim, Platonic shadow of an ideal; a lazy, inept gesture towards something too real and solid to exist in this world of feeble pretenses. I ask myself, is this a thing, or merely a trying to be? The veils of maya are thinner here. Reality crumbles away under a touch, and reduces to trash. The shoddy, weak, and faded quality of Indian objects seems to reduce the quality and value of life itself. Reality takes on a transient cast. What is the use of any real effort towards the material in this world of manifest delusions?
    Yet I am reminded of how objects in Europe are of better quality than those in the states. Paper is a little thicker. No amount of searching in Europe will turn up anything as horrific as Wonderbread or Coors Lite. In Switzerland this is especially obvious. There, everything is heavy, solid, and perfectly engineered. Every mountain pinnacle is beautifully mapped. A parallel gravity is invested in all life and experience there. An earthquake in Kashmir kills 40,000 people and drops from the news in days, while an even stronger earthquake struck Japan a few years ago, and caused 17 injuries. Life is fast and cheap in the developing world. Traffic fatalities and spectacular train wrecks are routine in India. Eleven people die from drinking poison homebrew booze. Arms are chopped off daily in bus accidents. Myriads of beings and events arise and collapse back into the matrix without notice.

October 18th, 2005 Kolkata
    I began this day by visiting the Kali temple after which Kolkata was named. It was a rather small and very crowded place. I chose not to wait in the long line to see Kali herself. Around back was the gruesome alter where black goats were sacrificed to the goddess. A dejected huddle of small black goats waited their doom, surrounded by huge piles of scarlet flowers and the hot, bloody, oozing intestines of their predecessors. It seems that only pure black goats and bright red flowers are acceptable. A man shivering in some sort of weird religious ecstasy placed his own head in the bloodstained stone yoke used for decapitating the victims. Unlike Aleister Crowley on his visit to this spot, I opted not to sacrifice a goat to Kali. The pitiful little strings upon which the trembling, knock-kneed goats were being led about poignantly emphasized the sadness of the scene. I hurried away, trying not to be overcome by the weird amalgam of pity, disgust and religious awe that I felt swirling in me.
    Next I visited a wonderfully overgrown old cemetery in which the English colonists were buried in the early 19th century. Kolkata, then Calcutta, was capitol of British India for years, and many of the graves were very impressive in a wonderfully gothic way. Massive stone pyramids, spires, and pillars were totally covered in thick moss and epiphytic vegetation. The ground there was unusually soft, moist and spongy, and as I walked under the dark trees, among the corroding monuments, I felt that I might sink down into the deep layered decay and be lost. A flash of genuine supernatural terror impelled me back to the more regularly frequented section of the cemetery. The Brits all seemed to die very young. None made it into their 60’s. Most seemed to croak in their 20’s and 30’s. I suppose that the ones who didn’t immediately drop must have made it back to be buried in English soil. Many of the inscriptions mentioned “discharging one’s duty to The Company.”
    Now it’s raining hard outside, and I’ve been reading Robinson Crusoe in my room. The psychic drain of walking on the streets here is so intense that I find I have to reserve every bit of strength to make it through the day.

Slop ingestion outside of the Kali Temple.

October 19th, 2005 Kolkata
    The torrential downpour continued all last night. When I tried to leave my hotel I was confronted with a sizable lake about 1.5 decimeters deep. Wading across this, I found many streets totally flooded. They seem to have some drainage issues here. I read a newspaper article today about how one government agency clears silt out of the drains and dumps it by the side of the road, where another agency is supposed to pick it up. But they refused to do this on some grounds, so guess where all the silt goes next time it rains. Brilliant. I bought a train ticket to BUBANESWAR to the South. I somehow felt that I would end up in Bubansewar, and so I did, as there were no seats left on the train to Puri, where I wanted to go. Bubaneswar must rank right up there with Lake Titicaca in the silly obscene name competition. I spent long hours wandering around Kolkata before returning all wet to my room. Nothing dries in this climate.

October 20th, 2005 Kolkata
    It rained hard all last night, and still rains now at noon. The flooding is just absurd. The entire courtyard of my hotel, as well as all the streets, are under 3-6 inches of water, or more. Everyone is walking around barefoot through the trash-ridden water. I don’t want to contemplate what foulness it contains, or what would happen were an electrical wire to fall into it. Wading back to my hotel, I looked with trepidation at the huge, confused entanglements of wires and rusting fuse boxes tacked up everywhere. Hundreds of people could easily be electrocuted while wading through the slimy, oily mess. I resolved to stay in my hotel room and read about particle physics and cosmology until I can leave this demented town. There is a sort of equation relevant to visiting 3rd world countries, that balances how fascinating it is to be in an ancient, colorful, alien place, with how much of a pain it is to deal with the squalor and mind-bending inefficiency that characterizes all aspects of existence there. For me, in India the balance falls squarely on the annoying side.
    I ventured out into the floodwaters again to find food and drink. As I waded through the opaque, grayish flood, I wondered where all the dead rats and piles of human shit lining the streets were now. Soft, pulpy objects squelched under my bare feet. The locals seem to accept the situation calmly, even happily. They took an especial relish, I noted, in saying “Welcome to India!” as I waded past them. I slogged down to the special beer store at the end of the street. From there, I could see way down another big street, which was entirely flooded and filled with wading pedestrians. Taxis passed, churning waves of the foul miasma. The situation seems to be accepted as normal. According to an informant, this happens whenever it rains here. “India is very poor,” he said. I somehow think there might be something more to it. Do I detect the entrenched fatalism of the Gita?

October 21st, 2005 Bhubaneswar
    Today I made the 7 ½ hour train ride South to Bhubaneswar. The train was full of beautiful plump ladies and their shrimpy husbands. The stream of shambling deformities slopping and dragging up the aisle was unusually intense. They must make a lot of money. Many people gave Rupees to them. When the train arrived at Bhubaneswar, all of the passengers, perhaps thousands of people, had to wait to file up a single narrow staircase to get off the platform. Everywhere is abysmal incompetence, in which the locals seem to take an especial delight. For example, at the left luggage depot at Howrah train station in Kolkata, there were two huge signs proclaiming BEWARE OF RATS – don’t leave eatables in your luggage. These signs were larger and more prominent than the sign for the luggage room itself, as if they were advertising the proud fact that they had a rat infestation there. Each compartment of the train had an engraved steel placard bolted to the wall, saying something like- “Beware of strangers giving you food or beverages. Those people could be anti-social elements who will drug you and take your possessions.” I found it quite remarkable that each carriage had a placard with that inscription. The phrase “anti-social elements” would appear to have been borrowed from some type of Marxist literature. Seeing my picture tubes, a fellow passenger inquired, “Pardon my inquisitiveness, but what have you got there, some drawings or something of that sort?” Meanwhile, I broke my nine-day streak of going without explosive, torrential diarrhea.

October 23rd, 2005 Puri
    Yesterday I took a short, crammed bus-ride out to Puri on the coast, about one hour east. It’s famous for its Jaganath temple and legalized bhang. Today I was too sick to venture far from toilet radius, so I lay around and read Stephen King’s Skeleton Crew. The hotel I found here is really cool- it is the former palace of some sort of local maharaja, near to the sea.

October 24th, 2005 Puri
    This day I felt well enough to venture beyond toilet radius, so I walked over to the mighty Jaganath temple, home to Jaganath, Lord of the Universe. He bears a VERY suspicious resemblance to Cartman of Southpark fame. Even the image to the left fails to convey the full resemblance, because he is usually depicted with a fully round head. I bought the picture in its own glass case for 10 Rupees and pried it out. I failed to find the government Bhang shop, which was probably for the better. I sat around on the beach and started in on a new Stephen King novel, The Tommyknockers. People were swimming fully dressed, saris and all. While smoking ganja may be fully legal here, one thing is not- sitting undisturbed and reading a book, unless behind a closed and locked door. But the beggars, vendors and parasites weren’t actually too annoying, at least this time. It’s amazing how strangers will just ask me “Where are you going?” I wonder if that’s permissible for one Indian to ask another.

konark wheel

October 25th, 2005 Puri
    Today I visited the Konark Sun Temple, 34 km North of Puri. Although only an hour long, the busride ranked among the top three worst ever. The Indians can take overcrowding to insane extremes. I sat in the middle of the back row, the only place where my legs would fit. Every cubic decimeter inside the bus was crammed with sweating human flesh. An extended family was crammed into the space between my legs- a mother and child, a grandmother, and a younger daughter. I would have given up and gotten off of the bus, had it even been possible to move. Between the crush of limbs, I could see that the exterior of the bus was encrusted with a thick layer of humanity as well. Truly, this is a totally miserable country. The Sun temple was quite good though, much bigger than the ones at Khajuraho. It was also covered in erotic sculptures. I paid a dude 60 Rupees to take my picture with one of the 24 giant stone wheels that adorn the temple. In the photo, you can see the strange non-black color of my clothes.

October 28th, 2005 Chennai
    Here I am in Chennai (Madras) capital of Tamil Nadu, after an insane 36-hour train ride from Bhubaneswar. It was supposed to take 20 hours, but was delayed by rain. I slept much better the second night in the train. When it became clear that a second train-bound night was going to be necessary, I went out to buy some whisky to drink with some other foreigners, two Japanese and a Polish couple. The phrase “he smote the sledded Polocks on the ice” kept recurring to me. I had a great chat with a cute Japanese girl who had lived in New York City for a year. She had a really great sense of humor and eye for the absurd. We drank whisky until everyone else was asleep.

October 29th, 2005 Chennai
    This day I visited the world headquarters of the Theosophical society. It was a large, forested estate full of mysterious buildings that seemed not quite abandoned. The world’s largest Banyan tree was there, but it more resembled an extensive thicket. There was no central trunk, only a forest of supporting stems. Perhaps this was like India herself- vast but diffuse and irreducible. There was a great bookshop full of mystic tomes, of which I bought many. There was a particularly awesome book on occult chemistry by Annie Bessant and Mr. Leadbeater, full of their weird psychic explorations of the sub-atomic realm. Fully illustrated. It cost 900 Rupees ($20) and weighed several kilos, so I passed it up in favor of several smaller works.

October 30th, 2005 Mamallapuram
    This day I went down to Mamallapuram aka Mahaballipuram, another town with a silly name that stuck in my head. I don’t know if I’ll be writing much in this diary for a while, for I have come to hate India and don’t want to fill pages with vitriolic ranting. But for the record, what I particularly loathe is how anything you do in India, whether going in or out, up or down, buying something or selling it, going somewhere or staying put, any process has engineered into it incompetence, inefficiency, corruption and parasitism. All towns and streets have two names. I’m well used to bargaining for things (an inefficient, obstructionist process at best) but I can’t deal with the oblique, protracted, tedious, indirect Indian bargaining. You never get a yes or no, only endless blather filled with elaborate prefaces, devious circumlocutions and impassioned emotional appeals. People have no guilt about being caught in flagrant lies, as if they were children.
    Imagine you are assigned to work on a project with a partner. Your first impression of them is bad, but you try to keep an open mind. However, things soon go from bad to worse, and you rapidly reach the point at which every little thing your partner does, be it ever so minor in itself, is apt to propel you into a spasmodic, towering rage. At last you retreat into a siege mentality and just try to wait out the project until the end. Such is my relation to India. After a few weeks here, I thought India would be tolerable if I was being paid to be here, but I’m not so sure now. This is the only place I’ve ever been where I’ve felt that having an old-school servant would be a great benefit. Someone I could pay to deal with all the interminable bullshit perpetually welling up from the abyss.

November Journal

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