After the retreat, McLeod Ganj looked empty. The tourist high season had passed, and the mountain air was growing crispy and cold. I was the only customer in my guest house, and the restaurants were empty. Even JJI Café lacked the buzz it once had. It was time to move on. One month had passed since I walked up this mountain for the first time, and tomorrow I would take a bus at 5 AM to my next destination, the Sikh holy city of Amritsar.

The bus peeled down the mountainside in the darkness, picking people up at random places, and even stopping for a much-needed chai break. A one-legged man sat next to me, practically on my lap. I tried to sleep, but as the bus rumbled, leaned, and chugged its way down I resigned myself to staring blankly out the window. It is commonly said that to leave Dharamsala is to go out into “India” again. By the time we reached Pathankot, “India” was staring me in the face, with all its choking traffic, determined beggars, curious eyes, sights and god-awful smells.

It took only a few hours and one spontaneous change of bus tires to reach Amritsar. When the bus turned the corner onto Amritsar’s main street, a bunch of touts boarded the bus at the corner and surrounded me and the two British fellows behind me. They babbled at us furiously about guest houses, rickshaws, taxis, crowding each other out as they competed for our attention. They were so close I couldn’t even stand up. I looked behind me and the Brits were completely blockaded. There must have been fifteen of them.

The bus pulled into the station and we shoved our way off. They didn’t let up. One was missing an arm, another had a huge goiter sticking out of his neck. They followed us as we got our bags, and kept at it as we walked through the parking lot to the rickshaw stand. One of them got to haggling with the Brits, who finally gave an exasperated “OK” to the offer. The pack scattered instantly, and every one of the touts disappeared as quickly as they arrived. (There’s a good India tourist trick for you.)

Amritsar is the home of the Golden Temple, one of the must-see sites in India. You can eat and sleep there for free, chat up the friendly Sikhs who make the pilgrimage from all over the world, bathe in the holy waters, and thoroughly enjoy yourself. The adjoining Sikh martyr museum is a bit, well, horrifying, full of paintings (and a few photos) of slaughter and death, bodies being sawn in half, etc., so if you want to leave your fine impression of the Sikhs’ tremendous hospitality unspoiled, I’d recommend skipping that part.

We also partook in one of the stranger rituals I’ve seen, the famous India-Pakistan border closing ceremony in nearby Attari. At the sole land crossing between the two nations sits a kind of stadium where spectators from both sides can watch Indian and Pakistani soldiers stomp, march, kick, and growl at each other, all in the name of nationalism. The ceremony ensures the national flags on either side of the border are lowered at day’s end at the exact same time, and at the exact same pace. Presumably the temptation to keep one’s flag higher than the other side’s is how the ceremony arose in the first place. This elaborate spectacle takes place daily, and is followed by a handshake between spectators on either side. I stampeded my way to the front of the line and stuck my hand into Pakistan, but nobody grabbed it.

We also visited a strange Hindu temple that was more like an amusement park. It was full of teenagers, and no parents. Touring the temple involved climbing, crawling, trudging through knee-high water, and entering ominous passages shaped like lion and snake mouths. A couple of garrulous kids followed us around to practice their English. We were certain they would beg us at the end, but they just left with a simple “goodbye English people!”

My tolerance for Punjabi hospitality has its limits, though. Shortly before leaving Amritsar on the train to Delhi, while I was looking in a shop, a transvestite, the first I’d seen in India, wearing a sari and a healthy five-o’clock shadow, tapped me on the shoulder, muttered a few sweet nothings, and then began caressing my face.

With his left hand.

Lonely Planet describes McLeod Ganj as “a major centre for Buddhist scholarship”, or something like that. There was certainly no shortage of monks, nor of Westerners following them around hoping to absorb some of their austerity and self-discipline. The buildings of McLeod Ganj were papered with advertisements for a vast curriculum of Eastern culture and philosophy seminars, covering subjects like the Tibetan Book of the Dead, reiki and crystal therapy, Tai Chi, hypnosis, past-life analysis, and traditional Tibetan medicine. An “Introduction to Buddhism” retreat in the mountains overlooking McLeod Ganj caught my eye.

I mentioned this retreat to Sonam, and showed him the brochure. He politely laughed at my trepidation. While ten days of hauling myself out of bed at 6 AM into the chilly mountain air for hours of meditation, menial labour, and chanting wasn’t exactly appealing, Sonam had survived seventeen years of this, and seemed to think it no big deal.

I had a little experience with meditation, and found it to be worthwhile the few times I’d managed to sit still. But my experiments typically ended with the frustrated acceptance of my fate as a fidgeter. As for Buddhism, I barely understood a thing about it. Might I be willing to try one last kick at the can?

After a few days of deliberation, I realized there was no reason to drag my feet. I could always leave if I didn’t like it.

So I said goodbye to the JJI Cafe gang and began the trek up the mountain, along a steep path of monasteries and guest houses and packs of sleeping monkeys at the roadside, arriving at the Tushita Meditation Centre coated in a layer of sweat. My fears appeared silly to me at that moment, as fears always do once you’ve overcome them.

What follows is my account of these ten days.

Day 1

More of a half-day really, for registration and administration and such. We fill out our paperwork and take our seat in the spotless meditation hall underneath a giant, golden Buddha. The walls are hung with thangkas of the Tibetan Buddhist pantheon: Shakyamuni, Chenrezig, and a stunning Green Tara.

The retreat starts with a Q&A and introduction session in the main meditation hall (or “gompa”). The group is around forty people, mostly Europeans but some North Americans as well, including a large group of teenagers on an exchange program from America.

After going around the circle for introductions, they show us to our quarters. I was to share a room with two of the American kids, and a French guy with a woolly beard, who in his introduction had said he lives in Mali (”in the forest”) and studies Shamanism there. In fact he had Shamanistic tattoos on his temples and when he was changing clothes for bed I saw a strange celestial diagram tattooed on his back.

The retreat follows a strict schedule. Morning bell at 6 AM, followed by morning meditation. Breakfast, then a teaching, yoga. Lunch, more teaching, more meditations. Then a small supper, one more meditation, and then bedtime. Short periods of “free time” scattered throughout.

Also, the rule of “noble silence”–no talking and no communication, even visual, except at specified times–was in effect throughout.

Noble silence begins at bedtime.

Day 2

The morning bell rings, and that means it’s meditation time. We file into the gompa bleary-eyed and confused, and take our cushions noisily. The meditation instructor, a sprightly Aussie named Cory, shows us the basics of sitting in the half- and full-lotus positions. The idea is to use the knees and spine as legs of a tripod, with one foot on top of the opposite thigh, thus placing no undue stress on the ankles or circulatory system.

I try the half-lotus with some success at first, making it through a good twenty minutes barely moving a muscle, though it could scarcely be called “meditation”–within minutes, pain flowed into my legs, and my thoughts followed.

Cory rings a bell to commemorate the end of the forty-five minute session, and everyone immediately expels sighs of relief. A chorus of cracking backs and knees is heard throughout the gompa.

We file downstairs for a breakfast of rice porridge, bananas, and delicious Tibetan bread, taken in total silence. The American kids all sit at the same table and communicate to each other with gazes and giggles. Nobody else makes eye contact.

We file back into the gompa for the first teaching, the meat of this “Introduction to Buddhism” retreat. The class stands up (a Buddhist show of respect) as a tall monk enters the room in saffron robes, our teacher. He is an American monk with a smile as wide as the moon. Cory had called him “Bob” but the name given him was “Lobsang”, a Tibetan name. He looks my age and has an unmistakable glow about him.

Lobsang sits on a meditation cushion at the head of the class and lectures us, on this first day, about “disturbing emotions”, and the Four Seals of the Dharma:

1. All compounded things and phenomena are impermanent.
2. All emotions are painful.
3. All phenomena are empty; they are without inherent existence.
4. Nirvana is peace.

Apparently, these are the four criteria for Buddhism. If you believe these four items, you are a Buddhist; otherwise, you’re not.

Lobsang is a terrific lecturer, moving effortlessly between detail and generality, and answering questions with aplomb (we were allowed to break silence during teachings). The discussion is lively and stimulating. He is simply incredible.

So far, so good. No mind-control tricks yet. I’ve never been much interested in Buddhism per se; to me, meditation is the most compelling part of the practice, and meditation doesn’t require much intellectualization. But I can’t say I’d given Buddhism a fair shot, either. The few books I’d read confused me greatly with their terse prose and aphoristic style, and a simplicity of outlook that was almost impenetrable. Like everyone else in here, I wonder how capable am I to believe in it. My mentality is that of a lawyer looking to find a slip-up in the available evidence, and I suspect I’m not alone.

For example, Lobsang and the other instructors start each session with three prostrations to the shrine at the head of the class. They don’t ask us to prostrate three times. But some of the students do, anyway. I’ll buy that these rituals help put you in the mood. But are they the only way? The answer is no, says Lobsang. So could I get in the mood by some other method like, say, listening to Russian techno music? Sure, he says, if it works for you. At what point, then, am I no longer practicing Buddhism but instead some other thing? That question, in various guises, comes up in every teaching. It seems that the primary question in most minds (including mine) is how many of the “traditional” customs we can slough off without losing the core of the philosophy.

Afterwards, we are ready to go outside to do some yoga. Men and women are separated, and us men are put through the wringer by a Dutch ex-soldier who volunteered as the teacher. We hold our power asanas a little too long, run a little too hard, and by the end, most of us can barely stand up from our Corpse Pose (”Shava-asana”).

Lunch features excellent, temporary-pleasure samosas, daal, rice, and dessert. The food here is just as good as anything you’d get in town. Never let the fear of bad food put you off a Buddhist retreat.

At the evening meditation, my inexperience starts to reveal itself. Within minutes of sitting on the cushion, my right knee and hip throb with pain. I’ve done some meditation before, but never longer than half an hour, and certainly not several times a day. Cory rings the bell and I stand up, legs quivering, and I hobble out of the gompa, not feeling anything like a bodhisattva.

Day 3

The solution, the instructor tells me, is to “observe the pain”. Observe it doing what? I asked. Turning my knee into goop? Observing, he says, is not the same as experiencing, for experiencing includes your reaction to the stimulus. To observe, you must instead restrain your body’s instinctual response to the pain, such as wincing or shifting positions, and instead watch that pain. Study it, observe its impermanence.

Well, screw that. My right femur was about to snap in half. Isn’t there a point where the pain is just too great to hold it at bay?

Sure, he says. But it’s only a forty-five minute session, and you’re not going to injure yourself. Just try playing with the pain.

Admittedly, there was something to this idea, for I occasionally lost track of the pain. Where’d it go? My mind would drift elsewhere, and as a result I’d stop noticing the pain in my knee. Only when I remembered the pain did it start to hurt again. “Shouldn’t you be in pain right now?” my mind seemed to ask. “Here you go,” my body obliged.

I have to think about this some more.

Day 4

Forest Man has been waking up at 4 AM every day and heading off God knows where. The world of McLeod Ganj seems far away.

No matter what happens during meditation, we can always count on a monkey attack. I’ve learned to regard monkeys as Satan’s minions, vessels of pure, undiluted evil. Their organized raids on North Indian towns call to mind the sack of Rome, degenerates trying to spread their culture and ideals, shrieking of revolution. The trees rustle in the distance as we take our seats on the cushions. By the time all eyes are shut in the gompa, hordes of marauding monkeys, sensing their opportunity at last, appear from the treetops like phantoms, swinging from branches onto the drainpipes and eavestroughs in single file, the babies following the mother, the mother following the chief. Tramping around on the tin rooftop, they wail in righteous contempt of the civilization under their feet. It is impossible not to look out the window while this is happening, and even harder not to snicker. Damn them.

The American kids have given up on the “noble silence” thing, and are now passing written notes around and taking long, clandestine walks down to the tea shop in their free time. In the other students, there is palpable irritation.

Day 5

Each of us was given a “karma job” at the start of the course, a daily chore to keep us humble. Some people had to dishes, others scrubbed johns or swept walkways. My job was to teach English to a resident monk for 45 minutes a day, much like I had with Sonam. But the monk has only been around one day of the four so far. I guess monk schedules are just as busy as anybody’s. In spite of the lovey, let’s-everyone-pitch-in atmosphere here, I can’t help but feel good to be relieved of the duty, because that means more free time.

I spent most of my free time reading books on Buddhism from the Tushita library. I grew to like Nagarjuna, Mayahana Buddhism’s first “scholar” of the 3rd century AD, the best. He is fond of writing things like:

Life is no different from nirvana
Nirvana no different from life
Life’s horizons are nirvana’s
The two are exactly the same.

and

How can seed, empty of mangos
create mangos?
How can seed, not empty of mangos
create mangos?

Buddhism has always positioned itself as a religion supposedly based on personal experience, not dogma, and it makes no effort to resist scientific inquiry (The Dalai Lama: “The contemplative method, as developed by Buddhism, is an empirical use of introspection, sustained by rigorous training in technique and robust testing of the reliability of experience.”). I’ll buy that.

But today, on his last day of teaching us, Lobsang has been straying into the more esoteric strata of the Tibetan tradition: hell-realms and hungry ghosts, the Eight Leisures and the Ten Endowments, mundane and super-mundane paths. He lectures with the same enthusiasm as on day one, but my attention is becoming fractured. I can relate to disturbing emotions and craving, but fall short when it comes to obscure Tibetan mythology.

What makes Lobsang a good teacher is that he anticipates all our suspicions and doubts, because he knows the inner lawyer in us all. He knows that if he posits something called “hell-realms”, some European is going to demand evidence of “hell-realms”, or at least a reasonable explanation. There is a tendency—perhaps Western, perhaps not—for students learning new material to probe the logical boundaries of that material with an assault of “what-if” questions, or demands for proof. All this is very good, and in fact Buddhist scholarship demands it. Lobsang punts a few times, offering these things up as traditions of Tibetan Buddhism rather than laws. He repeated a few times that he was only presenting the material as it is, and wasn’t “trying to convert anyone.” The lions are, for the time being, sated.

Questions nag at me, too. For example, the sheer amount of numerical classification in Buddhism boggles the mind: the Eightfold Path and the Four Noble Truths and the Three Poisons and Nine Stages of Mental Abiding. On and on it goes. I wonder how the gurus arrived at these numbers and not other numbers. Do these correspond with observed phenomena? Does the neurochemical state of someone in the sixth Bhumi differ from that of someone in the third?

For that matter, what does it mean to “believe” in hell-realms and hungry ghosts? How does a mere belief affect one’s life? If someone truly knows hell-realms exist in the same way he knows standing in the rain will get him wet, he would take great care to avoid landing in a hell-realm just as he would remember to pack an umbrella. But a person might believe in hell-realms without behaving as if they actually exist (Daniel Dennett calls this “belief in belief”). Belief is an imperfect thing. What’s the use of believing in hell-realms without actually fearing hell-realms?

“Take a break for lunch,” Lobsang says, “and we’ll come back to talk some more. About suffering.”

Day 6

The morning gong rings. Forest Man is gone again, presumably to his native habitat.

In the afternoons, there is an activity called Discussion Groups, the one time we’re allowed to talk freely with each other. They divide us into groups of five and hand us topics to discuss. The phrasing of the topics tends to steer us towards the Buddhist answer (”Can suffering truly arise by means other than craving?”), though in the austere surroundings the answers seem to form on their own.

But as the groups are generally unsupervised, the conversation meanders everywhere. We talk of our motivations for taking the course, tell a few stories, compare our Tushita experiences thus far. I am surprised to hear that others had found “noble silence” the hardest part. For me it was the easiest. Eating rice porridge every morning was the hardest.

After lunch, I struggle to teach the monk how to make a “vvvv” and “ffff” sounds (i.e. labiodental fricative, voiced and unvoiced). He has no idea how to do it, and I have no idea how to show him.

I return to my room to the sight of a large monkey trying to jimmy the lock. He runs off. I couldn’t see his face; I’m sure he was laughing.

Day 7

Today is a special day, for we’re being taken into McLeod Ganj to see a lecture being given by His Holiness, Tenzin Gyatso the 14th Dalai Lama, in the temple across the road from his residence. We’re allowed to talk freely to everyone, including non-retreat heathens. Security is tight; our bags are searched to the bone and Indian men in plain clothes patrol the aisles of the temple with automatic rifles.

The Dalai Lama walks past our section, surrounded by an entourage of fellow monks and security guards. He stops for a few minutes, waving and smiling and touching our hands. He is downright giddy, and seems almost overwhelmed by his own joy. His handlers nudge him forward towards the stage. As he walks away I see him shake his head, as if to stir himself out of his happy stupor, in preparation for serious business.

His teaching is on the Three Principal Paths of Lama Tsongkhapa. He gives the teaching in Tibetan, and it is translated on the fly into English, Chinese, and Russian and broadcast over radio into our headphones. The translation is stilted and most of us barely understand a thing, but the serious Buddhists that are His Holiness’ intended audience hang on every word. It is a fun day and we novices are grateful just to be there.

Day 8

Eight days. If we measure days by number of showers taken, I’ve only been here two.

The last two full days of the retreat are devoted almost entirely to meditation. We are to do guided meditation, walking meditation, chanting meditation, vipassana meditation, and probably some other kinds too. Physically, I don’t do very well at this, but after the third or fourth session I notice a change in my mental state. The chatter filling my brain begins to recede. It doesn’t disappear, it just moves a little to the left. If I listen to it, it pulls me back into the cyclone, and I’m off again.

This feeling is new to me. I’ve had moments where the chatter has disappeared completely, but never where my mind is merely ignoring it as if it were a fly buzzing around.

They’ve got us doing other types of meditation now. Chanting, visualization, compassion, other guided meditations. Admittedly, I’ve ignored most of them, because they required a level of concentration that I simply do not possess. I can’t even sit still and listen to my breath; what makes you think I can visualize a bunch of Buddhas extinguishing flames with their fingers?

I’m beginning to feel like the definition of “meditation” could be expanded to include just about any human activity there is. Even the simplest meditation involves some direction of the will towards a stated end (in this case, watching the breath). In Hindu philosophy, yoga is considered more meditation than exercise. What about ultramarathon running? Or practicing the piano? Everything can be done meditatively, that is, with full awareness of the presence of distraction, disturbing emotions, and craving. Traditional meditation is a means of practicing this awareness, and so are all of Cory’s guided meditations. But it is not the only way.

Day 9

I teach the monk one last time. He is overly interested in learning the phrase “mashed potatoes”.

Instead of the evening meditation, we were given a multimedia presentation by a representative from an Australian NGO about some kind of global educational reform incorporating Buddhist ideals of peace, love, equality, etc. Forest Man stood and left the room right away; I wish I’d followed. The presentation was chock-a-block with the worst assortment of nauseating “do-gooder” tropes, including pictures of starving children, the music of Jack Johnson, and all the “think globally, act locally” bromides you could ask for. I’ve long felt that the dreamy progressive NGO-neverland is ripe territory for satire, and I tried to enjoy the presentation in that light, but it dragged on so long that most of us could barely muster a round of tepid applause at the end. Comments during the end-of-retreat feedback session were particularly harsh about this little interlude.

For our final “meditation”, we go down to the stupa in a clearing at the edge of the Tushita property and perform a Tibetan “candle ceremony”, which amounts to lighting a pile of candles, walking around the stupa (clockwise, of course), and thinking good things. Thankfully the instructors do not try to imbue it with much spiritual significance. The group leans on the mountainside, well above the reach of McLeod Ganj’s mosquito hordes, and we watch the sparkling stars. Someone gets the idea to start naming things to be grateful for, a kind of secular prayer, so the group takes turns enumerating their blessings and remembrances aloud, veering ever closer to the banal with every passing plea but only truly attaining it with treacly mock narratives of motherless children and elderly rotting away in nursing homes. I see Forest Man slink off immediately. I wonder if there might be Enlightened beings walking amongst us after all.

Day 10

Any remaining pretense of noble silence is now gone. The only activity of note today is the picnic lunch, where we’ll peel off the veneer of seriousness and start living again. We mingle freely, and I finally get to meet everyone. Plans for dinner are discussed, emails exchanged. The American kids can’t wait to get out of this place and back to McLeod. Forest Man turns out to be a really nice guy. The NGO woman from last night is there, and we’ve all forgiven her by now, for we are free at last.

So was it worth it? I suppose even making it through the ten days counts as an accomplishment. The retreat didn’t feel like work. It felt more like a vacation, a vacation from me, from the immediacy of my thoughts, my habits, and my opinions (”Opinions are absurd,” says Nagarjuna). Having your mental life scheduled out in minute detail by someone else is an oddly liberating feeling. There’s no need to worry about anything because your life has no scope beyond the borders of the Tushita centre. Removed from the pressure of unending external stimulus, existence takes on a relieving determinism, quieting the mind and bringing into focus the irrationalities we all so foolishly carry along with us.

I walked the slope down into McLeod, not with a new sense of purpose, not with a rekindled joie de vivre or appetite for world conquest, but with a sort of passive stupor that felt a lot like immediate experience of life.

And then I realized I forgot my damned shoes under the bed, and had to walk all the way back up. So much for mindfulness.

The first matter in Dharamsala was to confront Indian beer. We chose McLlo’s pub—hardly an ideal Indian venue, the decor of the place being clearly inspired by TGI Friday’s, but authenticity matters little to the travel-weary and unshowered. Besides, only two places in McLeod Ganj serve alcohol. McLlo’s is a three-story monster overlooking the town square, serving up expensive curries and paneer pizzas, and offering a wide selection of Himachal Pradesh’s “finest” brews. Over the entrance hangs a photo of Pierce Brosnan posing with the wait staff, an oddly reassuring sight, though it’s a stretch to imagine Pierce spending a languid evening pounding back bottles of Thunderbolt Lager.

We opt instead for Godfather, and it tastes like fermented hell. Some stylish Tibetans sit down at our table. The Tibetan youth are quite the party animals, it turns out, and lead a cosmopolitan life as far as North Indian hill stations go. Oblivious to the limitations of their surroundings, they live as though McLeod Ganj were NYC. They pile onto noisy motorbikes (often blaring dance music through speakers under the seat), speak English capably, abuse the Indian waitstaff in Hindi, stay out all night with tourists, chat up girls, drink their faces off, dress as sharply as anyone. Their calm, peaceful outward mien, their sharp eyes and Buddhist smiles, seem to melt away under the acid-bath of Indian ale. Bad booze, the great equalizer.

One of the Tibetans, Sangye (which means “Buddha” in Tibetan, I believe), has just returned to Dharamsala after two years spent abroad in Austria, and couldn’t be happier about it. He looks around the room excitedly, almost unable to believe he’s home. I practically have to strap him to his chair.

“I love this bar! I love Dharamsala! I love it! I love it! This is the best bar in the world!”

Jamyang, another Tibetan, buys me a Thunderbolt. Rotten. I notice that the quality of Indian beer varies by the bottle, owing to the complete lack of quality control. Even the shape and colour of the bottles themselves are subject to the laws of chance. You’re as likely to get a green or brown bottle as a clear one, which causes me to consider what other random variables are at work in the breweries of Himachal Pradesh.

We drank deeply, we drank hard. We drank with a professional cricket team, and we drank with Austrian hippies and American expats. So swept up in the moment we were, that we neglected to note the closing time of the front gate of our hotel: midnight. It was now well past, and we were locked out. I climbed the gate, as the monkeys do, but it was impossible to reach my room from the balcony. So Sangye brought us back to his place, escorted by packs of yammering street dogs vying for our loyalty, and we all slept on the hard floor of his tiny apartment, underneath posters of Tibetan pop stars and Lenny Kravitz.

It was there that Sangye drunkenly, but seriously, gifted me with his personal theology: “The main purpose of Buddhism, and of every religion, is to loosen the bowels. Religion allows you to shit freely. Think about it.” I had never conceived of religious worship in gastric terms, but I had to admit it warranted further study.

The next day, Jamyang took me to his family’s cafe on Bhagsu Rd for some Tibetan thentuk (noodle soup). I met a Dutch couple who had taken a six-month leave from their jobs to teach English and study Buddhism at the relevant local institutes here in McLeod. They ran an English conversation class at a local school at the base of the hill, and asked me if I might like to give it a try some time. An hour a day was all they needed, and no qualifications necessary. Sure, why not, I said.

I showed up at the school that evening at 5:30 PM, where I was matched with a group of eight students, Tibetan refugees, some newly-arrived, some longtime residents of McLeod Ganj. A few were monks or nuns, and all ages were represented. I sat at the center of a semi-circle and went around the room, trying my best to spread the conversation around equally. A few were better in English than others, and helped those who were having trouble. The monk to my right, in particular, understood almost nothing and got constant verbal cues from the well-dressed girl on my left, whose English was almost fluent. I wondered why she bothered with conversation classes, as she spent most of the class helping the others. But the conversation classes were also a great social institution of the town, and they seemed to be full of Tibetan twentysomethings who were presumably single. I left it at that.

I asked the students about their life history, where in Tibet they were from, and how long they’d been in India. A couple of them were born in Dharamsala, others had fled Tibet in childhood. Two of them fled later in life, because they’d been in jail in Tibet for political reasons, distributing leaflets or joining in rowdy protests. The oldest guy in the group, a leather-jacketed man of 38 years, had spent twelve of those years in the slammer. They told me this with a shrug, as if it meant nothing to them, like it was just a part of the Tibetan coming-of-age.

The story of the Tibetan exile is a familiar and sad one, and every visitor to Dharamsala hears it, for it is in fact the story of many of the town’s residents. Fleeing the oppression and brutality of the People’s Republic of China’s military presence in Tibet, the exile makes his way to Lhasa, leaving his family behind, probably for good. From there, they hire a kind of rogue sherpa who takes them on a punishing month-long trek over the Himalayas, through deep forest and under the cover of night so as to avoid snipers. They eat little (one guy told me he ate nothing but boiled grass), sleep barely a wink, suffer severe frostbite and snow blindness and often death, walking tirelessly towards the Nepalese border, where they are received by monks and kept in Kathmandu until they regain their health. From there, they are taken to Dharamsala to meet His Holiness, and brought into a monastery if they so desire, and their life as a refugee begins.

Things are much better here, the students insist. They rarely speak of China. It’s in the past. Their indifference amazes me. Tibet was once the great terror of Central Asia, the empire of the steppes. There is little of the conqueror in these Tibetans. They seemed to have moved past their own history. Sure, there are political rallies and uprisings in Lhasa, for which the Dalai Lama is typically blamed, but in general they have turn the other cheek (in the direction of the West, as it were). No Tibetan that I met spoke ill about the Chinese as a people, only as a government, and I never once heard a warlike word. The easy answer is that Buddhism played a role in their pacifism, but Buddhism was introduced to Tibet in the 6th century; I doubt that it took fourteen additional centuries to finally settle in. I don’t know.

I kept going with the conversation classes, but I found a monk to tutor one-on-one instead. Next post is about him.

(A note on the publishing schedule of this blog: I realize I’m way behind here, but there are lots more posts in the pipeline. Right now I’m in a country with little to no Internet access, much of it highly restricted [if I tell you it's in Southeast Asia, I'm sure you can guess the country]. But I am not dead, not even slightly. And this blog will rise from the ashes and terrorize the world anew, but only after I’ve had a proper week in a suitably cool place [did I mention it's hot in this part of the world?]. So I’ll see you then.)

Our bus arrives at midday in the hill station of Dharamsala. I’m on my way to McLeod Ganj, the famous Tibetan settlement, and home of the His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. Our bus wheezes its way up the steep Dhauladhar mountains, watched meaningfully by monkeys. The road grows steeper and starts to zigzag up the mountainside, forcing our driver to make wobbly hairpin turns at each corner. Oncoming traffic, mostly Tibetans on motorbikes, stops to watch our bus driver adeptly navigate the serpentine roads. The spectacle of the bus lurching forward, rolling back a little, bumping into a tree, spinning the tires, delights all of us; the crowd gapes and laughs with a mix of astonishment and horror, like they’d stopped at the side of the road to watch a doe give birth. We are even treated, after one perilous corner, to joyful applause.

The bus lets us off at the Dharamsala bus station, where we transfer to a more nimble jeep, which takes us up to McLeod Ganj for the almost-free price of seven rupees. I untie my pack from the roof and walk with the British girl I’d met on the bus in search of guest houses.

After two hard weeks in India, I’d decided to come here to boost my spirits a little bit. The place came highly recommended. McLeod Ganj is a little city sitting on the cap of a mountain, overlooking the stunning Kangra valley. It is a major centre for Buddhism, as well as yoga, meditation, etc. It is also the home of the Tibetan government-in-exile, presided over by that lovable “simple monk”, Tenzin Gyatso, aka the Dalai Lama (or HHDL, as he’s called). Monks in maroon and saffron robes walk the streets and bow politely to me as I pass. There are elegant Western ladies in saris, and men wearing skirts. People talk and hold hands and smile and hug. Steam rises from the pots of a small Tibetan lady’s roadside food stand. The air crackles with potential; there is vivacity and excitement, unlike the profoundly Indian cities I’d visited so far. Except for the cows prowling the streets, and the odd rickshaw, it looks like another country. I feel like I have entered the mythical city of Shangri-La, and it’s full of dreadlocked backpackers.

In any case, I’m thrilled to be here. I find a dirt-cheap, clean guest house that has a balcony with a view. On the balcony below, a ponytailed Columbian guy gives a Tai Chi lesson to a group of tourists. Across from me is the Kangra Valley, and to my left, a snow-tipped mountain with a crisp treeline.

I have lunch with the British girl on the balcony of the Kunga Guest House; we agree that it will be tough to leave this place and go back out “into India” again. I eat Tibetan momos, steamed dumplings stuffed with cheese and vegetables, and they are delicious. The customers passing through the restaurant are a varied and eclectic group indeed: a strange German wearing a rainbow vest covered in embroidered peace-and-love platitudes (and his email address), aristocratic English ladies, groups of Indian businessmen, a “New Age Chuck Norris”, Tibetan monks who order nothing but tea, various French people dressed like Indians.

I take a walk down to the temple, where monks debate in the courtyard, finishing off each point with a clap of the hands and stomp of the right foot, as if to cast it off to the higher realms. Around the temple are Buddhist bookshops, Tibetan medicine clinics, Indian touts, Western-style bars that serve pizza and beer. Dharamsala is a strange blend of the exotic, the spiritual, and the banal. A tourist town, it gives Westerners what they want, or more specifically, what Indians and Tibetans think Westerners want (pizza is less popular than thentuk; a nightclub on Jogiwara Rd, X-Cite, seems always to be empty). Under the neon signs and shouting matches, the “local culture” hums along, oblivious to the din of motorbikes and dance music, monks walking in silence to their evening discourses and elderly Tibetan ladies spinning prayer wheels and chanting: om mani padme hung. Both worlds are accessible to everyone. To be a tourist in Dharamsala is to be simultaneously a guest in the home of an ancient civilization of mystics, monastics, and seekers-of-truth, and, a place where you can buy bootleg Led Zeppelin concert DVDs and drink (terrible, Indian) beer under a mountain moon and a blinding canopy of stars. It is absolutely perfect. I’ll stay here for a while.

The bus driver is gone an awfully long time. Lonely Planet gives the population of Pathankot, this bus-transfer outpost, as 140,000. I step outside to buy a drink, which I bring back to the bus, dodging the shawl salesmen. One of the passengers, a young man with a thin moustache, is outside having a smoke. As I approach the bus he seems delighted by me, and his face lights up with excitement.

“Hello friend!” he says. The Indians like to call people “friend”.

“Hello.”

India’s enormity is only physical and economical. Culturally, it is vast, but surprisingly uniform. And there is no greater evidence of this fact than what I will call the Indian Friendly Five, which are the five questions that you, a tourist, will be asked by every random Indian you meet, without exception, no matter where you are in the country, from Kashmir to Karnataka, from Pondicherry to Punjab. The Indian Friendly Five are as follows:

1. “First time [city name]?” or “First time India?”
2. “Where you come from?” (or “Your country?)”
3. “How long India?” ([sic] - this could mean “How long have you been in India?” or “How long will you stay in India?”)
4. “What’s your occupation?”
5. “You married unmarried?” ([sic] - or “You have girlfriend wife?”)

The order of the IFF varies (some Indians want to know the last two before all else), but the delivery is always as given. If I were to try to read meaning into these questions, I would start by mentioning that Indians love to practice their English, whether amongst themselves or with tourists. But the nationwide ubiquity of the IFF is the real riddle. I assure you I’m not making this up; most tourists I’ve asked about this have laughed reassuringly, and a Dutch guy I met in Bulgaria told me about these same five questions before I’d experienced them myself. For whatever reason these are the data that Indians are most curious about. An explanation of the IFF would require proper methods of scientific inquiry, perhaps by dispatching a fleet of garrulous and clandestine European pollsters across the Indian countryside. But I suspect that, as the saying goes, there are no answers, only more questions.

The immensity of India doesn’t strike you right away. A visitor landing in Delhi or Bombay might comment sourly on the congestion, waste entire days in cross-town transit, or wince at the startling cacophony of car horns and Bollywood dance music, but he is unlikely to conclude that these places are too big. They look like any other big city, with buzzing business centers and markets encased by endless suburbia. While they are dustier and have higher cow and ox populations than most, Delhi and Bombay do not look otherwise like places unique to India, at least not in scale. The received wisdom of India as a violent crush of humanity, one big stampede between ticket windows, train entrances, and taxi cabs, is true to a point. But while the hum of daily Indian life is noisier and more bacteria-laden than perhaps it ought to be, there are always quiet corners to tuck away into, especially so in the cities. Yes they are enormous—13.7 million and 13.3 million people—but their enormity is neither oppressive nor confounding. We expect big Indian cities to look this way.

India’s size reveals itself when one drifts out into the regions. A typical Indian bus ride between here and there will take five hours, and will pass any number of towns and settlements on the way. Some are proper towns, with all the cows, choking traffic, bazaars, beggars, and dogs that don’t look half as sickly as they should. Others are little more than collections of squat tin-roofed shops, leaning on each other for structural support. Usually a family lives inside. The placard is painted with English text, and a Coca-Cola or Airtel billboard looms overhead. Underneath, racks of Kurkure chips dangle from the wall, and rows of bottled water for sale sit on display. The men of the family toil around the dirt lot, fixing motorbikes, hosing things down, or just waiting for customers to show up. From the bus window, you can see the white eyes of the women inside, who sit cross-legged on the floor, immersed in some chore or another.

We make a rest stop at a bus transfer station called Pathankot. It is little more than a dirt parking lot. The driver takes a walk. Tens of vendors board the bus, shouting their wares: snacks and drinks, garam chai, lentils, chocolate, blessings from a sadhu. And stranger things: cricket bats, noise-maker toys, electric razors. One kid is selling steel zippers (?). And there are beggars, usually children, who perform some menial task like sweeping the floor under your feet, or they just tug on your pantleg until you give in. Outside, other buses at Pathankot are enduring a similar siege. Salesmen prowl between the buses and jeeps with stacks of folded Kashmiri shawls balanced on their heads, hoping to sell to people changing buses or going inside for a leak. It is startlingly well-organized.

At every bus station in the country, at bus stops outside Chennai and Ahmedabad and Mangalore, and even at our next three rest stops, there will be tens (if not hundreds) of these men, whose sole means of subsistence is by walking onto hundreds of buses trying to sell a cup of chai or a cricket bat. And that they will sell to the affluent and the destitute of India alike, to the entrepreneurs and university students, the farmhands and the little old ladies, for everyone takes the same cramped buses.

Everyone in India seems to have a job. The sight of Indians labouring is the definitive image of the country (Salman Rushdie, in Midnight’s Children, defined the true religion of India as “Businessism”, which is hard to argue with). No matter how mundane, how trivial, how gratuitous, or how vile the job, there is always an Indian to do it, or usually hundreds of Indians who will do it. The division of labour is divided and subdivided again, and most are left with one small task to do, for eleven hours a day, to win a few rupees. And this economic ladder starts with the lowest beggar, climbs over the labourer and peasant, the street vendor and rickshaw man, the chai-wallahs on the bus, and up it goes, to the call-centres and mechanical engineers and property speculators, all the way to the moguls of Infosys and Tata, all rungs of this vast ladder visible from anywhere in the country, omnipresent in India. And that’s when you realize how big this country is.

After grudgingly stuffing a small billfold of baksheesh into Bashir’s shirt pocket, I climbed into the white jeep and closed the door. I was the last passenger to arrive, so I was given the passenger seat, a crumbling cushion sitting on a wobbly pedestal. Behind were several Kashmiri families piled high in their shabby seats. Some sat on their luggage. I felt their eyes on me immediately, but in India you quickly grow used to that. I stuffed my backpack under my feet and tried to get comfortable. For the next eleven hours, this jeep would drive through the Kashmir Valley, from Srinigar to the city of Jammu, the “winter capital” of Kashmir.

As we left Srinigar and made our way into the hills, the beauty of the Kashmir Valley started to reveal itself. A crystal-blue river slithered between the snowy peaks. Our jeep wheezed its way up a series of short hills, following the endless convoy of goods carrier trucks, veering close enough to the road’s edge to offer stunning vistas of the terraced farmers fields below. Monkeys prowled the roadside, watching us carefully with an unnerving simian vigilance.

Of course, Indian Army personnel stood at the roadside every fifty metres or so, making sure I couldn’t take pictures.

The road sloped at unfathomable angles, hugging the mountainside meekly, as if it could at any moment grow tired and release its grasp. On the sharper curves, I could stick my head out the window and look straight down and assess our probability of survival should the wraithlike, chain-smoking driver of this jeep attempt too daring of a pass, and that probability was usually zero. There was no room for error whatsoever. One hasty jerk of the wheel, or tumbling boulder from above, or wandering monkey…

In Canada we take certain road-safety privileges for granted. There aren’t many cliffhanger roads like this one, for one thing. Nor many avalanche zones. Also, our roads have guardrails and proper paving, our cars equipped with ABS brakes and expensive tires. The rules of the road are different, too, as is the psyche of the driver. One does not, for example, even think to overtake the truck ahead by doing a blind-as-a-bat pass around a sharp bend while the weight of his shabby jeep with bald tires leans ominously over the edge of a 2,000m cliff. But in the Himalayas, they do this. And on an eleven-hour trip, they do this hundreds of times in a single day.

The Indian approach to road safety in the Kashmir Valley, as practiced by the Border Roads Organisation, is to pepper the mountain roads with slogans advising drivers to take it easy, drive carefully, and so on, and to make sure that each slogan is expressed as a clever riddle or rhyme. For example:

• Mountains give pleasure, but only if you drive with leisure
• It’s not a rally, enjoy the valley
• There’s no race, arrive with grace

And my personal favourite:

• Better Mr. Late than Late Mr.!

After a few hours, my grip on the oh-shit bar loosened. Surely the driver makes this route every day, and he’s still breathing, though barely from the sounds of things. We stopped for lunch at a roadside cafe on a downward slope, the kind of place that every travel guide says stay away because you’ll get sick. But the locals crowded into the place and began shouting their orders to the young men tending the saucepans, so I gave it a try, and the food —fried dal and chapati—was delicious. I ate some strange Indian potato chips, and then we got back in the jeep. Somehow, I fell asleep for several hours, perhaps to assure that my death would be painless, but when I woke we were still hugging the cliff’s edge and dodging gravel trucks. Behind me, the Kashmiri eyes still warmed the back of my neck.

Arriving in Jammu was like entering the heart of one of those post-apocalyptic sci-fi outlaw towns, where motorcycle gangs prowl the streets, robbing and looting and shouting, and there is junk and garbage strewn everywhere, and half the city is on fire. The din of rickshaw horns and shouted Hindi blasted my eardrums. The jeep driver unceremoniously kicked us out at a roadside rickshaw stand, where I was besieged from all sides. Beggars pawed at my pantleg. I found a guy who could take me to Diamond Hotel, a place enthusiastically recommended by Lonely Planet, and quickly got in his rickshaw.

The Diamond Hotel staff showed me the rooms. They were horrible. Easily the worst hotel I’d ever seen. Brown stains on the walls and bedclothes, tattered pillows, bed like a slab of concrete, and a window that didn’t close. “Head and shoulders above the competition,” said LP. I’ll take it.

I sat on the bed and turned on the noisy fan. An exhausting day. I felt like a shower. I stripped, walked into the bathroom and turned on the water. Nothing. Tried flushing the toilet. Nothing. At least the lights worked. I’d been in India for about nine days now, and none of those days were good. It was true what everyone had told me, what people in Istanbul and Bulgaria and Vienna had told me: that India was a tremendously difficult place to travel in, and that you’d better lower your expectations all the way to nothing.

Tomorrow, another bus ride through the mountains, another day of breathing, smelling, rubbing shoulders against this crazy country.

Day One
Early next morning, the tout picked me up in a taxi at my hotel in Paharganj. For an astoundingly low price, he had arranged for me a plane ticket from Delhi to the city of Srinagar, which sits in the north of the Indian territory of Kashmir. He told me all about it in the taxi.

“It’s so beautiful, my home. The lake, so beautiful. When I go home, I go fishing, I bring my children. You will love it. Kashmir is best place in India. Kashmiri people so good, so much love. That’s all I want in life, to live there with my family.”

His bubbling about Kashmir went on for quite some time, and though it grew repetitive, his eagerness to please calmed me, as in these early hours of the morning the fears and doubts of last night had not faded, and continued to churn. I still couldn’t understand how I’d been brought to say Yes to this, and there would be no relaxing until I was sure they weren’t leading me, the hapless tourist, like a lamb to the slaughter.

We pulled up to the departure gate. The tout gave me a big hug, and reminded me that his family expected me and was lovely and that Kashmir was lovely and that I should call him if there were any problems. He seemed about to cry. I said goodbye and tried visibly to stoke some enthusiasm about what was coming my way.

The Delhi domestic airport was predictably chaotic. I boarded the Air Deccan plane after a convoluted luggage check-in, and sat next to a young Muslim woman in near-total burqa (she had lowered the veil for the flight). We chatted, and while we chatted there was a commotion under the plane, noises and shouting, and twenty minutes later there was an announcement that they were unloading all the luggage onto the tarmac and that every passenger would have to go outside, identify his luggage, and put it back on the plane himself. A reminder that I was not going to Orlando, Halifax, or Frankfurt, but the heart of Kashmir, and in that area of the world some people have been known to blow things up from time to time.

The woman turned out to be a Ph.D in Genetics, and was heading home to Srinigar to visit her daughter “for the first time”. Meaning that, immediately after giving birth her daughter was taken from her and put in the care of her (the woman’s) mother for a period of one year, while the woman took the first flight back to Delhi to continue working, without seeing the kid once. Maternity leave is apparently for wimps.

At the Srinagar airport, a man named Bashir was waiting for me. This was the tout’s father. He looked just like the tout except with grey hair, a penetrating gaze, and the effortlessly cunning smile of a Cheshire Cat. We got in a taxi and left, barely exchanging a word.

My first impression of Srinagar was that it looked like any other place, except with hundreds of armed Indian Army personnel, razor wire, sandbagged sentry huts, and checkpoints. There was a man holding a semi-automatic weapon on every street corner. I did not see tanks rolling down the boulevard, but it would be no surprise to see tanks rolling down the boulevard.

The funny part was that all the military stuff—people, vehicles, even buildings—was needlessly decked out in camouflage, as if some gun-toting Indian walking the streets of downtown Srinagar was going to hide by blending in with the shrubbery somehow. Or that a two-storey watchtower covered in razor wire would hide itself behind the bazaars and houseboats to throw the militants off the scent. But I do not question the affairs of military personnel, at least not to their faces.

Bashir brought me on a short “shikara” (boat taxi) ride to his houseboat on Dal Lake. The place was lovely. The boat itself was docked next to a small house on the shore, crawling with children, some belonging to the family and some visiting from the neighbourhood. Three ladies sat on the floor and waved to me from a knee-high window. Bashir showed me my room, with its sumptuous king-size bed, bathroom w/ hot water, etc. They made me some delicious tea which was called Kashmiri tea, and I spent the day lolling about on the roof, hanging out with the kids, and relaxing. It was suprisingly perfect.

With every passing minute my doubts drifted into the recesses of my mind, a faint and distant echo, only their memory remaining.

Day Two
The night was cold, and I buried myself in blankets to keep warm. After rousing myself awake, I took a breakfast of a kind of English muffin thing that they called Kashmiri bread, an omelette of some kind, and more Kashmiri tea. Bashir made it known that if I wanted any kind of food or drink at any time, he would tell the three ladies to make it for me. As far as I could tell, the three ladies never left the kitchen, and whenever I looked over to their little window they gave me a wave and a smile.

Bashir took me on a little walking tour of the city. Srinagar is a Muslim town, so there is not much to see besides mosques and assorted Islamica. The place seemed like a Middle Eastern city, the kind you see on the news, with all the dirt roads, men in white robes and kufis, political slogans, crumbling minarets, etc. On the walls were badly-Photoshopped posters depicting Kashmiri martyrs. But the mosques were spectacular. They had a somber simplicity, a starkness that imposed far more than ornamentation could. Some also had spectacularly gaudy paint jobs, and others, very amusing signage.

What impressed me most was the prayer. Muslim prayer in Srinagar seems to be a kind of free-form affair, where as long as you are bestowing the proper degree of adulation upon the shrine at which you are praying, it’s all good. In the first mosque I saw terrified old ladies backing out the front door on their knees, lips quivering, kissing every post and banister-knob. In the second, shawl-clad men sitting cross-legged on the bare floor and giving a kind of low-pitched, ululating prayer in perfect unison. In the third, a man sitting facing the wall, crying, chanting, and rocking back and forth. They seemed to be experiencing such a deep feeling upon stepping inside the mosque, a kind of rapturous dementia, all the body’s energy employed in the task of worship and adulation. I found it puzzling and sad, but also beautiful, beyond reason, as if electricity were being channeled straight into their souls.

That night, Bashir and I shared a bottle of whiskey, and watched a Bollywood action movie with truly awful fight scenes.

Day Three
It’s hard to fill the day on the houseboat. The chief problem is that I’m in the middle of the lake, so I can’t head out into town without either Bashir or the oldest son, Raja, taking me there on a shikara. And if they take me somewhere they want to come along. My prefered method of exploring a new place is by aimless wandering (hence this blog’s title) and not by visiting a set of carefully curated map-points. But I don’t know what I’ll do today. Maybe Bashir has something planned.

At breakfast, I saw my first “tout shikara”: a guy paddled up to the boat and tried to sell me cigarettes, mineral water, and “Kashmiri apple juice”. Bashir smiled.

After breakfast Bashir sits me down in the living room and pulls out a few photo albums. Take a look, he says. Here are the trekking spots in the area. You can go mountain climbing here, or parasailing, anything you want. I’m going to sign you up for one of these, he says. You figure out which one you want and I’ll sign you up.

His demeanour seemed different, more serious and imposing. Instead of laughing and smiling he spoke in monotone, with an unnerving confidence. I felt the familiar tingle of doubt.

So, he wants to sell me a trek. First of all, how much? This is India, and in India if you want to buy something, anything, you first ask how much it costs. And then you close off all possible avenues the salesmen might take—hidden charges, commission, the ubiquitous baksheesh (tip or bribe)—for raising that cost without your consent. Then, and only then, do you say Yes.

Bashir informed me, with his Cheshire-grin, that the cost of a four-day trek in the nearby mountains was 35,000 rupees. Something like 180 dollars a day. For walking. This was beyond absurd; it was criminal. I could probably live in India for a whole month on 180 dollars, with a bed and a hot shower and everything.

So, thanks but no thanks.

He offered me a few more packages. How about this two-day trek for 18,000 rupees? Or this four-hour boat trip for 4,000? Ridiculous prices. He said, you think about it, I’ll ask you later. But there was no thinking needed; it was a ripoff, plain and simple.

I spent the afternoon watching Indian television, which is something of a marvel. I especially love the commercials, which are far more clever, daring, and unabashedly Indian than they have any right to be. One commercial depicts a scenario where the ancient Hindu-Muslim conflicts of India come to a peaceful end by the Maharaja’s announcement that everyone gets their very own mobile phone number. Nearly every commercial stars Shah Rukh Khan, and there is often a cricket theme. India’s love for cricket goes a little too far sometimes: in one commercial, a blue cricket ball lands in the center of a maxi-pad and dissolves into liquid, to demonstrate its absorbency. Another, a hostage-taking scenario on grainy surveillance video where if the assailant doesn’t get a 24-hour cricket network with up-to-the-minute scores, statistics, and highlights, somebody’s gonna get it.

But I could not concentrate. Since that meeting with Bashir, the attitude on the boat had changed. Every time he walked past, he shot me a smile that said “I’m gonna get you.” My doubts were back in full churn, and avoided the subject of trekking whenever he brought it up, saying that I needed more time to think about it.

“As you like,” he said.

Day Four
The main industry, maybe the only industry, in Srinagar is tourism. Since the outbreak of separatist violence towards the Indian Army in the 1990s, the tourist industry has dried up totally. On Dal Lake sit as many as 1,600 houseboats—each with catchy names, some clever, some derivative (such as “The Taj Mahal”, and next door “The New Taj Mahal”)—and most of them are devoid of visitors. The lucky few that snag a tourist for a week or so are, thus, hoping to get as much out of them as possible. Likewise, the Kashmiri handicraft, carpet, textile, and saffron industries rely heavily on tourism, and their presence on the waters of Dal Lake is like that of an invasive species, crawling into every empty space. The houseboat owners and merchants often work together to expose tourists to as much product as possible.

At breakfast a guy wandered onto the houseboat and told me he’d bring his shawls and rugs over tonight for me to take a look. I looked at Bashir. He nodded to the man.

“Yes, he would like very much,” he said.

It took me a couple of days on the houseboat to realize it was getting lonely. I was the only tourist. Every single day Bashir would say they had other tourists on their way from Delhi. “We have a South African guy, really wants to do some trekking. He should be here tomorrow.”

And then under his breath: “Or the day after…”

I knew this to be a complete fiction. There was no South African, or Dutch, or American on his way. He was hoping to get me excited for trekking, so excited that I’d gladly fork over enough cash to feed his family for the next three months.

Today Bashir wanted to take me on a little tour of the lake. Sure, I said. He made a show of calling a shikara over to our boat, and we got in. We made the short trip over to one of the islands, and as we paddled along, more tout-shikaras came up next to ours, selling shawls and saffron and cigarettes.

Kashmir was really starting to piss me off.

He took me to a couple of nice spots on the lake, and to the Mughal Gardens, and then he produced a picnic basket with our lunch inside. This boat tour was a professional affair, a little too organized to be Bashir’s whim. It then occurred to me that the tour was none other than the 4,000-rupee ripoff that he had suggested to me the other day. But there was no price mentioned, not even any talk of paying for anything. Oh, I’ll just take you on a little boat trip, he says! Fancy that! Was he going to say tomorrow that he’d just take me for a little walk in the woods, lasting about four days?

I was very angry. Sure, I said yes to it, but he wasn’t exactly upfront. I kept quiet, for if I started to get quarrelsome, things could take a turn. This was Kashmir. My position on their houseboat was that of a hostage, and these people depended on me utterly for their livelihood. I’ve heard of much worse things happening to houseboat guests than the loss of a few hundred bucks.

Since that lunch my mood towards Bashir changed completely: I was now taking a stance of complete and total resistance to his advances. I would say yes to nothing. If need be, I would sit in my room for the next two days, and then leave, and if I had to sneak out of this houseboat at four in the morning, or swim to the shore, then let’s have it.

Later, we sat down for dinner. After the first few days the family started inviting me into the house for meals, and I sat on the floor with them. The Indians eat with their hands, and even pass food to each other with their hands. Someone says pass the rice, the other makes a rice-ball with his fingers and then hands it to him. Thankfully they let me have a spoon, and I imagined bitterly that they’d charge me a per-spoonful usage fee. The grownups spoke in Urdu amongst themselves, while the children watched the tourist eat.

Despite all the extortion, I grew fond of Bashir’s family. The three ladies never left the floor of the kitchen except when they to do other menial chores, like scrubbing the floorboards of the deck, or hanging laundry. The men sat nearby, watching them toil, not deigning to lift a finger in assistance. I felt bad for these ladies, but the smiles never left their faces.

(I later discovered that in the room behind the kitchen sat a nargile, a tall water pipe, and the ladies would lean out the door every so often and take a haul. No wonder they were so happy.)

That night, Bashir and I shared some more whiskey. He asked me to play rummy, a game I’d never played. So he taught me, we played a few games, and then Bashir insisted we play for money. No, just for fun, I said. A few more games. OK, now for money? I knew where this was heading, so I said, sure, but we’ll play for only a few rupees a game. That didn’t satisfy him, but too bad, I said. Predictably, all of a sudden he became this amazing rummy player. He won nine games out of ten, and then got all offended that I stopped playing.

His policy towards me was that of cash maximization. If he could find a way to get a few rupees here, a few there, he would. That night he asked me, good and drunk, once and for all, which trek did I want? And I told him, I don’t want any trek. Not for 35,000 rupees, not for 15,000, not for 10,000. Nothing.

I expected him to fly off the handle at this, but he didn’t. Instead, he leaned back in his chair and said:

“As you like. But now you have to pay for the whiskey from the other night.”

Day Five
I paid for five days up-front back in Delhi, and today was my last day. Now Bashir was trying desperately to get me to stay the weekend. Ramazan, the Muslim month-long fast, was ending, and they called the weekend of ensuing festivities “Christmas”. Yes, Christmas.

That day, the Kashmiri sales squad was out in full force. Did you want some Kashmiri shawls today, sir? Please just look? How about some Kashmiri saffron? Would I like some more Kashmiri honey with my Kashmiri bread? Everything in this place is “Kashmiri”, as if they think half the world was invented here. They are like little programmed Kashmiri robots. Perhaps this is the fate of a tormented people, used by larger forces as a pawn in ways beyond its control or comprehension, seeking nothing but a simple and tranquil independence—but all I cared about on this day was my independence from Kashmir.

I passed the day in silence, keeping away from everybody. The oldest child knocked on my door wanting a wrestling match. I indulged him for a while by bodyslamming him on the bed a few times, but then kicked him out and shut the door. I packed my things and prepared for the quickest getaway possible.

Bashir brought over his account book and asked me to fill out the comments, watching over my shoulder as I wrote (so I would not leave negative comments, I suppose). He tried to sell me some more things. I said no, no, no. He was starting to give up on me. But not before finding one more way to get money out of me.

“I can’t wait for my baksheesh,” he said excitedly. Ahh, there’s that word again, baksheesh. He was demanding a tip from me outright? I couldn’t believe it. Then again, this is India. Without thinking, I shot back:

“Get ready for your five rupee baksheesh.”

He smiled in a way that said, you’d better not even think about not giving me good baksheesh. But he only said:

“As you like.”

Epilogue
The next morning, I had breakfast with the family. I sat on the floor against the wall of the kitchen, with the entire family—children and grownups alike—sitting around me in a semi-circle, watching me eat. When I finished my Kashmiri bread with Kashmiri honey and Kashmiri tea, I stood up, and in that moment, in a way most fitting to end this week of endless badgering, trickery, and deception, everyone in the family smiled, held out their hand and demanded some baksheesh.

By day three in Delhi, fatigue was setting in. My world was split in two: into the relative tranquility of my hotel room and attached café, and the steaming, stifling mess of city around me. In here, I could read, watch TV, or just sit for a while. Out there I had to avoid getting clipped by passing auto-rickshaws, bitten by dogs, pawed at by cripples, and blinded by the heat and pollution. To go sightseeing, or walking, or exploring the city involved being out there, and not a single fibre in my body wanted to go out there. I needed to get out of Delhi.

I took a mercifully brief walk to the New Delhi train station to pick up a ticket to Amritsar, departing for 6 AM the next morning. The touts were in full sprout that day, with the singsong refrain of “hello my friend!” ringing in my ears repeatedly, almost rhythmically, as I walked.

India’s touts are legendary in the backpacker world, owing to the utter lack of timidity by the Indians to do or say anything for a few rupees, no matter how absurd, shameless, or sad. You might feel it a cruel fate, but you’d have to be made of stone not to laugh; desperate as these Indians may be, it would be barbaric to let actual human concern interfere with plain amusement. Everyone on the India backpacker circuit has stories: warnings of riots or fire near your hotel (so he can take you to another one), offers of taxi rides in a car with only three wheels (parked strategically to obscure this fact) or no brakes (a fact discovered only when the driver enters a parking lot and circles to a halt), and so on. As I approached the station, a tout approached me, and as we both stared at the thousands of people there—people at every information counter, platform, and ticket booth, and even sleeping on the floor—he told me that the train station was closed and that I’d better go with him. I thanked him for the laugh.

On the way back, one tout said hello and for some reason I decided to say hello back. The Main Bazaar is a confusing place, and I was looking for a shop that would sell me a plug adapter for India, and thought to ask this fellow. There was nothing unusual about this tout. He was a beefy guy with short hair, without moustache (in India this is rare enough to help distinguish people). He led me to a shop, without talking, and I bought an adapter from a guy for 30 rupees, and then I went back to my hotel, which happened to be next to his shop. Would I like to come in for a chai (tea)?

I said yes. I felt confident enough in my tout-repelling abilities to amuse myself for a little while by hanging out with a local. If he wants to sell me something, I’ll just say no and that will be that. After all, tomorrow morning I was off to Amritsar.

It turns out he’s from Kashmir. This fact put me on guard immediately, because the Main Bazaar is full of people selling vacation packages in Kashmir. While I have a great desire to visit Kashmir—in fact, my trip to Amritsar is the first step on my journey up to the north which will end in that same Kashmir, or at least, I think so—I didn’t want to buy an arranged tour package of any kind. I’m a low-budget traveller who can make his own fun, thank you.

He insisted on showing me pictures of his home and his family in Kashmir, and I thumbed through his albums uninterestedly. “Very nice,” I say. “Looks good. Nice lake.” He puts the albums away for a while and we talk about other things. His shop was a small crafts shop, selling necklaces and shawls and pipes for all that Kashmiri hashish, but he wasn’t selling me anything. I kept looking at the door.

His nephew was there too, and we played a game of chess (I won). The chai was good and sweet. Nothing much happened. They seemed like very decent people, fully aware that there’s no reason for a tourist like me to trust some guy chatting him up on the street, but I haven’t got much to say to them, having only been in India three days, and not really enjoying Delhi much. Out of the blue, the tout says: “Come to my house for dinner tonight!”

And off goes every bell in my head, every flashing sign that says “GET AWAY”, every siren and whirring red light. I did not fear for my safety, but more for the inevitable post-dinner conversation where he would sit me down in front of a series of informational brochures about trekking trips in Kashmir and parasailing expeditions in the Himalayas, with a contract and a thick black pen with which I’m supposed to sign away my dignity.

I said no thanks. And he said, no problem, I understand.

“Forget about business. Fuck money. Money ruins everything,” he said. It sure does, buddy.

But hey, wouldn’t you like to do some sightseeing in Delhi today? It’s your last day here after all. Earlier in our conversation I may have proffered the fact (can’t remember) that I would indeed like to see some things in Delhi, like the Lotus Temple, and some other stuff. He suggested that the nephew take me to some of these spots, since he knows Delhi and will get a “local” rate on auto-rickshaws (true). Sure, I said. That would be fine.

The first rickshaw ride was very long, maybe even one hour, and cost 80 rupees (2 dollars). It was to the Lotus Temple, the principal shrine of the Bahai faith, which I had never heard of. It was lovely, and the nephew was a very agreeable fellow, and we got along very well. His uncle is just selling stuff, he said, but he’s a good dude. And I agreed, he was a good dude, I just didn’t want to buy what he was selling.

After the Lotus Temple, he took me to a fascinating Muslim shrine somewhere in the heart of Delhi, in a neighbourhood that looked nothing like the Delhi I knew. It had the noise and the dirt and the beggars, yes, but this was a Muslim part of town, and it looked like a different country altogether. We wandered into a sea of white robes, into the depths of this strange tomb full of quivering, prostrating, crying Muslims. Bony children sat in front of their Ramazan meals, unable to eat them until dusk.

A tout followed us around for a while and then asked for 120 rupees for being our “tour guide”, and I told him to go piss up a rope.

My guide insisted on bringing me to the nearby mosque for the upcoming prayer. We left our shoes in an enormous heap, walked underground, washed our feet in a square pool, and then joined the prayer line in a bare, carpeted room. He didn’t tell me how to pray in a mosque, but I knew how it worked from my time in Turkey. Mostly I just copied what he did, and afterward, he said I was doing it all wrong.

We went back to the shop. I was so delighted by what I had seen that afternoon, and was so trusting of the tout’s nephew that I decided, okay, I’ll have dinner with you guys tonight.

Their apartment was nothing more than a single room with no furniture except a TV and fridge. They shared a kitchen and bathroom with the adjoining units of their apartment building, and one other small guest room with a Muslim shrine taking up half the space of the room. Their entire living space was smaller than my parents’ kitchen, and my parents’ kitchen ain’t big. But they had cable.

The nephew prepared a lovely, Kashmiri-style chicken curry and rice. We sat on the floor and watched cricket and ate: the tout, his nephew, his nephew’s friend, and me. They gave me a half-frozen Kingfisher and I shared it with them. Mostly, they talked amongst themselves in Urdu the whole time.

After we put the plates away, the tout said, okay, now we talk business.

He knew I was a tough customer, so he wanted only to book me on his houseboat, bobbing blissfully on lovely Lake Dal in Srinigar. It’s like a luxury hotel, he said. Showed me pictures. Yes, it was lovely. He gave me all his contact info and also that of his nephew, and they were legit. There was no obligation to do any mountain treks, any arranged tourist crap. Just go and hang out for a couple days, and then leave if you don’t like it, no questions asked.

Lonely Planet says: “Under no circumstances should you book a houseboat outside of Kashmir.” They had a point. After all, what way was there to verify what I was buying? What if his “houseboat” was a lean-to made of particle board and had a cut-out hole in the floor for a toilet? He showed me pictures but you know how pictures go; everyone always shows you their best one.

I was hesitant, but at the same time, I liked these people. Not just because they offered me food and sightseeing. They were genuine and decent. We got along splendidly. I just didn’t want to buy anything from them.

My defense was to pepper him with question after question. Tough ones. And he answered them well, very well indeed. He understood my reservations, but had a good and convincing answer for each of them. Not some half-assed Indian answer. This taxi didn’t have three wheels and no brakes. And after I’d exhausted every ounce of my ammunition, I waved the white flag and said, okay, I’ll stay for a couple days on your houseboat. I can’t say why. I had grown to trust this guy and his family, and had actual feelings for them, and in the glow of the moment I insisted on going along with the feeling, letting events play out as they may, so that my faith in humanity could be either confirmed or shattered to bits. So I said Yes.

But one last question… what am I supposed to do with my ticket to Amritsar? His reply: I’ll give you a refund for that ticket myself, and handed me the money right there. And that made me feel much better.

And the next day I was off to Kashmir.

There is no possible description of Delhi that does not use or imply the word “hole”. Whether prefixed by “hell-” or some other fragment, no other term could truthfully describe Delhi except as a pit, indentation, or aperture filled with some noxious substance.

Within minutes of leaving the dumpy Indira Gandhi airport in a taxi cab, clouds of smog and dust enveloped me. My eyes burned and I could feel something bad happening inside my nose. It was after midnight and my hotel manager was nice enough to pick me up from the airport, for what seemed like the modest price of 500 rupees (12 bucks or so - a ripoff, actually). Our car cut through the plumes of dust, weaving between motorbikes, bicycles, rickshaws (motorized and pedal-driven), horse-drawn carriages, and of course, cows. We passed slums, crowds huddling around enormous bonfires in the middle of the street, one-legged men begging at our window while we stopped at the red light. Parts of Delhi at night seem not so different from what I imagine Hell to be like.

I arrived at my hotel room and threw my bag on the bed. The room was freezing, the staff having left the air conditioner on all day in anticipation of my arrival. The ceiling fan whirled as if possessed by a demon. The toilet did not flush and the shower was a bucket. Outside, a lady screamed at her neighbours while a man slapped a carpet against his balcony. Was this my next three months?

Having hardly slept a wink, I moved to another hotel at Paharganj, also known as the infamous Main Bazaar of New Delhi, a teeming beehive of India’s finest merchant mayhem, with aggressive touts, beggars, and hustlers trying to grab your attention (or your wallet) as you scurry past. It is also the unfortunate site of most of Delhi’s budget hotels, meaning that us cheapskates have to run this gauntlet several times a day in order to get anywhere. At the end of the street is an mind-boggling pile-up of rickshaws hoping to take you somewhere for twice the normal price. Everywhere, there is filth: gravel, garbage, cow shit, dead animals, broken glass. I even saw a jawbone.

The Main Bazaar is the only place for which I’ve had to prepare myself mentally before stepping out the door. “Okay. Going outside now. Inhale and… ahhh.”

Within a few days, though, the havoc turns to background noise. A properly assumed Paharganj mien, your eyes pointed to the horizon, your ears turned off, your resolve steely and single-pointed toward your destination, is essential. With a bit of aimless wandering, before you know it, the hole known as Delhi actually starts to reveal itself as a sort of charming hole. The Indians are a nutty people, and high tragicomedy lurks around every corner.

For example, there’s a well-known scam in Connaught Place, the enormous circular plaza of New Delhi, where a shoe-shine man will point to your shoe, revealing shit smeared thereupon. But you don’t remember stepping in any. And the shit is on the side or the top of your shoe, not on the sole… so how the heck did it get there? Turns out… he threw it himself! Yes, there are actually people who sit around throwing shit on shoes in order to clean them off for you. Which pretty much sums up India: sad, funny, infuriating, beautiful, baffling, and ultimately nonsensical. Welcome.