It may be obvious that India is alternately exquisite and excruciating. Exquisiteness and excruciatingness (see how I cleverly pick two adjectives that don't have nouns?) usually follow each other rapidly. They can both occur several times during the course of walking down a street, behind a cow or not. It takes very little to swing from one pole to the other. In Palolem in Goa, I took an early morning walk along the beach. In Palolem in Goa, any walk along the beach usually attracts several hawkers per dozen metres. By the end of my walk to the far end of the beach, I was not serene. I sat on some rocks and watched the sea. A barefoot little girl in a dress came walking towards me. I braced myself for “comeseemyshopmadam,” but she gave me a huge smile and said, “Merry Christmas!'
I felt like a louse, and much better, all at once.
Today it was the turn of Indian Railways to act as an upper. I am staying in Paharganj Bazaar next to New Delhi train station. Usually I avoid train stations as places of residence, but at 8 this morning in Indira Gandhi airport on no sleep with no room booked, it was the easiest option and the hotel is called Relax. Traversing Paharganj though makes Palolem look like, well, a beach. Cows, cycle rickshaws, touts, bazaar owners saying “hi' oleaginously. It's somewhat irritating. My mood was not improved by the fact that my friend L., an Indian who is a professor in the US and who I know from my time a hundred years ago at the University of Pennsylvania, was supposed to meet me today and I would have someone to hang out with in Delhi. But she has the flu and I have nothing to do (except hang out in internet cafes).
So the black mood swirled, and I had to get a train ticket. I expected more tout-braving, more queues, more hassle. And it was easy and took ten minutes. The railway man was charming. I asked him if he could get me a cabin with no snorers. He said, most seriously, “Alas, that is out of my hands.” He gave me a return ticket to Panthankot, the nearest railhead (I like the word “railhead” though I'm not sure what it means) to Dharamsala, whence I am bound to attend a workshop on Community Led Total Sanitation. The methodology of CLTS works like this: Visitors walk through the village and look at where people defecate in the open. Villagers are mortified. Villagers are then asked to calculate how much shit is deposited every day. When villagers realise it's about 500 tonnes, and that they are ingesting some of that, they are more mortified. Villagers then usually immediately run off and dig pits for latrines. How they will immediately run off and dig pits for latrines in the frozen soil of the Himalayas remains to be seen.
Staying in a bazaar makes shopping inevitable. I have just bought fruit, a knife and a hot water bottle. The fruit because I rarely eat it in India, because it's usually unpeeled and washed in water suitable only for Indian stomachs. The knife for the fruit and the overnight train journeys. The hot water bottle because it's 3 degrees outside, and my hotel room is unheated, and they want to charge me 150 rupees to have a heater. In a city that is regularly very cold in winter. I believe that's called chutzpah. It's what the thousands of Israelis in India would call chutzpah. They are astonishingly numerous. In Goa, all the internet cafes have keyboards with Hebrew stickers on. Here, the STD phone booths advertise 7 rupees per minute to Israel. They don't mention any other country. India is the first safe hot country Israelis can travel to. Also, they already look like hippies so they fit right in with the stripes and dreads look. But if they're wanting to escape bombs, they're in the wrong place. The internet cafes here all take your passport details. When outraged westerners want to know why they must be recorded to google, they are told, “Delhi police. There have been bombs in this bazaar.” In Goa at Christmas, all the Israelis had departed en masse because there were rumours of an Al Qaeda bombing. In Mumbai, the train I regularly took up to the slums was bombed in July by Kashmiri/Pakistani-supported Kashmiri militants/freedom fighters. “Legs and limbs everywhere,” said my Sulabh contact who used to work for the railways. “Terrible, terrible.”
I hope my mother's not reading this. If so, Mother: Remember Ossett roundabout.