Day 3: Scams There Are Three

I’m in a “house boat”… it’s just as much a “house boat” as the hostel in Delhi was a 5 star all inclusive resort. Everything is a lie. I wake up in Delhi at the hotel at 5am and go down for my chai. A cab comes. I have to share it with two obese Americans from West Virginia who are also having their extended tour of South Asia. They were obnoxiously chipper. Every time I meet people like this who are doing the same thing as me and just cruising along I feel pathetic. These guys are a few pounds away from driving the Walmart carts and having the time of their lives while I’m waltzing into scams and afraid of everything and perpetually uncomfortable. Anyway, we get to the airport and I realize I have no ticket. The first thing comes to mind is I’ve been super scammed, when you get ripped off and you don’t even get the thing that you were ripped off for. Fortunately, the panic attack subsides when I talk to Air India and find there’s a ticket waiting for me. So off we go to Srinagar. Multiple times at the airport Indians shamelessly cut in front of me in line. It must be a cultural thing because these people are chronic line jumpers. In America I might make a stink about such a thing but I don’t think these guys even realize they’ve done something wrong, they walk the way they drive, with an undying compulsion to overtake one another, so normalized that they think nothing of it. I’m starting to understand. On the way to the airport I saw a huge monkey god statue. I asked the driver how many gods there were and he said he wasn’t sure. Maybe around 38,000? It makes sense, in that perspective, the anarchy within the Indian soul, they split their love and faith between 38,000 deities. And there are 3,000 castes, with 25,000 subcastes. And 122 main languages, with 1599 other languages. On top of that there are 1.4 billion living breathing human beings, walking and eating and shitting and talking and surviving and loving, all here. Overwhelming is an understatement. There’s no word that can properly describe the plurality and multi-everythingness of India. 

At the Srinagar airport the customs official casually told me that the last American he met gave him a 10 dollar bill as a keepsake and asked if I had anything for him. I curtly said no and walked away, the skin on my neck crawling. Airport officials are asking for money too? I’m still in Delhi. A man greeted me with a sign bearing my name, something I’ve always dreamed of experiencing. He aggressively grabbed my two light front panniers while I held on to the heavy rear panniers and walked me the entire 10 meters to the cab that awaited. He said he was leaving now and stuck out his hand for his well deserved tip. I gave him 100 rupees for his efforts and wished a hex upon him and all his kin. The solemn muslim cab driver took me to the location and did not solicit a tip, may Allah grant him the highest place in Jannah. As we drove through the city I noticed the occupants were ethnically distinct Muslims, while the many soldiers patrolling the intersections and manning checkpoints were for the most part Indian Hindus. Kashmir is an occupied place, yes, I knew this, now I see it. The owner of the house boat, Hamid, came to greet me. His English was perfect and he was a good looking guy with major dad vibes that was easy to talk to, damn it I fell in love again. He was kind and thoughtful and welcomed me to the kitchen area to eat. I took off my shoes and sat on the rug and they made me a delicious potato lamb and rice thing that warmed my soul. They were treating me well, too well. Once I was nice and comfortable and even happy and I had admitted I enjoyed hiking and that my bike would be a moment so I had time to kill, a younger guy named Faisal who was 6’4 and would’ve fit in at any Syracuse fraternity started to sell me on a trekking package. Here we go. It was another situation that was hard to say no to or pull out of in any way lest I disappoint them all, and this place was so remotely located I knew I’d have absolutely nothing to do if I didn’t pay for an experience. Plus they were really making it sound like an amazing once in a lifetime thing, and I had to do it tomorrow or never, and of course I’d regret it forever if I didn’t do it. I was trapped, and before they could heat up another pot of Kashmiri tea I had parted with another 570 dollars. I don’t know if I’m stupid, or if this is just what traveling through “cheap as dirt” Asia is like, but I feel as though I’m not learning my lessons, or maybe I just have horrible luck. I am the white American tourist, I have disposable income, they’re just connecting a customer to a product and giving themself a little fat off the top, they see nothing wrong. I’m just a stupid cash cow being passed around from exploiter to exploiter, getting squeezed at various intervals. Everyone who is nice and friendly and warm is just playing an angle to solicit a larger sum from me. This is actually… incredibly sad. I knew India was full of scams but I didn’t realize that they emotionally manipulate you with friendship first. That’s a con that works on me every damned time. I worry I will never have an authentic experience here. I will always be a tourist with a target on my back.  I’ve been here only three days and have been only spoken to or smiled at by people who wished to separate me from my money. 

And the “houseboat”, well, it’s quite rustic. I do not have my comforts here. It’s as much a house boat as a pigeon is an eagle. There’s no advantage to being on the water and another house boat obstructs my view. There are mosquitos everywhere and the doors and windows don’t fully close. I’m in a floating shanty house. I tried sleeping but couldn’t and now I’m writing at 3am. I pooped and flushed but the poop won’t go away. Was I not supposed to poop? Was there some other kind of way to get rid of the poop that I just don’t know about? There’s no wifi here or anything, no AC. Just a fan. The fan is too close to my face to sleep but when I turn it off the mosquitos come devour me. How is this so expensive? They forced me to eat incredibly tough lamb on a stick for dinner, and I fear I messed up my teeth trying to eat it. I kept trying to refuse and they kept giving me more. I wasn’t able to swallow a majority of the pieces and threw them to the dogs who have been barking all night long. There are two other guests at the moment, an Indian woman and a German man. They are both so happy to be here and have done the treks and loved them, the German just did a 21 day trek. Why aren’t they angry and wanting to commiserate with me? Why must I be so sensitive? Maybe they just have fuck you money and don’t care about getting ripped off. Was I truly not cut out for this? It’s still early days but the adjustment is rough for me, its rough to always feel uncomfortable and alone and to not be able to trust anyone. Part of the “package” I was pushed into purchasing involved a romantic boat ride on the lake. I was gassy and bloated and didn’t really want to do it but I paid for it so I had to. It was so  weird, I had to sit laying down on this pillow facing away from the man who was paddling, as if he were my slave, with nothing but my own thoughts to keep me company, and he took me through this incredibly mediocre lake. There were flowering lotuses all over, so I guess that’s cool, but its beauty was lost on me. All around us, I saw Srinagar belching out smoke, people burning garbage, polluting the air in what I thought was a mountain valley paradise. I felt so alone. A man paddled out to us, from a distance he looked elegant and majestic. Could this be an authentic humble fisherman? He stopped our boat and tried to sell me flowers. I said no. repeatedly, but he kept insisting. He then tried to sell me the seeds of the flowers. I still said no. He kept glancing at the man who was paddling incredulously, with his eyes asking why isn’t this stupid tourist foreigner buying the damned flowers? Is something wrong with him? Did I not explain something correctly? And then, of course, when it became clear that I wasn’t buying, the disappointment on his face. This is my curse. I either make people happy with my money or I ruin their day by holding on to it. What the fuck am I supposed to do with flower seeds out here? Find another hustle my dude. Water bottles, sunscreen, bug spray, literally anything else. The paddler let me use a spare paddle so I didn’t have to feel like bourgeoisie, but I was at the wider middle part of the boat, making my paddling efforts hard and laughably useless, nevertheless I enjoyed the opportunity to get a little exercise in. 

I spoke more with the Indian and German when I got back. Neither of them have ever gotten vaccines for anything, including Covid. They have fairly bad senses of humor but I still managed to squeeze some laughs out of them. It was nice just to feel a little less alone and have people to connect with, just a tiny bit. It was something. I’m going on the trek tomorrow. I’m expecting it to be disappointing and lonely too. You can’t go hiking out here without permits and a guide, so at least I have the comfort of knowing I couldn’t have done it any other way. But after losing a thousand dollars in just 3 days, I can’t help but feel that I’m getting very little for my money here in Asia, which is the opposite of what I was told would happen. I can’t wait to be reunited with my bicycle. That is the only thing that can promise to save me from these profiteers and scam artists, to take me deep into the land where the people are good and I might be safe. But I think even that could be a disappointment. There’s only one main highway into Ladakh and it could be teeming with financial predators. I’m learning an expensive and valuable lesson. If this theme persists in the rest of Asia, I think Europe and Latin America are going to be where I plan future adventures. Or maybe just Europe. Or maybe just nothing. Maybe I should just disintegrate into nothing and no longer endure any of the pains of moving around too often or staying somewhere too long or being too alone or being too attached to someone or being in too much discomfort or being too comfortable. Maybe it’s all too much for a weak man such as myself to be in this world, inhabiting a body I never asked for or deserved. What was I expecting? Capitalism has subverted and polluted the souls of every living being on this tiny planet, and I can not escape it. The images and ideas of traveling which evoked freedom and led me out to this massive trap were all manufactured and planted in my brain by the advertising complex, a system that I made most of my money in New York off of in one way or another. I scammed myself. 

Everything is about money. To be specific, everything is about money, labor, time, freedom, and love. Let’s start with time. We all inherently own our time, it is ours. Time is the most important resource a human owns because it is invariably limited. You can’t get more of it and no one knows how much of it they have. Time is always moving forward. You can’t stop it. Every second that passes, you have less. Therefore you must spend it, and how you choose to spend it determines your life. You can spend your time in two different ways. You either spend time laboring or you spend it being free. What is freedom? Freedom is the time you spend doing whatever you choose to do: weeding the garden, reading, staring into the abyss, helping your dad rebuild the shed, and so on. The most wonderful thing a human can experience in their freedom is love, and love is at the root of human fulfillment and drives all things. But in our society, every second of freedom must be sustained with money. As they say, freedom ain’t free. In fact, freedom is expensive. So you have to labor. Labor is the opposite of freedom. Labor is compulsory work that is not done out of love or necessity, but for the direct benefit of the owners of capitol who profit within an economic system that depends on the constant burning of fossil fuels, therefore accelerating the doom of our world. But you have to do it, unless you’re among the lucky few in the rentier class, you have to labor. Labor takes your time and thereby your freedom. It takes the worlds time. It forces you to feed the fires of our planets collapse. You can never get the precious time you spent laboring back, it will alway be gone, so instead you are given a receipt acknowledging this time and that is called money. Money exists to justify the sacrifice of your time to labor. Money is the measurement of the time you spend selling your labor multiplied by its supposed value.  The more valuable your labor is, the less time you need to spend laboring and the more time you can spend being free. The promise of money is the promise of freedom. The American dream is vast wealth acquired through an intense but limited period of labor, such as what an entrepreneur selling their company or actor or athlete might make, giving you a high freedom to labor ration. This is the pursuit of happiness. The only way to achieve this without winning the lottery or having an extraordinary idea or talent is to join the rentier class and exploit the time of those below you, converting their time and labor into your freedom. But most of us labor, and make just a bit of money. And life always costs more money, so you need to labor more just to stay afloat. If your labor is valued low, such as mine has been throughout my professional life, it takes a lot of time to make money. And it takes even more time to save money, especially if you spent your earning years in New York where you were just barely getting by. Any dollar you can manage to put away is precious. It is a share in the stock of freedom and it is yours to do with as you please. But money is not granted, even when you have it. Though it takes a very long time to acquire, it takes no time at all to lose. Through debt, accidents, large purchases both necessary and frivolous, and all of the unforeseen consequences of life, one can lose it all. In fact, if you’re not careful you can lose an impressive amount of money and freedom in just days in India to professional manipulators, scam artists, and tip solicitors. That is the cruel tragedy of money. It is an invention, it obeys its own arbitrary law. It has no ethic, it is not fair. Time and freedom and love have always existed, and they used to be all that existed when people lived in small groups based on mutual aid and reciprocity. Work was done because it needed to be done and it was done out of love and those who did it were the constituents of its benefit. Labor and money are inventions that were developed independently in every ancient agricultural civilization to serve the interests of the powerful and are the foundations of modern society. When opportunistic sociopaths realized they could engineer hierarchical systems that reaped the rewards of others labor and use debt to enslave them, the  rentier class was formed and the world became what it is. In New York, time and freedom and love have been undermined and distorted. Labor and money are all that really matter. People speak of freedom like something you might get a small dose of on the weekend, or this far away thing on the other side of it all, after all the labor is done, a light at the end of the tunnel. But that tunnel keeps getting longer, the light further out of reach. The promotion means a nicer apartment, better restaurants, but your savings stay the same, and then you want more money, you need more money, you need more respect at the office, and it never ends. And in short order money and labor become the ends themselves, they replace time and freedom and love, money and labor begets more money and labor. Instead of through community and love, we look for meaning and fulfillment in our jobs and take pride in how much we earn and how valued and important we are because we have been told and accepted that labor is inevitable and time is money. This perversion of human nature, this rewriting of our code has disrupted our interpersonal relationships and cast love aside as an inefficiency, turning us into individuals seeking to maximize our every advantage and optimize our lives: friends and family are either serving our interests or holding us back, sex and romance are at best quid pro quo manifestations of a narcissistic need for validation and often short lived as we always seek better for our partner is the reflection of our own status, any talent or gift you have is wasted if not fully exploited and sold for its market value and that is what we mean when we speak of realizing ones full potential, we are more driven to love our jobs than our families and friends and partners, freedom is the freedom to choose what, how and where we labor. Our very identities are reduced to labor and money. What do you do? How much do you make? We are pitted against each other vying for status in a twisted machiavellian game that we all lose, because we all play alone.  But what makes humanity beautiful is not found in labor or money, it’s found in freedom and love, and that’s what I’m trying to get back in touch with. I am incredibly lucky. I found an opportunity to get up from the table, cash my chips, leave the smoke-filled casino and go into the woods and scream “what the fuck was I doing in there?!” I have some time, some precious little time, to think clearly. But when my money runs out, I have to go back to the casino. I have no choice. I live from money like everyone else. And that’s why the meager savings I was able to barter my time for and smuggle out of New York are so important to me, that’s why every scam I fall victim to and bad decision I make is like a knife in my heart. That’s my time, that’s my freedom, and I need every second of it. I’m looking for what’s left of our souls. I want to see if there’s a way to escape the corruption that labor and money have wrought on the world. I need to meet people, good people, who aren’t just trying to pry money away from me or use me. God, I need that. I need to believe there’s more than money. I need to find love. And my time is so very short.