April 17, 2019 -
The following is a brilliant, immersive excerpt of travel in India from the authors’ Anne LaMott and Sam LaMott book called 'Some Assembly Required'. It is available at most bookstores, Amazon, and the iTunes bookstore.
If you have ever been to India or ever considered travel there yourself you will love this travelogue by a clever writer. It is supplemented with pictures from our trip. Enjoy. -
"January 20
I arrived in a socked-in Delhi at two a.m. I was met by a cabbie sent by my hotel, who drove me through the fog like Mr. Toad, hell-bent and blind. I was in bed at four, and up before nine, when I was to meet Bill Hanson, who had been in India for two weeks already, at a Buddhist retreat with his teacher. I felt strangely okay, having been on a widely discredited anti–jet lag diet for four days. The hotel was small, tucked away from the main street, with marble floors, and no shower in my small bathroom, just faucets extending over the tile floor, so that you sat on a plastic stool like some washed-up old tribal chief, sploshed room-temperature water all over yourself, sudsed up, and rinsed off. There was a pair of men’s worn flip-flops, which at first I recoiled from, and then ended up using frequently.
I went to Bill’s room to begin our day, and knocked on the door.
He peered at me from around the door. “I’m naked,” he announced, and pointed me to the hotel dining room.
Bill Hanson is Bill and Emmy Smith’s oldest friend from the East Coast. He’s close to seventy, a former Peace Corps teacher and manager, and he speaks a dozen languages. He is handsome, fussy, Buddhist, with blue eyes and a monk’s tonsure. He has a piercing knowledge about most places on earth. The first time I met him, twenty years ago, I thought to myself, Paul Lynde, someone who managed to be both masculine and feminine, and who makes a joke out of everything, and is swishy in a nonspecific way.
When we stepped out of the hotel, Bill told me that if I gave a single rupee to a single beggar, he would leave me there in the dirt and dust of Old Delhi to fend for myself.
India looks like every movie I’ve ever seen of India, the way Georgia O’Keeffe always looked exactly like herself. People were going about their day: Brahmans, vendors, beggars, rickshaw drivers, schoolchildren in eentsy-beentsy buses. Some people were waking up under blankets: families who lived on the streets in this soft fever dream, with temporary homes built against low walls and fences. A kitchen materializes when the mother produces two bricks and some dung and someone has found pieces of coal or wood from packing crates; they have a rice pot and a minimal amount of grains to cook. In the market stalls were great vats of milk boiling, and clay pots in which yogurt would be made, from warm milk and yesterday’s curds. Everywhere, people were doing their daily puja, their offering of flowers, fruit, devotions: in their stalls, on their blankets, in their rickshaws, in their fleeting homes on the street.
Bill waved away every beggar by saying, “Nay! Nay!” and it was painful for me, as I seriously wanted to start saving everyone, with a few rupees and some of the nice granola I had in my purse. But Bill gave me the stink-eye. “I will leave you here,” he reiterated, and I remembered that when I first got sober, someone told me to take the action, and the insight would follow, and that when all else failed, follow instructions. So I committed to saying no to everyone: Nay, nay! It’s all corruption, Bill explained, it’s Oliver Twist: you don’t give the beggars money, because it doesn’t go to them—it goes to each beggar’s goonda, the Fagin character, the thug who runs the beggar syndicate.
There are monkeys on the roofs and in the crazy canopy of the absolutely unfathomable spaghetti tangle of electrical wires, bizarrely shoved and hanging and twisted, which is your basic Indian electricity delivery system.
There are a million betel-leaf sellers on the streets, with their rolls of bright packets like condoms. There are teeny stalls packed together like timber, barely wider than a person’s body, from which are sold all manner of things. Ultra-poor Muslims huddle in front of restaurants where they are fed real food, not leftovers, for free. All of life is being lived right here, every generation and social standing in a crowded parade. It is not a place where people get on the subway and go home. Life is lived lower to the ground: mothers and grandmothers holding babies go into squat to rest, or reconnoiter, or pee, and rise with grace, their babies still attached. The babies and children have mastered the cling here. I saw a few mothers holding out infants to pee and even on one occasion poop—diapers are not so common here. They are used for backup, if at all: mothers learn to read their babies’ gestures, to predict every sound, fidget, reflexive move that might indicate impending elimination. Maybe I will not mention this to Amy.
I would imagine there is less fixation here on the baby’s life of the mind than there is back in Marin. I bet not many of these Indian babies have the black-and-white mobiles provided to newborns at baby showers all over the United States to boost their spatial reasoning.
There are goats in ski parkas and sweaters milling around, tended by boys who want ten rupees from tourists to take a photograph of them and their goats. Bill says no, that this will count against me, but he stops to chat with them in his most animated Paul Lynde way. There are sadhus everywhere, wandering holy men wrapped in ragged warm blankets, sitting before tiny fires, smiling from deep within. The smells of spices, incense, humanity, cooking, marijuana hang in the air.
We got into an auto-rickshaw. Bill bargained Driver-ji down, while I wanted to pay him way more than he asked, plus give him my socks and shawl. Bill talked to the driver in Hindi, and then indicated me with a wave and a flourish:
“This is my former wife,” he said in English, “and we are on our friendship tour.” This turned out to be his major coping strategy in India. Everywhere we went, he bantered with drivers, waiters, beggars, almost always sharing some miserable aspect of our imaginary marriage: that I was cheap, or wouldn’t put out, or had taken him to the cleaners when we broke up. And I laughed every time, so I guess it was my coping strategy, too.
There is no way to prepare for the mystical zap that is India. It’s stunning, tragic, hallucinatory, bejeweled, smoky, overpowering. I’ve noticed that many people here have tiny hygiene issues. My automatic response to overwhelming situations is to try to organize everyone into small functioning groups. This usually requires a clipboard and Post-its. But these were hard to find in India. And the people did not seem to want me to organize them and improve their lot. They, and India, are the song that never ends, no matter what has been thrown at them over the millennia, or earlier this morning. You see packs of children begging, whose parents often put them up to this (another reason Bill won’t let me give them money, as it encourages them not to pursue a real trade); minuscule open-air buses full of Muslim children in uniforms heading to school; packs of young glue-sniffing teen agers, zoned out. The smell of pot is everywhere.
Bill tells me that in Nepal, there is a phrase, rungi-chungi jilli-milli, which means total bombardment on every level, too much of everything all at once. Every color, smell, taste, sound, and echo fills the air, hot and spicy curries, every kind of sweet, harmony and silence and horns honking.
The air here is as soft as cashmere. Saris are for sale every where, and most women, no matter how poor, are works of art. There are way more men on the street than women—Bill says all the Muslim women are home, behind walls.
Most of the women I do see are petite, with long black hair and round brown eyes. My eyes played tricks on me, and I saw Amy everywhere in a sari.
I almost backed into a bull on the street while I gaped at a crowd of hijras, whom you see all over: they are men in body only, who adopt female gender identity; they’re not quite transvestites, and not transgendered. Some have castration surgery, some do not. There is no equivalent word or adequate definition in English. You cannot believe that some of them were born men. They are low-status, marginalized, and are often sex workers. Others look like male movie stars in saris. People are afraid of them, as they are always crashing ceremonies to which they have not been invited. You pay them to go away when they hit on you for money, or you risk their putting dark spells on you and yours. Hijras frequently stand outside the homes of families with newborns until they are paid not to put curses on the children.
The horns of the bull that almost gored me were painted with the colors of the Indian flag, green, orange, white. The bull pulled a cart with sacks of rice. I stepped aside at the last minute, like a matador. Ubiquitous urchins laughed at me, and I smiled.
India is a round place: round noses and round, soulful eyes; sacks of grain; beach balls for sale everywhere; kids with hacky sacks; fried balls of anything edible for sale, savory or sweet.
It is layers upon layers of ancient and living civilization, a profound and tangible sacredness that has been alive for 7,000 years, always and still evolving, so maybe not exactly the song that never ends, but more like a song that has no beginning and no end, a Möbius-strip song, the same ancient note that ever was. Delhi is built upon and built upon and built upon the most ancient foundation, the Stone Age; the Indus Valley civilization from more than 5,000 years ago, the birth of most great religions; the Mughal empire; the sadhus, the yogis, and the British. The obscene Raj takeover left gorgeous buildings and squares and gardens everywhere. Everything is right there on the streets—everything that ever was, everything beautiful and destitute that ever was and will be, with Stone Age fires along the streets burning outside high-tech corporate offices, the Divine being transmitted and worshipped, and the reality and the continuity of that; and the dirt and pee and people shitting in the streets, and a million beggars right around you, and two million dogs, and as many cows and bulls, and every God everywhere, so that this sense of worship envelops every thing, permeates and emanates. Other places I’ve seen in Asia, Thailand and Vietnam, for instance, seem as though they are behind glass, whereas here, you’re a part of it. In Thailand, it’s a great ballet or a play—a representation. But here I was part of it, part of the dance.
What people are faced with is mind-blowing, yet everywhere you see people getting up, making their fires, the women stirring, the men shaving, getting the kids clean and combed, ready for school; just getting on with things, in a much better mood than I would be in.
The wooden tables at the yogurt stalls are stacked with clay bowls that will be used only once, and never again, because meat-eating lips may have touched them. You’re rotten and polluted if you’re not a Brahman. The business class does not want to share even a well-washed bowl with disgusting putrefied old you.
The ordinary poor people are fourth-caste. Even lower, people who sweep, deal with bodies and shit, or work with leather are the Non-Scheduleds.
I, sweet adorable me, would not be allowed to step over the threshold of a Brahman’s house.
Bill continued to tell anyone who spoke even rudimentary English that I was his ex-wife, and about our friendship tour, and said not to offer me any alcoholic beverages, as I would end up back in the gutters. Also, not to lend me money. “I am afraid I found this out the hard way,” he grimly told the man at the coffee stall, who nodded politely. I couldn’t help laughing. Without his constant patter, I would have dissolved into a dust pile of grief.
The crush of extreme deprivation tears you apart. I said, “Nay, nay,” harshly to the mothers who tugged on my sleeves, pleading, “Mama, Mama.” And I said, “Nay, nay,” to their babies who tugged on my sleeves with Jax-sized fingers, also saying, “Mama, Mama,” in tiny Kewpie voices. Then, in a stroke of genius, I started adding “EnRaHa!” in a menacing tone. It is from the Mike Leigh movie Happy-Go-Lucky, in which a furiously tense driving instructor shouts “EnRaHa!” at the main character whenever she makes a mistake—he points to the side mirrors, and then the rearview, the all-seeing eye of Ra, and shouts “EnRaHa!” at her. Brake! Watch out! EnRaHa! So I waved each beggar away dismissively and shouted, “Nay, nay! EnRaHa!” all but batting people away; this was a side of me not so often seen, least of all by me. It absolutely threw or scared everyone off.
Life here became a lot easier after I turned on the beggars.
“Can’t we give anyone any money?” I implored Bill later, at another coffee stall.
You could start a riot. Beggars will end up being beaten after you create disturbance and panic. We’re going to give it to people who can help,” he pronounced. So we took money over to a friend of his who runs a foundation through which teachers go to the streets to teach girls to read.
There are scruffy, starving, mangy dogs everywhere, and you see people bring them plastic bags holding a little milk to drink.
Bill and I sat near the top stairs of the Jama Masjid, the great Red Mosque built by Shah Jahan, of Taj Mahal fame, to watch life on the streets. They spread forth like crazy roiling runners woven of people. When the unearthly call to prayer sounded from a PA system only a few feet above us, like an air-raid siren or foghorn from antiquity, I leapt skittishly to my feet, like a cartoon cat, the whitest old lady in town.
On the way back to the hotel, Bill told our driver, “The ex wants to give all the money to beggars, and bring all the dogs home. Now, there’s one special bullock I’ve allowed her to keep. She’s brought it to her room. The hotel room is packed with the sixteen children and the one bull. They are all watching the BBC and having snacks: Lay’s potato chips and full-sugar Cokes.” The driver nodded solemnly and said, “Coca-Cola,” and so, Day One.
Thursday, January 21
The second day, Bill told the men at the front desk, “My former wife likes your dal very much. Don’t you, darling? Every restaurant we go to, she orders dal. But yours? Yours she loves best.” Dal is the ubiquitous lentil stew. It is one of my favorite foods here and a staple at home.
He told the man at the counter at a Jain bookstore that our marriage was “rocky” until the truth came out, that he was a major fruit.
He told each of our drivers about our divorce, plus the children and the bull whom I’ve brought to my room for chips, Cokes, and the BBC.
He is, everywhere he goes in the world, a trove of historical information, gleaned from travels and his extensive reading. He was here when Indira Gandhi was killed by two Sikh bodyguards in 1984, and saw the city devolve into smoke and riots. Floods of memories came back to him—his driver was Sikh, and people were trying to kill him. We spent several hours at the Indira Gandhi Memorial Museum, the white bungalow surrounded by trees and a magnificent garden that was her residence. Mohandas Gandhi, Mahatma, was the reason Bill first fell in love with India; he saw in Gandhi and in India the uniquely divine that he had been seeking in the West. He had seen Gandhi on TV and in magazines: the dhoti, the sandals, the spectacles, the cane, his spinning, his love, and his defeat of the British Empire with the goodness, simplicity, and faith of the Indians. Bill came here to see this for himself, and he has kept coming back.
We passed by the crystal pathway in the museum’s garden, where Indira Gandhi was shot by her bodyguards. I sighed, and bowed my head to honor her.
India showed me reality: two concentric circles further from what life will usually show of itself, because India doesn’t have the extra energy to work on the surface or appearance or veneer. So you see how animal, how human, how divine and bodily and mystical we are, and how this is all swirled together.
I was eating some of the best food of my life, as good as the great food of France. It was tandoori and Punjabi food. Punjabi is what we are used to in the States, but I was enjoying original versions, every family’s greatest-hits versions. Food is usually served on thalis—plates with dividers to hold five or six kinds of food, with little condiment bowls around the edges for yogurt and bright hot sauces. You leave space in the middle for rice, and there are three kinds of bread, two kinds of dal, one sweet and one sour, plus a vegetable dish, my favorite being the crisp brown slices of cauliflower and blackened peppers. Chicken cooked in cinnamon, clove, paprika, and saffron; cardamom-flavored pudding, milk curd and semolina, which tastes somehow like delicious milky dish soap, the way cilantro tastes of deliciously soapy grass.
Babies were everywhere, part of the flowing saris, or peeking forth like baby kangaroos, eyes lined in kohl. I see Jax everywhere, his eyes framed only by those black, lush lashes. We took a rickshaw and a subway to Humayun’s monumental tomb, the first garden tomb of the Mughals. The sheer scale left me feeling thunderstruck and stupid: the ancient and imperial gardens, the great dome, the cupolas, arches, sarcophagi. I felt as though I might begin to stagger, Snaggletooth onstage doing Shakespeare. We wandered around for a couple of hours, and then went back to the hotel for naps. Bill told the bicycle rickshaw man, “Driver-ji, you see old white “sweet and one sour, plus a vegetable dish, my favorite being the crisp brown slices of cauliflower and blackened peppers. Chicken cooked in cinnamon, clove, paprika, and saffron; cardamom-flavored pudding, milk curd and semolina, which tastes somehow like delicious milky dish soap, the way cilantro tastes of deliciously soapy grass.
Babies were everywhere, part of the flowing saris, or peeking forth like baby kangaroos, eyes lined in kohl. I see Jax everywhere, his eyes framed only by those black, lush lashes. We took a rickshaw and a subway to Humayun’s monumental tomb, the first garden tomb of the Mughals. The sheer scale left me feeling thunderstruck and stupid: the ancient and imperial gardens, the great dome, the cupolas, arches, sarcophagi. I felt as though I might begin to stagger, Snaggletooth onstage doing Shakespeare. We wandered around for a couple of hours, and then went back to the hotel for naps. Bill told the bicycle rickshaw man, “Driver-ji, you see old white foreigners like me sometime? And they need to sleep in the afternoon? That’s me: I need absolute dark and quiet for half an hour. My ex-wife has been very patient about this all these years.”
The driver nodded eagerly, although he did not seem to speak English.
After naps, we walked through the streets for a few hours, to look in stalls, mosques, gardens. The babies and children here are gorgeous. Half of the little ones are so physically beautiful that they could work for the airlines. And the other half look like Ragu, like ticklish containers of the divine, sneaky little beings with secrets. I saw one toddler who looked exactly like an elephant’s baby, yet managed also to be lovely. I stopped to flirt with him and his mother. You could almost feel the words that the baby wasn’t saying out loud: “I could tell you the secret, but I don’t need to, because you can see it everywhere if you simply look around and breathe.” The mother tugged on my sleeve and said, “Mama,” but Bill was glaring at me, so I just gave her half a muffin I had in my purse from breakfast.
The babies have shiny black hair, and eyes that you fall into like black pools or furry caves, like Jax’s. He could pass here, except for those babyish diapers he insists on wearing.
We saw the original Mama beggar. She and the baby made a beeline for me. “Nay, nay!” I thundered, turning away. “EnRaHa.”
“Why don’t you bring them back to your hotel room?” Bill suggested. “Share your chips with them. Help them forget about their destitution.”
He said the woman had a life, and was part of some community, and had people she returned to every night. Like the people who made a home on the street, where, in the early morning, someone would take a pot, and a match, and a piece of coal, and make a fire; the family would cook rice, and be together, and beg, and later in the afternoon, when, as Bill put it, they were off-duty, we’d see them maybe bathing at the public faucets.
I couldn’t really tell if some people were dead or just sleeping. We approached an ancient prone man in a head wrap; he was so tiny, and lying so still in the dirt. I said to Bill, “Can I at least give that one money? I can’t even tell if he’s alive.
“Certainly not—you may not give that one money if he’s dead. Honey, you have got to work on your boundaries.”
Friday, January 22
We spent the morning walking around the sprawling, ancient, sinister but ethereal spice market: thousands of stalls and aromas, a riot of color and sparkle, and unbelievable squalor. Then to Jama Masjid, the biggest mosque in India—Bill has seen it many times, and so he sat outside on the steps to read William Dalrymple’s great book on Delhi, City of Djinns, while waiting for me. I stepped into the courtyard of red sandstone. A gregarious man who looked to be my age came up, unasked, to act as my guide through the courtyard and the mosque. He gave me a loaner hijab to cover my loathsome female head, and I felt like Christiane Amanpour as he led me around the domes, towers, minarets; took a picture of me standing near the low tombs; and showed me the black-and-white-mosaic workmanship of the great inside walls. The mosque leaves you flabbergasted. But when we turned to walk back to the entrance, he demanded money for the first time, two hundred rupees. I said a hundred, and he gave me a threatening look, but I bellowed, “EnRaHa!” at him and he backed off.
Most people were not wearing shoes. The pinkness of their palms and soles, when they sat resting, was quite striking and vulnerable, almost edible—the tops of their hands were as darkly rich as chocolate, and then underneath, you saw the universal pink.
I saw great, beautiful, difficult weirdness every inch of every street and alley. I was successfully still doing “EnRaHa” everywhere to chase away beggars. The begging and deformities were killing me, but Bill again maintained that it was useless to give money, because the beggars wouldn’t get it. Yet they grabbed at you and knocked on taxi windows with their stumps and babies and leprosy, and cried to you in your rickshaw. I told them each firmly, “Nay, nay,” then added, “EnRaHa,” and looked away, so Bill wouldn’t abandon me on the streets. I would hate to end up in some squalid jail even if it had been fashioned out of a formerly glorious Raj mansion.
I decided I would trap some monkeys later and start a Monkey Tea Party.
I would be the Chief Monkey.
Almost all the babies and little children I saw had kohl around their eyes—Bill said it was to protect them from the evil eye. I wondered if it had something in common with the eye black that football players wear around their eyes to protect them from the sun’s fierce glare. I Googled “kohl on babies’ eyes” on my tiny computer, and discovered that the lead in the powder from which kohl is made is toxic to the tiny flies that are everywhere in India; the kohl keeps the babies’ eyes safe from fly infestation. I was worried sick about the effect of lead on children’s eyes. Maybe I could form some consciousness-raising groups for the mothers.
We planned to go to bed early, as in the morning we were going to be driven to the airport
for our flight to Varanasi. That evening our taxi driver drove us through a heavy San Francisco fog. There had been, and remained, a militaristic presence of wildly heightened security, cops everywhere for the last two days, and barricades going up. The formidable, sprawling Red Fort, built in the 1600s and capital of the Mughal empire until the mid-1800s, was closed because the Republic Day parade would start there in a few days, and chaos was expected. We were in our rooms by nine. The sound of massive bombs exploding nearby sent me down to the front desk to inquire politely if we were under terrorist attack, but I was told it was only a wedding party. I put in my earplugs, and repeated Baba nam kevalam silently in my head until I eventually fell asleep.
Saturday, January 23
We were up early for our plane ride to Varanasi—the modern name for Benares—the holiest of cities, but before we left, the most fabulous thing happened. My BlackBerry rang, and it was Ragu calling from the ashram in Los Altos—he had arranged a conference call with me, and Sam and Amy, who were at my house, and Dada, who was at his orphanage in Delhi.
I thought I was dreaming at first, but decided to go with it.
“Hi, Mom,” Sam said, and my heart swelled, but he was instantly cut off by Ragu, who shouted to Dada that “it is Anne, from Great Britain, who is so great! Remember?” Dada said something quietly in Hindi, and Ragu shouted back at him with enthusiasm, and then shouted for Sam to talk, so he said, “Hi, Mom,” and then was interrupted again by Ragu. He wanted to explain how he had engineered this conference call, and how cheap it would be for him, and how maybe I could drop by Dada’s orphanage while I was here, and then he shouted to Dada, “That is Anne! Sam’s mother!” And then I heard Jax squawk, and I actually clutched at myself like Blanche DuBois, and Ragu then shouted for Amy to say hello, and as soon as she did, he interrupted her—he was like a crazy symphony conductor on acid. He made sure Dada was on the line. He was, but he seemed totally confused, and was speaking softly, possibly to himself, in Hindi. So Ragu talked to him loudly in English for a minute, and Dada spoke in Hindi and with obvious confusion, and an animated loud conversation ensued between the two of them. It was like a Marx Brothers comedy routine or an old radio show, like Bob and Ray, with no conversation going between me and Sam or Amy. But then I heard Jax babbling, and Amy said, “Jax, it’s Nana!” But this, too, was interrupted by enormously loud vitality and excitement from Ragu. Then Sam said, “Mommy! Mommy! We are all fine, are you okay?” and I started to cry because I was so happy, so connected in this Mad Hatter symphony piece. I said I was the happiest I had ever been in my life, and Sam asked me to tell him a story, but then we were cut off as Ragu kept shouting to Dada that this was Anne, from Great Britain, who was so great and who wanted to come visit Dada at his orphanage, which I didn’t quite remember having said. I surrendered and simply cried out every so often that I loved Sam and Amy and Jax, Ragu and Dada, and I cried out thanks over and over to Ragu for arranging our conference call. We were on the line for a little less than ten minutes, with perhaps a minute of direct “conversation” between me and Sam and Amy, and eight minutes of this Indian Who’s on First, and Jax’s squawks for a few seconds here and there, and I felt that this phone call was why I had come to India.
Because of the fog, almost no flights and no trains for Varanasi were leaving Saturday morning, and it was like being in the chill in the Outer Sunset district in August back home, but one plane—ours—eventually took off after a four-hour delay. We sat near a young Israeli beauty and her Lebanese boyfriend, who both spoke English, and whom Bill anointed as the Mideast’s only remaining hope for lasting peace. They fell in love with him.
Varanasi was so rungi-chungi-jilli-milli-plus-plus that it made Old Delhi look organized; multilayered chaos and congestion and pandemonious beauty in the streets, with vendors, sadhus, rickshaw drivers, but mostly regular Indian families getting from one place to another. We checked into our hotels—I was staying at a nice one across the street from the river, Bill at a much cheaper one nearby (five dirt blocks away). We immediately headed for the Ganges, which was one block from my hotel, to the ghats of Benares. They make up a stone thoroughfare that runs along the river beneath the temples and mansions that rise like cliffs above the steps and sidewalk. Every kind of person you could ever imagine in India—monks and priests and devotees, hawkers, ragamuffins, food sellers—was there. Mark Twain famously said that Benares “is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.” My hotel was at Assi Ghat, the southernmost end, and we walked along the huge stone steps that create the embankment of the Ganges, beneath the mansions built for royal family pilgrimage. Men of all ages bathed in the river, and drank from it, the very thought of which, as the old hymn puts it, caused me to tremble, tremble, tremble. Women and men did laundry, laying hotel sheets out to dry; people were talking or praying, rowing, selling, begging, feeding their children; cows, oxen, and horses milled in the sand. The younger holy men looked like they could be from Bolinas or Woodstock. Small fires burned everywhere, for every reason. The river was the color of mist.
Bill pointed way down the embankment to the burning ghat, where cremation takes place day and night, but I couldn’t go there yet. I needed to eat and to get my bearings. You lose the known package of your nice organized self almost instantly here. Overeating is one way back, the way it is at funerals at home.
We went back to my hotel for dinner, but the dining room was too postmodern, too Louis Farouk, the ex–king of Egypt whose taste ran to deep red velvet drapes and chair upholstery, Las Vegas, Versailles, Elvis. I couldn’t eat there. We walked through the crazy crowded street to Bill’s hotel, with me shouting “EnRaHa!” at the beggars, and Bill laughing at how it always worked.
I collapsed at the dining room table. Bill ordered a beer with his dinner, but when the waiter arrived and began to fill my glass first, Bill said, “My ex is an alcoholic. She can’t have any beer.” The waiter brought me a sweet lime drink instead.
Sunday, January 24
We were on the Ganges at five in the morning, in a riverboat in the fog. One image that had called me to India for years, besides the Taj Mahal, was a dawn visit to the Ganges on a riverboat, for the sunrise.
All four mornings we were in Varanasi, our boat was socked in with fog. This morning’s riverboat man said, “Too much the foggy!” which I think captures all of human life. It was a thick, white pea-soup fog—a vichyssoise fog—and apparently we were not going to see any of the sights I’d assumed we would see, and in fact had come here to see.
But we saw something else: We saw how much better mystery shows up in the fog, how much wilder and truer each holy moment is than any fantasy.
Through the cold vapor emerged outlines of buildings, and the palaces and water towers painted with images of gods, Shiva and Ganesh and Krishna, and boatfuls of other people who drifted by quietly, muted by the fog. What we saw was the river up close, because you couldn’t see anything that was far away: gloriously, giddily colorful disintegrating figures of Saraswati, the goddess of learning, made of straw and clay, painted and adorned with flowers; the lights of fires on the distant shore; and candles on leaves floating a few feet away in the murky river.
I asked Bill if we should go back on land, wait for the sun to come out in a few hours, and then return.
Oh, come on. It’ll be fun,” he replied. “We’ll swirl around in the fog and watch the dead bodies float by.”
It was so eerie. Spooky, in a strangely benevolent way. Annie Dillard said, “We awake, if ever we wake at all, to mystery.” You believe, in India, that the unseen, the unfathomable, is the bedrock, that the unseeable is the truer reality, which doesn’t work for me at all. I mean, I’m an American! I like to know where I am and what I am seeing and what it all means. On the other hand, I do like to shop. We bought trinkets from a rascal-eyed boatman who floated up beside our boat and then would not leave us alone. Bill lost patience. “Look,” he told the man, “you’ve got your deal, we’ve got our deal. Now let’s all move on to bigger and better things.” The rascal-eyed boatman looked askance for a moment or two, then smiled and paddled away.
We saw people bathing in front of certain ghats that are specific to their god. We saw Brahmans instruct—i.e., shove—their reluctant sons and nephews into the freezing dirty water, and dozens of formerly fantastic, now deteriorating floating Saraswatis from a festival honoring her two days before. Of course they disintegrate, as we all do. They would be taken away by the river, into the Unseen, like the bodies we saw being cremated, becoming smoke and then merging with the fog.
Back on land, we walked for hours, and then went to our hotel rooms for naps.
Nothing could ever seem as gorgeous and bizarre as what I had seen that day; until my BlackBerry pinged, to indicate a text, from Sam:
“Come home, Mom! Jax can now do the pre-crawl, kind of scooch across the floor. Also, he can almost read, I swear to God. Or at least hold a book now for twenty seconds or so, like he’s reading it. Then he starts trying from various directions to eat it.”
I met up with Bill at sunset. He was sitting on the steps of Assi Ghat, flirting with an Indian family. He threw himself into my arms with extravagant relief when I walked up. “This is her,” he told them, and they clapped. “I told them, I can’t find my ex-wife. And they tried, with no success, to comfort me.” Bill and I walked down the ghats and joined a group of people gathered around a man with a small monkey. The man asked me if I wanted to pet it, so I did, and as I turned away, it leapt onto my head. I could have been killed, conceivably! But it was so hilarious, and the couple of dozen Indians watching laughed in a very loving way. Everyone loves my dreads. The monkey played with them. Then he got his hands tangled up in them and tried to jump away, and almost succeeded, but the guy put him back on me because we had drawn a crowd, and therefore profit. When the man finally tried to unhook him, the monkey scratched my hand.
Instantly, all I could think of was Dustin Hoffman in Outbreak—the Ebola-infected pet monkey spreading it to Americans. And me without my Purell, which was back in my room, and is very effective against hemorrhagic viruses.
I went to the front desk of my hotel to ask if the person on duty had any emergency disinfectant, and the manager told me to go downstairs and see the hotel nurse. I found a beautiful Bollywood woman in nurse clothes, sitting with her Bollywood “it, so I did, and as I turned away, it leapt onto my head. I could have been killed, conceivably! But it was so hilarious, and the couple of dozen Indians watching laughed in a very loving way. Everyone loves my dreads. The monkey played with them. Then he got his hands tangled up in them and tried to jump away, and almost succeeded, but the guy put him back on me because we had drawn a crowd, and therefore profit. When the man finally tried to unhook him, the monkey scratched my hand.
Instantly, all I could think of was Dustin Hoffman in Outbreak—the Ebola-infected pet monkey spreading it to Americans. And me without my Purell, which was back in my room, and is very effective against hemorrhagic viruses.
I went to the front desk of my hotel to ask if the person on duty had any emergency disinfectant, and the manager told me to go downstairs and see the hotel nurse. I found a beautiful Bollywood woman in nurse clothes, sitting with her Bollywood boyfriend, and I explained about the monkey attack and showed her my small scratch and asked for antiseptic or antibiotic ointment to prevent Ebola or Marburg.
Unfortunately, she did not speak English.
But the boyfriend spoke a little, and became our trans lator. I asked for Purell, demonstrating how calm and grown-up Americans could be. The boyfriend translated, but the nurse told him, No Purell. I rubbed my hands faster, to indicate dire urgency. She shook her head. I asked for rubbing alcohol. Nay, nay—no rubbing alcohol. Fine, I said sort of huffily, “Fine, let me use your soap and hot water.” Oh dear, no soap or hot water at the nurse’s station.
Now I was extremely frustrated, as the virus coursed through my veins, and I was about to stomp off when the boyfriend said, “Wait! We have a veddy excellent cream!” He went into the secret nurse chamber and returned with a tube that said “anti-fungal” on the label. Veddy excellent, he assured me, and gave me a dab in a water bottle cap. I stared at it for a moment. I smiled, thanked them, and headed up to my room to use my own Purell, and then the antifungal cream.
Monday, January 25
The next day we ate our meals at the restaurant at Bill’s hotel, and then went to find our permanent boatmen, Ashok and Max. Ashok was delicate as a deer, Max much more Western, like Gomez Addams. Every so often Ashok would throw a handful of crispy dough bits from a bag into the water beside our boat, and the seagulls would descend screaming in a cloud to pick them off the river, inches from the boat. We walked among Brahmans and beggars of every age, and people selling food, and batti. This means “light”—the little flower boats with candles that you light for devotion and float on the Ganges. The Flower Boat Children descended on us like mosquitoes, and I EnRaHa’ed them all, except when Bill was distracted, in which case I furtively bought their batti. “Uncle, Uncle,” they beseeched him, and he waved them away, except for a persistent little boy in a Spider-Man T-shirt, whom even Bill could not resist. People carried bodies wrapped in cloth on litters, Papaji or Mamaji covered with flowers, and headed to the fires, headed to the river. Bodies burn all day and night. You stop even noticing.
We knew a few people after a while—the nurse, the nurse’s boyfriend, Ashok and Max. Bill came upon the Israeli woman and her Lebanese boyfriend who had sat near us on the plane. We stood around together at the burning ghat. Bill asked the young Lebanese man if he read much, and he said yes, and Bill pleaded with him to buy all my books. Bill said that I was down on my luck and that he’d had to lend me money, but now he could see that there was no chance of getting it back. Plus, he added, he was too embarrassed to ask me for it. They commiserated with him. I smiled sheepishly. We all hugged and kissed good-bye, our eyes burning from the smoke of the bodies on the nearby pyres.
That night on our way to find Max and Ashok, I casually dismissed a boy who was trying to sell me batti, and near tears he cried out, “Auntie,” and ripped open his outer shirt. “I’m Spider-Man!” And indeed he was, the one Bill had not been able to resist. I splurged on his batti.
Tomorrow night Bill and I fly back to Delhi, and then Wednesday I take a car ride to Agra for the Taj. So two and a half more full days in India.
We took our nightly riverboat ride past the burning ghat to the evening prayer ritual, which involves Brahman priests and so much fire and incense and displays of light that it makes Catholic High Mass look like a Mennonite service. At least a thousand people were gathered at this ghat, reverential and pumped, carrying torches and candles, and it made me think of the Tribal Council on Survivor. But then, it was also hypnotic and lovely, with the Ganges, mist, and the boats and white sand of the far shore across the river as a backdrop. Tonight a holy man came up to me and made a red powder bindi on my forehead with his thumb, like red Ash Wednesday ashes. When I got back to my hotel room, I went to wash and nearly cried out when I saw it, because I’d already forgotten it was there; my first thought when I saw myself in the mirror was that I was bleeding out from monkey Ebola.
By that time my scratch was slightly red and puffy; pre-hemorrhagic. I used lots of Purell and antifungal cream, prayed furiously, read the great novel of India, Shantaram, for hours, and slept well, and this morning most of the puffy redness was gone. It was a medical miracle.
Tuesday, January 26
Today was abridged; we were going to leave for Delhi at three. In the morning I walked alone along the Ganges, watched the mist rising, people doing their laundry on the rocks by the river, washermen and washerwomen laying out hotel sheets to dry. I passed the monkey man with the monkey on his shoulder and gave him a big thumbs-up.
It was International Annie Defies Bill and Gives Away Money to the Beggars Day. I gave an old beggar granny with big feet my Birkenstocks, and my socks that had a festive moose print. I wondered what she made of them. I gave a begging mother my long-sleeved Gap T-shirt; next time I will pack only things I can leave behind. After I checked out of the hotel, I stood outside with my carry-on and forty ten-rupee notes (each worth about a quarter). I went to the ghat in front of the hotel. There were two nice, manageable beggar moms with little babies on the steps, all four crying to me, “Mama, Mama,” and pantomiming feeding themselves with a fork. I whipped out my tens, and gave one to the first mom, and one to the second, and then one to a third who had appeared, and then another to a grabby sadhu; and suddenly it was like when the seagulls roared in a cloud straight at us on Ashok’s boat. Dozens of beggars descended on me, calling, “Mama, Mama,” and “Auntie, Auntie.” I was handing out ten-rupee notes to all these hands that were tearing and snatching at me—and I was scared to fucking death. I felt like Tippi Hedren in The Birds. I was shouting, “Nay! Nay! EnRaHa! EnRaHa!” but boy, talk about closing the barn door after the horses get out. There were easily forty or fifty beggars surrounding terrorized, white, cringy me, and then some sort of security person from my hotel pushed into the crowd and starting shoving the mommies and babies and miscellaneous beggars away and rebuking them all, and another security man in a cap arrived, swinging at them with a stick, and he pulled me out of the vortex. I broke free and fell down, but caught myself. I sat down on the ground trying to catch my breath. I felt like a chick that had pecked its way out of its shell, lying there in the wet plop of freedom, with security making batting motions at beggars and with the curious peering at me on my butt.
When I met up with Bill at his hotel and told him what had happened, he cried out with distress. Then he flamboyantly zipped his mouth closed to avoid saying he had told me so, but he sniggered off and on all the way to the airport.
Wednesday, January 27
I woke up early in Delhi, and had a big breakfast in my room, a cheese omelet, several pieces of wheat toast, and an orange. I tapped on the door of Bill’s room down the hall to say good-bye, but he didn’t answer. I went outside and stood waiting for my driver to Agra, game for a total immersion in quintessential India.
Then an e-mail from Sam arrived on my BlackBerry:
“We are so excited you are coming home. I know we told you that Jax is pre-crawling, which might make you think he is up on all fours—but that is not exactly true. What he can do is the army crawl, using his elbows for rapid propulsion across the floor, with occasional success at getting on his knees. So don’t be disappointed. It is great anyway! Come home!”
I hit the lottery with my driver, Prem. He spoke English, sort of, and pronounced Bush’s name Jaja W. Boot, which made the entire trip worth it. He drove the car you see everywhere in India, an Ambassador, which looks like a small, fat Peugeot with a snub-nosed hood. Bill had told me that its marketing slogan used to be “The King of Indian Roads.” Most of the Ambassadors are old, and either black, as they were originally in the 1940s, or white, from when they became official government cars.
Prem and I talked about our children and shared my roast cashews and a large chocolate bar. I was glad to leave the city and be in the Indian countryside, passing fields and the suggestions of villages, lots of animals. Everything was fine— except that our car started breaking down. It broke down four times in the first four hours after we left Delhi.
Each time, Prem assured me that it would take just a second to repair, that it was just loose wires. I pretended not to be worried sick. The car broke down by the side of the road in the countryside, and once alongside a curb in a town where beggars descended on it. I made a gesture of waving them away, looking with great annoyance to the opposite window, where there were another dozen beggars. One man on a cart who had leprosy tapped on the window the entire time, smiling.
Finally, I rolled the window down to just above the highest his arm stumps could reach, and said, very nicely, with Christian love, “Nay, nay. EnRaHa!”
The third time the King broke down, when Prem appeared from beneath the hood with his tools, he asked if I knew anything about car wiring. Me. I can just barely work a toaster.
I said, “Jeez, no, not really.” He went back under the hood with a strip of cloth, came out, and then got the car running. We started up again, and were soon passing fields full of beans and grain and rice, and every so often fourth-world outdoor cafés with white plastic lawn chairs. I laughed out loud at the memory of Father Guido Sarducci saying, “Where did the lawn chairs come from? And what do they want?” Prem and I talked off and on in our best broken efforts about our children, the glue-sniffing children on the streets of Delhi, Obama, and Jaja W. Boot. We were quiet for long stretches. It was an honor to see the countryside with him.
After several hours, much longer than I had expected it would take, we got to the gates of the Taj Mahal. Prem turned me over to his cousin, who worked as a guide there, who spoke perfect English and had a name made up of dozens of syllables.
I had wondered often since we’d set out this morning if it was really worth the time and effort to come here on my last full day in India. I had seen the image of the Taj Mahal a thousand times, and I’d thought I was prepared, but I couldn’t possibly have been, any more than I was for the Great Sphinx at Giza, or Jax. The Taj Mahal fills you with such awe that you feel stoned. The great spotless-white rising domed marble mausoleum, the four minarets, the garden; it’s perfection. It is beauty; it is truth.
Prem’s cousin and I walked solemnly around the grounds for a couple of hours. He told me the history of the Mughal empire and about Shah Jahan and his grief when his wife died. I told him about Jax and Sam. He pointed out the most unbelievable details, mostly inside the mausoleum, where the walls are inlaid with millions of bits of jigsawed gemstones—sapphire, carnelian, lapis, turquoise, coral, topaz. Its sheer glory stupefied me, like a lightning strike in slow motion. I got out my pictures of Jax, and the dogs.
The Taj made me laugh out loud, because it is so amazing, and I cried because I was here for only this one time. Prem’s cousin gave me his handkerchief. Dabbing at my eyes, I asked him to tell me his name again. It was Rasoolasallahualayi-wassallam, or something. I asked if I could call him “Cousin,” and he smiled and said yes.
Cousin handed me back to Prem, and we headed back to Delhi. We drove maybe fifteen
minutes before the car started acting up. Prem tore a bleached-out red mechanic’s rag into strips, and disappeared under the hood again. Then I had an inspiration. I tore out the blue cord handle from a bag I had. The cord was pretty thick, almost a foot long. The next time the car failed, about fifteen minutes later, Prem started to get out of the car; I dangled the blue cord toward him, and the relief on his face was radiant.
Thursday, January 28
Bill had promised that we would walk to all of our pet places in Delhi today, maybe take a subway ride. I was flying home at night. We went back to my favorite restaurant for one last thali lunch, six dishes on the divided metal plate, two kinds of chapatis. We went to see the Red Fort, finally, the great fortress of gates, courtyards, a moat, and breathtaking mausoleums, and then visited some storefront temples whose walls were decorated in mosaics that seemed to have been created out of peacock feathers, meadows, candle flame, each temple worthy of a day’s attentions. But all I really wanted to do was marinate one last time in the street life.
A gorgeous, sexy woman vendor said sweetly to Bill, “Banana?” He shook his head and we kept walking. She called to him again, more seductively, almost suggestively, “Banana?” He smiled. Then, as we walked past, she screamed at the top of her lungs, “BANANA?
Bill admitted, after nine days, that there was one person in all of India he felt bad about not giving money to, a woman who had been begging at the subway entrance for a starving guy who lay on the ground beside her, who Bill had heard was dying of AIDS. So, a few hours before I went to the airport, we came upon them on the stairs to the subway. This guy looked much worse than Bill had described—as if he’d been exhumed and cleaned up, though not particularly well. He weighed maybe sixty pounds, and had the hands of death, badly receded teeth, biblical dirtiness, wild eyes.
Bill approached them and dropped coins into their cup, and I put in most of the bills I had left. I said to them both, “Bless you, bless you,” over and over, beseeched them with my eyes. I was kind of unhinged on their behalf. Then I had to walk on, because of the crush behind me.
A beautiful young woman with two pretty female companions fell in step with me and tugged my sleeve.
“Oh my God—you must never give anything to those two.”
“I looked over at her and her two companions, who rolled their eyes.”
Bill said, “But he’s obviously about to die.”
“Oh, no,” said one of the young women. “Those two have been there forever. He stays in that condition so his wife can beg off him.”
Shocked, I said, “That can’t be.” But all three young women nodded. Bill and I instantly got that we’d been had but good: we were so busted. We laughed and for a while talked about beggars with the three women, who were university students.
“What about the starving little kids?” I asked. “Don’t you help them?”
“No, no,” one of the women said adamantly. “If they are successful at begging, it just makes them want to keep doing it. They’ll never learn a trade.”
“But how do these children eat otherwise?”
“They will probably go home for dinner. Their parents will feed them. Their parents are the ones who put them up to this.”
Bill and I laughed at ourselves all the way to our train, helpless as little kids.
I still sort of thought that we should notify someone from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, and maybe get the guy at the subway a checkup. But for once I could not inflict my goodness and good ideas on the world, because I had to get back to the hotel and pack.
Sunday, January 31
I don’t really remember much about flying home, except that it took several years and was pretty awful and that I did the best I could. I rode a cab home from the airport, and now I have been here for two days, and have seen Jax, Amy, and Sam. My house now seems like a bungalow in Beverly Hills, so quiet and clean, with beautiful rugs and fixtures everywhere, and running water in three out of six rooms.
Jax is six months old, and will not need us for much longer. He is a fully formed person with a nice tan and huge black eyes, who now rolls over, and over, and over. I keep thinking of Teri Garr as Inga in Young Frankenstein, having a roll in the hay cart, crying out joyfully, roll, roll, roll. Jax is happy and social, rocks and kicks and rolls. He bounces when you hold him in a standing position, and sits, briefly, before falling over like a drunk.
Amy and Sam seemed to be in a good place when I got back, but demented with jet lag, I had to grip myself by the wrist not to pitch one good idea after another at them. I didn’t say, “Let’s find some great day care for Jax, so Amy can work part-time,” but I writhed with the effort to stay silent. I almost offered to babysit twice a week to this end, but didn’t. Since Jax’s birth, my ideas about what would be best for everyone usually got in the way. Life is already an obstacle course, and when you’re adding your own impediments (thinking they’re helping), you really crazy it up. You make it harder to even just cross the room. You should not bring more items and hurdles to the obstacle course.
February 2
It was pouring rain when I woke. I drove up in the storm to see Millard today. The end is near. He was restless and jerky, in Beckett agitation, like the lady onstage rummaging through her bag. But this discomfort and squirm may launch him into what awaits.
He was a total exaggeration of how this life does not work—he urgently needed to do his lists, and make phone calls, and all this felt frantically imperative to him. I’m really seeing how the machine of our lives is always on the fritz, whether because of our bodies’ failing us, or our minds’. Millard’s twitchy end-stage agitation looks the way a lot of us feel sometimes, even if we seem fine on the outside.
For some reason, my cousins did not call in hospice while I was in India. It was driving me crazy. I want to make lists of what they need to do, and make their calls for them. But all I can do is show up, laugh with Millard, listen, and breathe with him. All I can do is sit and bring my love to him.
During a moment when he was quieted, like a horse, he told me he was worried that he would live too long like this. I told him about the end of my father’s days, the flurry before the final deep sleep, and how peacefully he passed.
The rainstorm was grotesquely elemental, sheets of blowing rain, a nightmare on the roads. Someone was playing with the hose up there!
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Millard waited for me to get home from India, or that I was in such a jet-lagged mess. The supposed succor of the familiar world, which I missed in India, was not going to bolster me. And it was not going to give comfort to Millard, either—there was not much relief for him, on this side.
I had no choice but to feed the animals, walk the dogs, get my work done, help take care of Jax, talk to friends, and be in what was true. It’s always the same old problem: how to find ourselves in the great yammering of ego and tragedy and discomfort and obsession with everyone else’s destinies.
February 3
I miss India, in a way. I had fewer problems to solve there. Actually, I hardly had any, except when I got the monkey tangled in my hair. Oh, and the riot I started in Varanasi. India was spectacular and difficult, timeless, immediate, and demanding—mood-altering, with its ecstatic overwhelm and horror and beauty. I really had to pay attention."
Excerpt From: Anne Lamott & Sam Lamott. “Some Assembly Required.” iBooks. https://books.apple.com/us/book/some-assembly-required/id456075599
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