Delhi Belly 1

                         “I met a hundred men going to Delhi and everyone is my brother.”
                                                                                                       Pope Paul VI


Pope Paul was an underachiever. There were a hundred men just hanging off the outside of the bus that stopped at the Tibetan baker’s shack, at the bottom of Naggar hill. The women were all inside, with husky voices, bright pattoo dresses, silver broaches, shawls and scarves, hemp slippers, long nose wires, and enough gold loops punched through their ears to hang curtains. It was exotic.
We were leaving Naggar with a whimper. I had already met my Destiny, but it was here she had planted her flag. In the calm castle solitude, we had become something timeless, and we felt a profound sadness on leaving.
An hour later, the bus crawled, over the swaying bridge across the Beas, to the far side of Kullu, once Kulanthpitha, the End of the Habitable World.
In the middle of a local festival rehearsal at the bus stand, we found a totally disinterested unshaven potbellied official, who finally told us of a ‘superfast, ordinary’ overnight bus to Delhi, leaving at seven thirty that evening. Becoming more familiar with the adjectives used by Indian functionaries, I asked him if it was ‘superfast’ or ‘ordinary.’
“It will be very superfast and very ordinary.” He reassured us. After a round of veg cutlets and Limcas at the HP Café next door, we set off up a winding two-kilometer shop-lined incline, to provision our night journey. I bought bread and peanut butter, Julie bought apples, and Robyn bought bananas, in a harmonic subliminal birthday cake fugue state. I stopped to play a portable pump organ, a square eight-dollar banjo, a mile-high fretted guitar, and a flute with a miserably tough reed, in a music shop further down the road. This drew the predictable crowd and, unlike what would have happened in ‘my country’, further encouragement from the owner. We looked over the pashmina shawls in the Government Emporium, but none came close to those that Soman had shown us in Leh. I promised Robyn that, some day, I would be able to afford to buy her one.
Julie had her fortune predicted in Hindi, with bystander translation. She had a choice of the three-rupee caged bird random beak selection of ‘superfast and ordinary’ preprinted predictions, or the deluxe five-rupee palmistry divination. Julie never scrimped, where fate was involved. With an extra special head bobble, the palm reader told her that she would have ‘long life, money, and marriage at thirty-two.’ She was pleased.
We took a more convoluted route back down to wait for our bus, past one of the Mahatma’s spinning wheels, whirling on the sunlit balcony of a mud-colored shack. Under an umbrella on the side of the road, was another white-turbaned swami, with a beard and a bobble. Julie sought double-blinded prospective end-point validation for her fortune. Serious research takes serious money, and another five rupees hit the lotto. She crossed his palm and he crossed hers. He told her that she would have ‘long life, money, and marriage at thirty-two.’ She was pleased. It may have been proof, or it may have been productivity. I kept the Bob Dylan in my head, behind my tongue.

                    ‘Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
                     But you're gonna have to serve somebody.’


We arrived back at the station to meet François and a friend, watched the sun go down, and tell stories until our bus arrived, in a cloud of dust. The fleshy functionary had been very correct. It was very ordinary, very, very even. The original interior had undergone the usual rewelding and reupholstering, in order to squeeze in more seats and passengers. Considering we were already twice as large as the locals, our determination to shoehorn ourselves into one of these shin-shearing blood-clot traps for an overnight ordeal to Delhi, could have only been construed as an attempt at deliberate self-harm.
After finding three ‘seats’ abreast, on the right side, near the back and across from Francois and friend, the driver went from very ordinary to very super fast, too much so for the Italian girl who vomited out the window after the first curves. A burning house drove by us on the right, and we settled into the nightmare. The metal edges of welds that had never seen a grinder began to cut into flesh. The oxygen that departed with us, left warm nitrogen and body odor that became progressively more humid as we descended onto the Deccan plain. Julie’s ability to fall asleep anywhere kicked in and, as her head began clanging off the upright heavy metal poles in surround sound, Robyn and I began rubbing ours in sympathy. When an occasional particularly large bus lurch concussed her more than usual, she would awaken momentarily, just long enough to hold the traumatized bit, before falling back to sleep. In the morning she wondered why she had a headache.
But it wasn’t going to be morning for a very long while, and an hour into the marathon, I began to receive the kind of agonizing signals that strike terror in the heart of any traveler. The HP café’s veg cutlets had grown into cutlasses, and were carving a swath through my intestines. At one rest stop, in a town without toilets, I read the news behind a house. At another, too far down the road, I left four little pools of nectar in the turnoff grass. The pain came in breakers, rollers, and big kahuna swells. It was most excruciating at the crest of each wave and, when the froth and backwash tried to rumble ahead of the bus, took every ounce of my remaining energy to maintain continence. I began to live for rest stops, and wish for death. On a southern night heading to the ancient Mughal city of ShahJahanabad, the same strangury and dysentery, that killed the ‘Ruler of the World’ in 1658, was honing its powers of liquidation and elimination, on a far lesser mortal. I had Delhi belly, and I wasn’t even there yet.