Amritsar

Amritsar marked the beginning of my adventure in the “real” India, away from the mountains, into the vast chaos of the heartland, defined by my waxing struggles with heat, IBS, and a hedonism centered mainly around food. The food hedonism had started earlier than that, but I think my awareness of it grew here, and once I’d gotten to Amritsar I was paying the price physically. The Tibetan medicine didn’t clear my IBS problem, and in Amritsar I got sick again after a decadent meal of buttery curries which included a quick visit from Palak Paneer and his buttery cousin Baigan Bartha. It was the kind of curry I knew I’d get sick from even as I was eating it, I guess that’s what they call a gut feeling. With a thick transparent layer of ghee on top, it was screaming IBS bait, and I took the bait like the incorrigible diarrhea monster I know myself to be. And it was damned good too. The Punjabis are like the French of India, everything needs to have butter in it. This was a bad place for me to be. A recovering heroin addict in a field of poppies. But Amritsar had good food. What could I do other than eat it? I made fast friends at the hostel and we all went out to get Kulcha, which is like naan but with more butter and betterness. By this time I was an expert at consuming large quantities of the stuff. These weren’t exactly the spirituality-focused travelers to whom I’d become accustomed up in the hills, but just regular old “I want to explore India” types, which is a different vibe. Then again, I think no matter what your intentions are when you come to India, if you spend enough time here you do eventually become a spiritual traveler. That’s what happened to me at any rate. But many people here were on shorter term holidays, and that’s where you see the main differences. If you don’t come to India to really just rot here for months, I honestly think your time is wasted. You’ll end up with an invariably superficial trip, rushed and shuttled from one place to the next, taking your little photos and never really experiencing anything. And you’ll probably come out of it a racist, because on its surface India is… well… loud and suffocating and dirty. I’m sure the Taj Mahal is cool though. My time in Amritsar was punctuated by a well-timed visit to the Golden Temple during the Diwali celebration. It was bright, colorful, glorious. But even more glorious was the Golden Temples kitchen. Let me tell you about this kitchen. You can eat at this place whenever you want, any time of day, any day, every day. And the food is delicious. You sit down in a row with strangers and receive bread in both hands (this is important) and then volunteers come by toting massive buckets of mushy slop and you say yes please as they later it on to your plate as if they were army rations or you were in some kind of orphanage except that the slop is Michelin quality slop. And it’s all free. God is great. Unfortunately, IBS is greater. It’s hold on me was tighter than ever and I could never fully enjoy anything without the faint fear of shitting myself in the back of my head. I went to the crowded temple bathroom quite a few times, even when I had no alms to donate, just to push out some farts because better safe than sorry. If there’s one place you shouldn’t shit yourself it’s the holiest site of Sikhdom. Especially not on this holiday where they’re all walking around with sharp long spears, just ready to impale the offending rectum. No joke. I heard a story that a Sikh straight up murdered a tourist who didn’t take their shoes off or something to that effect.

The next day was the real treat. I went on a trip to the Waga border where literally every single day India and Pakistan have what amounts to a military dance battle, all choreographed of course, with stadium seats faithfully filled out and a lively crowd cheering their respective nation on. This is how the two nations have maintained their fragile peace all these years, and I find it inspiring. It was also hysterical. The men were models, with perfectly groomed mustaches and perfectly high kicks as they marched. It didn’t seem that any of them had ever seen a real day of combat, but they filled their uniforms out well. You could barely see the Pakistan side, but the crowd over there didn’t seem quite as vibrant as the one on our side. People were really into it here in India. Like way more than they should’ve been, and unironically too. Just total genuine support of India. I realized I was witnessing nationalism. The whole crowd was chanting “Hindustan zindabad”, Hindustan forever. It probably wouldn’t be a comfortable thing for a Muslim Indian to witness. Our tuk tuk driver had told us to leave the ceremony quickly, as it was ending, but this turned into a situation. We ended up having to walk past a lot of old white tourists with expensive cameras who all became furiously indignant with us for ruining their chance to get shots of the closing act. On one hand, I get it, we were in their shots, but on the other their behavior was so disgusting, as were they themselves. Who are the weird old white people, coming to India to take pictures? Why are they doing it? They just seem so gross to me. Many had German accents. And they’re grumpy all the time. Don’t come to India if you’re going to be grumpy all the time. This isn’t the place for that vibe, and you’re definitely just going to get grumpier. And since they’re not allowed to get mad at the Indians they must have loved the opportunity to direct their anger at fellow tourists. Sometimes when I’m around other tourists it just feels like we are aware of each other as competition, trying to mine out the last little bits of authenticity left in the world, and you better not get in my way. That’s the vibe I get from them. We walk by each other on the street, don’t acknowledge each other. I’m white. You’re white. We both came here to do the same thing. Stay out of my way. That’s all.

I’m still figuring out how to interact with other foreigners. Lot’s of them are traveling with the same lack of purpose as myself. They are all lost, but in our loss there is a community and a shared sanity, a shared rejection of the world we’re escaping, a shared openness. I make friends easily, but then it ends. That’s both the curse and the pleasure of travel, never seeing where a relationship can go. But sometimes you want to see. I met a guy named Dino who has a really gentle and good soul. He’s from the Netherlands but has some Indonesian blood, I spent some time exploring with him and enjoyed his energy. He was on his way to do some volunteering at different schools, and this was what he figured he’d be doing for his life. I admired that. Apart from him I didn’t make any super memorable connections. There was a British girl who I ended up bumping into later on several times. Another dutch guy who was pretty funny and had that classic cute lispy dutch accent, but he also faded away like a strange memory. A group of three english folks who were nice. I met a British photographer who seemed really angry and was not enjoying India. He had a snobby colonialism to him. He couldn’t handle the parts about India that any wise traveler does well to embrace and accept. He wasn’t forced to come here. Sorry the trains are crowded and the bathrooms aren’t up to snuff and people are pushy, that is the way of it, adapt or leave. Not a good vibe, but I still helped him get a jacket back to him in Jaipur which he’d left in the hostel because I’m a good person.

It was time to plan my next steps. I could go east to Nepal, but that didn’t seem like my path anymore. The south was where I needed to be. I wanted to uncover the rest of India, all the way down the western side. But the plains of Punjab and Rajasthan and Gujarat are vast and imposing and to be frank don’t seem to contain much. I also wanted to avoid choking my way through the next 500 kilometers or so. At this time of year the Punjabis have finished the harvest and are preparing their fields for planting, which means they’re burning the old crop. Everyone in India does this and it’s the cause of the horrible air quality. I wish they’d figure out a different way, but so it goes. The streets of Amritsar were thick with smoke and I had it on good authority that much of the same awaited me in the immediate South. I decided this was a good opportunity to finally do a train, and hopefully not get scammed out of a thousand dollars this time. Thanks to the hostel owners kindness, it ended up being a breeze. He bought my ticket for just 700 rupees. The next challenge was getting my bicycle there, which had to be done separately. I had to get to the station hours before the departure and figure it out from there. Luckily, and I always am somehow lucky, a very kind young man took an interest in me and helped me through the entire bureaucratic process. It wasn’t that the process itself was complicated, only that the employees of the rail station spoke no English, so I would’ve really had trouble without this guys assistance. He was a funny dude. The first thing he asked was if I wanted to smoke weed. He went on and on about psychedelics. We really had a ball together. I found out later he has tens of thousands of followers on Instagram, he’s cultivated some kind of spiritual guru vibe which I find hilarious having met him. He’s 21 years old and the least serious person I’ve met. The train bureaucrats were incredulous when I told them my bicycles cost was around a lakh, over a thousand dollars US, and that was a conservative estimate. They thought I was confused. They told me they could get the same bike in India for under 10,000 rupees. There was no use arguing so I let them insure the bike for this amount, praying to God nothing bad would happen to it in transit. With that I left my bicycle in their care and took a tricycle taxi back to the hostel.