Travelers' Tales India Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  OTHER TITLES IN THE SERIES

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Preface

  Introduction

  PART ONE - ESSENCE OF INDIA

  First Tango in Ladakh

  A Bath for Fifteen Million People

  Monument of Love

  Chai! Chai! Chai!

  A Sufi Spring

  Predator

  The Calcutta Fowl Market

  Food for Body and Spirit

  The Boxer from Calcutta

  A Wedding in Mahabaleshwar

  God and Chocolate

  Hobson-Jobson

  Caretakers of the Dead

  My Delhi Home

  PART TWO - SOME THINGS TO DO

  Merle Haggard and the Ambassador

  The Dharma of Heli-Skiing

  Greeting the Monsoon

  The Other Raj

  Through Rajasthan by Rail

  Stairway to Heaven

  Worshipping the Wicket

  A Vision of Vijayanagar

  Scribes of Bengal

  The Horns of Kaziranga

  Wheels of Life

  Love Has Teeth

  Remnants of the Raj

  Slow Boat to the Islands

  PART THREE - GOING YOUR OWN WAY

  The Valley of Refuge

  Elephant Man

  Shalom, Bombay

  Lost and Found in Agra

  The Cycle-Wallah Does Northern India

  My Wedding at the Ashram

  Down the Brahmaputra

  Breaking the Fast

  In the Ladies’ Compartment

  Reading the Leaves

  Serenity 101

  To the Tribal Heartland

  Encounter with a Rajah

  The Mirage of Life

  PART FOUR - IN THE SHADOWS

  The Boys’ School

  The Die is Caste

  Beyond Turkman Gate

  Sick under the Bo Tree

  Shifting Gears on the Grand Trunk Road

  The Suffering of Eve

  PART FIVE - THE LAST WORD

  Kanya Kumari

  Recommended Reading

  Glossary

  Index

  Index of Contributors

  Acknowledgements

  About the Editors

  Copyright Page

  CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR TRAVELERS’ TALES

  “The Travelers’ Tales series is altogether remarkable.”

  —Jan Morris, author of Journeys, Locations, and Hong Kong

  “For the thoughtful traveler, these books are an invaluable resource. There’s nothing like them on the market.”

  —Pico Iyer, author of Video Night in Kathmandu

  “This is the stuff memories can be duplicated from.”

  —Karen Krebsbach, Foreign Service Journal

  “I can’t think of a better way to get comfortable with a destination than by delving into Travelers’ Tales…before reading a guidebook, before seeing a travel agent. The series helps visitors refine their interests and readies them to communicate with the peoples they come in contact with.…”

  —Paul Glassman, Society of American Travel Writers

  “…Travelers’ Tales is a valuable addition to any pre-departure reading list.”

  —Tony Wheeler, publisher, Lonely Planet Publications

  “Travelers’ Tales delivers something most guidebooks only promise: a real sense of what a country is all about.…”

  —Steve Silk, Hartford Courant

  “These anthologies seem destined to be a success…Travelers’ Tales promises to be a useful and enlightening addition to the travel bookshelves. By collecting and organizing such a wide range of literature, O’Reilly and Habegger are providing a real service for those who enjoy reading first-person accounts of a destination before seeing it for themselves.”

  —Bill Newlin, publisher, Moon Publications

  “The Travelers’ Tales series should become required reading for anyone visiting a foreign country who wants to truly step off the tourist track and experience another culture, another place, first hand.”

  —Nancy Paradis, St. Petersburg Times

  “Like having been there, done it, seen it. If there’s one thing traditional guidebooks lack, it’s the really juicy travel information, the personal stories about back alleys and brief encounters. The Travelers’ Tales series fills this gap with an approach that’s all anecdotes, no directions.”

  —Jim Gullo, Diversion

  OTHER TITLES IN THE SERIES

  Thailand

  Mexico

  Italy

  A Woman’s World

  France

  Spain

  San Francisco

  Hong Kong

  Food

  Brazil

  Paris

  Gutsy Women

  Nepal

  The Road Within

  Gutsy Mamas

  A Dog’s World

  Love & Romance

  The Fearless Diner

  A Mother’s World

  There’s No Toilet Paper on the Road Less Traveled

  Women in the Wild

  Italy

  Japan

  America

  Safety and Security for Women Who Travel

  A million lotuses swaying on one stem, World after coloured and ecstatic world Climbs towards some far unseen epiphany.

  —SRI AUROBINDO GHOSE

  Preface

  TRAVELERS’ TALES

  We are all outsiders when we travel. Whether we go abroad or roam about our own city or country, we often enter territory so unfamiliar that our frames of reference become inadequate. We need advice not just to avoid offense and danger, but to make our experiences richer, deeper, and more fun.

  Traditionally, travel guides have answered the basic questions: what, when, where, how, and how much. A good guidebook is indispensable for all the practical matters that demand attention. More recently, many guidebooks have added bits of experiential insight to their standard fare, but something important is still missing: guidebooks don’t really prepare you, the individual with feelings and fears, hopes and dreams, goals.

  This kind of preparation is best achieved through travelers’ tales, for we get our inner landmarks more from anecdote than information. Nothing can replace listening to the experience of others, to the war stories that come out after a few drinks, to the memories that linger and beguile. For millennia it’s been this way: at watering holes and wayside inns, the experienced traveler tells those nearby what lies ahead on the ever-mysterious road. Stories stoke the imagination, inspire, frighten, and teach. In stories we see more clearly the urges that bring us to wander, whether it’s hunger for change, adventure, self-knowledge, love, curiosity, sorrow, or even something as prosaic as a job assignment or two weeks off.

  But travelers’ accounts, while profuse, can be hard to track down. Many are simply doomed in a throwaway publishing world. And few of us have the time anyway to read more than one or two books, or the odd pearl found by chance in the Sunday travel section. Wanderers for years, we’ve often faced this issue. We’ve always told ourselves when we got home that we would prepare better for the next trip—read more, study more, talk to more people—but life always seems to interfere and we’ve rarely managed to do so to our satisfaction. That is one reason for this series. We needed a kind of experiential primer that guidebooks don’t offer.

  Another path that led us to Travelers’ Tales has been seeing the enormous changes in travel and communications over the last two decades. It is no longer unusual to have ridden a pony across Mongolia, to have celebrated an auspicious birthday on Mt. Kilimanjaro, or honeymooned on the Loir
e. The one-world monoculture has risen with daunting swiftness, weaving a new cross-cultural rug: no longer is it surprising to encounter former headhunters watching All-Star Wrestling on their satellite feed, no longer is it shocking to find the last guy at the end of the earth wearing a Harvard t-shirt and asking if you know Michael Jordan. The global village exists in a rudimentary fashion, but it is real.

  In 1980, Paul Fussell wrote in Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars a cranky but wonderful epitaph for travel as it was once known, in which he concluded that “we are all tourists now, and there is no escape.” It has been projected by some analysts that by the year 2000, tourism will be the world’s largest industry; others say it already is. In either case, this is a horrifying prospect—hordes of us hunting for places that have not been trod on by the rest of us!

  Fussell’s words have the painful ring of truth, but this is still our world, and it is worth seeing and will be worth seeing next year, or in 50 years, simply because it will always be worth meeting others who continue to see life in different terms than we do despite the best efforts of telecommunication and advertising talents. No amount of creeping homogeneity can quell the endless variation of humanity, and travel in the end is about people, not places. Places only provide different venues, as it were, for life, in which we are all pilgrims who need to talk to each other.

  There are also many places around the world where intercultural friction and outright xenophobia are increasing. And the very fact that travel endangers cultures and pristine places more quickly than it used to calls for extraordinary care on the part of today’s traveler, a keener sense of personal responsibility. The world is not our private zoo or theme park; we need to be better prepared before we go, so that we might become honored guests and not vilified intruders.

  In Travelers’ Tales, we collect useful and memorable anecdotes to produce the kind of sampler we’ve always wanted to read before setting out. These stories will show you some of the spectrum of experiences to be had or avoided in each country. The authors come from many walks of life: some are teachers, some are musicians, some are entrepreneurs, all are wanderers with a tale to tell. Their stories will help you to deepen and enrich your experience as a traveler. Where we’ve excerpted books, we urge you to go out and read the full work, because no selection can ever do an author justice.

  Each Travelers’ Tales is organized into five simple parts. In the first, we’ve chosen stories that reflect the ephemeral yet pervasive essence of a country. Part Two contains stories about places and activities that others have found worthwhile. In Part Three, we’ve chosen stories by people who have made a special connection between their lives and interests and the people and places they visited. Part Four shows some of the struggles and challenges facing a region and its people, and Part Five, “The Last Word,” is just that, something of a grace note or harmonic to remind you of the book as a whole.

  Our selection of stories in each Travelers’ Tales is by no means comprehensive, but we are confident it will prime your pump. Travelers’ Tales are not meant to replace other guides, but to accompany them. No longer will you have to go to dozens of sources to map the personal side of your journey. You’ll be able to reach for Travelers’ Tales, and truly prepare yourself before you go.

  —JAMES O’REILLY AND LARRY HABEGGER

  India: An Introduction

  We confess a deep bias towards India, an attraction that goes back, for one of us, to teenage years spent reading Aurobindo and Tagore, meditating and doing hatha yoga, for the other, to time spent roaming India as a young man, a temporary sadhu from Minnesota.

  India is everything human. It is all of our history: it is the past, it is the future. If it has been thought, experienced, or imagined, it has all happened before in India and you can be sure it is happening right now.

  It is among the most difficult of places to travel, and the most rewarding. Some say India stands for “I’ll Never Do It Again”; many more are drawn back time and again because India is the best show on earth, the best bazaar of human experiences that can be visited in a lifetime. It has been said that there are 330 million gods in India, and there are at least that many varieties of experience available, religious or otherwise.

  Many go to India on the eternal pilgrimage, looking for enlightenment and answers, and India has plenty, from the genuine article to those devised by the cleverest touts and swindlers born. India will dissolve your ideas about what it is to be a human being, what it is to be compassionate, what it is to be spiritual or conscious. Its people give new meaning to perseverance, courage, ingenuity, and friendship. India’s is a bewilderingly old culture, with myth and history so intertwined and layered that one knows immediately it cannot be known nor understood, only experienced.

  Similarly, it is an exercise in futility to compile a single volume on India, where ten would not suffice. In Travelers’ Tales India, we’ve admittedly only dipped our toes in, but one has to begin somewhere.

  India, of course, is more than gods and swamis and ancient art, ashrams and temples and ruins too numerous to count, it is a vast expanse of jungle, desert, oasis, and the utterly peerless Himalayas, which tear open the hearts and minds of all pilgrims. India, an embarrassment of riches, is also home to elephants and tigers, leopards and rhinos, and maybe even the elusive yeti in the rhododendron forests of Sikkim.

  It is also a country strained beyond belief with people and pollution, an incomprehensible bureaucratic labyrinth, and the calcification of caste structure, laws against it notwithstanding. It is home to the world’s largest movie industry and some of the world’s worst living conditions, a place where advanced technology and science coexist with crushing poverty and disease, where exquisite music and dance and the science of right action live side by side with political corruption and mob violence on a massive scale.

  India’s colonial relationship with Great Britain produced one of the most fascinating meldings of civilizations ever, and one of the bloodiest nation-birthings during the Partition of 1947. India is the world’s largest democracy but one threatened by Hindu-Muslim religious conflict, an ever-tense border situation with Pakistan in Kashmir, trouble in Tamil Nadu state spilling over from civil conflicts in Sri Lanka, and numerous movements trying to break off autonomous pieces from the nation.

  India—monsoon and marigold, dung and dust, colors and corpses, smoke and ash, snow and sand—is a cruel, unrelenting place of ineffable sweetness. Much like life itself. And, like life itself (if reincarnation be true) worth visiting repeatedly, in this turn of the wheel and the next.

  PART ONE

  ESSENCE OF INDIA

  First Tango in Ladakh

  HUGUES DE MONTALEMBERT

  Blindness can be a function of seeing.

  SPRING CAME AND I FELT CLAUSTROPHOBIC, HEMMED IN BY THE city. Meanwhile, I had fallen in love with a whimsical and unpredictable ballerina. In fact, she was so unpredictable that by the end of June she had vanished in an ultimate pirouette. That was how I found myself embarking on a most extraordinary journey. Someone told me that she had gone to India, to the Himalayas, Kashmir, and Ladakh.

  Ladakh. I tried to remember. Years ago I had seen some photographs of a fertile valley amid a fantastic wilderness of stone. The air was so thin that you could distinguish the texture of the rock, crevasses, and stratified folding, and beyond, towering above, the far snowcapped peaks of the mountains.

  I had always been reticent about going to India. I felt that I needed to know more about it, that such a huge subcontinent should not be experienced haphazardly. Nevertheless, today I am off to India on an impulse.

  Standing in the middle of New Delhi airport with my bag, I am suddenly aware of the folly of my venture. I do not know India; I have never been here before. How do I get to Kashmir, the Himalayas, when I do not even know how to get out of this airport or where to end the night? I left New York so suddenly that I had no time to call anyone for advice or practical information. It must be aro
und one o’clock in the morning, but judging from the hubbub in this vast hall, you would think it was the middle of the day. Footsteps, hurried yet slack, pass me on all sides. I attempt to stop them, but in vain; they are driven by their karma to urgent business from which, I fully realize, I am excluded. I feel utterly helpless. I have been told that there is no plane to Srinagar before three o’clock tomorrow afternoon. I am exhausted from lack of sleep and badly need a shower.

  Hugues de Montalembert spent a dozen years wandering the world, often lingering in places to get a clear view of things; he shot documentary films for television, took photographs, wrote. This life came to an end when he was mugged in Manhattan by thugs who threw acid in his eyes, blinding him for life. After three months in the hospital and two years of rehabilitation, he wondered if his life would now be confined to a small apartment, a city block. The idea of travel terrified him, but in time he became an excellent traveler around Manhattan. Then, after one recent winter…

  —JO’R and LH

  “Sir!” A hand is tapping my arm. “Sir! Can we help you?” Before I have time to answer, my passport, bag, and a fistful of money are whisked away. I am left standing alone. Everything happens so fast that I have no time to ask the people who they are or, for that matter, to count my money. Hardly have I arrived in India, land of Gandhi, birthplace of nonviolence, than I am stripped of my belongings; yet, I admit, without violence.

  More than half an hour has gone by. I am considering going back to New York when all of a sudden my passport is thrust into my hand with my money stuck between the pages, changed into rupees. Somebody grabs hold of my wrist and pulls me along at such a speed that I have difficulty following. This is an abduction!