I was so absorbed in your story of India that I truly forgot where I was--it brought back a flood of memories from our summer in India and Nepal. I could practically see these characters in action--so familiar in the Indian landscape. We mixed an occasional good hotel (for example, the island in Udaipur, and a palace in Jaipur) with government rest houses, which we had become familiar with while working in Sri Lanka. We were "kidnapped" by a trishaw driver in Delhi, but had a great sunrise excursion in Varanesi, a wild taxi ride ouside of Khajuraho, where the taxi broke down and we eventually went with tri-pedocycle to our hotel--too bad you missed the temple carvings there--and a taxi that almost became a boat during a flood near the temple of the sun on the East Coast.
Thank you so much for a great experience--you are a terrific writer!
-- Elizabeth Hanson-Smith (http://www.oocities.org/ehansonsmi) @ 03/01/2004 03:16
Varanasi is a holy city, where old people come to die, in the hope of by-passing their remaining earthly reincarnations.
It is also a very dirty city. But the pilgrims do not see the dirt. They bathe in the holy river of the Ganges and drink its magical water. They pay no mind to the brown filth from the factories upstream, the ashes from the primitive crematoriums along the river bank, the assortment of body parts that occasionally drift by, incompletely consumed by their four hours in the flames. Pollution has a different meaning to the true believers. There is only spiritual pollution. Bacteria do not come into it.
It is a congested city. People come and do not leave. They come and wait to die. The streets are narrow. Even without the crowds of human beings there is barely enough room to pass the cows that wander freely, leaving their sacred dung scattered on the ground.
It is a holy city, but not a good place in which to be ill. My wife was not about to bathe in the Ganges in the hope of washing away the disease. We were more interested in finding some Western medication for her, and thus were relieved when our hotel told us there was an English doctor in the town. They arranged a couple of trishaws for us and we set off for a consultation, each taking one of our two sons along for the ride.
The English doctor turned out to be an elderly Indian man, who spoke reasonable English, and who claimed to have lived in England. There was some uncertainty about what he had actually studied there. The plaque on the outside wall where we rang the bell stated his qualifications, but we were unfamiliar with the acronyms displayed. This was not quite the sterile surgery we were used to when we visited doctors at home. For a start. the swarm of flies buzzing around us was rather disconcerting. I was very conscious of the cowpats outside where they were probably breeding. We could only assume that the instrument he placed in my wife's mouth to hold down her tongue had been properly sterilised, but there was no visible evidence to justify the assumption.
"There is nothing to worry about," the doctor told us. "I can assure you that you will certainly be as right as rain in no time at all." He wrote out a prescription, we paid him the small amount of money he asked for and we took our trishaws back to the hotel, stopping off to buy the medicine at one of the little street stalls which operated as drug stores.
My wife's condition did not improve during our stay in Varanasi. We did not find out until later that the initials on the impressive-looking plaque outside the surgery would have told us, if we had known how to interpret them, that this man's qualifications were woefully inadequate, and that his diagnosis was useless.
If we had stayed in either a five-star hotel or a backpackers guesthouse in Varanasi, they would probably have directed us to a properly qualified doctor, assuming such a person exists in Varanasi. The worst places to stay are the middle-range hotels, because they are not used to dealing with foreigners. But we didn't realise that at the time. We could not afford an expensive hotel, and, with my wife sick, we thought, wrongly, that a middle-range hotel would be more comfortable than a backpackers place. It was our first stop in India so we were trying to be careful. When we arrived at the airport, we deliberately avoided the taxi drivers who fought for our custom, and took an airport bus, which the guide book told us would stop at a particular recommended hotel. We had not reckoned on Dinesh, a well-dressed and well-spoken man who accompanied us on the bus and told us that it was his hotel the bus would be stopping at and that he would help us to check in.
When the bus stopped at Dinesh's hotel, a group of tourists alighted and were guided into the lobby, where we were quickly informed that there were no rooms available. No doubt the rooms would have materialised had Dinesh not been present to claim his commission. Certainly the staff did not seem to show him the respect due to their employer.
"Don't worry," he told us. "I have another hotel nearby. Please come with me. It is also as good as this hotel."
A car and driver appeared from nowhere. The other tourists got back on the bus, but I felt we needed to get some accommodation quickly because of my wife's condition, so we stuck with the smooth-talking Dinesh.
Sure enough he found us a reasonable-looking hotel, with, at least, an attractive foyer. The price was not exhorbitant, but no doubt it would have been much less without our guide. "And now I will leave you to settle in," he told us. "Tomorrow morning I will come at six o'clock and I will take you to see the sunrise over the Ganges. Don't worry. I will make a very good price for you."
"Are you actually an official tourist guide?" I asked him. "Do you have a license?" We had been advised that there were many unofficial guides who preyed on innocent tourists.
"I am better than a licensed guide," he assured us. "These fellows from the tourist office are not good enough. They speak very little English. Whereas my English is excellent, as you can hear. And my charges are not so expensive. I enjoy meeting people and guiding them around. It is a pleasure for me. The payment is of secondary importance only."
His command of English was indeed impressive. My wife was not very happy about the idea of being woken up at six in the morning, but he persuaded us that we should not miss the spectacular sunrise over the Ganges. "Everything will be included," he promised. "We will tour in a comfortable car to the famous River Ganges, and we will then be taken out by a small boat to see the sunrise. It is best if you allow me to arrange everything for you, and it will definitely save you money. Then when we have seen as much of the river and its attractions as you wish to see, I will also take you on a tour of the nearby sights at no extra charge."
Dinesh picked us up the next morning. This time he was not accompanied by a driver. He would be both guide and driver. To our surprise, the river seemed to be just around the corner. We could easily have walked. Well, at least it included a boat trip.
The last part had to be done on foot in any case. As we walked through the narrow streets, ragged merchants of all kinds surrounded us, offering us tacky souvenirs, fortune-telling, massages, haircuts and shaves. Thanks to Dinesh, we could negotiate our way past this without having to stop to check directions.
We expected Dinesh would accompany us on the boat, but he said he had to wait with the car. He gave instructions to an old boatman, who rowed us out to the middle of the Ganges in a creaky wooden boat. Occasionally he smiled a toothless grin and said things like "Desaswamedh Ghat" and pointed out the main crematoriums along the riverbank. He could name sights like these for us as they were known even to tourists by their Hindi names, but he could clearly speak no English. Nevertheless he looked after us well, and, after sunrise, which was as spectacular as we had been promised, he rowed us safely through the filthy water, past bathers chanting mantras and women in brightly-coloured saris washing clothes and banging them against rocks, back to the bank of the holy river.
As we began to alight the old boatman looked at us expectantly. Was he waiting for a tip? Surely the boat trip was part of the tour organised by Dinesh. Had he paid for the boat or not? If not, we could possibly pay first and sort it out with Dinesh later. But we had no idea how much we were supposed to pay. We looked around for our guide, trying to signal to the boatman to wait and all would be well. The message did not get across, and he looked more and more distressed, until he opened his toothless mouth and wailed, "Baksheesh!" Fortunately, Dinesh arrived on the scene at that moment and we hurriedly asked him to rectify the situation.
"Don't worry. It will all be taken care of," he said, and he put a few notes into the boatman's cupped hands. It seemed a pitifully small amount, maybe about twenty rupees, not enough to make much of a dent in the sum we had paid Dinesh. However, the boatman put his hands together in thanks and the smile returned to his face, so it obviously met his expectations.
The carpet-seller sat us in front of a pile of brightly coloured rugs, and started displaying them one at a time, starting at the top of the heap. "Just look, please. Which one of these fine-quality carpets are you liking the most?" The carpets were all very colourful and attractive, but of course we liked some of them better than others. Once we admitted that one piece appealed to us more than the others, this magically became the carpet that we had chosen to buy.
"What do you think is the cost of this carpet?" said the salesman. "As you can see it is a very high quality carpet, but because you like it so much I am going to give it to you for a very special price."
I knew that once a vendor starts talking about prices, all it needs is a counter-offer from the customer and the bargaining starts. There is no way out. If the seller accepts your offer, you must buy. It is no good suggesting a price in the belief that it is laughably low unless you are really prepared to pay that price. Despite our lowered resistance, we were alert enough not to fall into the trap, and we parted with no hard feelings on either side. "You are very welcome. Please come back later if you decide to buy this beautiful carpet. You will not find a bargain like this anywhere in India."
Dinesh was not put out by our failure to buy a carpet. He wanted to take us to yet more shops, all of which were owned by various relatives of his. But we had seen enough carpets for now, and wanted to go back to the hotel to rest.
"And now," he said when we got to the lobby of the hotel, "we will plan your sight-seeing for tomorrow."
"To be quite honest, Dinesh, we think we have paid too much for this morning's tour. I really think we can find our own way around for the rest of our stay."
However, he proposed a schedule that did seem very reasonable for the price, and we agreed to continue with him the following day. It was easier and more comfortable for my wife. In the meantime, I had decided, we would find our way to the tourist office and find out whether the price we were paying was indeed reasonable.
Dinesh was actually quite a good guide. He seemed knowledgeable about the history of his country and Varanasi in particular. As he said it was not his full-time job, we asked what he normally did. "I am a professor of English Literature", he announced. This was very interesting to me, as a teacher of Literature myself. However, Dinesh seemed a bit disconcerted by the fact that we shared similar professions, and I was unable to engage him in any meaningful discussion of Literature, beyond a mere mention of his favourite writers, Dickens and Shakespeare.
After a full day of sight-seeing, we found our own way to the tourist office, where we asked about the cost of hiring official guides. We ended up admitting to the official what had happened to us. He found this quite interesting. "You must help us to catch this fellow," he insisted. "He is a scoundrel and we must be finding him and stopping what he is doing. He is undoubtedly operating outside the law."
This put us on the spot a little. We did not want to get Dinesh into trouble, and his charges were not really that much higher than those of the guides organised through the tourist office. We thanked the official for his help and asked him about the concert performance by Ravi Shankar that was advertised in the window. He indicated a pile of flyers on the counter. I picked one up and saw it was similar to the window notice, with a little more detail. The cost was US$10 for foreigners, at least ten times what the locals had to pay, but it was a small amount to hear the world's most famous sitar-player. The official advised us to take trishaws as the venue was a little way out of town. We certainly did not want to engage Dinesh's services any more than necessary, so we agreed that this was what we should do.
As it turned out, my wife, whose condition did not yet seem to be improving, was not well enough to attend the concert. "I just need to sleep," she told me. "You take Dylan with you. Leave Kit to look after me, and I'll be all right." She knew how much it meant to me seeing this concert, though it would mean more if she was able to come as well. But her health had to come first, especially as we were leaving for Khajuraho the following day. By the time we had sorted out our plans and were ready to go it was already 7.30. The concert was due to start at 8 p.m. Leaving my younger son to look after his mother, Dylan and I walked out into the street to find some transport.
We had earlier taken two trishaws back to the hotel. They had charged us what appeared to be a negligible amount, so I was pleased to see one of our trishaw-pedallers outside, probably hoping for more business from us. Presumably the pittance he had asked us to pay was more than he could expect from local customers. He had the advantage of being able to speak some English, which enabled him to get the more profitable foreigners. I showed him the pamphlet about the Ravi Shankar concert. I forgot for the moment that he was unlikely to be able to read English, if indeed he could read at all, but, of course, he knew who Ravi Shankar was, and claimed to know the way to the venue which I named. He offered to take us there, wait until the end of the concert and take us back home for forty rupees, a sum that translated to a couple of dollars. I didn't feel the need for any bargaining. It was a fraction of the sort of money we'd been paying Dinesh, and, after all, it would probably be quite late when the concert finished.
Our trishaw-man had a wrinkled face and thick callouses on his hands and feet. He seemed to be getting on in years, though he obviously had strong leg-muscles. He moved at a fairly rapid pace, and we soon left the shanties on the outskirts of Varanasi behind us. We managed to have a conversation of sorts as we were pedalled along.
"Mister, where you from?"
"We are from Australia." I continued to talk to him. It was only polite. But I had to strain to hear his soft voice, which was rather low and rough around the edges. "Do you have many tourists from Australia?"
He gave a friendly laugh. "From everywhere. People from every country are coming. From German, from America. Everywhere. It is making good business for me."
I usually felt a bit sorry for these hard-working men, weathered and prematurely aged by their labour, using all their strength to transport heavy spoiled foreigners from place to place. But his tone betrayed no tone of resentment at his position in the scheme of things.
"Do you enjoy doing this job?" I asked.
His low voice rose a little higher, tinged with joy, as he told us of his success.
"Before I come to Varanasi, I am farmer. Every day working, working to grow food. It is no good. I come to Varanasi, I am getting many, many rupees. Sometimes in one day is like one year I am farming."
He went on to joke about rich tourists who did not understand Indian money and who paid far too much for being pedalled a short distance. With barely disguised contempt he exposed his technique. "They ask me how much they must pay. I tell them, 'As you like. As you like.' Always they give me so much money. I am many times going home to my family and bringing new things for them."
I was lost in thought for a while. The clothes he was wearing were little more than rags, but this man considered himself rich.
I had expected a trip of about twenty minutes. About forty-five minutes later we were still travelling along narrow country roads with minimal street-lighting. We came at last to the outskirts of a small village. "This must be it," I said to Dylan, looking at our guide for confirmation. He was silent. It was only when he stopped to talk to a cluster of young men by the side of the road that the resulting hand gestures and finger-pointing made us realise that he really did not know the way. Certainly he had some idea of the general direction or he could not have taken us that far, but we started to get the feeling that he was in unfamiliar territory.
The venue was not in this village, nor was it in the next one we passed through, where we stopped for further directions. It was now well past nine o'clock, and I began to wonder whether it was worth our while continuing. The concert could be over before we arrived. I voiced my concerns to the trishaw man, but he dismissed them with a shake of his head, which seemed to say that an eight o'clock starting time might mean something on paper, but probably had little to do with the reality of the concert. He assured us that it would not be far now.
Suddenly we had to stop. We reached a train-track and the barrier was down. We looked up and down the track. There was no sign of a train. Patiently we sat for five minutes, then ten minutes. Still no sign of a train. Eventually we could make out the figure of a man up in the signal box. Could our driver perhaps ask him how much longer we would have to wait? He did not seem to want to communicate. Maybe he was in awe of officials wearing uniforms. Maybe the signalman was waiting for some kind of bribe, which would be beyond the capacity of our guide to pay. But something had to be done. There was no way around the barrier, the trishaw could not go under it, so the only solution was to go over it. The three of us alighted from the trishaw, and we lifted it off the ground and over the barrier. It was not as difficult as I expected, though I suspected most of the work was done by our driver, who took it in his stride as if lifting his trishaw over immovable obstacles was an everyday part of his job. We gently lowered it onto the railway track, and drove off again, leaving the barrier still down ready for the non-existent train.
It was nearly eleven o'clock by the time Ravi Shankar walked onto stage to thunderous applause. At last, the treat we had been waiting for. As the resonating notes below the main strings were brushed, I glanced at my son. He was stretched out beside me on the mat, sound asleep. Should I wake him up? This was probably the only chance he would have in his life to hear Ravi Shankar play. He could sleep any day. I tried a few gentle shakes, to no avail. Sleep had settled in for the night, as far as he was concerned. I shrugged and gave my full attention to the stage. I would have to enjoy the music on my own.
A pure crisp note rose into the night air. It sounded again, this time rising a quarter-tone, then falling back to the original pitch.
One after the other, the clear notes floated upwards, slid and twisted as they ascended the scale of the raga, inducing a kind of trance in the listeners, foreign and Indian alike. As the slow movement came to an end and the notes rose and fell faster and faster, the tabla took up the rhythm. The Indian members of the congregation were beating out the rhythm with their hands, palm down, palm up, palm up again. As the rhythm became more complex the sitar stopped playing suddenly and the tabla continued on its own, building up an increasingly complex and exciting pattern. The sitar came in again, racing towards the climax, the continuous drone of the tamboura tying it all together.
Then suddenly it was over. A breathless silence as the audience came down from the heights to which the master had carried them and joined together in enthusiastic applause. The whole raga had taken about a half an hour.
Ravi Shankar shifted a few frets to create the intervals required for his next raga. I glanced down at Dylan, stretched out sound asleep beside me. I felt a pang as I reflected that this music that induced in all who heard it a feeling of the one-ness of mankind could not be shared with my wife or my children. But then I gave myself up to the music as the magical sounds began again.
At midnight there were no signs that the concert was heading towards a conclusion. I could happily listen to Ravi Shankar play all night, but I was concerned about our driver. How could we keep him waiting outside for so long? And my wife and child back in the hotel. Wouldn't they be worried if they woke up and found we were still not back? They were not to know how far we had travelled. Reluctantly I made the decision to leave at the end of the current raga and aroused Dylan to a semi-conscious state sufficient for us to be able to make our way out of the tent.
It was dark outside, and at first I could see no sign of our driver. Had he abandoned us after all? Was the small sum we owed him not worth the long wait? Then we saw him. There was a row of trishaws side by side some distance from the entrance. On the seat of one of them was a bundle of rags that we realised was our guide, curled up asleep. I was reluctant to wake him, and said so to my half-asleep son, but that was sufficient to make him stir. He sat up and welcomed us, dismissing my apologies for making him wait so long. He probably would have been quite content to settle there for the night. Perhaps his trishaw was his bed in any case, his only home in Varanasi.
We took the long journey back through the cool night air in silence, this time uninterrupted by any obstacles. The train, presumably, had long since come and gone.
As we arrived back at the hotel, suddenly the driver, who had been pedalling at a steady pace, seemed to droop with exhaustion, his muscular legs at last giving way. "It is so far," he groaned. "I don't know it is so far." His face took on a pathetic pleading look.
I understood his motives, and observed his performance with amusement, a performance which was not necessary as I had already made up my mind to pay at least double what we had agreed on. I would start with eighty rupees and observe his reaction. He was not as skilful an actor as he could have been. He immediately expressed his gratitude with many verbal "thank-you"s as well as putting his hands together and lowering his head. The amount of money involved seemed to me a trivial amount and I was prepared to give him more if he seemed unhappy. "Twice nothing is nothing," as my wife often said. But it was clearly more than enough.
Next morning when we came out of our hotel, we were surrounded by trishaw-men clamouring for our custom. Obviously word had got around about these foolish foreigners who did not know the true value of money.
But we had already arranged with Dinesh to take us to the airport, where we were to get the plane to Khajuraho. This ride was part of a package we had negotiated which had balanced out somewhat the bare-faced theft of the first part of our engagement with him.
At the airport my wife left the car with the boys, leaving me to deal with Dinesh. Despite her continuing illness, she was annoyed at the feeling of being cheated by our smooth-talking Literature professor. As I took out my wallet to pay him, I named clearly the amount we had settled on. "Ah, yes, sir," he began, "but if you feel that I have been of good service to you and you are very happy with ?"
It was exactly what I had expected, and I was ready for him. "I have been to the Tourist Office and I know what it should cost to hire a guide. I feel that you have cheated us, so we are not entirely pleased with your services. I will pay you what we owe you, but no more." Dinesh seemed surprised that I would confront him in such a way, but he accepted the money without protest. He took my hand when I offered it, and I thanked him, then he drove off, immaculately dressed as always, to seek fresh prey.
No more cars, I thought. The trishaw pedlars were more in need of our custom.
I joined my family in the airport lounge, where we found out the plane had been delayed. The waiting area was dirty and crowded. My wife was overwhelmed by a feeling of tiredness, though she had slept soundly through the night. "Oh, what's the matter with me?" she sighed, leaning against me. There was no room on any seats for her to lie down. The only way was to lay the bags down side by side so she could lie down on top of them using them as a bed. She stretched out and slept in this manner, guarded by the boys, while I went back and forth to the counter trying to find out what was happening about our flight. We each had two tickets. The first was from Varanasi to Khajuraho; the second was for the onward flight to Agra three days later. To my surprise, the airline attendant took both tickets and gave us boarding passes to Agra.
"No, no!" I protested. "We want to go to Khajuraho, not Agra. We will go to Agra after three days."
"I am sorry. The plane is not stopping in Khajuraho. You must go to Agra today."
"But why? There is supposed to be a flight to Khajuraho today. It's on our tickets!"
The man shook his head, and merely repeated the information that there were no flights to Khajuraho. "I am sorry. It is impossible. The plane is not going there."
We never found out the reason for the cancelled flight. There was a long delay, which gave my wife plenty of time to sleep, despite the rather uncomfortable bed. The plane finally took off, some hours after its scheduled time. I was getting increasingly concerned about my wife's drowsiness. No matter how much she slept, it never seemed to be enough, and there were no signs of improvement.
When we got to Agra, the Taj Mahal had to wait, until we had managed to find medical help. We were directed to a lady doctor at a maternity hospital, and quickly engaged a pair of trishaws to take us there.
"It is a worm," she told us, "a parasite that you have picked up by eating unclean food. But it is nothing serious. You need not worry."
We suspected a relatively up-market Russian restaurant in Katmandu, where we had trustingly eaten an uncooked salad.
"The doctor you have seen in Varanasi is not a doctor. He is a quack."
The next piece of information explained a lot.
"This medicine you have been taking will not help you. It is merely valium. This is why you have been so sleepy all the time. You must stop taking it at once. I will give you some medicine which will quickly clear up your problem."
Thankfully we paid the small sum for the consultation and medication. From that moment, my wife rapidly began to regain her health.
"India," the doctor sighed, as she saw us out of her office. "This country is one hundred percent illiterate!"
