Delhi Belly 2

                    “Delhi came as a shock. There were so many people, and oh, the traffic.”
                                                                                                            Tina Turner



The night passed slowly, growing warmer and sticky, as we drove through the contrasts of Chandigarh. A child of Le Corbusier, the Fort of Chandi, with its central grid of gardens and mansions, referred to itself as The City Beautiful. It was the first planned metropolis in India, designed to replace Lahore after Partition.
Hordes of untouchable harijans, Corbusier’s other children, milled on the sidewalks and slept in the station. When the sun rose orange over Haryana, and on my left cheek, I realized I had been asleep for about an hour. Finally, about nine am, we arrived down the Grand Trunk Road into a raging rickshaw battleground, and a breathsucking ride to Connaught Place. What had, less than a century earlier, been a tranquil kikar tree-covered ridge, inhabited by jackals and wild pigs and partridges, was now a bustling area of narrow streets lined with shops, bazaars and pandemonium, the high capital of Satan and his peers.
Here, Robyn and I found a closet-sized room on the freak-filled terrace of Ringo’s guesthouse. Our small bed filled up every corner of the space. It was the space. Julie got a bunk in the dungeon dorm for sixteen rupees. The cold water that lived in the shower, some of the time, held out just long enough. We were in the big smoke, and out of money. While Robbie had a nap, Julie came with me to the American Express office, where good fortune smiled. The very last quantum of solace had arrived from the bottom of my bank account. I had twenty-two hundred dollars, to get around the rest of the world, or live in India forever. We woke Robyn and I took us all out to Gaylord’s, for a banana split. Julie saw me wince.
“What is it, Wink?” She asked.
“I just had an orgasm.” I said. Coffee came, with real sugar cubes. I calculated how long I could live in India, if I moved into Gaylord’s. We slept the rest of the day away and, in the evening, Gaylord’s gave way to glory.
The red and white sign we had passed, in our rickshaw arrival, now lit neon above our heads. It rolled off and on our tongues in promise. Nirula’s Salad Bar. After the alimentary agony of the previous weeks, one could well have questioned the insanity of consuming something green, fresh out of Indian ground, without passing through nuclear decontamination first. But, as the Mahatma had said, ‘What is true of the individual will be tomorrow true of the whole nation if individuals will but refuse to lose heart and hope.’ We climbed the stairs.
Inside was a buffet berm of tuna salad with green pepper, chicken with pineapple, coleslaw, lentils, macaroni, cucumbers and tomatoes, grated Parmesan, black muffins with butter, and all the good cold water we could drink. There was lettuce we just stared at. It smelled like California. There was a DJ on the sound system. Eyes rolled back and quivered. It was done, and we basked in the afterglow. I looked out the window, through the diffuse lighting, wood paneling and potted plants. And saw rickshaw drivers asleep in the only property they owned, and begging mothers in the filthy deserted streets. Gandhi had also said that India was country of nonsense. We walked quietly back to Ringo’s, and fan blown dreams.
The next three days were pulled by rickshaws, and pushed by errands. The Canadian embassy held a treasure trove of letters, and a cheque from Metro-Golden Meyer in Esbjerg for twenty-nine dollars, in Danish krone. Ever the bean counter. We all put in our applications for Nepali visas, and I left the girls to mail home my Kashmiri folk art. The forms weighed more that the package. I booked a trunk call to my mother for the evening.
“Sorry, no answer.” The operator said.
“Try again.” I replied. Booth number one. She sounded distinctly distant and disassociated, unlike me, only distinctly distant. You couldn’t blame her. She hadn’t seen me in over three years, and didn’t know if it would ever happen. This kind of pain takes decades to ripen properly, bearing the best fruit long after they’re gone. Unsurpassed when they’re dead and gone.
Even on Ringo’s rooftop terrace, Old Delhi’s nights were hot and muggy, making sleep impossible. We spent as much time as possible outside our bed room bedroom, with the other freaks. The second night I played a lot of chess with Aussie Ralph, winning every match.
The third night I emerged from the bed room bedroom, I had to rub my eyes. I had a black beard, Uncle Albert’s red baseball cap, a blue t-shirt, white shorts, flip-flops, and a Kashmiri leather bag. Sitting, beating Aussie Dave in chess, was a guy with a black beard, red baseball cap, blue t-shirt, white shorts, flip-flops, and a Kashmiri leather bag. He looked up, and laughed. Neil worked as a ‘meter maid’ in Whistler, but he didn’t look like a meter maid. He looked like me.

                                      “In a cap she looked much older,
                                       And the bag across her shoulder
                                       Made her look a little like a military man...
                                       Oh, lovely Rita meter maid,
                                       Where would I be without you?
                                       Give us a Wink and make me think of you.”

We played chess. I won. We became friends anyway.
Robyn, Jules and I picked up our Nepali visas on Friday morning, and went on to the five thousand years and two hundred thousand works of art of the National Museum. I particularly admired the Central Asian collection, the Moghul miniatures, and the sacred relics of the Buddha. Like Jesus and Mohammed, he must have been a big man. Unfortunately, the need for luxury and pretentiousness overcame our intellectual curiosity, and we spent the afternoon lounging in the air-conditioning of the Emperor’s Lounge at the Taj Palace Hotel, drinking coffee, eating custard cake, and rereading the International Herald Tribune. Robyn returned from the gold fixtures and marble of the ladies room with a fanfare, and drum rolls of liberated toilet paper. Character is Destiny.
Our last day in Delhi was spent seeing it, for Robyn and I anyway. Julie had come down with Delhi belly. We started at the Jantar Minar, Jai Singh’s 1725 observatory, a palm-lined pink earth-coloured astronomical sculpture playground, still recording time and near space. The pink earth had dropped a little Disney acid to create the pigmented shikhara projections on the Laxmi Narayan Temple, where Robyn and I jumped to ring the bell. We drove on to see the ‘last flicker in the lamp of Mughal architecture’ through the ornate gate of Safdarjung’s Tomb. One of the snake charmers lost his cobra. We didn’t offer to help him look for it.
The most impressive site of the morning was the Qtab Minar, the chubby 12th century fluted tower, out of the red sandstone debris of twenty-seven Hindu and Jain temples, destroyed to construct a Moslem minaret. The tallest in India at 240 feet, no one could hear the muezzin who had climbed the 379 stairs to call the faithful to prayer. I wondered if no one heard him, was God really great? I was able to encircle the nearby Iron Pillar with both arms, the accomplishment of which, according to legend, had ensured me a qualification as swordsman to any emperor, and the granting of a wish. I wished to quench my thirst, and the three bottles of Appella I had under the restaurant fan were an obvious fulfillment of the prophecy. The red earth and black marble slab of Raj Ghat, Gandhi’s cremation site, was devoid of accursed ‘English lawn.’ We walked down the Rajpath King’s Way, under the pink sandstone India Gate, inspired by the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. But this was not France.
The Rashtrapati Bhavan had originally been the ‘Viceroy’s House,’ and the largest residence of any Chief of State in the world. The 360 rooms in the five acres of interior floor area, had taken seven million bricks, 3.5 million cubic feet of stone, the eradication of two villages, and twenty years to construct. The Durbar Hall dome seemed to float above the summer heat haze. The chandelier inside it, suspended over a hundred feet in the air, weighed in at two tons. Past Parliament House and back along the Yamuna River, we came to Shah Jahan’s Red Fort, and four more snake charmers. I asked why the last one looked so dejected.
“His cobra has departed.” Said the one with the biggest turban.
“Dead?” I asked.
“Oh Heavens, no.” he replied. “Only missing.”
“How long has he been missing?” I asked, looking around furtively.
“Only this morning.” He said. “But no problem. It is most likely he will be returning.”
I had a mental image of a 35 pound fifteen foot growling King cobra, with enough poison in its fangs to kill an elephant, or the thirty people riding him, reassured that ‘most likely he will be returning.’
The picture of Lord Shiva is incomplete without the cobra around his neck, and Lord Vishnu rests on a seven-headed naga. The Buddhists believed that a massive cobra had spread its hood over the Buddha to protect him from the sun while he meditated.
I told Robyn that, with Julie feeling lower than a snake’s Delhi belly, and the neighborhood wildlife running this free, it was most likely we would be leaving.


                                     “You will trample upon lions and cobras.”
                                                                               Psalms 91:13