Ben and Aliyah's Excellent Adventure

America's ill

2008-08-25T04:39:00.002+05:30

We're back.

Yes, after a swashbuckling year of rat-dodging, leech-fleeing, fish-mourning, strange-massage-receiving adventure in Asia, we've returned to the US. Everything is so clean and orderly here. The portions are gigantic. And I've yet to see a single amputee beggar here in the Pleasantville of a beach community that my parents call home.

And of course, we're sick as dogs (Indian dogs at least. American dogs appear shockingly well fed after our year in Asia). Aliyah's been fighting a fever that hit 104 the other night, and I'm quickly following suit. We're pretty sure our bodies are rejecting America.

And yes, we know, we've done a lousy job of keeping up the blog during our last couple months of traveling. Well hey, what do you expect? We were having too much fun.

With us back on American soil, this post will likely be the last on this blog. We'll keep it online for posterity, but no need to check back regularly for new posts. They're not coming.

Thanks to all for reading and keeping tabs on us this last year. We were always delighted to know our friends and family were interested in and amused with our adventure. Thanks.

Prison beating

2008-07-14T07:02:00.001+05:30

I got beat up in prison.

Well, sort of. I got a massage that beat me up pretty good. At a spa. At a women’s correctional facility in Chiang Mai.

The women’s prison apparently uses the spa as a way to train its inmates for honest work on the outside. And let me assure you, those lady criminals are tough.

The massage studio looked like any other in Thailand—all air-conditioned cushy pastels. Our masseuses were quiet and mild-mannered—mine even wore bookish glasses—and outfitted in soft blue jammies that looked like OR scrubs. That was something of a disappointment to me. I’d been hoping for black-and-white Hamburglar outfits and faces clawmarked from shower fights.

After the masseuses gave our feet a nice biblical scrubbing, we changed into jammies of our own. Then the criminal masseuses served us tea and laid Aliyah and I down on adjacent cushions.

“Soft, medium or heavy?” my seemingly meek masseuse asked me.

“Heavy,” I said as toughly as I could. When in Rome…

The criminals giggled. Aliyah wisely opted for medium. And then the pain began.

My criminal dug her elbows into my thighs with such determined ferocity I would have thought she was trying to dig a tunnel under the prison walls. She jammed her forearms into my back so violently I wondered whether she thought I was a narc. And when my masseuse sent Aliyah laughing by clamping onto my upper body and twisting it around as easily as she would a bottle cap, well, my masseuse could only have been imagining I was the member of a rival prison gang, right?

But oh, it hurt so good.

When the hour was over and I started limping toward the exit, Aliyah and I quickly agreed: best massage ever.

Just as we reached the door, in mid-whisper trying to goad each other into asking the masseuses what they were in for (assault and battery was our best guess), we noticed the armed guard was not manning his post by the exit. Before I could scream, “Jailbreak!” Aliyah pointed behind me. The guard, in a khaki uniform with a gun and billy club dangling like Christmas ornaments from his belt, was fast asleep in one of the La-Z-Boys the gals use for foot massages.

Talk about hard time.

Tourists flee

2008-06-29T13:23:00.002+05:30

The newspaper changed our travel plans.

We had just sat down in a cafe in McLeod Ganj -- India's Little Tibet -- for a relaxing pot of Tibetan butter tea, which tasted like twelve sticks of butter melted into a thimble of boiling water. I grabbed a newspaper off an empty table -- the first paper I had seen in days in this remote hill station -- and began reading. A banner headline on page four jumped right off the page and began worming through the more cowardly parts of my character: "Kashmir still on the edge."

We had been planning on going to Kashmir in two days. I kept reading the story. The first subhed was "Tourists flee," and the text underneath quoted a businessman with a vested interest in drawing tourists to Kashmir as saying that tourists ought to stay away.

We read a couple more stories in other papers. Massive protests of thousands upon thousands of angry and riotous young men -- justified, perhaps, in their anger but not their means -- blockading major roads in Srinagar, attacking police (who often attacked back, if not first) and bringing the fragile state government of Jammu & Kashmir to the brink of collapse. AFP called the violent protests among the biggest in two decades, with at least 300 injured and 3 dead. It didn't exactly sound like the houseboat holiday we'd expected in one of the world's most notoriously beautiful (and most fiercely fought over) destinations.

So we changed our plans. We may be a little crazy, but we're not stupid.

We're off to Bangkok tonight, bidding India farewell -- at least for now -- after a wild year here.

So goodbye, India. It's been real. In spite of everything, or perhaps because of it, we'll miss you.

Fake!

2008-06-27T19:30:00.003+05:30

The man with the mustache accused me of a felony.

We were checking out of our hotel in Amritsar for an early morning car trip to McLeod Ganj -- India's Dalai Lama Land. We owed the guesthouse 1,300 rupees for our stay of two nights, and I handed the hotel clerk two crisp 1,000 rupee notes. Frowning, he started trudging toward the door to go scare up some change. A fat man with a bureaucrat's mustache and an unflatteringly tight t-shirt was sitting in a plastic chair by the hotel's front door. He grabbed the young clerk's arm as he passed and asked to examine the money.

The man held each note above his head, squinting seriously as he examined how much light passed through each bill. Then he crinkled each into a ball next to his ear, listening with pretended meditative concentration. Then the man with the mustache, who I'm nearly certain was not even an employee of the hotel, stood and strode toward me with the aggressiveness of a confident prosecutor with an airtight case.

"Pakistan is a great country," he said knowingly.

"What?"

He repeated himself, and winked.

"What are you talking about?"

A shyster's smile unfolded beneath the mustache as the man wagged my money in my face.

"These are counterfeit," he said. "From Pakistan."

I laughed.

"Really," he said.

"Look," I said, winding my laugh down and replacing it with a well-worn tone of terse annoyance. "We may be just thirty kilometers from Pakistan here, but I got this money in Delhi. From a Citibank ATM. It's not counterfeit."

"Yes," he said, crinkling the notes next to his ear again and nodding as if this telltale rustle was proof enough. "Counterfeit, sent in the mail from Pakistan."

"Stop being ridiculous. They're not counterfeit."

"Yes they are."

"No they're not."

"Yes they are."

"No they're not."

Etc...

After a few minutes of this inane back and forth, the hotel manager showed up. Without a word, he sneered at my accuser, snatched my money from the mustachioed conspiracy theorist, threw it in a drawer, and handed me seven hundred rupees change.

I held up one of the notes to the light and shook my head.

"No, no, no," I said. "This is a fake!"

Four more Nepal scenes

2008-06-22T08:52:00.003+05:30

1. I crouched next to Chanu behind a sparsely-leafed tree branch in the jungle on an island in Chitwan National Park. Chanu held his fingers sternly to his lips as I stared with wide-eyed fright at two 1,000-plus pound rhinos not thirty feet away. These wild one-horned rhinos were about eight feet tall and fifteen feet long, and covered with thick bulgy body armor. They looked like dinosaurs.

Along with me and our guide Chanu, there were four other tourists, Aliyah included, stalking these rhinos by foot. A fat sixty-something Canadian lawyer with a boring drawl and a penchant for retelling sleepy stories rode an elephant a few meters away.

Chanu had warned us an hour earlier, at the start of our jungle walk, that if we came upon rhinos we might need to run (in zig-zags that would out-agile the giant beasts) and possibly need to climb trees to safety.

"Why are we doing this again?" Aliyah whispered to me after Chanu's dire speech.

An hour into our wet buggy jungle walk we stumbled upon the rhinos. Crouching low, we crept forward, though I quickly had to dart aside as the Canadian-carrying safari elephant following on our heels nearly trampled me and an Australian construction surveyor whose name I never bothered to learn.

The Aussie and I then took just a few more steps toward the rhinos before Aliyah and the others started scampering fast in the opposite direction, mouthing "Run! Run!" I did, and while frantically looking for a tree to climb while I fretted about being impaled by a rhino horn, I ran straight into one of the elephant's tree trunk legs.

False alarm anyway. The rhinos weren't charging.

Moments later, we'd set up behind a thin layer of leafy cover, watching up close two gray jungle dinosaurs while the elephant noisily chomped on branches and vines. The rhinos were incredible. I felt like I was in Jurassic Park.

Then Chanu tapped my arm and whispered in my ear.

"If the rhinos charge, and they will come fast, we go hide behind the elephant," he said. "Rhino is afraid of elephant. Otherwise, we are in trouble."

I passed the whispered instructions onto Aliyah.

"Why are we doing this again?" she asked.

2. The fake guru at Planet Osho looked like Danny Devito's Penguin -- long straggly black hair, pointy face, lumpy bowling ball belly.

Looking for a yoga class on a rainy day in Pokhara, we'd stumbled upon Planet Osho and had signed up for an immediate one-hour private session before even meeting the guru -- billed as a "teacher with experience."

Inside the yoga studio, Penguin quickly sat down on his mat -- which was actually a thin mattress with white bedsheets and a feather pillow. A nearby plastic trash can was full to the brim with junk food wrappers.

"Please take off your watch," the fake guru said importantly to Aliyah, even as the glint of his own gold watch became visible beneath the sleeve of his maroon jammies.

"Now," the charlatan said, "watch me first."

Struggling, the guru reached out to touch his toes, his flabby breasts rolling over his cantaloupe belly, his fat fingers clawing at empty air, unable to touch his toes. He held his breath the whole time. I pictured yoga master Sukant Tiwari telling this idiot not to fight with his body.

Guru soon exhaled loudly and instructed us to attempt the pose. I nearly palmed my feet fairly easily, but was admonished for breathing.

"Now," the huckster guru said, exhausted, "we rest."

And he laid down on his bed-mat and shut his eyes.

3. The spider was crawling up Tom's face. He was freaking out.

"What is it?" he yelped, squirming in the tiny wood and canvas box strapped to an elephant's back in which the four of us rode.

"Turn toward Ben!" Aliyah yelled at the Yale-bound sociology scholar.

He did, just as the thin-legged, big-bodied arachnid began to crawl onto the underside of his glasses.

I flicked it off.

We were on the first of two elephant safaris through the jungle of Chitwan National Park, and as we brushed against or were dragged through thick jungle foliage as the elephant rumbled along, the four of us -- me, Aliyah, Tom and his girlfriend Jill -- were constantly on bug patrol. As the member of our foursome least terrified of bugs (though still quite terrified), the job of bug flicker offer fell to me.

We were beset by loads of spiders, shiny black buzzing beetles the size of silver dollars, bright red winged somethings, wormy crawlers, giant flies, scurrying ants -- but thank goodness, none of the giant red millipedes we saw so many times on jungle trees and rocks.

I liked flicking the bugs off everybody. Sometimes I even flicked their shirts with a cracking pointer finger push when there were no bugs there at all.

I didn't consider that as a misuse of my authority as designated bug flicker offer. They were simply preemptive strikes.

4. Straddling the elephant's tough leathery neck, I clung tightly to the surprisingly handle-like cartilage curls of his massive ears.

The elephant trainer standing easily on the pachyderm's butt yelled a sharp command in Nepali and the giant beast rolled slowly onto its left side, dumping me into the river.

The trainer laughed and urged me back on. I scrambled up the elephant, hung on for dear life, and after another barked order from the trainer, was thrown like a rag doll from a champion bucking bronco.

We repeated this exercise at least a half dozen times. Each time I was flung into the river, I tried not to think too much about the trampling power of the elephant's massive legs, not to mention the river's many crocodiles -- called marsh muggers by the British for their habit of snapping up unsuspecting villagers.

After getting tossed one too many times, Aliyah and I moved to the second and friendlier attraction of the activity our resort dubbed "Elephant Bathtime." Climbing onto a second elephant, we held tight as its trainer whacked its behind with a sharp stick. The elephant immediately dunked her trunk in the river for several seconds, then curved it into a sideways U and showered us with a soaking spray jet from its 10-foot proboscis.

We repeated this several times, and as I swallowed too much river water delivered by way of pachyderm sinus, I hoped silently that the elephant didn't have a cold.

Three Nepal Scenes

2008-06-21T13:14:00.002+05:30

1. It was our first dinner at the Jungle Island Resort in Chitwan National Park. After a full day of riding the back of an elephant in Nepal's jungles--with only one monkey sighting and several mosquito bites to account for--we, along with the Aussies, Brits and Canadians had tiger-sized appetites.

The buffet dinner was served promptly at 7:45 p.m. (electricity on the island was non-existent except during the hours of 7:30-9:30 p.m.), which meant there was a mad rush for dinner, showers, and any reading during this time. All the food was prepared in a small kitchen, which we later found out, was the sighting of nine-foot-long python as thick as my neck.

The macaroni in sweet and sour sauce, a chicken curry that had more bone than chicken or curry, and buffalo meat dressed in something resembling the mud still caked on to my shoes seemed like a feast for Nepali kings.

As I sat down in front of my dinner, I felt like a real adventurer. I had survived the jungle, had never had such awful body odor or so many bug bites and was even wearing cargo pants. I was a natural amazon.

As I stuck my fork into a pile of jungle feast, the lights suddenly went out and I found myself in complete darkness. Power outages in Nepal are common, so all of us laughed and continued to eat in the pitch black. A minute later the power went on, followed by shrieks and groans. As we looked down at our plates, we realized we weren't the only ones who were hungry. Cockroaches had taken advantage of the darkness and had scuttled onto our plates for a feast of their own. I like to think the crunchiness in the chicken was the excess bone. Dinner time, at least for us, was over.

2. We were into the second hour of our jungle walk in Chitwan National Park. Our guide, Chanu, had shown us many scary animals and fauna, including giganta-sized rhinos with horns that could pierce through our bodies as easily as a needles through silk, poisonous plants that, if touched, could turn our entire bodies crimson, and fresh sloth bear poo which indicated the ferocious creatures were lurking around the corner. Our weapons? Walking sticks.

Several of the other tourists were scared, walking tenderly on the footpath trying to make as little noise as possible. One said she wanted to head back to base camp. I, on the other hand, felt invincible. That was until Chanu stopped, smiled and held up a thick blade of grass, which had my nemesis lurching and squirming up the green plant. "Blood leech," Chanu exclaimed proudly. Memories of my experience in Pokhara re-emerged (See Fear Factor Nepa l). I'd rather be surrounded by starved tigers and marsh muggers than a single leech. Chanu pointed to my arm and said matter-of-factly, "There is a leech." I screamed and did what Ben has termed my "banshee impression." The group of tourists looked confused. "Just kidding," said Chanu.

3. It was like an episode from Lost. We wanted off the island, but forces beyond our control wanted to keep us there. Our three days at the Jungle Island Resort were over. Our clothes had never smelled worse and never had we wanted wi-fi, light from a source that wasn't a kerosene lamp and AC so badly. The trip, especially the elephant bathing, had been fantastic, especially because we were on a private jungle island for just us and nine other tourists. But we were ready to return from the stone age.

The plan was to depart the island at 8:15 a.m. by boat to the mainland before we'd be escorted by tourist bus back to Kathmandu. Chanu, our guide, had news for us. A strike was going on over...school books. The government was supposed to provide books to a school, but they were never delivered. The natural solution? A strike blocking the main road. Naturally.

The plan of action was to wait the strike out. After a few hours of playing scrabble, gin rummy, and eating far too much candy out of sheer boredom, it was announced that we would leave the island by row boat and walk around the strike--1.5 kilometers--where we would then be picked up by bus. Annoying, but simple enough, we thought.

As we started down the path, a heavy rainfall impeded our journey and we had to hide out in an elephant trainer's shack before we could continue down the muddy, slippery path to the row boat. After waiting for the row boat to arrive to the bank, 11 of us piled into a small, narrow boat, that because of our weight, was riding much too low beneath the water. A toothpick-sized layer of wood separated the water and the lip of the boat.

A jeep (not a bus) waited for us on the other side. We squeezed in, 11 of us, and went down a bumpy path not to the tourist bus but to a hotel affiliated with the Jungle Island Resort. We took our 50 pound bags into the hotel, only to be hold to pile back into a small bus. We were told that the strike might be over. The strike wasn't over, we soon discovered after running into miles of parked cars that hadn't moved for hours. "Now you walk," said the bus driver. Naturally.

After walking down a busy road with our rhino-sized backpacks for half an hour (I felt like I was in an iron man competition, except instead of being cheered on, the Nepalis were looking at us as if we were Shiva himself), another bus picked us up. "Finally," I thought. "Now we'll be able to go to Kathmandu." We were especially worried because we had a flight back to Delhi the next day. Wrong.

This bus took us to another bus which wasn't a tourist vehicle at all, but a local bus. The seats had strange stains and was made for midgets. I'm pretty sure there were a few goats and Nepalis piled on to the top of the bus as well. There was no room for our luggage except for our laps. Fiver hours and two chip bags later, we were back to what we would call 'home' for the night. Naturally.

Fear Factor: Nepal

2008-06-14T09:57:00.004+05:30

We got mugged on the way to the World Peace Pagoda, but it didn't go down exactly the way we'd expected.

After being advised by the Lonely Planet that there had been in recent years a string of tourists who'd reported getting mugged on the two-hour forest hike from the small lakeside town of Pokhara to the hill-straddling World Peace Pagoda, we'd elected to leave our more important possessions -- camera, passports, etc -- in our $7-a-night hotel room, figuring they'd be safer there than in the path of Maoist muggers.

We'd already had a busy day -- Aliyah had run for an hour that morning, then we'd kayaked on the lake for two, and after lunch we'd walked for at least another hour before even reaching the trail head -- and as we set off on the hike, we were already pretty tired. But exhaustion was quickly replaced by awe, as we chugged along a small dirt path bordering beautiful, brilliant green rice paddies peppered with smiling Nepalis.

After getting lost a couple times -- once being offered help by a Nepali teen who spoke excellent English but would only give us directions if he could act as paid guide (denied), and once by a group of Nepali women and girls who spoke no English but seemed tickled to point us in the right direction free of charge -- we set off into the forested hills on what seemed to be the correct path. We scrambled up over hundreds of mossy stone steps, and after passing and briefly chatting with a dazed and confused British trekker, we quickly realized we were otherwise the only hikers on the mountain.

The scenery was gorgeous, lush, green, and serene. We listened to bullfrogs croak loudly and watched as a family of monkeys scampered past us, not ten feet away.

"This is a real forest," Aliyah said.

The mugging happened about an hour into our forest trek. Aliyah stopped in the narrow mud path. She bent over at the waist, her eyes glued on her shoes. And then she let loose a shriek that could have raised the dead.

"What's wrong?" I nearly yelled, racing toward her.

"Oh my god!" Aliyah screamed. "Get them off me! Get them off me!"

"Get what off you?"

Aliyah turned around, sheer terror spilling across her frantic face, and pointed to her feet. I immediately saw what looked to be a three-inch long earthworm crawling across her ankle. As I looked closer, I saw several more, ranging in size from one to four inches, crawling all over her shoes. Several were actually wriggling through the synthetic mesh of her Nike running shoes, their tails flapping wildly in the air as they struggled to bore through shoe and sock to the tender flesh beneath.

Leeches. They were everywhere.

"Oh shit," I said like a soprano (not a tough Italian Soprano -- a high-voiced fragile soprano).

As Aliyah continued to scream in terror and bounce around like she had to pee really, really bad, I began whacking her shoes with the Lonely Planet and my water bottle. That didn't do much good.

I knew that picking leeches off the skin can raise the risk of infection, and that the preferred method of removal is either a lit match or a pinch of salt (think of those childhood shriveling snail experiments). But I figured there wasn't much harm in me plucking leeches from Aliyah's shoes. No harm other than me having to touch a bunch of disgusting leeches, that is.

As Aliyah continued to totter on the edge of a nervous breakdown (to her credit, it was terrifying, and I learned later that during the whole awful episode Aliyah was under the mistaken impression that leeches could actually burrow beneath her skin and make themselves a nice home snuggled among organs and veins), I began nervously pulling at the tails of leeches half-buried in her shoes. This was easier said than done. Leeches are strong and resilient, wriggling and fighting each time I tried to grab them. And as soon as I pulled one off Aliyah's shoe, it would immediately try to attach itself to my thumb or forefinger.

A couple minutes into this awful exercise, I looked down at my own feet.

"Oh shit," I said. My feet and ankles had as many leeches on them as Aliyah's, and they were burrowing similarly into the mesh of my crappy athletic shoes.

At this point, Aliyah did what I've since dubbed her "banshee impression," rounding on me with frightening red-faced anxiety, pointing to her shoe, and screaming at a glass-shattering pitch, "Get it off me! Get it off me!"

I looked down. The biggest leech yet -- at least four or five inches -- was wiggling its way below Aliyah's bloodying sock and into the dark dampness between cotton and flesh.

"If I pick it off it could get infected," I said as calmly as I could, simultaneously thinking, "I really do not want to touch that thing."

"I don't care," my terrifying girlfriend screamed. "Get it off NOW!"

I know when an order is an order. I yanked the leech off immediately.

It is worth noting, I think, that while I appeared to do an admirable job of keeping a brave, calm and commanding front during the leech episode, I was inwardly as terrified as Aliyah. I've got a thing about my feet, and a thing about bugs, and a thing about snakes, and this whole catastrophe seemed to be a grotesque marriage of the three -- an army of tiny bloodsucking snake-like bugs attacking my feet. I was scared and grossed out.

A few minutes after discovering the leeches, we actually decided to keep going toward the World Peace Pagoda. We didn't know how far it was, but we figured it couldn't be farther than the hour we'd just hiked into the isolated forest. But as soon as we reached a dead end a few minutes later (the whole time, Aliyah continued to pause to examine her feet and freak out every fifteen seconds or so), we realized the smartest course of action was to head back.

We ran. We'd already exercised hard all day. But while we were basically running on nothing but adrenaline and fumes, we were somehow able to race down the mountain at a furious pace. Terror will do that, I suppose. It's a wonder one of us didn't slip and fall. Especially because I spent much of the run leafing through the Lonely Planet to make sure I was well-versed in the art of leech removal.

We stopped a couple times during this twenty-minute run to pluck leeches from our feet (there were still several digging through our shoes) and for Aliyah to worry about the blood on her socks and the constant red drip-drip-drip on the back of my left calf.

Close to the base of the mountain, we ran into three old Nepali women carrying bundles of sticks. We must have been quite a sight -- two terrified, scrambling Americans roaring down the mountain, pausing only to shake and hit our feet.

"Namaste," I said, offering by way of explanation, "Leeches."

As we neared (relative) civilization, and as Aliyah grew more worried over the nearing inevitability of having to actually see the leeches on her feet, I adopted what I'm sure was the grating habit of greeting every Nepali we passed with a cheery "Namaste!"

We quickly crossed a bridge over the dammed lake, hit a road, and found a small store. A man with a colorful fez was sitting outside. I asked him for matches. He gave me a box. I asked for salt. He spooned some into a makeshift paper packet. I threw down 100 Nepali rupees (about $1.50) and told him to keep the change. Then I ran outside, where Aliyah was still freaking out.

Still under the mistaken impression that leeches could tunnel under her flesh, an outcome that Aliyah was half-convinced would require the certain amputation of both her feet, Aliyah buried her face under my baseball cap and cried while I started to remove her shoes and socks. We were sitting on a low concrete platform -- not unlike a stage -- and we quickly drew an audience of perhaps thirty interested Nepalis.

Aliyah peeked out from under the hat as I removed her left shoe and saw three preschool-aged Nepali boys staring at her with confused amazement. She managed a gurgling laugh from beneath a veritable sea of tears.

I took off Aliyah's left sock, which was dotted with blood. There were no leeches on her foot.

"OK," said the man in the hat who had sold me the matches. "You are OK."

I took off Aliyah's right shoe and sock. No leeches there either. Both feet had two or three bloody bites on them, but none of the leeches that had made it to her flesh had stuck around for seconds. They'd fed and bolted.

"You are OK!" said my friend in the hat. "No problem."

And then through a complicated series of gestures and broken phrases, he made it plain that the leeches had bitten Aliyah and then split.

"This happens to all Nepali women one or two times a day," he said in hobbled English.

Aliyah soon stopped crying.

I was waiting for the crowd to disperse before I took my own shoes off, but after a couple of minutes of them waiting and watching, it became clear that wouldn't happen. So, I took off my shoes with much flair and fanfare (even announcing "Tada!" once). One of my shoes had a big wormy leech in it, but otherwise, I too was clean. One of the Nepali women plucked that leech out of my shoe and inspected both of our shoes and socks to make sure they were clear of blood suckers.

My friend in the hat gave us a bag for us to dump our shoes and socks in (we were still far too afraid of the possibility of sneaky hidden leeches to put them back on) and we began the long three-mile walk back to our hotel...barefoot. And laughing the whole time.

A touch of the divine

2008-06-07T16:58:00.004+05:30

Surprise, surprise. The tarot card reader was a fraud.

Giving into Aliyah's guilty curiosity of astrological and occult ruses, I recently purchased a "divination for couple" session with an "expert" in Gurgaon. The "expert" -- we'll call her Bhavana -- "is a popular Tarot reader, rune consultant and also a crystal healer," according to her promotional materials.

"I promise to be on my best behavior," I told Aliyah on the car ride over, stifling a somewhat wicked giggle.

We arrived at Bhavana's apartment, where candles were lit, a pressure cooker was whistling, and a small Mona Lisa print hung framed on the wall. Bhavana was barefoot and wore jeans. Aliyah sat down on the couch, but Bhavana told her to move. The tarot card reader must always face east, she intoned.

We chatted for a few minutes before the session began, and Bhavana's casual conversation began to betray her ignorance. When I mentioned the tough job market we faced back home, she asked, "Is there a slump of some kind?" When I explained that there was, she said something to the effect of "I don't pay attention to such things. I am concerned only with the spiritual, with what the cards tell me."

We were allowed six questions, and Aliyah first inquired about our relationship. Bhavana squinched her eyes tightly and drew a balled fist to her mouth while she drew seven cards on her coffee table. I couldn't make out what they were exactly, though many looked like cartoon royals and monks with unnaturally big bottoms.

"Marriage is not in the near future, nor is it in the far future," Bhavana said importantly. She told us marriage was out of the question before June 2009 (sigh of relief), but good news! The cards said we were free to marry after that.

Bhavana squished her eyes again and hummed a bit while she drew cards for Aliyah's next question -- this one on the health and future of her family members. I took a picture (with flash) of Bhavana while she pulled cards.

"Please don't," the fake fortune teller snapped. Then, without skipping a beat, she angrily turned to Aliyah and said, "Your dad's health is not going to be very good." (That's what we get for taking the fraud's photo. Sorry, Agha.)

Bhavana quickly cooled down and tried to be a bit more passively reassuring, but in the middle of her assessment of Aliyah's mother she turned to me and demanded rudely, "How much did you pay for this experience?" (I booked it through a separate company, so I suppose it was reasonable that she didn't know.)

I told her, and Bhavana continued as if this fiscal blip had not even happened.

Aliyah asked about her job prospects upon her return to the US, and Bhavana pulled a card (with a colorfully gowned sorcerer on it?), which she didn't even look at before saying, "Things are going to be fine. You're going to get something of your choice."

"Phew," Aliyah said.

"Within a year," Bhavana said.

There was a moment of silence.

"What's 11 and 10?" Bhavana said for no reason. "Twenty-two?"

"Um," I said.

"I'm pretty sure 11 and 10 is 22," said the expert.

"It's not," I said. "It's 21."

This aside was never explained. I made a note to myself not to invite Bhavana with us to Las Vegas.

It was soon my turn to pull a card, and Bhavana instructed me to think long and seriously about my question as I selected from her fan of oversized cards. With soap operatic exaggeration, I spent at least ten seconds studying the cards, almost selecting one, pulling back, scratching my chin, hovering over another, before finally pulling one. Bhavana flipped it over. The picture was of a heart with three swords through it.

"Can he pick again?" Aliyah said.

Bhavana gasped.

"You've gone through a lot. My God! Disaster!"

She turned toward me tenderly.

"You've had a really hard life, haven't you?" she said softly.

"Not really," I said. "In fact, it's been relatively easy, I'd say."

"Then you obviously didn't concentrate on your question correctly when you picked a card," she scoffed meanly.

"Um," I said.

Perhaps trying to rescue herself, Bhavana turned to Aliyah.

"Do you have a sister?" Bhavana asked.

"Yes," Aliyah said. "You told me about her health and future ten minutes ago."

"Oh right," Bhavana scrambled. "She's younger than you, right?"

"No," Aliyah said.

"Oh," Bhavana backpedaled, looking at a random card in front of her. "But she is married."

"No," Aliyah said.

"Oh," Bhavana stuttered. "But she is more frank than you."

"Not necessarily," Aliyah said.

Etc.

It was no surprise that Bhavana was a charlatan. But that she was so inept a huckster, well, that was a bit of a shock. I had expected her to at least be skilled in extracting from our conversation and answers nuggets of truth that she could spin into plausible fortune telling. Instead, she couldn't even add 10 and 11 or remember the "fortune" she'd told five minutes earlier.

"Can I interest you in any charm bracelets to protect against danger on your travels?" she asked as we prepared to leave. "I've charged them with protective energy myself."

No thanks, Bhavana. We'll stick with reason.

Gold class

2008-06-03T09:00:00.002+05:30

I felt like a modern day maharaja.

The waiter, dressed in a well-pressed black dress shirt, leaned over our seats and politely offered us champagne flutes of sparkling apple juice. I pressed a button on the side of my heavenly red leather La-Z-Boy and inclined from my totally horizontal 180 degree position to a 150-degree angle that allowed me to sip my juice. Yawning, Aliyah reached her hand out from beneath a red velvet blanket to grab her flute.

Just another day at the movies.

This is a trip to the cinema in style in India. For about $18 (as opposed to $4 for a normal movie ticket), you get one of 32 cushy leather thrones in a VIP theater dubbed "Gold Class." First, there's a private entrance (so maharajas like us don't have to mix with the commoners) that leads to a stylish black and red lounge with an Italian espresso machine, red velvet love seats, a five-star bathroom (with tricolor shoe polisher!) and oil paintings of Marlon Brando and James Dean bathed in soft yellow light. While we waited in the lounge to be let into the theater, a waiter brought us a menu that included many of the usuals (popcorn and pepsi), but also some higher-end items, like litchi iced tea and spaghetti bolognese.

After a few minutes of giggling in the lounge, we headed into the theater and crawled gratefully onto our leather sofa-chairs. We played with the recline-incline buttons. We drank complimentary apple juice from regal glasses and curled up under soft blankets. We pressed the red call button on the table between our chairs and ordered a tub of popcorn the size of an autorickshaw, a soda, and a mint-chocolate shake (that they served in a martini glass).

"I've never been more comfortable in India," Aliyah said.

And that, my friends, is how you get your girlfriend to enjoy an Indiana Jones movie.

Four auto scenes

2008-05-21T13:50:00.004+05:30

Due to budget cuts, the typical five scene format has been reduced to four. Apologies. -BF

1. I'd lost a bet several weeks before, and though Jared left the country before I fulfilled it, I wound up having to a couple weeks ago when the craziest autowallah in our neighborhood was the only driver around one night. His vehicle was nearly full of boxes of god knows what. Dead bodies maybe. Regardless, there was no room for two in the carriage.

Aliyah squeezed in the back next to the boxed corpses. Crazy patted the edge of the driver's seat next to him.

"Do it," Aliyah said.

I got in and put my arm around the automaniac, half my body hanging out of the auto, the other half clinging to the vehicle's interior for dear life as Crazy flew over potholes and sped around sharp curves.

It was actually pretty fun. That is, until the nutty driver started talking to himself/me/no one.

"Whiskey, dinner, Pepsi, whiskey, whiskey," he said in that faraway gravelly voice.

"How you doing up there?" Aliyah said.

"Um," I said in a too-high voice.

2. The woman wore a colorful sari and had teeth browner than her skin. She held a baby in one arm and a fan of magazines in the other. I know the magazines were for sale. I'm not sure about the baby.

"Siiiiiiiir," she said in that hollow, strung out plea that Delhi beggars here are made to memorize without understanding. "Siiiiir."

She tugged on my jeans. I didn't even look at her. She went over to Aliyah's side.

"Siiiiir," the awful beggar said, tugging at Aliyah's pants ("Madam," "Ma'am" and "Miss" are typically not in the panhandling vocabulary here). "Siiiiir."

I said something moderately funny and Aliyah laughed. The light turned green and just as we pulled away, the beggar freed one hand by dropping her magazines and slapped Aliyah in the face.

We were silent, breathless.

"She just slapped me!" Aliyah said.

"Sorry sir," I said.

3. Every day it's the same thing. I leave the house in the early afternoon to go do some writing at the sheesha and coffee cafe, Mocha, in Defence Colony Market. It's a slow and lazy part of the day for the autowallahs. There are typically at least five and as many as fifteen waiting at the stand around the corner from our house.

Sometimes one of them spots me as soon as I shut the front gate at our house -- pretty impressive from 30 yards away (and through a corner hedge and fence). The spotter never plays it cool. He immediately starts running toward me, waving.

"Sir!" he says. "Sir!"

The others immediately perk up on tiptoes like a gang of meerkats. Their eyes open wide and their noses point in my direction as they stand still for a split second before running toward me.

Soon they're all crowding around me, bandying harmonies of "Sir"s back and forth among them. Some will gently grab at my elbow to lead me to their rickshaw.

I feel like the prettiest girl at the prom. And whoever's lucky enough to get picked on any given day, well, I imagine he does too.

4. The autowallah pointed me to the backseat of his vehicle. An old man was already sitting there. I shook my head no.

"You share," the autowallah said. "Thirty rupees."

Thirty rupees was a pretty good price.

"Me first," I demanded.

"OK," said the autowallah.

We drove for about ten minutes and I chatted uncomfortably with the old man about where I was from and if I was married.

We arrived at my destination and I got out and handed the autowallah a 100-rupee note. That's a bit more than US$2.

The autowallah shook his head. "No change," he said, shrugging his shoulders unapologetically.

"How can you not have change?" I said angrily, even though it's pretty common for autowallahs to fail to produce change for even the smallest bills.

"Fine," I grumbled, digging through the coins in my wallet and producing a jingly amalgamation of 27 rupees. I shoved them toward the autowallah.

"Thirty," he said, after taking a long time to count them.

"You don't have change!" I yelled. "So you either get 27 or nothing."

The autowallah considered this for a minute, then reached into his front pocket and removed a two-inch thick wad of bills. He could have made change of several 1,000-rupee notes, not to mention my measly 100.

Then I said some things in a loud voice that would make my mother cringe. And she doesn't cringe easily.

Check it out

2008-05-16T16:53:00.000+05:30

Take a look at Ben's latest book review:

http://feer.com/book-review/2008/may/the-white-tiger

A little confusion

2008-05-07T14:35:00.002+05:30

If you ever need anything from the supermarket, don’t ask Ben.

Ben likes to cook in India (and he makes an excellent chicken curry), but sometimes he gets a little/lot confused about the ingredients. A few weeks ago, he went to our local vegetable market—where all of the produce is unlabeled—with the idea to make a salad to accompany the night’s meal, a thoughtful gesture, really. Our salads here consist of tomatoes, cucumbers and onions. But that particular night it was tomatoes, onions, and raw zucchini. To this day, Ben is convinced there is no difference between the two vegetables.

Another time Ben decided he wanted to spice up the chicken curry with a green chili. He came home with a single piece of okra. I can only imagine what the store owner’s reaction was when he tried to buy the quarter of a cent item.

This morning, I went to the refrigerator for an orange, which was on the week’s grocery list. Instead, I found two melon-sized fruits. “Grapefruit?” I asked. Ben was convinced they were oranges until I showed him the flamingo pink flesh. Ben had one response.

“At least it will make a funny blog.”

Visitor Paths

2008-05-06T13:47:00.003+05:30

You'd be surprised how many people find this blog by googling "nipplectomy."

We have an invisible stat counter buried in this blog, and yesterday Aliyah and I browsed through one of the logs it keeps on the paths visitors take to reach this site. While most visitors are friends and family and arrive via a direct link, strangers take some odd e-routes.

For instance, yesterday someone in Florida googled "fish autopsy" and clicked on a link to our post on the death of Ben Fish. Around the same time, someone in Los Angeles googled "Floating dead fish pictures" and landed in the same place, as did someone in Tucson who actually googled "ben fish." A UK googler looking for "american fish names" found his way to this post on Ben Fish too. And there was the slightly suicidal google search term of "the world seems a little less bright" that brought a visitor from North Carolina news of the death of Ben Fish.

Two days ago, someone in Egypt googled "oily thong" and clicked on this post in which I wear a, well, oily thong. The day before, someone in Baton Rouge got to the same post by googling "trying on my first thong," as did someone in Massachusetts by searching for "wearing my first thong." Oh, and someone in Spain googling "first thong experience," someone in the Canadian Saskatchewan googling "my first thong," and someone in Memphis googling "thong indian." And someone in Connecticut found their way to this blog post by googling "oily massage videos."

Someone in Wilmington, Ohio googled "looking for live in servant" and wound up on our post about our runaway servant. Someone on the east coast of the United States and someone else in Portland recently navigated to our post on the death of Aliyah Fish by googling "aliyah death" and "ALIYAHS DEATH," respectively, which while initially jarring, are probably just misspelled attempts at learning more about the death of the singer Aaliyah.

As for "nipplectomy," in the last week or so that googled word has reeled in visitors to our blog from Florida, California, Denver, Portland, New Jersey, Paris, Berlin (the same visitor twice in three minutes), London, Vienna, Washington DC, the Yukon Territory, and Park City, Utah. Oh, and someone in Ontario got there by searching "nipple amputation."

Departure and Arrival

2008-05-05T09:53:00.002+05:30

Because it's easier than a mass e-mail...

Family and friends,

We've been in India nearly a year, and while it's been a fantastic experience, we've begun to settle on plans for getting the heck out of here. We're leaving our perch in Delhi in mid-June, traveling around Nepal, Kashmir and north India until my one-year India visa expires July 8, then heading to southeast Asia where we'll spend a month or two exploring Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos.

We'll likely be returning to America in mid to late August. Where in America our final destination will be, well, we're not exactly sure. New York is probably most likely, but much depends on where we land jobs. (I hear the US economy is booming and the job market is full of lucrative opportunities. Especially in journalism, right?)

And yes, yes, I know we've been terrible about updating the blog in recent weeks. [Insert a good excuse here.]

Cheers,
Ben

Five More Jared's Visit Scenes

2008-04-17T15:33:00.003+05:30

1. We were walking along a small side street in Colaba laughing about something when an Indian shopkeeper with a bushy mustache caught Jared's eye. He was holding a two-liter bottle of water -- overused to the point of being label-less and tinged with brown -- and staring at the sidewalk with determination.

The Indian took a couple purposeful steps toward the street, started to raise the water bottle, but then quickly shook his head and clutched the bottle almost lovingly to his chest. He turned around, took a couple more steps, studied the ground thoughtfully and nodded. Then, with the sudden erratic violence of Britney Spears, the Indian shopkeeper upended the bottle and shook it radically and indiscriminately over random patches of sidewalk and street. He looked like a mental patient attempting to water the lawn but who, due to furious irrationality, also managed to drench his car, the paper boy and the neighbor's dog.

"Oooooooh," Jared said, as wet Rorschach patterns formed on the sidewalk before us, "so that's where the water goes."

2. Jared was still a bit jet lagged, and we were looking for a bit of wine to help him sleep.

After asking directions to the nearest wine shop from two doormen and a beggar in Colaba, we found ourselves walking down a dark alley spotted with malaria-friendly pools of black water.

"Um," Jared said as we plowed on.

At the end of the alley was an open window and counter, behind which was a small inaccessible wine shop. I smiled at the three gruff Indians behind the counter.

"One bottle of Sula red, please," I said.

One of the workers ambled off his stool with a hint of surliness and walked to the wine rack along the store's back wall. He grabbed a bottle of wine and returned to the counter to hand it to me.

"Hmmm," I said, studying the label. "Zinfandel? No thanks. What else do you have?"

The worker huffed and took the wine back to the shelf. Meanwhile, two small Indian men who smelled as if they'd just bathed in feni slammed exact change on the counter and barked orders in Marathi. One of the shopkeepers handed them two fifths of cheap whiskey.

My guy returned with a bottle of wine.

"Reserve?" I said, reading the label. "No, I don't want this. Bring me a cabernet, or a shiraz, OK?"

The shopkeeper's tired eyes silently called me a fancy boy and he returned to the wine rack. While I waited, a dark-skinned man who smelled like urine and had a huff rag tucked into his back pocket elbowed me aside, dumped a handful of rupee coins on the counter, and received a bottle of vodka without having to place an order at all. A regular.

Finally my guy came back with a bottle of reasonably-priced, Indian-made Shiraz. I squinted and studied the label before smiling.

"See?" I asked the shopkeeper. "Was that so hard?

3. "I think this is rigged," Jared said as he lost another hand of blackjack at the rigged digital blackjack table we were gambling at in Goa.

The casino was in a decent air-conditioned hotel appropriately called Chances, and included a handful of Roulette tables and a bunch of rigged digital games. The blackjack game was a sleek black table with invisible sensors beneath each player's betting area, and several small screens on which a player's "cards" appeared. The dealer stood behind the table and pressed buttons to "deal" the "cards."

A new round began and I was "dealt" an 8 and a 3. The dealer was showing a 4. I doubled down. I was "dealt" a 2. Then the dealer "flipped" her down "card," which was a Jack. Then she "dealt" herself a 7 and everyone lost.

Similar things had happened several times, and while our own experience was not even close to a large enough sample to draw any firm conclusions about the stilted statistics on which this digital game was based, the lack of transparency provided enough circumstantial evidence for me to convict.

"Jesus!" I said, slamming the rigged blackjack table and turning to a man in a suit standing behind the dealer. "Why don't you have a table that uses real cards?

"That is not allowed," the casino official said.

"Well, how do I know this digital game isn't fixed?" I demanded.

"That is also not allowed," the casino official said.

"Seems rigged to me," I said, as I placed my bet for the next rigged hand.

4. "I can't believe you made me wear this," Jared said as he walked into a busy outdoor Saturday night market in Goa wearing a loose-fitting long-sleeved black-and-white shirt with portraits of a passively plaintive Jesus on the chest and both elbows.

"You lost a bet, dude."

"This is a very nice shirt," an Indian woman said to Jared as he passed her stall. "You want to buy bed cover?"

Jared had that afternoon lost a passionately-contested game of Playa (a mashup of Spades and Hearts that Aliyah and I invented on the beach in Mexico last year), and as punishment had to either get a card-sized temporary tattoo of our choosing, or wear for one night the shirt of our choosing. He'd opted for the shirt. We made him wear Jesus, which was not hard to find in Goa, which is full of God-fearing Christians.

"I like very much your shirt," an Indian hawker said to Jared as he strolled with a modicum of embarrassment through the market. "Want to buy another one?" he added, pointing to several identical shirts in his stall.

"No thanks," Jared said. "I think one shirt of this fictional character is plenty."

The guy looked a little hurt.

We kept walking and a hefty Indian woman soon latched onto Jared's Jesus-elbow-patched arm.

"I love this shirt!" she said. "Where did you get it?"

"Bala," Jared said, repeating his chronic mispronunciation of Baga, which is the beach we were staying near.

"Oh yes, Bala," the woman said. "You must have bought it from my friend Maria. She's the only one in Goa who sells that shirt."

"What?" Jared said. "What about that guy? And that one?" he quipped, pointing to two nearby stalls selling his Jesus shirt. The woman shrugged.

"Jesus," Jared said, shaking his head sarcastically.

"Exactly," I said.

5. The three of us were ass to ankles in the back of the autorickshaw, and all wondering why on earth our autowallah had pulled to the curb on this random street.

Motioning with a stubby digit that he would be just one minute, our autowallah started fiddling with the lockbox-cum-seat in the front of his vehicle. After much jingling and fumbling, he pulled a small metal cannister out and smiled.

"Is he going to drink that?" Aliyah said.

"Brake oil," the autowallah said in broken English.

"Don't drink it," Jared said.

The autowallah bent over and generously emptied the contents of his brake oil can into a his green and yellow machine. Then, standing up, he lightly shook the can to make sure it was empty. Satisfied that it was, the autowallah, with absolute carelessness but clear purpose, tossed the empty metal can into the street next to his vehicle.

Jared giggled before I could begin one of my overused rants about how so many Indians seem to keep their homes immaculately clean, no matter how slummy the neighborhood outside, while being so quick, obvious and almost proud to litter in even the nicest public spaces.

"Excuse me," Aliyah said to the autowallah as Jared kept giggling. "I think you dropped your can."

The autowallah said nothing and started his vehicle.

"Oh," Jared said, looking at the garbage in the street. "So that's where the brake oil goes."

Five Jared's Visit Scenes

2008-04-14T10:50:00.003+05:30

1. Jared's lips curled as he stared at the brown-gray smear and seeped-in grime on his pillow at our budget guest house in Bombay.

"Gross," he said, inching away from his bed.

"What?" I said, flopping down on my own nasty pillow and allowing any number of invisible disease agents to commence exploration of my body. "They have pillow cases."

"That don't look washed."

"Yeah."

Jared went to the dresser and took out a short-sleeve blue polo shirt he'd worn all day and had hung up to air out. He brought it to the bed and placed it delicately over his pillow, smiling proudly at this new line of defense.

"I'd rather sleep on a shirt soaked in Sandrew sweat than that," he said, pointing at his filthy pillow.

2. Jared and Aliyah were in a rolling race.

It had been a skittishly-played, back-and-forth game of backgammon -- a new favorite hobby of ours that we picked up after Sawyer asked Locke on a recent episode of Lost to play backgammon and Aliyah said, "Backgammon is fun."

Now, weeks later, in the final game of our round robin tournament, Aliyah and Jared were pinning all to chance. No opportunities to bounce opposing pieces to the bar remained. It was all about who got the highest rolls.

The stakes were high. The loser would have to yell curses -- "May you have 1,000 daughters!" -- at disagreeable autorickshaw drivers for the rest of the week.

Aliyah shut her eyes and blew on the dice. 1 and 2. She shook her head.

Jared rolled. 4 and 6.

"Uh oh," I said from the sidelines.

Aliyah rolled again: 3 and 1. Jared: 3 and 6. He was, by now, almost assured a victory.

Aliyah looked up at our ceiling and held the dice like an offering.

"God!" she cried. "If you exist! I need doubles! If you exist, give me doubles!"

Taking a deep breath, Aliyah rolled. 1 and 2.

"Damn it," she yelled.

"I knew it," clucked the peanut gallery.

3. The slowly roasting chicken outside the Iranian-Lebanese restaurant on Colaba Causeway had been tempting me for days. The joint didn't appear from the outside to be the paragon of class or cleanliness, but on our last day in Bombay I convinced Jared that we should eat lunch there.

Our all-smiles waiter steered me toward the chicken shwarma platter, and Jar opted for the easier-on-his-stomach Mushroom Mania sandwich. The food arrived quickly, and I went to town slapping together sandwich rolls full of chicken, french fries, pickled beets and creamy garlic sauce.

It was about halfway through lunch that I picked up a purple stick of pickled beet and saw something brown at its tip. I looked closer. A dead cockroach. Nearly an inch long. Buried in a plate of raw vegetables I'd been devouring. In India.

After our requisite "Yuck"s and "Gross"s, I politely signaled the waiter, who apologized sheepishly and replaced the offending beet dish.

Then I ate everything else on my plate, not to mention everything Jared left on his.

The bill came, and it did not, as many Indian restaurants do, include a compulsory tip. As we waited for our still-all-smiles waiter to bring change, we debated a gratuity.

"Are you kidding?" Jared said. "No. No. No. In America, you would eat for free."

"Right."

The waiter brought our change. And then he didn't leave. At first he pretended to tidy up our table, but then he dropped this pretense and just hovered.

I took every rupee out of the leather bill book and put them in my wallet.

I stood up and looked at our still-hovering-but-no-longer-all-smiles waiter. He nearly snarled and narrowed his eyes with unmitigated disgust.

I paused, hurt, before quickly remembering that I too had been aggrieved.

"You served me a dead bug," I said to the waiter who had served me a dead bug.

He continued to look at me with more revulsion than I had shown at the sight of the cockroach in my lunch.

4. The monk looked like Hayden Christensen.

Jared was busy haggling with a t-shirt vendor on Colaba Causeway in Bombay when a white skinned monk in orange robes who had white paint smeared where a unibrow bridge might otherwise have been tapped me on the shoulder.

"Are you Canadian or American?" said the Buddhist Anakin Skywalker.

"American," I said.

The gora monk smiled and handed me a small brochure for a tour led by monks that included stops at a house shaped like a shoe and a vegetarian restaurant that serves some sort of holy seaweed.

"No thanks," I said, studying Anakin evermore skeptically. "Where are you from, anyway?"

"Canada," said the Canadian monk.

I narrowed my eyes and gave his orange robes a slow and obvious appraisal.

"You sure don't look Canadian."

Anakin shrugged. "I've lived in India for almost a year," he said.

"So have I," I laughed. "But I don't look like you."

5. "How many fingers do you have?" Jared said to the old woman who looked like an old man who was violently hacking apart coconuts with a frightening machete in front of ZanziBar -- our preferred beachfront watering hole in Goa.

The old woman let Jared's provocation pass -- possibly because she spoke no English -- and eventually overcharged him for no fewer than three coconuts. One to snack on, and two stuffed with straws through which coconut milk could be sucked.

Jared returned to our table, red-faced and giggling, and immediately ordered a shot of rum. The waiter quickly brought him a not-quite-clean glass with at least two ounces of noxious liquor in it.

Jared looked at the rum in his glass and then looked at the coconut, which had only a small hole on top, and which appeared very nearly full.

"Now," Jared said, "the question is, how do I get this" -- and he held up the rum -- "in here" -- he pointed to the coconut.

I love to pontificate, particularly when solicited, so I was very quick to reply. But Jared was faster.

No sooner had he smacked a tipsy period on his last sentence had Jared upended the glass of rum into his coconut. It was as if instead of asking how he might best transfer one of the liquids into a second container, he had simply said, "Now I am going to hastily transfer one of these liquids into a second container."

Half of the dark rum either missed the small hole entirely (and sloshed onto the table and Jared's lap) or quickly caused the coconut's liquid content to exceed capacity (thus spilling onto the table and Jared's lap).

"Oh man," Jared said. "My leg is covered in rum."

Then he took a sip from his coconut and smiled.

"Pretty good though," he said.

Urgent Business

2008-04-10T20:59:00.003+05:30

I had told the same lie so many times in the last two hours I was starting to believe it.

"I have urgent business in Bombay," I said, looking at my watch with aggressive annoyance. "And this delay is unacceptable."

"Now," I continued, poking my finger in the chest of Go Air's backpedaling customer service representative, "when will my plane take off?"

Of course, there was no "urgent business" -- other than meeting Aliyah in Bombay sooner rather than later. And for some reason, no one seemed to question exactly what sort of professional business the gora with a ratty t-shirt and too much red hair poking out from his backwards baseball cap might actually have that was so pressing.

Still, as my Delhi-Bombay flight was delayed, delayed, and then delayed some more, I found my "I'm a busy businessman" story giving me a lot of leverage, and I used it.

Eventually the Go Air customer service rep went into hiding, and the waiting passengers in Delhi's lousy domestic terminal became increasingly restless. Feet tapped. Eyes rolled. Foreheads tightened. Our plane was two hours late -- with no satisfying explanation from Go Air -- and we were mad.

Nearly an hour after the customer service rep had disappeared, I noticed a flash of neon green out of the corner of my eye -- the customer service rep's shirt. I bounced out of my seat and charged forward.

"This is outrageous!" I nearly yelled, shaking my fist above my head. "Where is our plane?"

"I'm sorry, sir. It was an unavoidable delay."

"When will I get to Bombay? I have urgent business!" I said, and actually believed myself.

"Well, if the plane arrives soon, and if we board you all quickly--"

"If!" I scoffed meanly. "I don't care about if! I have urgent business in Bombay! When will you get me there?"

As the customer service rep stumbled over his nervous answer -- and as I silently contemplated how the necessity of pushy persistence to get almost anything done in India had turned me into a real jerk -- I looked behind me and almost fell over. There was a crowd of nearly twenty Indian males -- teens, middle-aged father types, seniors, and more! -- gathered around and behind me. Their faces were angry and self-righteous, and seemed to delight in seeing the customer service rep squirm. They were the closest thing to a mob that I've been a part of in India. And apparently I was their leader.

A young man with a big smile made up of irregularly shaped quadrilaterals with too much space between them stepped up next to me and spat at the customer service rep: "We have urgent business in Bombay!"

"Yeah!" several men chimed in. At least one more added an emphatic "Urgent business!"

"The plane had technical problems," the customer service rep nearly begged. "Technical problems!"

"Technical problems my foot!" said my weird-toothed sidekick, elbowing me in search of chummy approval.

Considering for the first time the possibility that I didn't want them to rush through fixing a technical problem on a plane I was about to board in India, and also realizing that I'm nicer than this, I smiled uncomfortably and figured it was time for this gora to resign as protest leader and just sit down and wait patiently for my flight in a way that wouldn't embarrass my mother.

Aliyah Shahid, reporting from Bombay

2008-03-29T21:03:00.001+05:30

Here's another one. Check it out here.

Video games on video

2008-03-29T10:03:00.001+05:30

Two more TV pieces by Aliyah: here and here.

Holy Holi!

2008-03-25T12:04:00.003+05:30

The rainbow motorcycle gangs sped through Delhi's streets with a strange mixture of tough guy malice in their eyes and bright Easter egg pigmentation on their faces.

There were three, sometimes four, to a motorcycle, packed too tightly against each other, each of them looking for victims with a fierce devotion understandable in a 14-year-old trickster on Halloween, but downright puzzling in these 25-year-old Indian professionals covered in bright colors.

This was Holi, India's festival of colors, a day on which millions of people purchase packets of bright chemical powders and industrial strength dyes, which they then proceed to toss, rub, smear and shoot onto their friends, family, and, most importantly, complete strangers.

The significance of the holiday is still something of a mystery to me, even after diligent Wikipedia study. As best I can tell, a demon king was made immortal by some other make-believe deity, grew arrogant, declared war on heaven and earth, and demanded that all worship no other god but him. The nerve.

The demon king's son defied his father and continued to pray to Vishnu. Dad tried to kill his son. Several times. He kept failing. There may have been some magic involved in his son's odds-defying escapes. So demon dad ordered his boy to sit in a pyre on the lap of his sister Holika, who had a magic shawl that could not be burned. The fire started. The shawl jumped providentially from Holika's shoulders to her brother's. He survived, she burned to death. Holika's death by fire is celebrated as Holi.

What? I know.

Generally, we found there to be two sorts of Holi practitioners. Members of the first group were kind and friendly. They would approach, smiling, their white teeth the only unblemished part of a face that was a maroon-pink smear. Tipping their head as a means of asking permission, this Holi celebrator would then gently rub a colorful powder on my forehead, ask me to do the same, and then embrace me while saying "Happy Holi."

And then there were the rainbow warriors, who seemed to view the holiday as an excuse to indulge in vacant machismo, an invitation to throw anything and everything at anyone and everyone.

We encountered our cruelest example of such a dope when, already splotched with pink and green, Aliyah and I were in a bicycle rickshaw on our way to lunch. Our colorful faces and clothes had drawn honks and smiles from many passing cars, and one family in a sedan had even slowed to throw a water balloon at us (it landed unbroken in my lap, so Aliyah threw it back at them). All was in good fun.

And then we rounded a corner, only to see a beat-up gold car coming at us too fast, and head-on. There was only one person in the car, and as he pulled even with us, he leaned out his window, narrowed his eyes, snarled like an angry dog, and threw an egg at us as hard as he could.

"Yuck," Aliyah said.

"I hope we don't get salmonella," I said, picking bits of gooey eggshell off each of us.

Even our rickshaw driver felt bad for us, and recognized the violent hurling of a hard projectile full of colorless (and possibly-diseased) goo as antithetical to the spirit of the holiday. He handed me an oily rag to clean with.

But in the end, the friendly smearers certainly outnumbered the rainbow motorcycle gangs and egg-chucking thugs. After all, violence is no way to celebrate a holiday that commemorates with festive colors the burning of an innocent woman.

You can check out the photos here.

It's Vogue!

2008-03-10T09:21:00.002+05:30

It's been 36 hours since we waded knee deep in the in the absurdly luxuriant waters of glitterati life, and I'm still a little queasy.

We'd scored an invite to a ritzy party thrown by Vogue and Audi celebrating the magazine's "love affair with India" at a swank five-star hotel in Delhi. So we put on our Saturday best (that's a button-down shirt and jeans for me), had an autorickshaw drop us at the hotel's back entrance (tuk-tuks aren't allowed to use the fancy front), and got ready to live large.

To get into the party, we had to walk across a red carpet and get passed a polystyrene woman armed with a brilliant smile and a guest list. She looked at my natty beard, my tangled hair, my ridiculous Thai street market shoes, and -- perhaps assuming I was some sort of artist (how else would I have such a hot girlfriend?) -- let us in.

Inside, the setup was fantastic. One room held a sharply arranged frameless photo exhibit of dozens of compelling photographs with Indian themes that had run in Vogue over the last 70 years. Indian butlers circled with trays of champagne flutes. We stayed in this room just long enough to drink a couple and eavesdrop on several catty men commenting on the "horrid" outfits of many of the young models in the photographs.

The next room: bonanza! A huge spread of first-rate sushi. All-you-can-eat sushi. And I did. Indian butlers circling with trays of toothpicks and appetizers, the best easily being the shrimp tempura that were each the size of a small lobster.

After I ate my first of four plates of raw fish, we hit the bar.

"Can I get a martini?" I asked the bow-tied bartender.

"Sorry," he said genuinely, shaking his head. "All I have is red and white wine, this," and here he held up a bottle of Belvedere vodka, "or this," and he held up a bottle of Chivas Regal.

"I'll take a scotch."

We strolled the room laughing. I felt like I was in a living, breathing modern art exhibit. An Indian man with dyed blond hair was wearing a leather jacket, tight leather pants and leather boots. A white woman showing too much leg for her age wore a floppy white Mad Hatter cap as she flirted with a Michael Stipe lookalike. In a corner, a senior leader of a national political party best known for Hindu nationalism chatted with a woman half his age while a bodyguard in full camouflage and shiny black boots held a machine gun beside him.

We ate and drank and laughed for awhile, but soon we began to feel really bad, if not outright disgusted. The whole thing was so phony. Plus, with hundreds of millions of people living in abject poverty in this country, hundreds of thousands of them in this city, and thousands of them within a strong stone's throw of this party -- well, it seemed pretty awful to wash down unnecessary bites of imported octopus with fancy scotch. We left.

I woke up in the middle of the night with a tumultuous tummy and vomited. I'd like to think that it was the physical embodiment of my moral reprehension, a physiological rejection of the useless glamor I had soaked in.

Really, it was probably just the raw fish and scotch.

An open letter to the state of Ohio

2008-03-05T12:35:00.002+05:30

Dear Ohio,

We've had some good times together. The batting cages in Toledo. My cousin's basement in Cleveland. That time I changed planes in Columbus. It's been fun. We've shared a lot. But I think we need to talk.

You see, Ohio, you keep disappointing me. I didn't pay much attention to your betrayal in 2000 -- I was too busy yelling at your unfortunately-phallic-shaped cousin in the south. You pretty much got a free pass.

Four years went by, and I thought we'd be OK. Surely, I thought, you'd learned from your mistake. You'd lost hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs -- more, I've read, than you lost during the Great Depression. You were poor and sick -- dying, by some accounts. But I believed in you. I knew you'd taken some time and gotten in touch with who you really are. I was sure you'd turn things around.

And then you went ahead and got behind W. Again. Sure, there was probably some cheating. But you should have known better.

Today was almost the last straw, Ohio. Now I know Hillary Clinton is no George Bush. And despite the hyperventilated parsing I eagerly watch each day on CNN, I know that her political platform is nearly identical to that of the candidate I'm so enamored with.

No, Ohio, your latest mistake is neither as ludicrous nor as calamitous as your errors in the recent past. But it hurts just as bad.

Now you may be thinking, Ohio, that I'm being unfair. After all, plenty of your pals have been just as foolish as you. Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma -- they almost always pick wrong!

Ah, but that's part of your problem, Ohio, always shifting the blame to someone else. I expect better from you. Those other states, they just don't know any better. But you should.

Really, Ohio, I just don't know what to do with you. If you hadn't given me Aliyah (who I'm fairly certain is the smartest among your native born), I think you and I would have to call it quits.

I'm not ready to break it off quite yet, Ohio, but I'm really hoping you'll do some serious thinking about who you are. Against my better judgment, I'm giving you another chance in November. Don't let me down. Because I really don't want there to be any weirdness when I see you at Christmas.

Best,
Ben

Say Cheese

2008-03-05T10:30:00.001+05:30

Check out Aliyah's latest TV piece.

We're not in Kansas anymore

2008-03-02T11:38:00.004+05:30

I felt like the Wizard of Oz.

We'd just spent a half hour flying in a hot air balloon several hundred feet above verdant farms, barking dogs and the occasional waving villager in Haryana, several miles south of Gurgaon. Our balloon cast a shadow on the square green grids beneath us, and we watched from above as animals that looked like deer but weren't seemed to swim through the farms below.

"It looks like Ohio," Aliyah said.

And OK, I admit it. Flying 500 hundred feet above the ground in a delicate basket carrying two meter-high metal cannisters full of liquefied natural gas just below a nylon balloon entrapping 77,000 cubic feet of 212-degree air -- it might not have been the smartest thing we've ever done. But it sure was fun.

The private balloon ride was part of what seems to be a never-ending series of birthday gifts to me from Aliyah. The balloon trip was operated by a company called Exciting Lives that also traffics in chocolate spa treatments in Bangalore.

The balloon ride was fantastic, but the best was our Oz moment at the end. Our pilot, Captain Jack, had just put us down in a barren brown field that was a little too close to a string of giant power lines (Don't worry -- this being India, it's unlikely electricity was running through them).

Our basket hit the ground and tipped forward, though not steeply enough to toss us out. We threw our weight to the other side, and the basket was evenly grounded.

"Wow," Aliyah said.

I looked across the field and saw two villagers hurrying toward our balloon. One had a colorful scarf wrapped around his head. We smiled and waved.

Then we turned around. Eight more villagers were coming from the opposite direction. I turned a bit to the right and saw a third group moving toward us. Aliyah tapped my shoulder. I turned around and she pointed to a half dozen Indians emerging Field of Dreams-style from a tight wall of brown stalks about 50 feet away.

"They're coming out of the weeds!" I said.

Within seconds there were 40 villagers huddled tightly around our balloon. Captain Jack wouldn't let us get out of the basket because he said our weight was holding it on the ground, so we stayed inside. The villagers stared at us in awe. I think they thought Aliyah was God, and I might have agreed with them, were it not for the indisputable fact that Aliyah exists. But the farmers sure were impressed. I felt like I was the main attraction in a zoo exhibit of some strange future. The villagers were all incredibly nice, but they were also quite stare-y.

As the crowd closed in tighter, Captain Jack pulled a metal lever and a 15-foot jet of flame exploded into the balloon. At least a half dozen villagers literally ran for their lives.

I pulled my camera from my pocket and started taking photos. I showed each photo to the villagers using the screen on the back of my camera. They were duly amazed. And rightly so! I had just dropped out of the sky and had a magic silver box that perfectly captured their likeness. I am Ben, the Wonderful Wizard of India.

After about ten minutes of gawking, the car that had trailed the balloon finally caught up with us, and the Exciting Lives guy pushed through the crowd to get to our balloon.

"So sorry we took so long," he said. "We usually try to beat you here so the villagers don't crowd like this."

"Are you kidding?" Aliyah said. "This was the best part."

American Idol, Idol America

2008-03-01T17:41:00.002+05:30

“Hurry up Ben. You’re going to miss American Idol!”

Ben came running out of the bathroom, his hair still soaked. He was just in time to see Ryan Seacrest’s smiling face as the host announced the night’s remaining contestants. “Phew, that was close,” he said.

“It’s a great day to be alive,” I added.

We’ve both become desperate when it comes to watching television in India. Because American TV shows are so limited here, we’ll watch anything we can get. We pop popcorn for My Wife & Kids, we sing along to the theme song for Friends, and we jump up and down when American Inventor or Hope & Faith is on. We even download episodes of American Idol that we may have missed during the week. And no, I’m not proud to admit it.

I think our standards have lowered because of the slim pickings. For example, we went and saw American Gangster in the theater last weekend (I didn’t know what the movie was about, only that it had the word ‘American’ in it). We thought it was the best movie ever. But when we asked our friends and family about it, they merely replied that “it was just okay.” Just okay? How about the best movie of my life?

I just hope I can distinguish what’s really good and what’s not when I come back.

Hindi Fiddler

2008-02-25T12:13:00.000+05:30

Check out my story in The Forward about a Hindi version of Fiddler on the Roof.

Red-handed

2008-02-22T10:22:00.004+05:30

He begged me not to tell, but I told anyway.

Aliyah was out for a morning run when our newest servant (after Shukti's return last week from a long, muddily-explained absence, we have two servants), knocked on the door. The 12-year-old boy handed me the three newspapers we subscribe to. Then he held up a straw broom.

"Cleaning?"

I nodded, motioned him inside, and walked back to my desk. On the way, I noticed (with a minimum of consciousness) that my wallet was sitting on top of a chest of drawers in our living room.

The boy started taking out the trash and I got back to work. I padded away at the keys and the boy piled dirty clothes on the couch. Then, hunchbacked, he started sweeping.

I was writing a complicated story for the law magazine about rules for foreign investment in India's retail market, and, in between cluttered thoughts, I took a deep distracted breath and looked up. My wallet was no longer sitting on the chest of drawers.

I must have made some kind of a noise. Because the boy's wide-open eyes peeked over the top of the couch and met mine. He tried to bob his head casually, but he looked scared. Then he ducked behind the couch again. He was about seven feet away from me, a wobbly brown couch the only thing preventing me from seeing what he was doing.

I sat still for a few seconds and wondered if I could have made a mistake. In the meantime, I heard paper rustling behind the couch. I got up and walked behind the boy. He was crouched forward on the ground, dirty sweepings at his feet, my open wallet in his hand.

I knew exactly how much money was supposed to be in my wallet because Aliyah had, just an hour earlier, declared that I was rich after she borrowed 100 rupees from my wallet. So I had counted the bills inside (there was 800 rupees, about $20) and announced that I was definitely not rich.

Now, shaking, the boy handed me my wallet. The correct amount of money was inside. I wondered again if I might have made a mistake.

Then the boy incriminated himself. He began blubbering in Hindi. He bowed low on the ground and pressed his forehead onto the tops of my bare feet, his small hands tightly gripping my ankles. I didn't understand the words he said, but the message was clear. He was begging.

Still a bit shocked (We liked this boy! We had given him extra money and sweets! We were the liberal Americans who had treated kindly and respectfully a boy unfairly born into servitude! What the hell sort of repayment was this for our self-righteous benevolence?), I pulled the boy up. His cheeks quivered and his eyes were afraid. He pawed at my shirt and rattled on in apologetic Hindi. His little voice choked as he made clear with pantomimes that he would be beaten if I told. I remain confident that our landlords are not the sort of people who would beat a servant for any reason, but the prospect still unnerved me.

The uncomfortable begging continued, and I didn't say much. I didn't know how to react. Finally, I told the boy to leave. He stood in the doorway for a moment, silently pleading. Then he left.

I started thinking, and remembered that twice in the last two weeks I'd looked in my wallet and found a sum lower than I expected. Nothing much, maybe 500 rupees (less than $13) each time. Both times I had fleetingly considered theft, but had quickly chalked up each instance to me having had too much to drink the night before and simply losing count. I was no longer so sure.

Aliyah returned a few minutes later. "We have a problem," I said.

Obviously, we didn't want this poor boy to be punished too harshly or kicked out of our landlord's house. His life sucks enough as it is, and we have always prided ourselves on trying to treat everyone, but particularly those in lower castes who are unfairly persecuted here, with respect, and on trying to make the lives of people like this boy a little better. The last thing we wanted was to contribute to making this boy's life even harder and lousier than it already is.

Well, the second-to-last thing, I guess. Because it turns out that when it comes down to it, the last thing we want is for a proven thief -- no matter how young or downtrodden he may be -- to have ready access to our home. We realized we'd never feel comfortable leaving the house again unless we told our landlords what had happened.

They were understanding and concerned. They swore up and down that he'd never be allowed in our house again and never be allowed anywhere near a key to our house (which the servants must retrieve from and return to Mrs. Aggarwal when it's time to clean and Aliyah and I aren't here). Mr. Aggarwal let slip that there's a debate in his family about whether to keep Shukti or the thief-child. Mr. Aggarwal said he's for Shukti, even though Mrs. Aggarwal prefers the boy burglar because he's a better cook. I put in my pitch for Shukti.

Shukti came and cleaned our house while I wrote this. He's done a helluva good job since he returned last week. He's been doing it all -- scrubbing the bathroom, washing the dishes, and even scraping the grime out of the inside of the garbage can in our kitchen. Bonanza!

I don't know what will happen to the poor little crook, nor do I know what I hope will happen to him. I'm not really angry at him for stealing a few bucks from me -- inarguably, he needs it more than me. But I do begrudge him putting me in a situation where I was forced to break the code of the schoolyard.

Aliyah Shahid: Televised

2008-02-20T17:38:00.001+05:30

Check it out!

Take my fish, please

2008-02-12T14:01:00.000+05:30

I took the fish even though I didn't want to.

I was standing with Aliyah and a handful of her colleagues on an artificial lawn at the Delhi Flying Club, where her friend and coworker Souveek was getting married. The venue was lavishly decorated with colorful floral arrangements and abundantly staffed with bow-tie-wearing waiters. One came up to us holding a silver tray piled with fried fish.

"Fish, sir?" he asked me.

"No thank you," I said, shaking my palm at him. I try to avoid seafood in New Delhi, this being a landlocked city in India.

The waiter ignored me. He stuck two toothpicks into a crunchy piece of fish. Then he drizzled it with white sauce. Then he pushed it toward me.

"No thanks," I said.

The waiter opened his eyes wider and thrust the fish closer to me.

"No thanks," I said again.

"Take the fish," the waiter said.

"Ummm, no thank you," I tried.

"Take the fish," the waiter said again.

I took the fish. And ate it. It was pretty good.

Over the course of the evening, this same waiter followed Aliyah and I everywhere. I was munching on naan near the chicken tikka station when he tapped me on the shoulder.

"Chicken seekh kebab?" he asked.

"No thanks," I said.

"Orange juice?"

"No thanks."

"Coke? Water? Tea?"

"No."

Fifteen minutes passed. We were eating syrupy desserts. The waiter's head popped up behind Aliyah's shoulder.

"Roti?"

"No," Aliyah said. "We're eating dessert."

Two minutes later the waiter came back with a plate of roti, which we declined.

Later, we were watching the end of the hours-long marriage ceremony. I was squeezed behind several video-camera-wielding Indians in a tight space next to the seated couple. About ten feet away, I saw our waiter elbowing his way passed grandmothers in saris and climbing over a number of small children. He finally clawed his way through the crowd to me.

"Coffee?" he said breathlessly.

"No," I said.

"OK," the waiter said. Then he added hopefully, "Tip?"

Nipplectomy

2008-02-11T15:36:00.000+05:30

I have two nipples now.

I used to make all kinds of third nipple jokes as a teenager before I knew I had one. I don't remember exactly how I realized it, but I think it was either at the beach or a pool that I made a mean third nipple joke directed at someone who didn't have one, only to see that person point out that the small mole below my right man-breast sure looked a heck of a lot like a third nipple.

Over the next few years, I continued to make third nipple jokes, but included the odd brag that I had one. I stopped doing that after someone with a gigantic third nipple asked to see mine and laughed at how small it was.

During my twenties, I rarely made third nipple jokes. But in inverse proportion to the number of jokes I told on the subject, my third nipple grew. And grew. And grew.

It got to be big enough that I worried it might be cancerous. So when I was in graduate school in New York, I went to a doctor. She was rude and said it would cost at least several hundred dollars to get the third nipple removed. "Cancer, shmancer," I thought, and walked out of her office.

Fast forward to India. Cheap medical care. Foreign trained doctors. A lot of time on my hands. That's a recipe for a nipplectomy.

Just hours after I'd called to make an appointment this morning, I found myself lying topless on an examining table in front of the UK-trained Dr. Malik. She poked a needle full of local anesthetic into my chest. It hurt, and my face showed it.

"Don't worry," Dr. Malik said. "This is the worst part."

That wasn't really true.

As soon as the anesthesia set in, Dr. Malik set to work with a small metal blade. I shut my eyes. I had the weird sensation of feeling her painlessly slice into my torso. She kept at it for a good ten to fifteen minutes. She was a careful cutter, but so slow.

"Open your eyes," she finally said. I did. The fingers on her latex gloves were spotted with blood. She was holding my third nipple about eight inches from my face.

She turned it from side to side so I could examine it. There was a cone of subcutaneous fat and other tissue attached to the bottom. She said she'd cut that off to make sure my third nipple didn't grow back.

I started feeling sick looking at my amputated nipple so I looked away, but not before I saw Dr. Malik toss my nipple in a metal dish and hand it to a nurse (who she called "sister") so it could be taken for a biopsy.

Then Dr. Malik set to work stitching me up. Two internal sutures, five on the outside. The only problem was that by the time she got to external stitch #3, the local anesthetic was beginning to wear off. I would have paid more for another dose of anesthesia.

Which brings us to cost. This whole outpatient procedure (and the biopsy) cost less than $100. We should outsource American healthcare to India.

So now I've got a stitched-up hole in my chest where an extra nipple used to be. Decades from now, I'm going to sit back in a rocking chair and say in my most wistful Isak Dinesen voice, "I got a nipple removed in India."

I bet my parents are freaking out reading this.

Bizarro India

2008-02-07T17:10:00.000+05:30

I was sure I was dreaming.

I had prepared myself for several hours of Indian frustration. I had to mail a letter. And get extra visa pages added to my passport. This would be not be easy -- maybe an all-day affair. I put four newspapers and Madame Bovary in my backpack and set out for the post office down the street.

I started shaking my head angrily before I even opened the post office's doors. I was sure there would be an unruly, haphazard queue inside whose unspoken rules of common courtesy were abided by fewer than half the people waiting.

But there wasn't a queue. There were four postal employees sitting at the counter behind a glass wall. Three of them weren't helping anybody.

Blinking in confusion, I walked up to the counter and addressed a female worker. "I need to send a letter to America," I said, expecting her to tell me that she couldn't do that in this office, but that if I filled out a form in triplicate, provided six copies of my passport photo, waited three days, drove across town, and donated a kidney, I might be able to mail the letter.

"Regular, registered or speed post?" she said.

"What?" I said. She repeated herself.

"Um, can I do registered and speed post?" I asked. She nodded.

"But that's probably really expensive, right?" I wondered, searching for the bummer of a but that's ever-present in India.

"Thirty rupees," she said. About eighty cents.

I mailed the letter. The woman printed off a receipt with a tracking number. A tracking number! I was in awe, and left the post office three minutes after I'd arrived.

Five adorable puppies were playing outside. One looked like a baby Tonka.

"Wow," I said.

I met Aliyah for lunch. Afterward, I steeled myself again for what would certainly be an exasperating experience at the U.S. Embassy.

Upon arrival, I saw a winding line outside -- perhaps 30 deep and three wide -- and I sighed with familiar resignation.

I signed in at a security desk (where the guards asked if I spoke Hindi, I told them I spoke some, and then they immediately proved my claim false by saying something in simple Hindi that I was totally unable to understand), and then got searched. One of the security guards, still chuckling, directed me to a sign that said "Line 5: American Citizen Services."

I went to the end of the outdoor line and stood behind a short Indian man with a silver beard. There were dozens of people in front of me. I stood there for a minute. The man in front of me kept looking at me, confused. Then he stepped to one side and gestured for me to walk passed him. I turned to a uniformed queue monitor and asked with my eyes what I should do.

"Go inside," said the queue monitor.

"B-b-b-ut the queue," I said.

"Not for you. Inside."

Feeling guilty and a little embarrassed, I walked passed a whole load of Indians and went inside. I got searched again. Then I was led to a crowded waiting room packed with about 50 anxious Indians. "Here it is," I thought, and began looking for a chair.

I hadn't even taken Madame Bovary out of my bag when a man in a uniform came up to me. He led me around the pack of waiting Indians and into a small, comfortable office at the end of the hall.

A woman with an American accent was behind the counter. There was no line. She added 24 extra pages to my passport with no hassle and didn't charge me a cent. When I left the embassy, I immediately caught a rickshaw, and the autowallah didn't try to overcharge me (I'm a white guy leaving the American Embassy! Is there an easier target for minor financial exploitation?).

I started feeling really eerie. What the hell was going on?

I'm sure things will be back to normal soon. I'll probably wake up at five-something a.m. tomorrow to the sound of booming fireworks and a fatuous holy man chanting the neighborhood's wake up call while a rat crawls into our bed and monkeys go through our trash outside. Oh, and somewhere in there I'll get tricked into getting naked in front of a male masseuse.

Now that's the India I know.

Super Blog

2008-02-04T08:43:00.000+05:30

I woke up at 4:30 this morning to watch the Super Bowl. It was totally worth it.

The only bummer was that the station that broadcast the game on Indian satellite TV didn't pick up the American commercials. Instead, I saw dozens of lame ads for cricket tournaments, Wrestlemania, an Indian life insurance company and the Dubai Horse Racing Carnival.

But what a game! Even though I hate Eli Manning (his snubbing of San Diego still rankles me), I admit that he played like a champ late in the game. And his spectacular play on that crucial pass to David Tyree on the last drive was legendary.

Aliyah woke up around 8 -- in time for the game's last few minutes. "What about the other Manning?" she said once it became clear the Giants would win. "Has he ever won a Super Bowl?"

"Yeah, Peyton won last year."

"Wow," Aliyah said. "That's so cool. That would be like if you won the Super Bowl one year and Aaron won it the next year."

What a game.

A servant disappeared

2008-02-02T11:12:00.000+05:30

Shakti left without even saying goodbye.

He told our landlord he was going to go visit his family in West Bengal. He said that the government was about to raze his parents' small village home, and that he needed to go there -- armed with cash -- to stop it. Our landlord gave Shakti several hundred dollars. Shakti said he'd call when he arrived at his parents' home.

That was about a month ago. He still hasn't called. A few days after Shakti left, our landlord realized he'd taken every single thing he owned with him.

Shakti was the live-in servant of the family we rent from (as you may recall, we live in a small house on the roof of their large home). The Aggarwals took Shakti in after a nail pierced his eye on a construction site they were managing. He cleaned house, fixed things with Mr. Aggarwal, walked and played with Ryan the dog, looked after Abhishek's 2-year-old son, and watched a lot of TV. Mrs. Aggarwal said he was as close to being a member of their family as a servant can be. He'd been here about two years when he did the old skedaddle.

Shakti claimed to be 17, though I think he was about 25. He's the sort of Indian whose age is difficult to discern -- his slight body looking prepubescent, with his rugged skin, legitimate mustache and winning smile giving a more adult appearance.

Shakti cleaned our house every other day. He took out the trash. He got on his hands and knees and scrubbed our tile floor with a wet rag. Sometimes he transformed our messy pile of shoes into an orderly line. A few times, he dumped the ash from our incense burner into the garbage. When the internet went down, he fixed it. When our water stopped running, he fixed that too. Shakti did a good job, and we liked him.

Housecleaning is included in the rent we pay. But a few times, we gave Shakti a bit of extra money. Fifty rupees when he shouldered my 70-pound duffel bag up four flights of stairs when we first moved in. Ten rupees when I felt guilty that he was wiping the floor around my feet while I sat at my desk and tapped away at my laptop. It always seemed to make Shakti a bit uncomfortable when I gave him money, so I stopped several months ago.

Every Sunday afternoon, Shakti took a semi-clothed shower using the trickling tap at waist level on our terrace. We'd spy on him through the window. Aliyah often wanted to invite him inside to use our shower. We never did.

Shakti slept on the floor of the small office that the Aggarwals built adjacent to their driveway. Some nights, we'd see Shakti walking out to the office with a blanket and headphones in hand. We'd feel bad about this briefly, but quickly realized that this situation was probably downright luxurious compared to the dirt-poor village he came from.

We struggle with the servant situation in India. We feel awfully guilty sometimes that we unnecessarily rely on the ultra-cheap labor provided by a class of supplicant servants who are born into incredible poverty. This country's continued adherence to an antiquated caste system gives people like Shakti almost no chance to be anything bigger or better than a deferent attendant to the rich.

Aliyah and I privately heap disdain on privileged friends and acquaintances who take for granted the shackles of servitude that they help to keep locked tight. We wonder with furious whispers whether a friend of ours even knows his servants' names.

But of course, it's not really that simple. Shakti was inarguably better fed, better clothed and better housed while a servant here than he was, or will be, in a destitute village in West Bengal. Maybe servitude in a cushy home isn't such a bad life for someone who grew up in a village with no water or electricity, in a hut where snakes dropped in through the ceiling at night.

We've talked a lot about servants in India over the last six months. And now that Shakti's gone, we realize just how much we liked and respected him.

The Aggarwals replaced Shakti a few weeks ago with the brother of a servant who works for friends of theirs. The new boy does a pretty good job. He sweeps the floor, and even moves the furniture around to find hidden dust bunnies. Shakti never did that.

The new boy is polite, quiet and usually avoids looking me in the eye. I've never seen him smile. I doubt he's older than 13.

Wax on, wax off

2008-01-31T17:29:00.000+05:30

For the past five days I haven’t been able to hear out of my right ear.

Yesterday, I had enough. I went to go see Dr. Bobby, a sweet man with less hair than someone his age should have. He was reliable though. He even cured Ben when we thought he had malaria. After all, Dr. Bobby did receive his M.D. from Hungary, which is printed in big block letters on all of his medical stationery and business cards.

I told Dr. Bobby that I hadn’t been able to hear out of my ear in days, that I just got over a cold, and subsequently had migraine-like headaches and jolts of pain that ran through my jaw.

His diagnosis: rest, drink warm liquids, anti-biotics, soniwax (ear drops to loosen up any wax in my ear), and some sort of deluxe pain killer.

We bought my new medication and headed home. Ben dropped the Soniwax in my ear. I tried to use a Q-tip to scoop out the wax, but only once or twice did a smidgen of wax appear on the cotton bud.

“Wax is not the problem,” I said matter-of-factly. “My ears are clean as a whistle.”

The next day, my ear felt worse. During the elevator ride up to the 12^th floor, my ears and head felt like they were ballooning. All of my co-workers declared that I must go to a hospital. Get a second opinion, they said. “An ENT!,” “an ENT,” they chanted.

One-and-a-half hours later (and after a call to Dr. Bobby who recommended I take a different type of anti-biotic—whose advice I decided to ignore) I found myself in the dentist-like armchair of an ENT. I looked on the silver tray in the room and there was someone’s blood, snot-like substance, and other “used” tools sitting in the tray. I glanced at Ben, and mouthed “LOOK AT THE TRAY.” He tried to hide his horror and shrugged.

Dr. Tripathy was all business. However, I found his jiggly cheeks, bureaucrat mustache, and sweater vest (which tried to hide his American stomach) quite endearing. . He looked in my ear, and declared there was no bacterial infection, but there was a wax buildup. “Nonsense!,” I thought. He pulled out a metal, tubular vacuum-like utensil and asked if he could clean out my ears. I thought I’d play along. “Okay, but this better not hurt.”

After twenty or so seconds of vacuuming, he pulled the utensil out of my ear. A dirty brown colored--tinged every so slightly with burnt red--piece of wax, the size of a large corn kernel, was resting on the tip of the utensil.

“WOW!!!” the doctor, Ben and I said in unison. This machine was incredible.

“Now the other ear!,” demanded Ben, curious as much as I was.

A similar sized piece of wax came out. Unbelievable.

I could hear better already.

As I walked out of the office (depleted of 1,400 rupees—about $35 dollars), I couldn’t stop smiling.

“Ben, you have to get this procedure. It’s just amazing,” I said. "I feel ten pounds lighter."

“No way,” he said.

“Then we are so buying one of those machines.”

Cold

2008-01-31T12:29:00.000+05:30

Before bed a few nights ago, Aliyah put on my down jacket. And a ski hat. And gloves. And thick winter socks. And a scarf. Then we double-mummied her in two big blankets.

"My face is still cold," she said.

It's arctic in India.

A lot of people assume it's unbearably hot here all year. I was once such a person. When we moved here, I brought one thin sweater and a light jacket. "Who needs a winter coat in India?" I wondered with silent sarcasm.

Answer: Everyone.

December and January in Delhi have been numbing. Temperatures this week have hovered around freezing. That's not so bad, I suppose, compared to our winter last year in New York, or the winter before that I spent in Colorado. But at least in those places, I had central heating. No such luck here.

Our house, like many here, is built to breathe. The tile floors remain cool even when it's sweltering outside, and the house's thin wood walls don't trap much heat. That's great in August. It's awful in January. When I work at my desk, I routinely lose feeling in several toes. Some nights, it seems as if it's colder inside our house than it is outside.

We do still have hot water (though because it only comes out of a waist-level tap, to use it we have to fill up a big bucket and shower by scooping small buckets of hot water out of the larger one). And the sun is still shining. And the cheap heater we bought from a nearby market raises the temperature in our house at least a few degrees.

But make no mistake -- winter in New Delhi is freezing. I'll probably eat these words when I'm languishing in 120-degree weather in June, but here it goes anyway. I wish it were summer.

Trick and Treat

2008-01-31T09:02:00.000+05:30

Aliyah tricked me.

This is probably the best she's ever gotten me. Better, even, then the time she convinced me on Election Night in 2006 that she was a closet Republican.

Days before my 27th birthday, Aliyah told me that she'd be giving me a series of instructions on my birthday about which I would not be allowed to ask any questions. I agreed.

After lunch on my birthday (I demanded that we go to Ruby Tuesday or T.G.I. Friday's so I could get a cheeseburger and chicken wings), Aliyah sent me the no-questions-asked instructions via e-mail. The subject line was "TOP SECRET: birthday toolbox." Among other things, I was told to pack a bag with running shoes, a Swiss army knife, a t-shirt, and a stuffed malaria doll that Aliyah's sister had sent us for Christmas.

I was confused.

"I wonder where we're going," I said to Aliyah when I picked her up at work that evening, making sure that my sentence ended with a period so as not to break my no-questions promise. After a few minutes of toying with me, Aliyah spilled the beans.

"First we're having dinner at The Imperial Hotel," she smiled.

"Awesome! But why do I need a Swiss army knife?"

"Because afterward we're going camping."

"Oh," I said, pulling my down jacket tighter around me in the icy January air as I feigned excitement. "Cool."

"I'm glad you brought that jacket," Aliyah said. "I'll want to wear it when we go to sleep outside later."

I continued to pretend like I was excited by the prospect of sleeping outdoors in below-freezing temperatures, and wondered aloud where the campsite was.

"You know, I could be lying about the whole thing," Aliyah said.

"Yeah right," I countered. "Why did I have to bring a Swiss army knife if we're not going camping?"

"Maybe it's a decoy," she said a bit too defensively. I was sure that Aliyah felt a bit of regret that there were no surprises left, and was trying to re-introduce doubt into our after-dinner plans. Using my finely-tuned bullshit detector, I was certain that Aliyah was bluffing and that we really were going camping.

We went to The Imperial Hotel -- which is Delhi's finest -- and had a fantastic dinner at a beautiful Southeast Asian restaurant. Near the end of our meal, Aliyah started giving further instructions.

"Before we leave," she said, "you have to go into the bathroom and change into your gym shorts, running shoes and t-shirt. Then we'll go catch a cab."

"OK," I said slowly. "Can I wear my jacket too?"

"Yes."

I paused and rubbed a stomach that was full of curry, noodles and beer. Doing anything that required running shoes sounded highly unpleasant.

"And, um, we're not doing anything too athletic, right?" I asked hesitantly.

"Of course we are," Aliyah said. "Don't be such a baby."

We left the restaurant and walked to the bathrooms in a hallway near the hotel's lobby.

"OK," I said. "Let's meet here after we change."

I started to walk into the bathroom. Aliyah stopped me.

"Let's sit down first, and I'll tell you exactly where we're camping," she said.

We sat down on an absurdly comfortable leather sofa.

"You want to know?" Aliyah said.

"I want to know," I said.

Aliyah handed me a small envelope. Inside was a keycard. That opened the door of a room at The Imperial.

I laughed for about three minutes. I had had no idea.

I'm pretty dumb for a smart guy. Or maybe it's pretty smart for a dumb guy. Either way, it was a fantastic surprise, and the most comfortable night's sleep we've had in India.

Five family scenes

2008-01-23T17:31:00.000+05:30

1. While a nasty shoe vendor demanded that we pay him 200 rupees for the privilege of using our cameras inside Jama Masjid mosque in old Delhi, a little girl touched my butt.

I almost didn't feel it at all. It was like a feather running over the outside of one of the back pockets of my jeans.

I turned around. A little girl, no more than seven years old, stared up at me as if I'd caught her with one hand in the cookie jar. A minute or two earlier, we'd chatted with this girl on the mosque's front steps. One of her friends had told Aliyah she had a beautiful name. Aliyah's father Agha had received a similar compliment. The little girl had said my name was "not so nice."

Now I put on my best scolding face as I looked down at the would-be thief, at the same time patting my front pocket to make sure my wallet was still there.

The girl scurried away toward a group of old British tourists wearing fanny packs.

2. "Jalebiwala?"

I asked the question shyly. The greasy-haired street vendor, who was selling nuts in a dirty alley where at least one man was urinating on a wall, pointed to a storefront a few feet away.

The shop he'd indicated was shabby and had no English signage. It hardly looked like the place Lonely Planet described as hawking India's finest jalebis ("deep fried squiggles").

"I think this is it," I said.

"Really?" Aliyah wondered as she squinted at the awful-looking shop.

We continued on through the smelly, crowded, confusing alleys of Chandni Chowk.

When we finally found the place -- several "I think this is it"s later -- Aliyah had just one word for the artery-clogging syrupy squiggles.

"Wow."

3. "Wow," Aliyah said.

After a four-hour drive and a long walk down a tout-littered street, we'd just gotten our first glimpse of the Taj Mahal. The whole structure wasn't visible yet, but the largest of the Taj's white domes loomed large above a red brick wall.

"Wow," Aliyah said.

Aliyah's mother Lani looked up at the white dome and sighed slightly.

"I thought it would be bigger," she said.

4. They were exploiting foreigners at Humayun's Tomb.

Ten rupees for a local to gain admission. Two hundred and fifty rupees for a foreigner.

"This is outrageous!" I said, offering a well-worn and slightly unfair comparison.

"Can you imagine if Disneyland charged Americans $20 and demanded $500 from foreigners?" I said. "This is outrageous!"

Agha turned toward us, smiling.

"Stay away from me," he said to us. "I want to try something."

Agha approached the ticket vendor and handed him a ten rupee note.

"Where are you from?" the man said in Hindi.

"I am from outside," Agha replied in Urdu.

The vendor gave him a locally-priced ticket.

5. Lani bravely reached for the paan.

The Indian digestive, which is basically spices, fruits and sugar wrapped in a triangular betel leaf and held together with a toothpick, had come on a silver tray after dinner at a fancy restaurant at the Sheraton here. Agha was already popping pieces of paan into his mouth like they were candy.

I had had paan once before, and almost immediately felt ill.

"Try it," Aliyah said to her mother.

Lani picked up a piece of paan and put the whole thing into her mouth. She had chewed no more than twice when her eyes scrunched up with disgust. With admirable open-mindedness, she continued to chew the paan, even as her struggling eyes revealed how much the digestive disagreed with her.

Three more painful chews and Lani spit the paan out.

"Wow," Aliyah said.

Crash

2008-01-16T14:49:00.000+05:30

The ceiling started to fall.

On Monday, my co-workers and I were editing a television news piece at a rental studio in south Delhi. Because our company’s studio was still under construction, it meant going to a rental space nearby. After a long day, we were finally finished. We began transferring the piece onto a CD, when one of the studio’s employees entered the room, waving his hands frantically in the air and shouting some sort of command in Hindi.

Mehak, my co-worker turned to me. “Quickly, Aliyah…Let’s go!”

“Huh?” I said. “What’s going on?”

“The ceiling! The ceiling! I’ll explain to you once we’re outside the building,” she said.

I was convinced the ceiling was about to cave in. I quickly put on my shoes and gathered up all of my belongings, knowing it would be the last time I’d set foot inside this building. It was going to crash, 9/11 style, I told myself. Unlucky for us, the studio was on the 5th floor of the building—without an elevator.

Safely across the street, Mehak pointed to a truck full of policemen who started filing out of the vehicle. Out of breath and full of panic, I asked what was going on.

“The sealing act. They’re sealing up the building,” she said matter-of-factly.

Apparently, since last year, the police had taken action to close down commercial units in all residential areas. Our studio, illegally, had been jumping place to place to avoid climbing rent costs. But someone, probably a competitor, had tipped off the police.

After realizing the building was not going to collapse, I asked how we would finish our project.

“The studio will probably just open in another house tomorrow,” said a co-worker. Naturally.

Oop-sa

2008-01-06T08:04:00.000+05:30

The child sitting next to us on the metro looked like a puffy ball of pink cotton candy.

Sitting on her grandmother's lap, the child was wearing a bright pink down jacket and matching pink pants both dotted with Teletubbies. The kid's socks were electric yellow and beneath her pink winter coat was a knit sweater in pastoral pink.

The little girl looked to be about 18-months old. Beneath each of her small eyes was a thick, shadowy line of makeup -- eyeliner, I think. Sitting on the lap of her bindied grandmother on the crowded metro train, the little girl kept clutching at my arm with her little hand.

I smiled back at the girl and waved cartoonishly. Then I looked at the little pink harlequin's grandmother and said, "She's a very pretty little girl."

Grandma smiled and shook her head. "He is not a she. This is my grandson."

Oop-sa!

I laughed uncomfortably and turned my back on the he-she child and its grandmother. Making sure that the old woman and her strangely-dressed grandchild couldn't read my lips or hear our conversation, Aliyah and I whispered quickly.

"I thought it was a girl, too," Aliyah said. "It's an honest mistake."

"There's no mistake on my part," I whispered furiously, only barely noticing a woman standing over Aliyah's shoulder eavesdropping on our conversation. "They dressed that boy in all pink and put makeup on him. They're the ones who made a mistake."

Smirking at me, the eavesdropper then reached across Aliyah and I and took the cross-dressed child off its grandmothers lap and held it as only a mother can.

Oop-sa.

No cuts!

2008-01-04T13:31:00.000+05:30

A balding man in an unflattering flannel jacket pivoted his bony elbow into my ribs while his wife ran over my foot with her wheeled suitcase.

"Jesus," I muttered as I hip-checked her into the metal rail on our left.

We were waiting on line -- or queuing, as it's colonially called here -- for a taxi outside the domestic airport in Delhi upon our return from Bombay. Most everyone in the crushing line was gripping a prepaid taxi voucher, and all seemed to be jostling and shoving for better position in the three-wide and twenty-deep line.

I placed my feet as wide apart as I could comfortably stand and hung my backpack over my right shoulder, and Aliyah's over my left, making it awfully difficult for any Indians to get passed me without shoving me, or my luggage, aside.

A fat man in a sad-looking suit shoved me and my luggage aside, waving his ticket in the air in a way that said, "I'm not just a V.I.P. I'm a V.V.I.P. Get out of my way."

"Hey!" I yelled as he wrestled passed the backpack on my left shoulder. "We're queuing here."

He looked at me as if what I had said was obvious.

"Yes," he said. "I know."

Such is the strange experience of queuing in India. The only really accepted rule appears to be that there are no rules. In any number of settings, I have watched with furious silence as an Indian man walks along the length of a somewhat-orderly line, elbows his way in front of whoever is waiting at the head, and rudely demands to be served.

Sometimes, but not always, I'll call the line jumper out on such behavior.

"Pardon me," I'll say, as if I somehow need this miscreant's pardon. "But we're all queuing here."

The result is basically a coin flip -- half the time, the man, who obviously knew he was bypassing the line, will look at the queue with false realization ("Oooooh, so that's why you're all waiting here.") before nodding in agreement and trudging to the back. The other half of the time, he'll look at me with disdain and continue on as if I'm the one who doesn't understand the rules.

This common attitude among minor reprobates is so commonplace that it's no longer surprising, particularly when all those waiting on line are strangers who will never be called to task for a violation of social courtesy. But what continues to amaze me is when people consistently hop lines in which they know everyone waiting.

This was a common situation at the office of my former employer here in Delhi. Employees were required to check in each morning, and out each evening, by fingerprint scan in front of the security desk on the ground floor (a fairly high-tech embodiment of an antiquated labor practice). There were only two scanners for an office of hundreds of employees, so there was typically a line of two to six people waiting at each scanner, particularly when the clock's hands were close to the company's official start and stop times.

I knew, at least by sight, every person who ever waited in this line. We all worked in the same building six days a week. Everyone knew each other. And still, several employees, both male and female, would often walk straight passed everyone in line and shove their way into the front of the queue.

On my second-to-last day of work, I watched with frustration as a young woman walked around seven people waiting in line and needled her way directly behind the person using the scanner. It was just too much.

"Excuse me," I said, fed up, "but we're queuing here!"

"Yes," the cutter said. "I know."

And everyone else looked at me as if I'd said something rude.

La Bamba

2008-01-01T10:41:00.000+05:30

An Indian band butchers La Bamba at the swank restaurant where we spent NYE.

Crab Grab

2008-01-01T10:19:00.000+05:30

Aliyah demonstrates at NYE dinner.

Five Mumbai Scenes

2007-12-28T08:55:00.000+05:30

1. "Let's get mutton leg," Aliyah said.

Knowing that in India mutton often means goat, I double checked the menu before replying, "But that's goat."

"So?" Aliyah said.

I hesitated. "Well, after we saw them slit that goat's neck today..."

"Don't be a baby," Aliyah said.

"Could you really eat goat leg after that?"

"Sure, I could eat goat leg," Aliyah said. "I just don't want to eat its neck."

2. They seated us on the rooftop terrace at Indigo, a chic restaurant in south Mumbai. Before handing us each a menu, the waiter slipped a piece of paper inside that listed the day's specials.

The title of the specials menu? Dinner with Ben Foumin.

"Oh my God!" Aliyah said. "That's amazing."

"Yeah, it's pretty funny."

A half hour or so passed, during which they brought us three baskets of bread (we'd eventually get two more, for a total of five). "The bread service here is terrible," Aliyah joked. "I know," I said. "What does a guy have to do to get some complimentary focaccia around here?"

We soon opened our menus again to order dinner.

"It's so weird," she said.

"What is?"

"The chef's name."

"What's the chef's name?"

"Ben Foumin," Aliyah said. "What a coincidence!"

"No," I said. "Ben Foumin is my name."

3. "Are you Jewish?"

The question from the Indian security guard at the old synagogue in south Mumbai caught me a bit off guard. I replied with a truncated Larry David-esque soul-searching stare.

"Are you Jewish?" The guard said it louder this time.

"Yes?" I squeaked.

The guard turned to Aliyah. He didn't ask her anything, but he did offer her a cookie.

4. Our eyes were turned skyward to watch the monkeys in the trees when I heard a small splat.

I looked in front of us. There was a small pile of monkey poo no more than a foot away.

I stared at it for several seconds. Then I looked up at the monkeys. Then back at the poo. Then back at the monkeys. Then at the poo. I thought some more. Then I looked at the monkeys again. Then at the poo. Then at Aliyah, with whom I shared this revelation.

"Those monkeys just threw their poo at us!"

5. The Muslim man skinning the dead white goat in a dirty alley of Dharavi slum smiled and pointed his knife at me. Then he pointed his knife at the goat, then back at me.

"Same same," he said with a head wobble.

"Um," I said.

"Your shirt," Aliyah said.

"Oh yeah," I said, realizing that I was wearing a Thai-bought shirt bearing the strange message "SAME SAME."

The man pointed at me again with the bloody knife, then back at the dead white goat and started laughing.

"White, white," he said. "You are brothers."

"Ha ha," I laughed very uncomfortably. "Yes, we're the same color, me and that goat."

"Same same," he said, pointing the knife again.

"Bye bye," I said.

mmmutton

2007-12-27T17:24:00.000+05:30

It took six men to hold the goat down. They laid the animal, no bigger than an adult sized golden lab on its side, his neck hanging over a makeshift stone hole. Around us, there were several skinned goats hanging in the alleys of the Dharavi slum—Asia’s biggest—in central Mumbai.

The men were sweating as they held the goat down, their lean biceps bulging as they pressed the animal’s legs on to the ground. With one fast slash, a slit was made across the goat’s neck. Blood poured out, its color greatly contrasting to the animal’s snow-white fur. The goat screamed a guttural shriek and tried to wriggle out of his position. It was no use; the men were too skilled and the goat too dumb. Both the men and the goat remained in their positions. A thick, lime green paste, which was likely part-digested food, came up through the goat’s esophagus and out through the goat’s neck as it attempted to vomit. Even when the goat should have been dead, it continued to shake and scream. After what seemed like a week, both the men’s muscles and the goat’s muscles relaxed as the animal seized all movement. The whole procedure lasted two minutes. The image and sounds, however, are burned in my brain.

This isn’t unique of Dharavi slum—we just happened to be there during the ceremony. Many goats in India and elsewhere were sacrificed for Eid. In Delhi, many of the goats had decorations around their necks and painted horns of green and yellow. Children paraded their temporary pets around on leashes. Muslims celebrate the festival as a commemoration of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son, Ishmael, under the order of God.

After watching the goat, we walked through the rest of the slum, partly in a daze. We learned that the annual turnover of work from the slum is approximately $665 million every year, with most of its workers earning less than two dollars a day. In this slum is the city’s recycling center, pottery factory, bakery, soap factory and many, many small scale industries that support India’s economy. Not one person asked us for money. The adults and children looked relatively healthy and happy. While the people in Dharavi slum do lack basic infrastructure facilities like sanitation and healthcare, maybe they do have reason to celebrate this year, with mutton, of course.

Baby monkey

2007-12-27T13:25:00.000+05:30

Also from Elephanta Island...

Indian Mother

2007-12-27T13:15:00.000+05:30

Mom does her best Indian dance at Humayun's Tomb during their visit to Delhi in November.

Monkey fight

2007-12-27T12:39:00.000+05:30

From our recent visit to Elephanta Island off the coast of Mumbai. No elephants, but plenty of bold monkeys.

Ratbird seat

2007-12-13T16:12:00.001+05:30

The pigeon has been flapping around our office for nearly 24 hours now.

It arrived yesterday just a few minutes before I left. I'm pretty sure it came in through a (carelessly left open) window on in the stairwell between the first and second floors, and then somehow managed to fly its way up to our fourth-floor office.

Perhaps thirty people work in the office area on this floor, which is divided into four sections by clear glass walls supported by white wooden frames. The design of the window walls is strange. Some reach to the ceiling. Others do not.

This is a bad place for a frightened bird to get stuck. Its wings flapping madly, the pigeon first flew into the glass-walled section where I work and tried to turn left. It bounced off the window wall like a tennis ball hurled against a garage door.

The pigeon fell in midair a foot or two before righting itself and continuing its flight. It flew over a glass wall that doesn't reach all the way to the ceiling, and into another glass-walled section of the office. Within seconds, it had slammed full speed into at least two more glass windows. It was like a game of Pong gone bad.

Of course, the employees were all freaking out. Several people screamed. One woman hid under her desk like this was an earthquake drill. I put my glasses on to make sure the pigeon couldn't peck out my beautiful eyes.

One man did try to capture the bird. He stood on a chair and jumped in the air as the pigeon flew by. The man missed and fell to the ground.

After banging hard into a few more windows, the pigeon momentarily perched on top of one of the glass walls that doesn't reach to the ceiling. I was quite pleased that the pigeon was no longer hurtling itself into windows, as I had cringed in empathetic pain each time this happened. However, I was quite displeased that the perch the bird had chosen was directly above my desk. Worse still, its back was facing me. It was barely five feet away from me, and I could easily imagine the direct diagonal line from its tail feathers to my face. I drew my lips together tightly as I pictured the possible bird poo shower I might soon receive. I silently wished that my glasses had windshield wipers.

It was about this time that I decided to take off work a little early.

When I came back today, I assumed the pigeon problem had been solved. The morning passed uneventfully. And then, a few hours ago, a pigeon flew through the office and slammed into a glass wall.

"Holy shit!" I shouted, trying to gather the words back in as soon as I'd said them. "Another pigeon got in here?"

"No," one of my colleagues said. "It's the same pigeon."

Apparently, the bird had found a dark, shallow alcove high on one of the walls and had spent the night there, only to resurface this afternoon.

"He's going to die in here," I said. "How is he going to eat? Someone should get him out of here."

My colleagues nodded in agreement. Someone should, but we all knew none of us would be that foolish someone who would grab the bird with our bare hands. Hello, we've all heard of Avian Flu.

Aliyah asked me what the bird's name was. I said "Rat," for two reasons. The first is that this pigeon is like a rat stuck in some awful man-made maze. The second is that pigeons remind me of flying diseased rats.

Everyone in the office seems to have quickly grown accustomed to the doomed bird flapping and bumping around the office. No one but me even seems to look up when he circles just a few feet above our desks.

Rat has spent the last few hours flying laps over the short glass wall between my section of the room and another. He's passed above my desk at least twenty times. And when he stops flying laps, he picks just two spots to rest. One is the poo perch above my desk. I'm clean so far, but the day's not over yet.

Crash

2007-12-13T13:30:00.000+05:30

The autowallah smiled when he motioned me toward his autorickshaw. His brown teeth gave him a mouthful of what looked like soggy cigarette butts. The same guy has driven me to work at least twenty times this year, so when I hopped into his autorickshaw this morning, there was no need to tell him where to go.

I like this autowallah. He drives a bit slow, but he's pretty reliable and never claims to lack change of a 100-rupee note ($2.50) the same way most of his colleagues do. I've never had to raise my voice to this autowallah, which is saying something.

Barely fifty meters from our house, we approached an empty four-way intersection of two equally-sized roads at the corner of a small park. Just as the autowallah began braking into a right turn, a silver Honda Accord (a luxury car in India) began racing through the intersection from the road we were turning right onto. The guy behind the wheel of the Accord looked neither right nor left as he tore through the intersection at a perilously high speed.

The autowallah turned right hard and slammed on the brakes. The idiot driving the Accord didn't even see us until we smashed into his rear left bumper.

The autowallah and I were both OK, and a quick examination of his vehicle showed only a minor dent. The Accord squealed to a stop and the fool driving it jumped out, surveyed the significant scratches and dents on his bumper, and started yelling at the autowallah.

The brash boob driving the Accord wore a navy blue sweater with the collar of a button-down shirt poking out. His shoes were shiny and his hair combed with precision. This rich fool sneered at my autowallah, heaping disdain and blame on the rickshaw driver's brown teeth and ratty ski cap.

They yelled at each other in Hindi for ten seconds while I continued to examine the damage to both the autorickshaw and the Accord. When I looked up again, a crowd of twenty people had gathered. A man in a dirty blue sweatshirt and unhealthy-looking red goop in his right eye appeared to be trying to mediate the argument.

I strode into the fray. Everyone but Goopy Eye ignored me. So, raising the volume of my voice as much as I tried to lower its pitch, I turned to the fool who caused the accident and said, "This was completely your fault. You didn't look right or left before you blew through the intersection. This is your fault."

Everyone looked at me like I had just spoken Swahili. The autowallah and the wealthy dope began yelling at each other again. Goopy Eye looked at me and shrugged.

Perhaps fearing the mob of poor people that was gathering around (because he certainly didn't seem troubled by my proclamation of blame), the rich fool soon scuttled to his car and drove off, without any information being exchanged. This was surely a victory for my autowallah, whose vehicle was virtually undamaged compared to the Accord.

The rest of the drive to my office was accident free. When we arrived, I tried to give my autowallah a big tip, but he refused, instead giving me a big brown smile along with the proper change from my 100-rupee note.

"You did great. That guy was a total idiot," I said to the autowallah. "That was all his fault. You did a great job."

The autowallah corrected me with a cluck. "God is great," he said.

"Whatever."

My First Thong

2007-12-10T15:33:00.000+05:30

You'd think I would have learned my lesson.

Not a month had passed since I'd given that strange little dilettante masseuse at the Sheraton a free X-rated show. And yet here I was, at an upscale spa in Panscheel Enclave, ready to be oiled up once again.

It was Aliyah and I's one-year anniversary (Now that we are no longer measured in months, I demand that you all take us far more seriously), and amusingly oily Indian massages (that I've been assured are authentic) were on the celebration menu.

It was a Saturday morning and we sat inside a small but delightfully-heated office while a mustachioed doctor from Kerala engaged us in a plodding pre-massage interview. This session had been pitched as a helpful introduction to the foreign treatments we were about to receive. It was no such thing.

"Where are you from?" the doctor asked gravely.

"I'm from California and Aliyah's from Ohio. We used to live in New York together. But we've been living in Delhi since the summer."

The doc thumbed his stethoscope and inhaled deeply.

"And what is the weather like in this Ohio?" he intoned seriously.

"Ummm, it's cold," said a clearly-confused Aliyah.

The doctor -- who at this point we'd both silently decided should probably be referred to as a "doctor" -- allowed the non-existent gravity of this irrelevant detail to sink in before moving on to his next question.

"Now, what do you take for dinner?" he said, holding up both hands, a gesture that implied all possible responses were held in his two open palms. "Rice or chapati?"

This is akin to asking someone in America what they eat for dinner -- crackers or breadsticks. Aliyah and I laughed through this and the rest of the "doctor"'s questions, which continued to focus on weather, diet, the popularity of Indian massages in Ohio, etc...

Eventually, we were escorted into separate massage rooms. Strange but authentic-looking wooden apparatuses hung from the ceiling. A long wooden table with a small raised lip stood in the room's center. Next to it were two small but very strong Indian men who wore matching shirts, aprons, mustaches and smiles. One of them told me to undress.

It was about here that I began to have a somewhat unnerving sense of deja vu.

I slowly stripped down to my boxer briefs while one of the Indian men stood no more than six inches away. I hesitantly moved toward the massage table. The masseuse shook his head. He pointed to my underwear. And then he held up an article of cotton clothing that looked like some sort of thin, diaper-like thong.

Sighing with resignation to the inevitable, I took off my underwear. And then this little Indian men dressed me in the skimpiest undergarments I ever have, and ever hope to, wear. I looked away from him while he tied tight bows with the bikini-like strings that dangled from my hips.

Ready for the prom, I was instructed to sit on the edge of the table. Both men started oiling me up. One worked on my back while the other rubbed (the contents of an industrial-sized bottle of) oil into my hair.

It was about here that I realized that two men would be massaging me, not one. And it is at this point in the retelling that I must admit that the four-manhand massage they gave was probably the best professional massage I've ever received.

The two men were powerful and in-sync -- like rowers on a professional crew team. A four-handed massage can be a lame novelty if two people are simply giving the recipient two separate but simultaneous massages. But not these guys. It was like they were sharing the same brain. What happened to my right arm happened to my left. The pressure and timing were in lockstep.

The massage was so good that I momentarily forgot I was wearing a thong diaper. I only remembered again when the flimsy undergarment became so soaked with oil that it flapped uselessly at my side and had to be retied.

("My thong kept falling off," I later told Aliyah. "Did yours?")

After the massage, there was an odd procedure where I laid still while a gold vessel dangling above my head dripped "medicated" oil onto my forehead. This must have gone on for 45 minutes, and was just about as strange as it sounds.

The massage resumed after this drizzling, and I was so caught up with the powerful synchronization with which the masseuses were beating the hell out of my tense and tired muscles that I almost completely forgot about the oil-soaked loincloth barely masking my nether regions.

When the massage ended, the lead masseuse led me to a large cabinet in the corner of the room. He instructed me to sit inside, and warned me not to touch a metal pipe running along one of the cabinet's interior walls. I sat down, my neck fitting comfortably into a groove carved in the cabinet's top. The masseuse then turned a nozzle, and shut the cabinet doors. My entire body was inside, with only my head and neck sticking up out of a hole in the top. And then the cabinet began to fill with steam.

Apparently, this spa could not afford a steam room. They've settled for a steam cabinet.

As excellent as this massage was in many ways, it was exceedingly strange in others. I've decided that for the rest of our time in India, I'll only be patronizing spas that have a BYOU policy -- Bring Your Own Underwear.

Shaken

2007-12-06T10:57:00.000+05:30

I was shaking like a Parkinson's patient in an earthquake.

My left foot was pointed south and planted a meter and a half away from my right foot, which was pointing west. My right knee was bent at a 90-degree angle, my right tricep was touching the inside of my right thigh, and Sukant Tiwari was pushing my upper body toward the ground. My calves throbbed, my groin was on the verge of snapping, and my quadriceps were shaking harder than a maraca held by an exonerated Barry Bonds.

"Ahhhhhhhh," I groaned. Aliyah, who was in a mirror position (minus the shaking, pain and monumental effort), laughed. Sukant Tiwari let up on my back and looked at my purpling face.

"Are you OK?" Sukant Tiwari said with genuine concern.

"Ye-es?" I squeaked.

"No, you are not OK," he said, gently easing me out of the pose. "Do not fight with your body."

We were on the rooftop terrace outside our home on a Sunday morning. As a (very thoughtful and appreciated) anniversary gift, Aliyah had hired Sukant Tiwari to give us a private yoga lesson every Sunday at our home. We were skeptical when he showed up on a motorcycle, wearing jeans, and without a yoga mat, but Sukant Tiwari turned out to be a killer yoga instructor.

I like to pretend that I'm good at yoga. I've taken at least a few dozen yoga classes over the years. Plus, I eat granola and listen to Bob Dylan. So when Sukant Tiwari asked us whether we'd practiced yoga before, I answered with ill-advised hubris.

"Oh yeah," I bragged. "We've done some yoga."

And to show him I really knew what I was talking about, I pressed my palms together in front of my chest and said, "Namaste." And then I winked.

As soon as our private lesson began, I realized this was going to be far more difficult than any yoga class I'd ever taken. When there are twenty people in the room, I don't really have to push myself. It's unlikely that the instructor of such a big class will correct me more than a couple times. But there was no escaping the watchful eyes of Sukant Tiwari. When he thought I could go farther, he adjusted my body the same way he would a Gumby doll. This hurt. A lot.

Poses which had always seemed simple were suddenly a struggle. For instance, I pressed my palms together, raised my arms above my head and, following Sukant Tiwari's instruction, leaned slightly to the right. "No problem," I thought. Then, from behind, two hands gently grabbed my armpits and dragged my upper body down and to the right, at least tripling the degree to which I was leaning. Muscles (whose existence I had previously been unaware of) on my left side quivered and screamed.

"Ahhhhh," I grimaced.

The class continued like this. I initially thought every pose was easy until Sukant Tiwari adjusted me into a far more demanding (and correct) position. Each pose then ended either with me bailing prematurely or shaking like a tambourine played by the Micro Machines Guy after six cups of coffee.

The class ended after an hour. My three chanted "Om"s, which I think is a mantra meant to represent a vibration that yogis say pervades the entire universe (or something else I don't believe in), sounded more like the last croaks of a dying frog than a powerful finale.

Over glasses of water afterwards (Sukant Tiwari, like many Indians I know, prefers room temperature water to the chilled stuff we keep in the fridge), we realized that despite the strenuous workout we'd just had, we actually felt great. Next week, same time, same place, we told Sukant Tiwari.

"Good," he said. "Next week we'll start trying hard stuff."

Another death

2007-11-24T16:55:00.000+05:30

R.I.P. Aliyah Fish

These People

2007-11-21T12:04:00.000+05:30

Roger Rabbit flashed a goofy smile as he handed over the pizza.

"Extraaaaaa pepperooooooooooooniiii," Roger Rabbit said, adding with a flourish a limber time step. I nodded hungrily. And then the cartoon rabbit did something strange. He started chanting fast and loud in a deep and distinctly Indian voice.

"Hooooooooooooooo! Do my do be do ba do ha do bo do bi, hoooooooooo!" Roger Rabbit chanted.

I opened my eyes. The chanting continued. The clock by the bed read 5:51. That's 5:51 a.m.

The chanting Hindu was several blocks away, but his voice was amplified by a megaphone that seemed to be of cosmic proportions. It sounded like he was standing right next to the bed. With a microphone.

Such has been our wake-up call for most mornings over the last two weeks. The time varies slightly, but it's almost always on the wrong side of 6 a.m. Finally, I asked our landlord a couple days ago what was going on.

Mrs. Aggarwal rolled her eyes at the question. She was clearly annoyed too.

"These people," she said, shaking her head.

Apparently, "these people" are members of a sect of Hinduism that Mrs. Aggarwal couldn't name, and that dutiful Wikipedia searches by me could not turn up. For a few weeks in the fall, when the weather in Delhi, in its transition from uncomfortably hot to uncomfortably cold, is somewhat pleasant, these people believe that they should enjoy as much of the beautiful day as possible. That means getting up very early. But they don't just think they should wake up early to enjoy the entire day, Mrs. Aggarwal said. They think everyone should.

It's thus no accident that it sounds as if there's a voice of god (absence of capitalization is deliberate and intended as mildly provocative, believers) alarm clock next to the bed. That's the whole point. It's not as if I'm accidentally overhearing one of these people's important ceremonies. The whole point of these people's important ceremony is to wake me up.

This strikes me as unfair, and really only a watered-down version of the sort of western proselytizing that so riles me. Who are these people to tell me when to get up? Who are these people to make me enjoy the beautiful day? If I want to lay in bed all day with the blinds drawn, eating Cheetos and watching reruns of My Wife and Kids, well that's my right, dammit!

Taking my cues from the great Mahatma Gandhi (wasn't it he who advised that opponents could be thoroughly vanquished by taking an eye for an eye?), I'm considering forcing some of my own habits on the neighborhood.

You see, to me, 8 p.m. on a Friday night is a really great time to eat bacon cheeseburgers. Why should I keep this knowledge to myself? After all, bacon cheeseburgers are delicious. But because the many cow-revering, meat-spurning residents of our neighborhood might disagree, I think it may take a bit of prodding to convince everyone. So I plan on hand delivering these artery-cloggers to homes throughout the neighborhood every Friday. If necessary, I'll shove them for several long minutes under the nose of whoever answers the door. Or, maybe I'll rent a van, park it near a school, sit in the back of it, and subversively hand out cheeseburgers to young kids.

Or I could just wait the whole thing out. After all, Mrs. Aggarwal said that within a week or two, it will have gotten cold enough that even these people will want to sleep in.

McIndia

2007-11-19T15:54:00.000+05:30

On a recent Sunday, Ben and I went to Lajpat Nagar market to buy a few belongings for Aaron’s visit. We made a copy of our house key, tried our meek bargaining skills for a sofa bed, and bought new sheets for the arrival of Ben’s younger brother. By 1 p.m. we were hungry, and our eyes caught glimpse of the golden arches at the same time

By lunchtime, McDonalds was filled. Thirty or so patrons nibbled on french-fries, sipped on milkshakes, and one or two kids even pointed at Ben thinking a real live Ronald McDonald had walked into their favorite restaurant. One woman tried to get a ketchup stain out of her cream-colored sari by spitting into her napkin and assiduously rubbing the paper cloth against her knee.

We were shocked to see that there were no super-size-me options. Ben immediately began to scan the menu for the biggest looking item. He found it: the Maharaja Mac, a double decker chicken sandwich. In India, we realized, there’s something missing at the world’s largest fast food giant: hamburgers. Besides chicken, India’s burgers are 100% vegetarian. A “burger” comprised of a deep fried patty is filled with potatoes, peas, carrots, and some sort of anonymous spice (It’s called the Mc Aloo Tikki burger). The cost: 50 cents.

Fast food here, is not so fast. We waited at least 15 minutes for our sandwiches (I settled for the paneer (cheese) salsa wrap). The meal also comes complete with security guards. When a barefooted child approached Ben for a McHandout, a guard quickly escorted her out of the restaurant. He seemed to appear out of nowhere.

Apparently, McDonalds is a popular place to go on a date. The few McDonalds that I’ve been to are teeming with 20-somethings holding hands, nestled in a booth while staring lovingly at each other over their sesame seed buns and vanilla ice cream cones.

Overall, the paneer salsa wrap tasted like cardboard food product, but maybe I need to give it another chance. Afterall, McDonalds has only been in India for about 10 years.

Searching for Steve Carell

2007-11-19T15:37:00.000+05:30

We'd been trying to watch The 40-Year-Old Virgin all day.

Aliyah had been proclaiming for weeks that this was one funny movie. So I downloaded it. But this being India, we were unable to play the downloaded film on either of our computers, despite multiple hours of me trying to come up with slapdash solutions like some sort of techie-Macgyver. No matter how much I threw around words like "codec" and "defrag," the movie still wouldn't play. I was stumped.

As day turned to night, our hunger for The 40-Year-Old Virgin still unsatisfied, we set off for Palika Bazaar, where we'd heard bootleg movies could be bought cheaply and easily.

We arrived at the (literally) underground market and began squishing our way through the crowded subterranean passageways as hawkers tried to coax us into stalls boasting electronics, clothes, jewelry and perfume -- all of it, we assumed, either stolen, counterfeit or defective.

"Hey buddy," one Indian said, "you come look store me."

Without slowing my stride, I peeked into his store, which had on display a stack of belt buckles, a rack of colorful shawls, and a whole lot of out-of-the-box electronics. "No thanks," I said. "I don't want."

Narrowing his eyes, lowering his voice and somehow retracting his neck like a turtle, the tout then tried this simple lure: "Porn." It was a sales pitch I'd hear a dozen times during our short visit to the bazaar.

Finding a stall with 40-Year-Old Virgin cousin The Wedding Crashers on display, we stopped to search. This, however, proved to be more difficult than using the handy layout of most American video stores, where separate film genres are further organized alphabetically.

"40-Year-Old Virgin?" Aliyah asked. The guy behind the counter nodded and slapped a pile of 100 or so disks in amateurishly-labeled plastic sleeves down on the counter. We looked through them all. Nothing remotely close.

While I'd heard of many of the big-name movies presented to us (X-Men, The Bourne Ultimatum, and Transformers) some were laughably unfamiliar. At the top of that list was something absurdly claiming to be Jurassic Park 4, and even more ludicrously subtitled The T-Rex Complex.

Many of the disks were compilations, boasting as many as a dozen different films on one DVD. Some were thoughtfully arranged. A Will Smith collection, for instance, or eight boxing movies on one disk. The composition of others was beyond confusing. A handful of Superman films on the same disk as the Saw series? The Sound of Music sharing digital real estate with Hellboy? Even a DVD of wedding-themed films inexplicably contained Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.

We looked through a half dozen stacks of pirated movies -- hundreds upon hundreds of films -- without finding 40-Year-Old Virgin, though we did find a handful of movies (Rocky Balboa for me, The Holiday for Aliyah) that we bought at about $2 a piece.

We went to another stall. Aliyah began flipping through movies while a smarmy shopkeep tried to sell me a fancy-looking, feature-laden, box-less Samsung DVD player for about $30.

"Is this a real Samsung?" I asked.

"Yes," he smiled.

"How can you sell it for $30?"

"Eh?" he said.

"If it's a real Samsung, how can you sell it for $30?"

He still didn't answer. I tried another approach.

"Is it stolen?"

"No," he shook his head. "It's not a real Samsung."

I went to look through DVDs with Aliyah. We easily flipped through more than a thousand. We bought Dreamgirls and The Godfather trilogy. No sign of 40-Year-Old Virgin.

We were starting to get tired of looking through DVDs, and were definitely tired of being offered pornography. A boy in a green shirt and hat dragged us to another stall, promising that they had 40-Year-Old Virgin. We told two guys behind the counter what we were looking for. They sped through stacks of DVD sleeves like automatons on speed. Ten minutes passed, during which I'm sure these robots looked through at least three million movies. No luck.

We were leaving the bazaar, mildly disappointed, when Aliyah decided to try one last stall. "40-Year-Old Virgin?" she barely managed. The guy behind the counter smiled. He gestured for her to wait as he loped off down the crowded corridor.

Still dispirited, we browsed through the DVDs at the now-abandoned stall while a nearby tout tried to sell me a gallon jug of perfume. A couple minutes passed. We started walking away.

And then, like some sort of comedy-carrying angel, that smiling Indian salesman came running toward us with his arm raised high, clutching a copy of 40-Year-Old Virgin. We were thrilled. Finally. We could go home.

"How much?" Aliyah said.

"150," the salesman said. About four dollars.

"What?" an outraged Aliyah said, pointing to the other disks we'd already bought. "We got these for 100!"

"Let's just buy it," I whispered.

The salesman smiled. "150."

"Is that your best price?" Aliyah demanded with the toughness that can only come from spending several months in Delhi, before laughing and forking over the cash.

We began walking away, Aliyah a few steps in front of me. The perfume salesman waited until she was out of earshot and then grabbed my wrist. "Porn?" he asked.

Toxic Fog

2007-11-10T18:54:00.000+05:30

Aliyah was reaching out to pet the puppy when the machine gun fire started.

The pup -- an adorable little stray too young for the typical Indian canine affliction of mange -- ran. We screamed. "Tat-a-tat-pat," went the machine gun.

Of course, the machine gun was not really a machine gun -- something we realized when we saw a handful of Indian tweens laughing near the source of the noise and smoke. These were simply firecrackers -- or crackers, as they're called here -- being set off in celebration of Diwali, a holiday which, as far as I can tell, commemorates the return to India of an ancient murderous god after his rout of an island king. Or something. I think the myth also includes a bit about the god getting a group of flying monkeys to build a bridge from India to Sri Lanka. Or something.

We spent the day of Diwali simply (a run in Lodhi Garden and lunch at the All-American Diner), and were on our way to dinner at a friend's when the kids began shelling Kalindi Colony with war-like sounds and explosions. I started making lots of bad jokes about how I felt like we were in Baghdad/Dresden/Grozny/etc.

The street in front of the kids' house was literally covered for tens of meters with ash and other remnants of hundreds of exploded crackers. The air was heavy with poison. As we passed the boys, I coughed loudly on purpose. Then I hurried by before they could fire at us in retaliation.

After a delicious Diwali dinner, we decided to go native and do our part in violating the Kyoto Protocol. We stopped at a roadside cracker stand. This was not like sneaking M-80s across the U.S.-Mexico border. There were racks upon racks of industrial-strength explosives, all of them being eagerly purchased by pyromaniacs-in-training. There were grenade-shaped explosives the size of cantaloupes. Rockets the size of my arm. And one piece of merchandise disturbingly called a Weaponized Nuke. Many of the cracker packages prominently displayed half-naked white women in the foreground.

With a huge sack full of ammunition, we headed back to Kalindi Colony. Meeting up with a couple dozen Indians, most of them our age or older, we staked out a spot in the middle of a wide residential street and began blowing things up.

Being a coward (and notably one that was particularly concerned that his beautiful, beautiful hair might catch fire), I hung back as several twenty-something Indians gleefully launched showers of colorful flame into the air, and set whirling galaxies of sparks spinning at our feet.

I was soon dragged forward, handed a sparkler (the firework's gay cousin, as it's been said), and nearly taken by the hand to the middle of the street, where I skittishly lit a few crackers of my own.

"Aiieee!" I screamed.

Around this time, the noise and the smell became overwhelming. The air was so thick with smoke, ash and innumerable pollutants that it was difficult to see more than a few meters ahead. It smelled like a lethal bonfire, and toxic fog hovered all around us.

"I feel like we're in downtown Baghdad!" I shouted to no one in particular.

The shouting was necessary because of the near-damaging level of noise. Every second or two, the trees shook with a booming explosion, or with the automatic-fire of several small crackers exploding in sequence. Half our crowd had their hands covering their ears at all times. The blasts were constant, deafening and a bit scary.

"I feel like we're in downtown Baghdad!" I yelled to the guy next to me.

"Yes, you've said that," he replied.

"Oh," I said. "Right."

Soon I started wondering about the very real danger of Delhi burning down. One guy in our crowd began lighting crackers that he held in his hand (Brilliant!) and throwing them onto someone's front yard, where they burst apart with a shower of fiery sparks that landed on grass and bushes. A couple other guys began shooting off fireworks that, once they reached their apex in the sky, opened into a burning ball of green flame attached to a parachute. The parachute slowly lowered the fireball down, often into a tree. I hoped our house would still be standing when we got home later.

After a couple hours of cracker attacks, we were finally out of ammunition. One of our new friends invited us over to his place for a quick Indian nightcap. Juice boxes were served. I had a sweet lime and a mixed fruit. About 10 adults stood in a circle sipping juice from little boxes through small straws. Outside the circle, someone's four-year-old son searched desperately among the juice boxes for more firecrackers.

Check out the photos here.

The Office

2007-11-10T11:15:00.000+05:30

A couple photos from a little party at work in September.

Dussehra in Delhi

2007-11-08T20:48:00.000+05:30

A few weeks ago, we celebrated Dussehra, the ending of a 10-day festival commemorating the forces of good over the forces of evil.

My Australian neighbor, Danielle, Ben and I went to the park where huge effigies of Ravana (the evil force) were burned. Ravana was the ruler of Lanka who abducted Prince Rama's wife. Prince Rama (the good force) was eventually victorious after praying and fasting for 10 days. The holiday is now known as an auspicious day to start new things in life.

Several hundred people gathered in our neighborhood park to listen to drummers, light firecrackers and watch the large mannequins burn to the ground. At one point a tree in the park caught on fire. At one point Ben went home. At one point my right ear stopped working from all the noise.

Take a look at the photos.

The Full Monty

2007-11-07T12:14:00.000+05:30

I was ready to relax. My parents were in town, and Aliyah and I were about to experience luxury.

I stepped out of the shower (Hot water! So much pressure!) in the men's locker room at the upscale Sheraton in Saket, and towel-changed back into my underwear. A small Indian man dressed all in white had been waiting for me, and now beckoned me into the massage room adjoining the locker room.

He shut the door of the small room behind us. I started to climb onto the massage table.

"Wait," the little man said. He pointed to my boxer briefs. "You take those off, too."

A veteran of many a massage, I wasn't unnerved by this request. What was strange, though, was that the masseuse didn't leave the room. He just stood there. Facing me.

I'm still not exactly sure why I didn't say something, though I recall thinking that I did not want to be seen as squeamish in the face of a foreign custom. After a couple seconds of internal struggle, I thought, "Well, what the hell?" and took off my last article of clothing. I made sure not to make eye contact with the masseuse.

"Start face up," he said, patting the table.

"Ummmm...OK."

I (nervously) climbed onto the table and lay there, naked and face up. I waited for him to cover me with a towel. Too many seconds passed. I shut my eyes. Then I felt two hands starting to oil up one of my legs.

I don't have any Costanza-esque hangups about male masseuses. I like to think of myself as open minded. But what followed can only be described as two to three minutes of muted panic. I gnashed my teeth. I squirmed. I frantically wondered whether I could beat up the little masseuse, if things took an even more uncomfortable turn. I opened one eye, and squintingly appraised him. Clenching my fists with absurd bravado, I decided that I could take him, if he made the wrong move.

Thankfully, the masseuse's hands came nowhere near restricted airspace, and my panic soon subsided. I spent the next couple minutes quietly laughing about what a strange custom these Indians had, and how this would all sound in the retelling. Then I resolved to enjoy myself as best I could, considering the unsettling circumstances.

About twenty minutes passed. I was just starting to relax. Then the masseuse announced he was going to get a hot towel. Before he left the room, he covered me from chest to toe in a long, sheet-like towel.

Apparently, it was only when I was alone in the room that the masseuse thought my private parts might want, well, privacy.

The masseuse returned, and replaced the first towel with the hot one he had just retrieved. Then he told me to flip over onto my stomach. I did. He resumed the massage. He did not remove the towel.

Yes, that's right. For the remainder of the massage, I remained covered. It was only when I was laying face up on the massage table like a tray of cold cuts that the masseuse did not cover me with a towel.

When retelling this story over dinner with Indian friends that night, it became immediately clear that such bare-all massages are most certainly not common here. I had been duped! Many a joking suggestion was offered as to the masseuse's motivation. Of all people, my mother had the best line.

"He'd probably never seen someone with red hair before," she said, "and wanted to find out if you were really a redhead."

Family album

2007-11-06T10:31:00.000+05:30

My parents are in India. Check it out.

Identity crisis

2007-10-26T16:39:00.000+05:30

Earlier this month, before I contracted, suffered from and eventually beat malaria, Aliyah and I spent a few days in Mumbai. I was on business -- a delegate for my employer at a national magazine conference at a fancy hotel by the sea there.

The conference was fascinating and fun, and the trip, overall, was wonderful and, perhaps best of all, essentially free. However, during the run-up to the trip, I encountered a frustrating obstacle as a result of subtle and benign racism.

The day before the conference, I still hadn't been given plane tickets and was starting to get anxious. Finally, about 20 hours before my plane was to leave, a woman who I'd never seen before, but had apparently handled the bookings, approached my desk. Speaking frantic Hindi to a couple of my colleagues, the woman meekly handed me two plane tickets. I began examining them. The dates and times were right. Everything appeared to be in order. But then a problem jumped out.

"Brian Escochar," I said, reading the name on the tickets.

"This might be a problem for you," one of my colleagues said.

"Yes," I nodded. "I imagine it will be."

I approached a senior colleague to ask about the mix up. He assured me that the company would fix everything. And for the record, it did. The name on my Delhi-Mumbai ticket was quickly changed to my own, and when the airline adamantly refused to change the name on the Mumbai-Delhi leg, the company bought me a replacement ticket.

But how, I wondered, had the mix up occurred in the first place?

"Well," a coworker told me, "the order to buy a ticket for Ben Frumin somehow got misinterpreted, and instead they bought a ticket for Brian Escochar."

"Who is Brian Escochar?" I asked.

"He works downstairs."

"But he's not a gora, right?"

"No," my colleague said, "he's Indian. But he does have a Christian name."

This confused me even more. "But I'm not Christian."

What had happened, of course, is that to the well-meaning Indian employee who'd booked my tickets, the foreign-sounding names Ben Frumin and Brian Escochar are very similar. I made a lot of hay about the subtle racism in this confusion ("It would be like if I confused the names Jose Garcia and Juan Gonzalez!"), but really, the mistake was harmless. And not one that I'm above making. After all, wouldn't it be conceivable for me to confuse two Indian names like Suvrokamal Charkravorty and Sukumar Choudhury? Of course. So, no harm, no foul.

This is Brian Escochar, signing off.

Five game scenes

2007-10-23T19:36:00.000+05:30

1. Yash's drawing looked like some sort of deformed sock puppet. He moved his pencil slowly and deliberately, drawing the ambiguous object while his teammates bellowed harried guesses.

"Oven mitt!" Amit shouted.

"Bread!" Dave tried. "Loaf of bread!"

"Oven mitt! Oven mitt!"

"Meatloaf!"

"Time!" Anant screamed with glee. I looked at the small plastic Pictionary timer. All the white sand had collected in the bottom half.

Yash threw his pencil down and looked at his teammates as if they were fools.

"Shoe!" he yelled. "Shoe!"

Dave leaned over the drawing and squinted. He shined his headlamp more directly on the sketch. He spun the paper 180 degrees. He looked at Yash, puzzled.

"Shoe?"

Amit stood up and pointed an accusatory finger at Yash and the drawing. He wagged it back and forth and screamed louder than the Ganges whitewater that would thrill us all the next morning.

"How is that a shoe?" Amit screamed, so loud that my own throat seemed to hurt. His finger wagging intensified, and Amit grabbed his hair with his other hand.

"HOW IS THAT A SHOE?"

2. "Strawberry."

"Apple."

"Mango."

"Papaya."

"Blueberry."

"Guava."

"Kiwi."

"Tomato."

"No!" several of the Indians seemed to yell in unison. "No!"

"Yes," I said. "Tomato."

"Tomato is not a fruit," Yash said.

"Tomato is a fruit," I said.

"No!" one of the girls chided. Her voice took on the sort of condescension usually reserved for children. "Tomato is a vegetable."

Soon there was a chorus of Indian voices trying to drown Aliyah's and my calm, reasonable and, most importantly, undeniably correct assertion that a tomato is a fruit.

"No! No! No! Vegetable! No!" the darkness along the river seemed to echo.

"Indians, Indians," I said, finally getting them all to quiet down. "Apparently, the news has yet to reach your country. So please, let me be the first to tell you: Tomatoes are fruit."

Devyani laughed and conceded the point.

3. "Bird! Bird!"

Puja waved them on with her free hand, continuing to point at the sketch (which barely resembled a bird) with the pencil.

"Songbird!" Devyani screamed.

"Nightingale!" Anant shouted.

Puja gave a thumbs up sign. I cringed.

"Florence Nightingale!" Anant screamed.

I stared at Puja's mediocre drawing of a quasi-bird.

"Yeeeeeeeeeesssss!" Puja delighted. "Yes! Yes!"

"Oooooooh, yes!" Anant shouted.

I looked at the picture again before offering a carefully considered comment.

"What the fuck?" I said.

4. "OK," Amit said. "Animals."

"Dog," Dipika said.

"Bird," Aliyah said.

"No!" Yash shouted. "Bird is not an animal!"

"How is bird not an animal?" I said.

5. "Puja and I will go make some tea," Anant said. "Anyone else want some?"

After a chorus of "No"s, the pair trudged off along the river sand toward the surprisingly good kitchen.

We were quiet for a few seconds. I looked at the Pictionary board. The quiet continued.

"So..." I finally ventured. "Are we just supposed to wait?"

"I guess so," Amit said.

"What the hell?" said the Irish river guide.

"Can we just go and skip their turn," someone suggested.

"Yeah, they forfeit their turn," someone else said.

"What time is it anyway?" I asked.

Amit checked his watch. "Almost midnight."

"What?" I jumped up. "Screw this. Let's go to bed."

We gathered up the game, drew a pictorial note that, we thought, conveyed our victory and the tea-makers' forfeit, and left for our tents.

I am told that a few minutes later Anant showed up with tea for everyone to find an extinguished lantern and abandoned game.

indian flu

2007-10-20T14:29:00.000+05:30

I woke up sweating one morning to find that the air conditioning was turned off (It’s still hot in Delhi--in the 90’s on most days, so AC is a must, especially at night).

I wandered into our living room to find Ben sitting on the couch wearing sweatpants, a thermal shirt, sweatshirt, socks and winter ski hat, all bundled under a thick blanket rubbing his hands together.

“It’s freezing in here!” he exclaimed through chattering teeth.

That’s when we discovered Ben has malaria.

Okay, well not really. But he’s been showing symptoms all week: fever, vomit, chills, cough, headache, and orthostatic hypotension. We don’t know what that is, but we’re sure he has it. Luckily, I’m not working this week, and Ben was able to take the whole week off to recuperate, which means I got to play nurse.

We quickly ran out of the American medicine we brought with us. After scrounging around in our medicine cabinet for a stray Airborne, Advil, Day/Nyquil, or Motrin pill, I knew I’d have to make a visit to the pharmacist (which they call chemists). I walked across the street and downstairs to the small dark store to describe Ben’s symptoms to the chemist. “Coughing” <>, “Fever” <>, “chills” <>>, I told her.

She said something in Hindi, and a man went scrounging through several boxes until he found the one he was looking for. He took a paper towel to rub dust off the box, and cut off a strip of medicine containing 6 tablets. “Take one morning. One night,” he said. “Sixteen rupees.” Only 43 cents. I asked for some other options and went home with four strips of medicine.

Upon returning home, we googled the name of the medicines to see which ones would best fit Ben’s symptoms. All of the medicine required prescriptions from a doctor, but not in India. One type of medicine was for HIV. Another was for hay fever. One was an antihistamine. One strip, however, was for the common cold. It was our golden nugget.

We’ve spent the week watching old movies like Sneakers and reruns of TV shows like Seinfeld, Full House and Who’s the Boss. There’s no such thing as chicken noodle soup, so we’ve been living off of hot and sour soup from an Indo-Chinese restaurant that happens to deliver. We’ve also been drinking a lot of orange juice, sprite and tea.

We’ve been making progress. The AC was on when I woke up this morning, and Ben made two eggs for himself for breakfast. I know we’ll be all better by the time he’s eating four.

Dead fish

2007-10-15T12:06:00.000+05:30

Gluttony, it seems, is indeed a deadly sin. Ben Fish, that pig of a fish who inhaled every food pellet in sight before his bowlmates even managed to digest a bite, died Thursday.

We had returned two days earlier from a short business trip to Mumbai. While we were away, our landlord fed our three fish. All seemed well to me when we returned, though Aliyah insisted in hindsight that something about Ben Fish's behavior had seemed, well, fishy.

"I suspect foul play," she scowled. "I think Ben Fish was poisoned."

"Why would our landlord murder Ben Fish?" I asked.

Aliyah looked at me as if the answer was obvious. "Because he's not paying rent," she deadpanned.

Time-lapse poison or no, two days after our return from Mumbai, I found Ben Fish floating belly-half-up on the surface of the dirty water (in my opinion, the real cause of death) filling their bowl. I tapped the glass. Aliyah Fish nibbled at Ben Fish's tail. He didn't move.

"Uh oh," I said.

I called Aliyah over and shared my morbid discovery. In between brief but passion bouts of sadness ("We couldn't even keep our first pet alive for a month!") she hatched all manner of conspiracy theories ("I'm sure Ben Fish was poisoned. There's no other explanation."), and searched the internet for specific causes of death (She googled "fish dying.") and for local veterinarians who might be able to perform a late-night fish autopsy ("I have to know what happened to Ben Fish. I don't care what it costs.").

It soon came time to dispose of the body. Perhaps too callously, I suggested flushing Ben Fish down the toilet. Aliyah reminded me that our toilet suffers from weak plumbing that sometimes prevents immediate, thorough disposal of waste. The toilet is prone to stragglers, and we did not want a dead fish floating there any longer than necessary.

"Get a shovel," Aliyah said. "We'll bury him in the park."

I shoved a spoon in my front pocket and gingerly placed Ben Fish inside a plastic bag.

"Now," Aliyah instructed, "we each need to pick something that's important to us to bury with him."

This proved tricky for me. I slowly walked through our house, but discovered that any object which meant anything to me was also something I was unwilling to bury next to a dead fish.

After several minutes of unsuccessful searching, I approached our medicine cabinet and pulled out my bottle of malaria pills. About 50 small pink pills rattled around inside. I began removing one. Aliyah narrowed her eyes.

"A malaria pill?"

"I don't want Ben Fish to get sick in the afterlife."

Aliyah graciously agreed that the green, white and orange wristband she'd selected (an office gift she'd received on the sixtieth anniversary of India's independence) could suffice as both our objects. Dropping the nationalistic accessory in the bag with Ben Fish, we began our funeral march.

Several Indian men were sleeping in the park. We tiptoed around them. Aliyah pointed to a spot beneath a tree. I stuck the spoon into the dirt. Hard as a rock. We continued looking, but found the park earth unforgiving.

Finally, we found a large pile of dead leaves and other dried brush. The pile reached nearly a meter high, and scooping out a deep crevice, we placed Ben Fish deep inside this once-verdant cave. After thoughtful eulogies ("I've never met a fish with such a strong personality," Aliyah said), we headed back upstairs to mourn with the survivors.

We walked from the park in silence for about three seconds. Then Aliyah looked at me with wide and excited eyes.

"Can we get a dog now?"

Of fish and meat

2007-10-06T15:08:00.000+05:30

The fish are alive. Ben Fish continues to eat every pellet dropped in the bowl. Aliyah Fish is still an incompetent eater who regurgitates every bite she takes. Amazingly, she lives. Maybe she's sneaking cookies and chocolate from our fridge in the middle of the night.

And that all-too-sober, protein-deficient month of September is, thank Vishnu, over. We're proud for having achieved our perplexing goal of abstinence, and have vowed never to make such a foolish commitment again.

We broke the fast on a Sunday. I drank whiskey and beer on the wrong side of noon. We ordered two greasy pizzas -- pepperoni and chili chicken -- from a delivery joint called Smokin Joe's. We sat on our terrace with our Aussie neighbor Danielle and reveled in sun and meat. I never thought flesh could taste so good.

And, of course, by 3 p.m. we felt ill. It turns out that returning to action after a meatless month can even make the most ravenous bacon-scarfing cheeseburger fiend sick. My stomach roiled. I belched more in an hour than I had all year. I could almost hear the pig oinking and the chicken clucking from the dark recesses of my churning abdomen.

Nothing a little nap wouldn't cure. By dinner I was back. We ordered way too much meaty, oily, gooey gloop from the Om Hotel, and I washed it down with a cold beer.

Ah, success.

give a dog a bone

2007-10-03T15:10:00.001+05:30

New Delhi is teeming with homeless hounds. The dogs spend their days trotting through the dusty streets and their nights scraping out a living in India’s capital. Many of the females have sagging nipples that nearly drag on the ground, the product of being a puppy factory most of their lives. Several have small patches of fur missing from scratching away their fleas or duking out their territory. They really are quite perfect.

And, like most of the poor in India, they are largely ignored, including the five or six pups in our neighborhood that always congregate outside of our grocery store, Hawker’s House. They sleep under cars and keep at respectful distances from humans. One recent evening Ben and I decided to walk to the store for an ice cream when I came up with, what I thought was a genius idea.

“We get a treat, why shouldn’t the dogs?” I asked Ben as I put a bag of dog bones on the cashier’s counter. He gave me a funny look and reluctantly paid for the 60-rupee bag of raw hides.

“These dogs are going to be so happy,” I said as we walked out of the store, opening the bag, thinking it would be a sort of trick-or-treat holiday for our neighborhood pets. I saw my first dog, a brown dog so skinny you could see his ribs poking out through his fur. I set a bone in between his paws. He sniffed the bone and then meandered to a garbage pile of onion peels, fruit scraps and plastic bowls that once held street vendor samosas and panipuri.

“These dogs are stupid,” said Ben. “They don’t even know what bones are.”

It turns out, he was right. After attempting the same routine with several other dogs, we decided they had never had a bone in their lives. One dog pawed at the bone, unsure what to do with it, another ignored it completely. The next morning, the bones lay in their original spots.

I recently read that over 2,000 dogs are born in India every hour. Someone should inform them about bones.

Next time, I think we’ll skip the bones altogether. Double ice-cream for the both of us.

Chak De India

2007-09-25T15:01:00.000+05:30

The explosions rattled the windows of our little house. We hurried outside.

Don't worry. This was no Baghdad moment. India had just won the inaugural Twenty20 World Cup of cricket, narrowly knocking off Pakistan in the finals in South Africa -- a match with so much baggage that one of my Indian friends had likened the India-Pakistan cricket rivalry to a war between the two nuclear powers.

The Indian victory won the celebrating team a full-page photo on the cover of today's Hindustan Times, knocking to page three the very important appointment of Rahul Gandhi (son, grandson and great-grandson of Indian prime ministers) as general secretary of the All India Congress Committee.

Cricket is really important here.

I watched the last forty minutes of the match, during which any doubts that cricket might be as interesting as baseball were incinerated. And within two seconds of the last out, the explosions started.

From our terrace, we watched the otherwise dark sky illuminated by explosions of red, green, blue and white. The fireworks came from all directions, and continued blasting every few seconds for hours on end -- at least until the wrong side of midnight.

"This is crazy," Aliyah said as we watched our typically slumbering neighborhood spotlighted by sparkling rockets several times each minute. It seemed that most of the fireworks were coming from the rooftops of residential buildings. We laughed as we pictured a blue-collar Indian man skipping most of the match so that his pyrotechnic setup would be ready for launch within seconds of India's victory. We imagined him standing on his scummy roof, waiting, waiting, waiting, until the moment when his stodgy wife yelled up to him that India had won, and he could set his display alight. We laughed even harder at the past possibility of India losing, causing our roof guy to sadly gather his unlit fireworks for potential use next year.

After about 15 minutes of watching the sky's seemingly ceaseless celebration, we went inside. We started reading, but were soon interrupted by what sounded like machine gun fire coming from the park across the street from our house.

"Aiiieeeee!" I cried. "I feel like I'm in Baghdad."

Aliyah patted my knee comfortingly.

"Nah," she said. "Just India."

Dunce Fish

2007-09-23T19:23:00.000+05:30

Aliyah Fish is still alive. And she seems to be making progress on the food front. That's the good news.

The bad news: I'm pretty sure she's retarded.

On the fourth or fifth day in our house, we put a huge excess of breakfast pellets in the fishbowl. Ben Fish didn't have time to gobble up all 40 pellets before Aliyah Fish had her shot. She swam to the surface, closed in on a pink pellet and opened her mouth wide.

The real Aliyah gripped my arm tightly, her eyes alight with excitement.

"I feel like I'm watching my child take her first steps!" Aliyah cried. "Oh, Aliyah Fish!"

That euphoria was short lived. As we watched more closely, we noticed that each time Aliyah Fish took a pellet in her mouth, it would pop out a second later.

While Ben Fish was doing his best Hoover impression, Aliyah Fish's failure to seal the deal repeated several times.

"At least she's getting to lick the food," Aliyah said.

We have several theories regarding the cause of Aliyah Fish's ingestion malfunction. It's possible the pellets are too difficult for her to eat. Or that she prefers algae. Or that she's taking bites so tiny they're too small for us to see.

I'm convinced, however, that Aliyah Fish is some sort of mental defective who's too dimwitted to master the basic act of consumption. I think we're going to have to instruct Servant Fish to chew Aliyah Fish's food for her and feed it to her baby-bird style.

American fish

2007-09-19T15:22:00.000+05:30

I’m afraid the Ben Fish is slowly killing the Aliyah Fish.

Those aren’t strangely aquatic pet names. They’re the names of our new aquatic pets.

It began when one of the writers I recruited for Caravan sent me a link to an excellent New Yorker story by Adam Gopnik that reflects on the trauma of dealing with the death of a pet—in this case, Gopnik’s 5-year-old daughter’s goldfish Bluie. Aliyah and I soon decided to get fish of our own.

So on a Sunday afternoon trip to Bhogal Market to buy, among other things, pistachio nuts and eggs (I wound up breaking all but one of the eggs when, in my hurry to get inside our air conditioned house, I roughly threw the bag containing the eggs down on the concrete terrace outside our front door), Aliyah spotted a sign for a fish store. Following the arrow on the hand-painted sign, we tiptoed down Fish Alley. Twenty yards in, we were lost. A man in a turban poked his head out of a small shop.

“Fish?” Aliyah asked. With my right hand, I offered a terrible impression of a swimming fish. The man in the turban invited us in.

We walked through the store (where most items looked as though they’d been picked up second hand at a Jaipur garage sale), and entered a dark room in the back. Our guide turned on the lights, revealing a dozen fish tanks, which he quickly began wiping dust from. I’m pretty sure we were the aquarium room’s first customers in months.

Aliyah quickly spotted her fish: a small white one with a big tail and a bright orange splash on its forehead. “Ben Fish!” she cried, directing our guide toward her chosen fish.

Ever chivalrous and compassionate, I knew I must reciprocate. “I’ll name my fish Aliyah,” I said, sweetly taking the real Aliyah’s hand. I turned toward the man in the turban. “Anyone of those fish will be fine,” I said, as he thrust his net into the tank.

The Fish Guy, who, for purposes of humor, I’ll assume is a vegetarian, then took the netted Aliyah Fish out of the tank, let her suffocate for several seconds, then grabbed her with his bare hand and shoved her into a plastic bag of water. Alert PETA.

We began loading up on accessories: a magnified fish bowl, colorful marble-like pebbles, a plastic palm tree, food and a net. I asked about cleaning the tank. The Fish Guy pointed to a small, dark fish sucking the aquarium wall, and explained that such a fish would eat any algae or poo in our fish bowl.

“So we’re getting three fish now?” Aliyah asked.

“No, no,” I said. “This is India. Two fish, one servant.”

So off we went with two named pale fish who were already the subject of much personality projection, and one Servant Fish.

We set up a home for our new fish and started to get them settled. We had a brief scare a few hours in when we thought Servant Fish, immobile on the bowl’s floor, was dead. I jabbed him with a ballpoint pen. Waking up with a start, he did several high-speed laps around the bowl. I jumped two feet in the air and screamed like a soprano (not the cool capitalized crime family Soprano. The girlie singer soprano).

“You’re a girl,” Aliyah said.

Our real problem surfaced the next morning when we fed our fish breakfast. The Fish Guy had instructed us to give them two pellets of food each. Generously, we assumed we should include Servant Fish in this calculation, so Aliyah dropped in six pellets. Ben Fish ate them all in about two seconds.

Aliyah rounded on me.

“Hey!” she said. “Why’d you eat my breakfast?”

We put six more pellets in. Ben Fish ate them all. Aliyah berated me, the real Ben, again.

“It’s not my fault,” I said, grasping at straws. I pointed at Aliyah Fish, who was dully gazing at the side of the bowl. “If Aliyah Fish would stop staring at her reflection for a second, maybe she’d get some food too.”

After discussion of numerous hypotheses (Aliyah Fish is anorexic. She’s a slow digester. She can’t swim up to the surface. She’s blind.), we decided to let the matter rest until dinner.

When it was time to feed our fish that night, Aliyah dropped in a generous dozen pellets. Aliyah Fish didn’t move. Ben Fish gobbled up all the food within five seconds.

“Hey!” Aliyah said. “Stop eating my dinner!”

I sputtered in protest.

“And what about Servant Fish?” Aliyah said. “He hasn’t eaten yet either.”

“Don’t worry about Servant Fish,” I scoffed. “He’s a servant.”

It’s been the same story the last three days. We overfeed the fish, making sure to put pellets directly above Aliyah Fish. We try to distract Ben Fish. Nothing works. Ben Fish eats all the food. Aliyah Fish hasn’t had a pellet since she moved in with us.

I was relating our fish woes to friends at dinner last night. Puja asked what kind of fish Ben Fish was. "American," I said.

I’m worried that Aliyah Fish’s days are numbered. And that Ben Fish will be blamed. I’m already planning a cover-up. I just pray that obstruction of justice as it relates to fishicide isn’t a felony here.

AutoManiac

2007-09-15T13:37:00.000+05:30

Our most loathed autorickshaw driver looks a bit like an Indian Santa Claus, only less jolly.

A bushy salt-and-pepper beard covers a round face topped by a turban. His forearms are huge and somewhat frightening. He wears the loose-fitting, drab blue-grey pants and shirt that compose the typically-ignored uniform of the hundreds of thousands of auto drivers in India's capital. He smiles a lot, but in a demented, screw-loose sort of way. He’s there most mornings at the informal auto stand around the corner from our house, where he can often be found urinating facing the street.

I'm pretty sure he's a lunatic.

“Mmm hmmmm KG Marg, hmmm,” he’ll say, sounding like some sort of Sikh Slingblade. He speaks in an incomprehensible but disconcerting gravelly rumble, his crazy eyes darting from the road to the rearview mirror.

We try to avoid this maniac whenever possible. But sometimes we’re in a hurry to get to work and he’s the only guy waiting at the auto stand.

The Maniac can’t believe his luck in such cases, and starts rushing toward us (usually, but not always, before he finishes urinating).

“Hmmm, come, come,” he hums, beckoning us with pee-stained hands toward his green and yellow auto.

With no other options, we reluctantly obey. Invariably, once we’re inside he looks over his hammy shoulder and tries to rip us off.

“Hmmmmm, KG Marg, Fifty!” he says, pointing enthusiastically at Aliyah. He turns to me, bouncing in his seat. “Jhandewala, hmmmmm. Eighty!” His eyes light up with insane glee as he imagines how many more crazy pills he’ll be able to purchase after this haul. “One-thirty!”

After complex negotiations (during which I say “No” twelve times), we settle on our destination and price. He revs the engine and drives away, a phlegmy tune soon spilling out of his big chest.

“Hmmmmm, oh, ho, hmmmmmmmmm,” he sings.

“I’m scared,” says Aliyah.

I nod.

“Let’s not go with this guy again.”

I nod.

Soon Cuckoo starts speaking loudly in a language that I don’t understand. After five or six seconds of Indo-jargon, he looks at me in the rearview mirror, his mad eyes open wide, awaiting my reply.

I squirm and smile awkwardly.

“Yes,” I nod.

He erupts with a booming laugh, as if I’ve just said the funniest thing in the world.

At a stoplight a few minutes later, Aliyah gently nudges me to look at our driver, who’s quickly descending from irritating wacko to potential sex criminal. The Maniac’s lips are slightly parted as he stares at a white woman’s uncovered calf in the auto next to ours. He stares for several seconds, looks away for a beat, and then stares for several more seconds. This repeats for the duration of the red light. When traffic finally starts moving, our mental driver hunches over and guns the accelerator, feverishly weaving in and out of other vehicles in an attempt to catch another glimpse of ankle (which is apparently an arousing body part here).

“Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm,” The Maniac hums in harmony with the overtaxed engine. All for naught, though, as The Calf's auto takes a turn and is lost to him forever.

He looks at me in the rearview mirror, his fanatic eyes plaintive and seeking some sort of male empathy over this loss. This madman looks at me as if were brothers, as if only I could truly understand the depth of his suffering. And then he says this:

"पिटी उस बोथ एंड पिटी थेम अल व्हो वैन्ल्य थे द्रेंस ऑफ़ यौथ रेकाल्ल. फॉर ऑफ़ अल साद वोर्ड्स ऑफ़ तोंगुए एंड पेन, थेसद्देस्त अरे ठेस: इत मिघ्त हवे बीन."

itchy and scratchy

2007-09-11T12:39:00.000+05:30

My feet look like they have chicken pox.

Saturday night Ben and I met up with some Columbia alums and went to a new lounge, “Tabula rasa” in South Delhi. I convinced everyone to sit outside on the over-sized beanbag chairs amongst lit pools covered in rose petals. It was the kind of lounge where a drink costs more than adopting a small cat.

The next morning I woke up to a fire—that is, on my legs. It was a burning sensation that all the hydrocortisone cream in the world could not quench. And there’s not even hydrocortisone cream in India. I counted: twenty-five mosquito bites on each foot. My initial reaction was that I’d rather my feet bleed than be itchy, so I scratched until both my feet were raw. But the itching did not go away.

My feet swelled from all of the itching. They looked like pregnant woman feet, with scabs. Good thing I’m taking malaria pills.

On Monday I had trouble conducting interviews, eating, and even carrying a conversation at work. The itchiness was beyond unbearable. More than once I spotted colleagues staring at my feet in disgust and wonder. “I swear, I’m not diseased!” I said.

I tend to diagnose myself on wikipedia. I’ve diagnosed Ben with strep throat and an ear infection more than once. It’s quite a handy tool. It was at work, that I found the answer on the net: toothpaste.

As soon as I got home from work, I slathered my feet in toothpaste. It quickly dried, and alas, the itching had stopped. It was a miracle.

Later in the evening I found benadryl in our medicine cabinet. After taking it and adding another layer of toothpaste on my feet, I went to bed. The next morning, the itchiness was mostly gone. I’m not sure if it was the benadryl or the toothpaste, but I’d like to think it was the latter.

2007-09-09T21:06:00.000+05:30

This weekend I got an e-mail from my college roommate, Lisa. Among its sweet inquiries about my life in India, she also mentioned, "Ben's blog is so funny." That's when I decided it was time to write a new entry.

This week was India's fashion week in Delhi. I've never been to an event like this before, so I didn't know what to expect. It was pretty ridiculous. I found the designers to be quite pretentious, and it was kind of disappointing that most of the clothes were all western. The highlight: watching men in pink and purple flowered suits walking the catwalk to Will Smith's "Welcome to Miami."

It was the first event in India that I covered with lots of press. There were 30 catwalk shows, and the schedule many of the journalists went as following: come in around 11 a.m., go to the 15 entree buffet, go the the designer show (where there were numerous gifts awaiting the press on their seats, including a teapot, chiffon tote, and chocolates), run back to the press room where press releases of the show would be waiting, file based on the press release as soon as possible.

It must be because of this whole vegetarian thing, but lately all I can think about is food. I think that's part of the reason why I decided to write a story about the food at fashion week and what models were eating. Let's just say I got some funny looks from the models when I snuck upstairs to their banquet room and said, "Uh, can I take a picture of you while you eat that butter chicken?"

Fashion weeks was fun. But now that I've done it once, it's enough for a lifetime.

Food at fashion week article

Preview fashion week

Stamina

2007-09-06T13:04:00.000+05:30

The Sikh farted.

I was stretching on the blue mat next to the leg press being used by the flatulent elderly man with a long silver beard down to his flabby nipples. I heard another noise come from the general direction of the short turquoise shorts he wore.

I crinkled my nose and stole a glance at the Sikh in the mirror. He didn't look the least bit embarrassed, and continued his gastrointestinal symphony by belching loudly.

I got up and walked to the other end of the gym. There, I found four young Indian men lounged comfortably on three blue benches. One was laying down with his square head resting on his fat, interlocked fingers. Another had his legs crossed as he clumsily worked his thumbs over the small buttons on his cell phone. The other two were sharing a bench and talking, the shorter (and fatter) one shaking his head to the rhythm of a Shakira song blasting from the speakers. Coach, smiling, stood over them and watched it all.

None of them were lifting weights, nor had they for the last ten minutes.

I approached tentatively. "Excuse me," I said to the prostrate man. "Can I use that bench?"

The man, a bulky twenty-something with a small belly and George McFly hair, looked at me with utter confusion, which was strange, because I knew he spoke English. I asked again. Lazily, McFly swung his legs over the side of the bench and, very reluctantly, stood.

Most of the young, affluent Indian men who go to our gym barely exercise. I'm pretty sure they assume that just being at the gym will balloon their muscles. It certainly seems to have that effect on their egos.

As for us, it's before 7 a.m. most mornings that we arrive at Stamina, the ritzy (for India) gym on our corner. It's in the basement of a residential building, behind a frosted glass door that's dotted with muscled silhouettes. The gym is modest in size, perhaps 60 feet long by 15 feet wide. The ceiling is bright yellow with a wavy blue line running down the middle. Three evenly-spaced pillars in the center of the gym are painted a fiery, almost flagrant, orange. Which is to say that the decor is tasteful compared to the laughable nouveau-cool standards of many South Delhi locales.

Coach, who we think is our gym's owner (or at least its pushy-but-pro-bono personal trainer) wears the same thing everyday: a red, white and black Adidas windbreaker and matching black pants. Does he have six matching outfits or does he wear the same one everyday? I can't stop thinking about it. How one becomes fixated on such things while lifting weights and listening to Les Miserables on an iPod.

But the outfit. It's tight enough to make Coach's shoulders and chest look huge, but baggy enough to allow me to wonder if the get-up isn't simply a way to hide a telltale belly lurking underneath. The outfit is made out of the same sort of glossy, synthetic material that I suspect Coach sprays on his head each morning to supplement his thinning hair. His scalp looks like it's been airbrushed, then applied with a Photoshop blur filter.

There are two more regular employees. First, there's the boy. He looks about 15. Coach calls him "Guy," or sometimes "The Guy." The Guy's job is to make sure no gym members have to rack or re-rack their weights. The Guy wears the same blue, pink and white striped Polo shirt every day. He has a faint mustache. The Guy looks like he doesn't get enough to eat.

There's also a paunchy older man with a thick mustache. He wears the sort of pants-and-tucked-in-shirt combo that would be more appropriate to an accounting firm than a gymnasium. He seems to really like loading the bar I'm lifting with more weight than I can handle. His name sounds something like Bareezbadoo or Beezbabadoo or Beezeebeezeebabaloo. Aliyah and I refer to him as Beelzebub. Neither Beelzebub nor The Guy speak a word of English.

Besides the see-and-be-seen members of the Boys Club, the oddball employees, and the digestively-challenged Sikh, some of the regulars at the gym include:

-A middle-aged woman who wears either a conservative sari or a Hard Rock Cafe: Kuala Lumpur t-shirt.
-A well-fed man with the mustache of a government bureaucrat who I've caught more than once looking in the mirror, grabbing his belly with both hands, shaking it violently, suddenly realizing he's not in private, letting go of his belly, shifting his eyes back and forth, and then nodding and smiling in the mirror like everything is cool.
-At least two really fat guys who do nothing but sit around breaking equipment and trying ever-so-hard to be accepted by Coach.

Have I mentioned I'm hungry?

Meatless

2007-09-05T14:34:00.001+05:30

"I'm so hungry."

Aliyah laughs. I guess she thinks I'm trying to be funny. I repeat myself, this time a little whinier.

"I'm sooooo hungry."

Aliyah stops laughing. She looks confused.

"You're hungry? Are you serious?"

"Yeah. I feel like one of those African kids with parasitic tapeworms swimming around their empty, bloated bellies."

"You just ate a four-egg omelet."

"Yeah, but it didn't even have meat in it."

I'm hungry all the time now. All the time. It doesn't matter how many mango milk shakes I down at breakfast, how many eggs I put in my omelet, how many bags of muesli I munch at work, or even the amount of fried cheese and greasy vegetables I eat for dinner. That stuff just isn't filling. Especially if you're used to eating four bacon cheeseburgers a week.

No meat, no booze, no problem?

2007-08-31T17:23:00.000+05:30

September will be our month of abstinence.

Beginning tomorrow, Aliyah and I will attempt to go a month without meat and alcohol. I expect it will be much harder for me than it will be for her.

Why are we committing ourselves to these 30 days of self-restraint? I'll buy a beer and a burger for whoever leaves the best answer in our Comments section.

one month down

2007-08-31T13:16:00.000+05:30

It’s been nearly month since we arrived in Delhi. I can’t believe it! We’ve settled into a nice routine and have a relatively easy way of life compared to most living here.
Sure, things will break, the electricity will stop and people will snub you. But we’ve decided if you just wait the problem out, things will usually fix themselves.

Work is good. I’m going to be covering India fashion week in New Delhi, looking primarily for business trends in the industry. I didn’t choose this topic, but it sounds fun and different. Watch out, catwalk.

On Sunday we’re taking a trip to Gurgaon, a neighboring city about an hour away. It’s known for its tall corporate buildings, giant malls, and luxurious residential complexes—all sprinkled amongst extremely poor villages. We’re going for the malls, I think.

So far, no more lizards or rats. Just an occasional bug or two. Things are looking good.

Columbia University Club of New Delhi

2007-08-30T12:29:00.001+05:30

One of these things is not like the others. One of these things just doesn't belong.

Heat

2007-08-29T16:14:00.000+05:30

Even my fingertips are sweating.

The air conditioning is broken in my office. The temperature in New Delhi today is 95 degrees Fahrenheit. I'm wearing jeans and a long-sleeved, buttoned-down shirt.

I could throw around adjectives like humid or suffocating or sweltering or torrid, but I'm not sure they would do the situation justice.

Let's put it this way: My latest scheme to cool off involves going to one of the street food stalls outside and asking a toothless cook with cow dung under his fingernails if I can join his collection of frying samosas and bacteria by taking a quick dip in his large metal pan full of scalding oil. That sounds refreshing.

The only training he has is how to salute

2007-08-28T20:27:00.000+05:30

(my first A-1!)

Little house in New Delhi

2007-08-26T08:56:00.001+05:30

The Lizard King

2007-08-25T11:45:00.001+05:30

I found a lizard in our kitchen sink two minutes after Aliyah asked me to check the bed for snakes.

There were no snakes in the bed, though we had succumbed to a somewhat-irrational, Big Love-induced anxiety about the possibility after watching the latest episode of the HBO show about polygamy (and, in this case, snakes in a bed).

There was, however, a lizard in our kitchen sink. It was pale green and about five inches long. It was about one-millionth as unnerving and disgusting as the rat-in-the-bed incident. Still, my adrenaline levels shot up. My heart beat fast. I took a small step forward, then three back.

"Don't freak out," I warned Aliyah.

"WHY?" Aliyah said in a totally-freaked-out voice. "What is it?"

She snapped up from her computer and rushed forward. I tried to block her view of the sink.

"Don't freak out," I said, sounding pretty freaked out myself. I started turning around in circles, looking for...I don't know...a ready-made lizard trap that comes standard in all Indian homes?

"What is it?" Aliyah begged. She stood on her toes to get a better view of the sink.

"OK," I said, now sounding way more freaked out than Aliyah. "OK."

I looked to the sink to make sure the small reptile was still there. It had barely moved. Clearly, it was the calmest living thing in the house.

"OK," I rattled, turning toward Aliyah. "There's a lizard in the sink."

"Oh my God!" Aliyah half-screamed. "What should we do?"

I kept spinning around the kitchen in irrationally-conceived circles. After four or five full rotations, Aliyah offered this advice:

"Call Abhishek."

I stopped spinning.

"I'm not calling Abhishek," I said, thinking how practical but emasculating a call to our landlord would be.

"OK," I said, grabbing a tiny plastic Tupperware knockoff. "I'll just trap him in this."

Aliyah and I both looked at the plastic cylinder and at the lizard. Sure, he'd fit inside. But the diameter of the mouth of the cylinder was half as long as the lizard. There would be no trapping with this device. The lizard would have to crawl in headfirst.

"No," Aliyah said.

"Right. OK."

I began ransacking the house for a better lizard trap. All the while, the lizard remained calm in the sink.

I stormed back into the kitchen with the metal trashcan from our bathroom. It was about eight inches wide -- big enough to trap the lizard. It's sides were covered with small stylish holes, but nothing the lizard could escape through.

I approached the sink. Aliyah hid in the bedroom.

Tiptoeing forward, I slowly brought the upended trashcan over my head. Standing above the sink, I slowly brought the trashcan down into a holding pattern about six inches above the still lizard.

Slam!

Aliyah opened the door a crack. "Got him?"

"Got him."

"Now what?"

"I have no idea."

After several minutes of debate (during which the lizard used those small stylish holes to explore the inside of the trashcan's walls), I walked toward the sink with the latest copy of Time Out Delhi.

"Do it fast," she said. "One swift move, (embarrassing pet name deleted)."

So, in several clunky moves, I lifted the corner of the trashcan high enough to begin sliding the magazine over the metal cylinder's mouth. After 30 seconds of ridiculous struggling and at least one high-pitched shriek (I'm not saying who it came from), I had the lizard trapped in an upside-down trashcan sitting atop a magazine in our kitchen sink.

With Aliyah again hiding in the bedroom, I carefully picked up the trashcan, being sure to hold the magazine firmly to the lid. I walked out to the terrace, all the while hearing and feeling the lizard climbing around inside my makeshift trap.

Setting the trashcan down several feet from out front door (and with the mouth facing away from our house), I removed the magazine and fled inside as if I were a frightened Japanese man in a Godzilla film.

Oh, and when Aliyah went to the gym this morning, our landlord told her that he'd seen six baboon-sized monkeys (and one baby) on our terrace this morning. I don't think we have a trashcan big enough for them.

2 stories

2007-08-24T08:35:00.000+05:30

The Mint:
http://www.livemint.com/2007/08/21004238/Meow-Time-to-connect-with-Mum.html

The Hindustan Times:
http://hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=fae72287-43e6-4a0a-9c21-922f17a5b735&&Headline=Frustrated+in+the+US%3f+Get+a+job+back+home

p.s. A woman in Connaught place asked me for directions today! Me! I must look like I belong. Too bad I had no clue what she was looking for.

My first article in India!

2007-08-18T10:04:00.000+05:30

http://livemint.com/2007/08/18021751/The-business-of-cashing-in-on.html

Five food scenes

2007-08-17T21:18:00.000+05:30

1. "One tomato, please," I said to the boy selling vegetables. They were arranged on a large wooden cart in front of an abandoned storefront on the nameless lane we've dubbed Rubina Khan Street because of the political advertisement Khan has on the corner.

The boy put one tomato on his scale. Then another. Then another. I began waving my hands in protest.

"No, no!" I said. "One tomato."

I held up my index finger. I pointed to the pile of tomatoes. I held up my index finger and offered an exaggerated nod. The boy smiled knowingly. Then he continued piling tomatoes on the scale.

"No, no, no!" I said. "One tomato." I held up my index finger again. I pointed again to the pile of tomatoes. I held up my index finger and wagged it a bit. The boy nodded with understanding. Then he continued piling tomatoes on the scale.

An elderly man lounging nearby laughed. With a short Hindi sentence, he corrected the boy's mistake (it turned out the boy thought I wanted one kilogram of tomatoes).

The boy put my tomato in a bag and handed it to me. I pointed to the onions.

"One onion, please," I said, holding up one confident finger.

The boy put an onion on his scale. Then another. Then another.

2. "One medium pepperoni and cheese pizza, please," I said. "And what's the difference between Cheese Burst crust and Double Cheez Crunch crust?"

"Yes, Cheese Burst crust," said the heavily accented voice on the other end of the line.

"Yes, Cheese Burst crust," I echoed.

"Would you like extra cheese?" he said.

"Yes."

"Anything else?"

"Yes. One order of cheesy garlic toasties."

"Would you like cheesy jalapeno dipping sauce?"

"Yes."

"OK. Anything else?"

"No. See you soon."

I hung up and turned to Aliyah.

"Domino's will be here in thirty minutes."

3. "You don't drink beer?" I asked.

"No," said Sanjit the photographer. "I only drink wine and single malt scotch."

I nodded. Sanjit leaned forward.

"I only drink alcohol that comes from a barrel," he said.

"Why?"

Sanjit rolled his big shoulders and looked as if he knew he was about to say something clever.

"Because," he said, "alcohol that comes from a barrel, that is someone's blood and sweat."

He gave my beer a dismissive look and said, "Everything else is piss."

Sanjit turned toward the waiter.

"Now," he said proudly, "bring us a bottle of Zinfandel."

4. "I love the Om Hotel," I said, my mouth half full of a spicy chicken seekh kebab.

"Me too," Aliyah said. Those were the first words we had exchanged since our food arrived minutes earlier.

The chicken seekh kebabs at the Om Hotel are basically chicken sausages. I stabbed one with my fork and slapped it onto my plate. I grabbed a piece of buttered naan and set it beside the kebab. I stabbed the kebab again and dropped it onto the naan. Then I took two heaping spoonfuls of the green chili sauce that comes in a metal dish on a plate with peeled red onions and dumped it on my kebab. Then I rolled the saucy kebab in the naan like a crepe and took a huge bite.

I love Indian hot dogs.

5. "What do we do?" I asked.

Aliyah and I both looked at the metal bowls of water in front of us. A lonely slice of lemon floated in each dish.

"Do we drink it?"

I shrugged. We had just finished dinner, our first at a restaurant in Delhi, and asked for the bill. And then they brought us Lilliputian Jacuzzis.

"Try it," I prodded.

Aliyah stuck her pinkie finger in the water and lifted it to her mouth. She nodded and smiled.

It was only then that I noticed a family at another table washing their curry-covered fingers in their bowls.

Oops.

EmployMint

2007-08-14T20:32:00.000+05:30

Today was my second day of work at The Mint, a business daily that's conveniently located close to Connaught Place, the main commercial district. So far, so good despite a few minor annoyances.

Work starts at 10 a.m. in India, which is a plus. The downside is that Saturday is a work day too. I leave my apartment by 9:30 and try to find an auto rickshaw to take me to work. Oftentimes, none of the drivers want to go to Connaught Place because of the heavy traffic, but chances are by the second or third rickshaw, someone will nod and say "get in." I played a game to see how many seconds of silence I could count before a horn would honk on the 25 minute ride to work. I couldn't get past three.

The Mint is on the 16th floor of the Hindustan Times building. By the time I arrive there's a long line waiting outside the elevators. It takes two or three elevator cycles before I'm allowed inside. In the reception area of The Mint, there are two security guards with a sign in sheet. I tell them, "I work here now." They don't understand. They make me fill out the sheet with my name, address, and purpose of visit. They make me sit in the reception area for 20 minutes and serve me tea as I try to make the case for entry into my cubicle. Eventually, an employee walks in to tell them I work here. Chances are, the guards will forget by tomorrow.

The actual work, on the other hand, has been fantastic so far. I basically get to write whatever I want with as much free tea as I please. My first article is about Craigslist in India and how it's being used by savvy India entrepreneurs to target expats for apartments, jobs, etc. . I'll post some articles on here soon.

I work tomorrow, despite Independence Day. While kids will be flying kites and parading around in green, orange and white, I'll be trying to get past security.

Headaches and hurdles and hoops, oh my!

2007-08-10T14:01:00.000+05:30

We were hot and cranky. We knew the line was too long, yet it remained somehow indecipharable in total length and start and end points. The room was packed with used-to-it Indians and put-out foreigners, and felt tighter than a Volkswagen bug full of Milwaukee residents.

I blinked sweat out of my eyes as I turned toward Aliyah. She looked as miserable as I felt.

"This isn't worth it," she said. "Let's leave."

And so ended a fruitless 24-hour journey through India's lumbering, antiquated and horribly inefficient bureaucracy. A word to the wise: Pack your patience and leave your rationality at the door.

After an early morning trip Thursday to the gym (I had made the mistake of asking Coach for suggestions on shoulder lifts. By the time we left, my shoulders felt like two of Mike Tyson's speed bags.), Aliyah and I took an auto rickshaw to the Foreigners' Registration Office in R.K. Puram in South Delhi, as per the requirements of my employment visa.

We arrived 45 minutes before the office opened. A man who looked vaguely Mongolian was organizing a sort of bag queue, where everyone let their backpack or purse hold their place in line so they could sit anywhere in the courtyard. A fine idea, but impractical in India. As soon as the office opened, bags were kicked aside, elbows impolitely poked at adjacent torsos, and all semblance of an organized line disappeared into a sea of international anxiety.

The line was finally sorted out, and within 20 minutes we reached the front. "Success!" I thought. "No, no, no, no," answered Ganesh. An Indian official (whose hair was died an unnatural and disconcerting shade of red) told me that to register I'd need four copies of an application form, four passport photos, two copies of my passport, two copies of my visa, proof of employment and proof of residency. He seemed surprised that I had not brought all this documentation as a matter of course. So we left. And had tea at the Hyatt. Their raspberry crumble muffins are delicious.

I spent the rest of the day getting pictures taken, printing and photocopying documents, and going with our very helpful real estate broker to the local police department, where a 100 rupee bribe got me a police-verified proof of residency.

Feeling good about my prospects for success at the registration office, I returned to the apartment to find Aliyah scrambling to convert her visa status, which her would-be employer now insisted as a requirement before she started work on Monday. Excellent.

We made phone calls and lists, and set out our gameplan for a successful day navigating India's absurd bureaucracy. We woke up early Friday morning and returned to the Foreigners' Registration Office. This time, Aliyah went native and dashed to the front of the informal queue when it dissolved into chaos. Straggling near the back, I entered the office to find Aliyah fourth in line. Well done.

The faux redhead, seeming pleased with the stack of documents I had assembled, told me to wait near Counter 2. I did, and watched the first man get turned away for reasons I didn't understand and a European girl denied because she lacked the proper stamp on one of her forms. "Suckers," I thought.

A Nigerian man went to the counter, got into a screaming match with the bureaucrat behind it, and got his papers approved. I was next.

The mustachioed public servant looked through my papers. He smiled. It seemed as if everything would be OK. Then he started making a list of documents I was missing: a request letter from my employer requesting that I be registered, an undertaking letter from my employer saying that they undertake responsiblity for me while in India, and a rental agreement.

"But I have a letter from my employer!" I demanded, pointing to my contract letter. The Indian man shook his head from side to side and smiled. I growled.

"And I have police-verified proof of my residency, with my signature and my landlord's!" I cried. The Indian man again shook his head from side to side and told me to come back Monday. I argued. He just kept smiling and shaking his head. Grrr.

Next we decided to be frustrated by Aliyah's business. We took an auto to Khan Market, where the internet promised the Ministry of Home Affairs Foreigners Division office would be. It was not there. We were directed to an office 10 minutes away. Our collective temperature, already high, rose.

We arrived at the next office and were directed into a dank, powerless room (no lights, no air conditioning). Aliyah was given number 103. Thank Vishnu they were already on 95. After too much waiting for eight numbers, a woman called 103. We asked her many questions about visa conversions. She didn't answer, and instead just wrote down Aliyah's passport information, handed her a slip of paper and directed her to another office up the lane. Apparently, we had only been waiting in the reception line, and were only now being admitted to the actual office.

The office was the hot, sweaty, crowded Volkswagen bug. We took one look at the hundreds of people crammed inside, the incoherency of any formal line or procedure, the utter pointlessness of waiting, and decided to bail.

So we went to get ice cream.

The place was The Big Chill Cafe at Khan Market. They have old movie posters on the walls and keep the air conditioning at a teeth-chattering 18 degrees C. One of the waiters wore a 'Free Tibet' t-shirt.

Aliyah had a chocolate brownie sundae with swirled vanilla and chocolate ice cream with pieces of chocolate cake in it, all topped with hot fudge. I had the Minty Monsta Sundae.

A couple photos of our neighborhood

2007-08-08T17:02:00.000+05:30

a place to call home

2007-08-08T10:55:00.000+05:30

Everything in Jangpura Extension is just a stone's throw away, says our 28-year-old realtor, Abhishek. He's right.

Our apartment is very different than when we were staying in Karol Bagh (see ratatouille). The streets are far less busy, most everyone speaks English, there are parks everywhere, and some dogs are even on leashes. We have restaurants, a market, bank and even a gym within walking distance. Work will be a 15 minute rickshaw ride away.

Our apartment in South Delhi is fantastic, sans the daily ant and mosquito massacres we must commit everyday (We've bombarded our house with incence, Hit spray and traps). We have air conditioning, hot water, satellite TV, and internet. We're actually moving to a bigger apartment with an outdoor terrace next week. It's just around the block from here.

The gym here is very interesting. Young boys are hired to rack and de-rack the weights for customers, and men mostly come to socialize. "Coach," who is dressed in the same wind pant suit everyday, comes around to help everyone. It's like having your very own personal trainer.

Ben and I hope to start work next Monday. But until then, it's mostly getting to know the neighborhood, eating delicious food and exploring Delhi. Pictures to come soon!

Aliyah

Ratatouille

2007-08-05T16:03:00.000+05:30

We woke up to find a rat in our bed the night that Satish's ceiling caved in.

"Ben!" Aliyah screamed. "Wake up! There's a mouse in our bed!"

I snapped into consciousness just in time to see a furry shadow scurry off the bed and out the door. I jumped up, slammed the lights on and began to prowl for vermin.

"Where'd it go?" I said, voice shaking, as I squinted one eye and pressed a cheek to the marble floor, looking beneath the bed we had just shared with a rat.

"There was a mouse in our bed," Aliyah managed, her very-justifiable fear made slightly comical by the two retainers muffling her enunciation.

"There wath a mouth in our bed," she repeated.

I didn't have the heart to tell her our visitor was no mouse, but instead a rat the size of a Hyundai Santa Fe. Nor did I mention that it probably had The Plague.

"Thank God it didn't bite me," I said, adding quickly, "Did it bite you?"

Absent Plague-infected punctures, Aliyah and I began our search in earnest. I held a small green flashlight keychain that I had bought at a hardware store in Manhattan. Aliyah shivered behind me as the small beam of light searched for the rat. No sign of him.

I escorted Aliyah to the hallway bathroom and continued to search. I scanned our bedroom again, then the sitting room. Nothing. I sighed, remembering how earlier in the evening the monsoon had soaked the ceiling of Satish's bedroom so much that chunks of Plaster of Paris fell at our feet. I had thought that was bad.

"Welcome to India," I muttered to myself as I moved, flashlight in hand, from the sitting room to the small shower room adjoining it. And there he was. The rat.

The rat was the size of a cat.

It stooped low over the wide drain of the shower's tile floor. Black sludge was visible just below. The metal grate that had separated humans in the shower from sewer sludge rats sat limply beside the hole, clearly vanquished by the Super Rat.

I gagged. This was no ordinary rat that had been in our bed. It had crawled out of the sewer. And not the sewer in Long Island. The sewer in India.

But for all my disgust, I couldn't kill or injure the rat. So I simply shut the door and hoped it would crawl back down the hole it came through (it did). I just couldn't kill it.

Though I wouldn't have minded if someone else did.

checked in

2007-08-01T01:18:00.000+05:30

Ben and I are at the JFK airport in New York after a hustle and bustle morning of cleaning out the apartment, last minute packing and more goodbyes. After a nine hour flight we will be flying into Vienna at 8 a.m. for a five hour layover (I hope they serve weinerschnizel for breakfast). The second leg of our flight is only about seven hours to New Delhi where we will be greeted by Satish, one of Ben's friends whom he met on his last trip to India. We will be staying with Satish and his family for a day or two until we find an apartment of our own. Our requirements are air conditioning, internet, hot water and satellite TV. Well, the TV would be a bonus.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous. If I wasn't then I wouldn't be acknowledging the realities of moving to a place like India. I was up since 5 a.m. this morning out of excitement, fear and nausea from the malaria pills I recently started to take. I can't wait to get settled and to have a daily routine.
More to come soon...
Aliyah

And we're off

2007-07-29T07:11:00.000+05:30

Namaste. Blog posts are the new mass e-mails. So check in here for semi-regular reports about our new life in India, which begins in just a few short days...