All The Wrong Things Move Quickly in India
Taner was in the fetal position when I said goodbye. He'd been coiled up like a street dog for several hours, and our toilet had intermittently resembled a pollock painting.
He figured it was the heat, the chain-smoking, the opium, and the Kingfishers that had screwed him, yet nothing on earth can save a stomach from a couple of dodgy North Indian street chais and expired meat camouflaged in heavy spices.
Poor bastard. I'd spent countless days of my 20s in jaded Indian hostels, head spinning and belly churning as I lay convulsing under a montage of mismatched bathroom tiles and technicolored baby Krishna paintings.
He handed me the last of our hash in a pitiful plastic bundle and quickly disappeared under the blanket, shivering just below the gaze of a topless, voluptuous Shakti fixed above the bed.
I closed the door, marveling at India's power to turn a vibrant human being high on life into a weeping, pathetic flesh vehicle in a matter of hours.
Pushkar had been kind to us, I reflected, smiling as I waded through the near-45-degree heat to the bus station, listening to Garcia's Sugaree.
We'd wound up there on Holi, where half a million sweaty Indian men pilled into the streets hurling paint, drinking Bhung, smoking opium, and seemingly molesting each other under cover of an impenetrable mesh of brown bodies and increasingly powerful fractal geometries—visions I was certain had contributed to the creation of the Indian pantheon.
At any rate, this was all normal fare in a region of the country where alcohol is beyond taboo and homosexuality can get you killed. I thought of a story I'd once been told of a mass of men huddled at the back of a Hindu temple, enthralled by the grips of a feverish circle jerk.
India truly is a universe of contradictions.
I rolled a joint and managed to smoke the last of it before the battered old bus rolled in.
It was covered in a peculiar mix of Hindu deities and Western capitalist icons—a common phenomenon on Indian roads. The Rishi's would have a field day scolding these miscreants for painting Vishnu adrift in a sea of Addidas and Apple.
I entered laughing, almost tripping over a lasagna of wirey Indian men stuffed in the aisle like abandoned children's toys in an attic.
I was a little stoned and a little drunk, which, despite the eat-pray-love depictions of soberly meandering through the safron-clad streets of Rajasthan, is actually how most locals spend their days avoiding the insufferable heat and an even more insufferable socio-cultural hierarchy.
My "bed" was a tiny berth in the back corner. Above, three unfathomably gorgeous Israeli girls chatted away, legs dangling seductively from their compartments.
They giggled as smoke billowed out the gaps in their curtains. In what is one of the last bastions of true misogyny, a Western man in their vicinity on an overnight North Indian bus seemed as much of a relief to them as their presence was to me.
I felt the first convulsion as soon as the wheels started rolling.
A wave of chills, as the familiar rectal tingles heralding explosive diarrhea enveloped me. Simultaneously, I lurched forward, narrowly avoiding projectile vomiting onto my cabin window.
You never forget the power of that first convulsion in India.
With no bathroom, no stops, and ten hours locked in an unairconditioned bus garnished with the body odor of fifty Indian men, I realized instantly that I'd been admitted into hell, one of the concentric rings of Dantes Inferno.
I clung to my knees, gently rocking, thinking of deities to prostrate to.
A painfully loud Bollywood film on loop wrestled with the undulating Hebrew above me. My throat and sphincter remained desperately locked, relenting on several occasions only to tense again instantly.
Several hours in, as we passed Jaipur, I manically watched the denim jacket huddled by my feet as the bus began to slow through the congestion.
Would the girls notice the smell if I released my daemon into the bundle?
I feared my jacket's inability to hold whatever was inside me once it started flowing, not the act itself.
I lay there, picturing brown sludge oozing out of my sleeves and rocking myself into another dimension.
By the time the sun rose on the outskirts of Delhi, I was beyond delirious.
I'd put more pelvic floor hours in than an expecting mother, and God had started to look like a sparklingly clean bathroom.
We'd been stuck in excruciatingly slow traffic for two hours before the bus abruptly stopped. I bolted out over the bodies in the aisle, terrified at any minute I'd unload on their gently stirring faces and perfectly curated moustaches.
I spotted a faded hotel sign in the distance and began to run through the malaise of rickshaws and vendors.
All the wrong things move quickly in India.
