To Delhi

We waited in the bus terminal area of Rampur, what appeared to be a charmless one-street town, but turned out to be a charmless one-street town with a bazaar that fell away from the road along the steeply sloping bank of the Sutlej. I went in search of some juice while Martin sat dazed and glum looking, rubbing at his throat and sucking on lozenges like they were candy. The bazaar was full of schoolchildren, and was pleasantly cool in the shade; up on the main road, the heat, the exhaust, the incessant horns, the cowshit all conspired to create a markedly less pleasant experience than we had had just a few short hours before.

The bus schedules were up on a board, hand painted. I was skeptical that they would still be accurate, but it turned out that they were. We had missed a few buses to Delhi, but a last one with Haryana Transport Company left at sundown. We idled in the parking lot, as travellers boarded and offboarded buses heading up to Spiti, Shimla, or even Srinagar. There was no ticket to be bought, although there was a ticket office. I was directed back out to the information booth, where I was told that I should just wait for the bus. Youths preened themselves, eyed clusters of the opposite sex. Children crawled through the dust, and a station attendant swept trash out through the legs of the crowd with a bundle of twigs. A Kinnauri woman, head topped with a characteristic green felt hat, accosted me for money, thrusting a harmless garden snake she had in a small wicker basket into my face. When I ignored her, she tapped at my shoulder and laid the snake on my arm. I brushed the snake aside and shook my head. I definitely felt like I was back in India.

We boarded the bus to Delhi, heaving our bicycles and luggage up onto the top. I carried most of it up the ladder, with some assistance from a worker. I offered him what I thought was a fair tip; he became indignant, demanding an additional twenty rupees. I didn't have change, nor did I feel like paying what was an exorbitant sum in rural India for a service that I mostly accomplished myself (I even had to provide my own way of fastening the luggage to the top of the bus - evidently rope or netting is not included with the bus ticket). We had this interaction on top of the bus - the driver was waving at us to get down so he could leave. Down on the ground, I offered him the same thirty rupees I had proffered up top. Again he was indignant, trying to enlist someone in the crowd. A young English-speaking guy tried to translate for me.

"I know what he is saying," I said. "He wants more money than I am offering him."

"You have to give him something," he said back.

I forced the thirty rupees on the man, saying I had no more change (which was true). He began to get agitated, and the English speaker calmed him down, throwing in ten rupees himself. The situation was ridiculous. Now I felt indebted to a stranger I didn't know and who was standing on the pavement as I stood in the bus stepwell pulling away. I called out "thanks" to him, he waved it off. "No problem, come back some time."

The bus was completely full, with several men standing in the aisle. As we lurched out of the station, the conductor worked his way down the bus, collecting fares. Each passenger was given several small pieces of scrip, marked with some amount adding up to their fare. Since Martin and I were heading all the way to Delhi, the stack was thick with fifty-rupee pieces of scrip. The conductor asked me to count the scrip, to make sure it matched what I had paid. It was off by fifty rupees, but he had moved down the bus and with so much jostling and bouncing I couldn't be sure I was right. I nodded at him when he looked back - what did it matter to me?

We raced along the road, first next to the Sutlej, and then up a winding road to Shimla, a resort hill town whose charms were not obvious to me looking out the window of the bus. We lumbered past a succession of unimpressive hotels, shops with proprietors standing in the doorways under flourescent light, and a stream of oncoming traffic. The roads in India are typically so narrow they are unable to accommodate all of the traffic now travelling over them, and buses and trucks slow to a crawl as they pass within a few inches of each other, perched precariously next to cliff faces or tightly packed houses. At Shimla, we stopped at a restaurant; passengers filed out, the men pissed into the gutter, and Martin and I stood next to the tandoor oven, watching a boy of eight work the night away (it was already 11:30pm when we arrived) pounding and shaping chapati dough, press it onto the sidewalls of the oven, and then work a pair of hooks to remove the bread, which was flung onto the stone counter and then added to a plate full of curry.

The rest of the night was a blurry collection of fleeting lights and lurching movements as the bus driver alternated between pressing the acceleration and brake pedals equally agressively. Turns threw all of the passengers from one side to the other, and the whole time a hypnotic raga played on the warbling radio. The person next to me, a young man, took turns curling up against my shoulder and then texting someone in the middle of the night. We left the mountains in darkness, and began speeding desperately across the flat plain of Haryana, featureless except for the bizarre business hotels with names like "Paradise" or "Quite Comfortable" that lined the highway and the occasional Indian approximation of a strip-mall. We raced between trucks laden with rebar or apples destined for the Delhi markets, the driver swerving maniacally from lane to lane, flashing his high-beams at anyone and everyone on the road. The haze of diesel smog along the highway mixed with the humid air and fog and swept into the bus, feeling more akin to punishment than relief. Passengers jumped off the bus in complete darkness, lone figures lost to the inky darkness as they walked away from the pools of light underneath lampposts.

Just before first light, we pulled into a transport yard, and three men in white short-sleeve shirts began asking everyone still on the bus (it was half-empty at this point) for their receipts. I got the large stapled wad out of my pocket and handed it to one of these men. He counted and recounted four times. Another colleague was called over to check his work. Finally the third was involved. None of the three spoke English, and no one on the bus seemed to either, or no one wanted to get involved.

"Problem," one of the men finally managed to say to me, jabbing at the stack of tickets he had taken from me and counted innumerable times.

I raised my eyebrows. "Yes," I asked. I knew it was off by fifty, but how was I going to explain to this man that I hadn't thought it was a problem, and go further and express my frustration with a system of scrip tickets printed on low quality paper that tears easily and are handed out to people on moving jostling buses? I just played dumb. He asked how much I paid, where I had come from, where I was going. I was pressed for this information more than once by each of the three men. I answered truthfully; the conductor was eyeing me with simmering rage. He was upbraided by these three men, lots of yelling and gesticulating ensued, and he appealed to me, saying he had asked me to count the tickets. I signed this as best I could to the three stern faces. The conductor was marched off the bus, and disappeared into an office across the bus yard. The driver shot me a dirty look, and the passengers tried to fall back asleep - not an easy task since the bus yard seemed to be next to a swamp, and mosquitoes attacked all of us viciously.

Finally the three men returned, with the conductor in tow, and handed me back my scrip tickets gruffly. They fired off more words at the conductor as they left, and I knew I had unintentionally made my first enemy in India. He sat down in a huff, sent me a disgusted look, and the bus pulled out of the yard. The sun had risen while we were idle, and now I could see what we were passing. The plains of India looked almost serene, shrouded in a haze that offered the occasional glimpse of a tree appearing ghostlike out of the mist. Fields spread out in all directions. Fetid, stinking ditches looked deceptively beautiful in the pink glow of the young sun struggling to appear through the thick atmosphere.

As the sun continued to rise, the beauty wore off, and I could see the miserable existence alongside the road. These were not slums, but the ambiguous sprawl of north Delhi. High-rise apartment communities reached into the haze, standing in former rice and wheat fields, the tenant farmers now sent into the city to find work as coolies and laborers. "Resorts" began to appear, places that advertised picnic grounds and ponds for children to play into - "shady and relaxing" some boasted, "We do weddings and events" said others. A string of elephants, shrivelled mahouts atop their necks, plodded along the shoulder of the road, forlorn and depressing next to the relentless traffic streaming into Delhi. Dogs lay on their sides, men cycled bicycle carts laden with bamboo or rebar or buckets of paint breathing in the smog. Figures squatted along the banks of a river, relieving themselves in full view.

Eventually, the apartments, buildings, warehouses, and lots closed ranks to form an urban space. The road became thick with bicycles, mopeds, trucks, dogs, and buses belching black diesel smoke. We found ourselves, finally, at the bus station, with no idea where in Delhi we were. I climbed up on top of the bus, and lowered the bicycles to Martin. When I got down, Martin grimaced. "I hate this heat," he said. The humid air, rotting fruit, and trash combined to assault the senses, so ill-prepared after more than a month in the mountains.

We rode off, and remembering nothing about Delhi except "Pahar Ganj", I approached pedestrians and rickshaw-wallahs with that simple chain of sounds. "Pahar Ganj?" Each time, the Indian I had approached would oblige me and point down the street. We cycled past pissoirs that lacked even a modesty screen or wall, just a trough in the ground and a wall to piss against. Out of neccessity, I suppose, people were less fussy about public urination - why can't my own city make peace with this and stop harassing homeless people for "quality of life" crimes?

Delhi was waking up, going to work, running errands. The thin lean bodies of men were washing off for the morning, sluicing water from buckets at the edge of broken sidewalks. Men with bicycle carts hawked bananas, smiling and holding up bunches as we rode past. The traffic, which I had braced myself for, was surprisingly unthreatening, much easier to ride in than, say, Bangkok or Jakarta. Part of this had to do with the fact that there are still many bicycles on the road in Delhi, and cycle-rickshaws as well; one doesn't feel like a beleaguered minority of one, but a beleaguered minority of many thousands, definitely far down the roadway food chain, but not unrepresented. I smiled to myself as I thought of the athletes from the various developed Commonwealth countries, in town for the games, which had been derided in the Indian papers I had seen in the previous month (Salman Rushdie had said he was embarassed that the India "of incompetence, bureaucracy, corruption, delay, and inefficiency" was being shown to the world). I didn't find it embarassing at all; rather, I imagined them riding in from the airport wide-eyed - it looked like what it was, a vibrant, energetic, chaotic, diverse, resourceful, interesting place with plenty of irritation to go around. Perhaps the middle and upper classes of India would find it an embarassment, eager to have instead the staid, predictable, genteel streets of Europe or the US (although the US at least has little to get excited about in its cities), the bourgeois dream. These classes always want to wish away the underclass, which is nothing but of a living indictment of their own selfishness, callous disregard, and craven political system that pays lip service (and often not even that) to the notion of helping a fellow citizen who might be down on their luck (never mired in systemic poverty). Maybe this doesn't fly when you have 400 million living on less than two dollars per day; it shouldn't fly in the US with far fewer in desperate poverty, but it does...

We found Pahar Ganj, but settled on a hotel before finding the true backpacker ghetto, with its Bob Marley t-shirts, proliferation of internet cafes, and agencies booking package tours to the Taj Mahal. Martin wanted A/C and hot water; I wasn't opposed to the idea. We spent a day more or less indoors, recuperating from the cough we acquired along the dusty stretch of road two days before, and marvelled at the fact that it was almost over. The following day, we rode a bicycle rickshaw to Old Delhi, wandered around a while, haggled for a few things, and took a ride back to the train station, passing a sign that said "Coolie Waiting Area". We were both stunned that in 2010, there could be an officially designated place for servants to rest, away from the rest of humanity.

And just as quickly as we arrived, we were in a taxi, heading out to the airport for late night flights. I watched wistfully out of the window, as we passed neat orderly streets, the "other Delhi", the buzzing sound of the driver's radio quietly pushing out the rhythm of a bhangra. I turned around to Martin and said "I'm going to miss this place." He replied "I was just thinking that. Now its back to shitty old Denmark." We both laughed, fell silent again, watched the buildings dwindle, then the airport rise up, and said good bye at immigration. An hour later, the wheels lifted up off of the runway, and I was airborne, looking down at that same plain, spreading out beneath me, hazy and indefinite, until the aircraft banked and there was nothing more to see.