Mughul Sarai--We get to the core of things

"You know, Lin, you've been here for a while now, and you've learned some language, and been to the village, and lived in the slum, and even been the fuck to jail and all, but you don't get it do you?...Damn right you don't, man. This is not England, or New Zealand, or Australia, or whatever the fuck else. This is India, man. This is India. This is the land of the heart. This where the heart is king, man. The fuckin' heart. That's why you're free. That's why the cop gave you back your phoney passport. Thats why you can walk around, and not get picked up, even though they know who you are. They could've fucked you, Lin. They could've taken your money, Khader's money, and let you go, and then get some other cops to bust you, and send you the fuck home. But they didn't do it, and they won't do it, because you got them in their heart, man, man in their Indian fuckin' heart. They looked at all what you did here, and how the people in the slum love you, and they thought. "Well, he fucked up in Australia, but he's done some good shit here. If he pays up, we'll let the fucker go." Because they're Indians, man. That's how we keep this crazy place togethor--with the heart. Two hundred fuckin' languages, and a billion people. India is the heart. It's the heart that keeps us togethor. There's no place with people like my people, Lin. There's no hearth like the the Indian heart..."

He was crying...

-Excerpt from Shantaram

So I bought Shantaram yesterday. Two different people told me about it in the span of two weeks. I by chance found myself in a book store and I saw the book "the white tiger" (I think thats what it was) and I thought to myself, if that book called, ("S" sounding name") is going to be anywhere it will be right here because its a similar iconic Indian based novel. The next book I picked up was it. Chance--whatever that means...

I read 200 pages yesterday. I woke up this morning at 5:15 to catch my 6:55 train out of Mughul Sarai rail station 45 minutes from Varanasi. I arrive at 5:55. There is a six hour train delay. Great.

Whatever. I'll just read. I post up in a waiting room and commence reading Shantaram. So how much of this is true (the book) is up for debate but lets just say I'm not crazy. This guy is fucking crazy and the core elements of the story are based on the authors personal life. He makes me look like those Japanese tourists I keep seeing here...You know the ones...They wear plastic visors, big goofy glasses, fanny packs, stupid neon pants, oversized nikon cameras, and audio/video vests...Thats me when I stand next to this dude. He was an intellectual heroin addict turned criminal to feed his habit, looses his family (wife/kid). He's sent to maximum security prison in Australia where he breaks out and flees the country to India. He lives in the slums of Mumbai...

"there he established a free health clinic and also joined the mafia, working as a money launderer, forger, and street soldier. He found time to learn Hindi and Marathi, fall in love, and spend time being worked over (tortured) in an Indian jail. Then, in case anyone thought he was slacking, he acted in Bollywood and fought with the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan..."

So yeah, he's real legit. Intelligent and a little too poetic for me at times but still a damn good writer. I would never want his life though...take it back and rewind now to here...

I'm sitting in the waiting room. I've moved from the first class waiting room to the second class waiting room downstairs because its closer to where they post the train arrivals. Its been about 3-4 hours now..Their really isn't much of a difference between the two rooms in quality--they both suck.

I'm reading in my book about how Gregory Roberts (the author) is being held in an Indian prison after living in the slums for some time. The description is utter hell. Shit and piss ankle deep. Water with maggots. Hardly anything to eat. Lice, fleas, and other nasty crawly things. Perpetual beatings and savage acts of cruelty are carried out by the guards and prisoners alike. Roberts writes about how when he is eating in this dilapidated hell hole holding more than one hundred people over capacity that he notices some inmates are approaching him--to test him out...

I'm sitting in this waiting room. Its literally caged in on all sides but one. The damp and dimly lit room smells of the classic and distinctly Indian smell of urine and shit mixed with shoddy Asian urbanization--for those of you who have been here, I know you know exactly what I'm talking about--It kind of smells like someone set a bunch of urinal cakes on fire...The floor is wet, muddy, and sprinkled in garbage. The benches are broken but fortunately not overcrowded. However, unlike Roberts situation no one is eyeing me out, prying for a weakness to exploit...Oh wait, shit...Yes there is....Ah, goddamnit, don't come over...Here come the eunuchs...

So, for the record, they could have just been transvestites but as far as my ignorant perception knows, the only way to distinguish between a eunuch and a transvestite is in a way I don't want to know ...However, one thing I do know is they can be aggressive and intentionally intimidate people for money, great. This one dude in traditional Indian female clothing (a sari) with make up, henna, a nice hair style and even boobs sits down on the bench next to me cross legged about two feet away. He sticks out his hand and goes, "ten rupees" in a very feminine way while sticking one finger through a circle made with his index finger and thumb on the other hand...

ahh, only ten rupees to fuck you! super! I was hoping it wouldn't cost me more than a 1/5 of a dollar...You didn't seem like that high class of a girl, er, guy...whatever...

I try to ignore him and keep reading. Not working. He's raising his voice, giggling and acting like a fucking jackass as you would imagine while continuing to attempt to seduce me into buying sex from him--or at least giving him money to leave me alone which I'm sure was his real intention--not happening dude--fuck off. I stay cool and handle it delicately. I notice now that the other 30 or so people in the large rotting room are looking with conniving grins in my direction...Attention I don't want coming in and I feel bad vibes beaming my way...A second one of these dudes comes up to harass me with his...girl/boyfriend...The two of them feed off each other and continue to do the sex motion with their hands while giggling and touching each other, rotating back between 5 and 10 rupees (not a bad deal, right?) while speaking what I presume were vile things in hindi.

More people have now actually moved over closer to me to watch this spectacle go down. Three men sit across from me on the opposite bench and just stare. I look at them. They aren't helping, just smiling, thanks. I'm paranoid the two transvestites are going to start grabbing me or something because I'm not giving them money. I can feel my temple pulse with intensity and my chest tighten up. I am tweaking out right now. But due to how I handled my anxiety in the past I've become a master at projecting false emotional states of serenity when I'm actually losing my mind. I've also learned the art of "fucking & manipulating with people's emotions" as one of my friends back in the states puts it. The key I have found is to create a relationship with your compulsions. Once you have a grip on your reactions, they become conscious. Then you have control, or more control than you had in the past. Also, when you do this your ability to read other people's states increases because you aren't so caught up in yourself...The downside to this is you deny a part of your humanity in some respects but in this case I just want to get out unmolested if I can manage...

More of this stupid interaction goes on with me trying desperately to ignore them. I look down at my book but due to the stress I can't read shit and all my attention is on them despite not letting them see it. I imagine they were waiting for me to either give them money out of fear or lose my shit in which case they would win. The adopted roles they've taken in the sexually and socially conservative society of India are ones of outcasts. Their goal is to fuck with your head, get under your skin, and make you squirm. I don't want to give them that victory for whatever reason. Pride--or maybe just fear of losing control of my own emotions. It doesn't really matter. The point is I'm not losing whatever psychological struggle is going on between us. I also have a feeling if I lose my shit then they'll just pour it on until I unload my wallet for them. There have been cases of these dudes just showing up at Indian weddings and coming indecently within the realm of physically assaulting people to get money--and those are to other Indians. I don't look very Indian...Its actually quite obvious I'm not from around here believe it or not...

However, I'm not about to back down to a bunch of giggling men in dresses with make-up...not to conform to socially constructed norms of gender...but, come on..

I've been through panic attacks that make this feel like a vacation. So in short, they can go fuck themselves, literally. I'm not a part of it and I'm not giving into this. I've also learned in the dismantling on my own psyche that the little bullshit social power games play with each other are just projections of insecurity and fear. The greatest strength and sign of confidence is to open your heart with unconditional compassion and acceptance--thats the truth, period. You do shit like put other people down, play little mind games (like I mentioned earlier, which im guilty of from time to time), or actively seek out power in the form of intimidation--any form for that matter--you're just covering up a fear, a weakness, and you merely hope the other person either caves in with submission or you aim to provoke a reaction out of them which you can then attack or exacerbate. However, if you remain neutral towards this kind of stupid shit it exposes other people when they attempt to project their insecurities on you.

We have a disagreement. I sit calmly and talk level headed while you scream and have a temper tantrum, making threats. The second I chose to detatch from your manipulative bullshit you lose your illusion of power and that shame you tried to put on me, falls on you.

The two transvestites make one final attempt to provoke something out of me and do so by lifting up their shirt and grabbing at their...boobs, or whatever it was...in public sight (bra still on). This is extreme for Indian culture. Not a big deal by Western standards but in Indian culture to expose yourself is huge. At Sarnath, the guy asked me if I get tickets from the police for making out with a girl in public in America like they do here...uh, not really...They give tickets for kissing here but not for half the other shit that goes on...the world is fucking weird...

I just stare at the man while he keeps flashing me and his friend jiggles the breast, I smile with a look of, "thats nice sir, but honestly I've seen more outrageous things than this, keep in mind, I'm from America, not a village in rural India" and after about 2 minutes of him neurotically flashing me while checking over his shoulder at the onlookers he gives up and runs away squealing. The other, bored, takes out headphones and listens to music. They wind up walking away and come back several times but don't attempt to bother me in the slightest way. It takes a good 35 minutes for my anxiety to baseline. There were about 6 or 7 of them. I'm glad they didn't all come over...When they decide to leave I did my best to genuinely smile and place my hands together as a sign of respect when you greet and leave people and I think I actually did mean it too. I had nothing against them at this point because they were going to leave me alone. So I smiled and kindly said goodbye as best as I could as if we had just engaged in a pleasant conversation.

I go back to reading and after a few more pages, Roberts talks about finally getting bailed out of prison after four months, looking worse than a holocaust victim due to the conditions and beatings. As I read this, I lift my feet onto the bench I'm sitting on because the rail workers need to sweep out the muddy garbage filled water. The transvestites walk away and a sense of restoration comes full circle to my real and literary worlds.

My train is now going to be an 8 hour delay I find out...

An hour or so later three very dark and very filthy homeless children come scampering up to me. Two boys and a girl. The boys look to straddle the girl in age. The youngest is entirely naked. He walks up and puts his hand on my knee. The other two come within inches of me. They signal they want money and tap on me. I tell them no but they won't leave. A new set of people have replaced those who were present for the previous scenario aside from one or two. These people intervene on my behalf and chase the kids away. One man, really doesn't like these kids and swats at them with a snarl and a newspaper like they were flies feasting on his lunch. They run off and they're wild. They just run around screaming, naked, half-naked, and spinning each other around, jumping on everything. I later buy them some food and when I do they still ask for money without saying thank you or anything...This bothers me but I don't hold it against them...They come up to me a third time hours later and ask for more money...No.

My train is now a 10 hour delay...I don't want to go back to the hotel in Varanasi because its 45 minutes away and I've already been here this long...

Two homeless beggars without legs come by asking for money within twenty minutes of each other. I thought they were the same person and I was confused why this guy was asking me for more money...The second guy had one distinguishable feature. His stump had a fist sized portion uncovered by skin. It look like someone had taken sandpaper to it and I think part of the bone was exposed. It was red but not bleeding. It looked fucking painful though. His hands and other foot were deformed and mangled as well. I gave him a bag of chips and a coin. Fucked up. I just shuddered when I saw that wound and I fucking felt some real uncomfortable shit. He got around on his hands, dragging what seemed more like someone else's corpse he had dug up from the ground than his own body.

I look up and see this while I'm reading about the torture Roberts endured in prison. These kids are begging for change and this guy in front of me looks like he's about to lose whats left of the mangled flesh and rotting bone he calls a leg...The world is fucking sick. The human race is fucking sick. Its fucked up. This whole planet is a fucking mess. Every single fucking place. The places where there isn't shit like this are just as bad if not worse because the people there live in denial of such horrific reality. This shit is truly horrific. Driving down the streets of Varanasi I saw another dog with its skull split open two days ago. He was still alive despite his brain being exposed to the open air. I reacted like a nest of maggots was unleashed in my stomach. Not nausea, just an inability to look.

Seeing stuff like this makes showing horror movies to your infants before bed time seem reasonable if not emotionally stabilizing...This isn't all that bad if you think about it. Go work in a hospital or go join the military if you want to see some real trauma. This stuff can be borderline entertaining when seen from a distance and with the right set of twisted eyeballs. Regardless, the world is fucking sick in the head it seems. People are sick in the head. I've had this re-occuring feeling that everyone in the entire planet is neurotically fucked up to the point of literal insanity but because everyone is in the same boat we just sail right ahead perpetually crashing into a brick wall floating on a ocean of denial. We kill ourselves, find some new bodies to replace those and just keep churning the combine ...It seems normal but if you could step outside yourself you would see how truly horrible the world is due to our inability to break routine.

Its a mess. The word that keeps coming to my head is "sick". Even if all this is an illusion, its still sick. Its fucked up. Its the dream of a sociopath. I'm not saying there isn't good in the world. There is, probably just as much bad if one could view the universe with an enlightened perspective but I don't really give a fuck. The fact that people can continue to live their lives AS THEY ARE while a man crawls on a muddy garbage covered floor with a bleeding stump, mangled fingers, and no objection is raised by anyone sickens me. The worst part is I'm just as much entrenched in this madness as everyone else is. I don't need to find anyone to blame because I can look right in the mirror. I feel like I'm stuck behind this glass cage where I just watch those born into a shittier life situation than me become burned alive by life circumstances turning children into literal zombies. The walking dead are real. They reside on every Indian street corner with a tin cup.

I felt like right there, especially after reading that horrific passage of this man being brutally tortured daily for hours on end and looking up and seeing this man hobble around on a chunk of rotting flesh while people ignored him or gave him something they deemed utterly worthless (like the coin and bag of chips I personally tossed him) that I hit the core of things. Regardless of what I know or believe about anything--god, religion, society, politics). I know one thing and its that the whole picture is FUCKED UP.

What I mean by this is--I often tell people that when you see great flaw and issue in the external world it is alway linked to a internal element you are incapable of accepting. Fine. But regardless of my internal state people still suffer and its not okay. I'm angry about this, obviously. And I'm sure a lot of my anger comes from other places, not just this event, sure. But I don't honestly care right now. This is fucked up. This is worth yelling about. This is worth being angry about. The apathy and self-centered egotism of the human race that I am as much to blame for as everyone else is tearing me apart and I hate it.

Something went wrong here. Life isn't supposed to be this way. We're way too used to this and we've just created ways of dealing with it where we neither have to consciously process it nor feel guilty about it. The thought that this might be horribly wrong rarely makes it past the sub-conscious barriers. Dude this guy is going to fucking die we need to help him, now. Stillness and everyone is silent. The noise only comes from the moaning of the zombies and the obnoxious repetition of late train arrival announcements from a female voice that exudes so much positive energy that you can tell there is something deeply twisted about her psycho-emotional state.

That's right, people have more important shit to do, like go to work to feed the family and make sure they don't end up like that guy with the bloody stump because in a place like India it actually could probably happen to anyone given the wrong set of circumstances at the wrong time.

The poor are just there to scare the shit out of the working class George Carlin said.

Maybe this is all just a growing pain for a higher conscious realization like the character Khader Khan suggests in his personal philosophy in Robert's novel. We are all made of star dust he suggests...Its just the universe figuring itself out...Unfortunately ,we created individual identities which shut themselves off from the unity of creation and fail to see the grand scheme of life in full lotus bloom. There is a point though, he claims, that will come, when God (or the universe, whatever) is manifested entirely and all this shit I've been ranting on ends...It could be over now if you just dropped your identity, dropped your ego...Tolle says its like being a ray of sunlight that forgot its a part of the sun and tried to survive with a separate existence. You are a being that forgot you are one with the universe.

The train is delayed 12 hours now...

I have managed to read 400 pages today. By the time my train arrives I have been sitting in a train station for close to 14 hours and not once was I bored--India.

Down with the sickness came onto my itunes on random shuffle. Seems like an appropriate song for all this...This post isn't over. Its 1:30 in the morning here on Saturday. I have been awake since 5 in the morning. I have had no food since 9:30 last night. Tomorrow I will visit the sight of the Buddha's enlightenment for the first time on my own and finish writing whatever is gnawing my brain matter away...to be continued...

Next Day:

I'm awake.

There was a small kid next to me with his family that was about the age of the beggar children. Its interesting to see how when the beggar children want to play with him and he gets excited his parents hold him back like those kids are a cliff into oblivion. The homeless children are the sirens calling out, luring their child in to sabotage him, forever. Its an interesting interaction because the kids don't see the class division totally, they just see kids but the parents are living in a whole other reality. I don't blame them though. It was just interesting.

Later on a Hindu priest comes by blesses random people with a third eye while reciting prayers in exchange for 5-10 rupees. That same little kid who is kind of walking around dumbfounded in swaying circles finds himself being bless by the priest with a red swipe on the forehead. The mom sees this and looks pissed. I noticed how she was dressed earlier and I think she and the family may have been Muslim. She grabs the kid, smacks him upside the head and tenaciously wipes the blessing off.

While I'm taking notes of this I get surrounded by Indian people who had been sitting near me. I get uncomfortable. They're just curious. We try to talk, they don't speak English. We exchange phone numbers and text each other. The one guy has a blackberry type phone so he can translate it. We only send two texts b.c. it doesn't work all that well. He apparently asks me about Bugatti cars and types out their stats...alright, cool? Whatever. After 10 or so minutes they leave and we shake hands, kindly.

That passage I posted as my intro to this post brought a lot of clarity into my basic interactions with people. People here just come up to you and try to form a personal connection in the oddest and most random of ways. Its made me so uncomfortable in the past but I finally understand it due to Robert's writing. This place is just so open hearted. The people here are almost always genuine in wanting to talk to me. It makes you uncomfortable because I think in America we have been trained in a lot of ways not to trust others, strangers, but in India, the other is your brother. Men just walk up and place their arms around each and start talking and I know they have never met before...I probably had 8-9 different talks with people here and all of them were really genuine. People helped me out without me asking. One kid told me I dropped my phone--really fucking glad he told me that. Several people helped me with my ticket. One kid showed me where my train car was right when it was about to leave and he sprinted with me to the front dodging in and out of people and I flipped him a quarter for it b/ I had no rupee change. Everyone loves to help me here and I do my best to repay the favor when I can.

I arrive in Gaya Junction station around 11 p.m. Bihar, the state where Gaya is in, is one of the most poor and dangerous states in all of India. My guidebook says if you arrive at night, don't continue on the next 17 km to Bodhgaya, just stay in Gaya until morning. However, a rickshaw guy comes right up to me and offers to take me to a hotel with rooms in Bodh Gaya for 200 rupees. I told myself I was going to go when its more safe in the morning but fuck it, I've had nothing but good karma this trip...and off we go...I arrive safely with no problem like I thought and my hotel is really nice.

I've spent the entire day in a run down train station due to a 12 hour delay, I've eaten no food, have had no sleep, been harassed by transvestites and I've finally made it to Bodh Gaya--lets do this.

I'm woken up by the sounds of the playing children who live in the slums across the street. I'm still tired but if you insist...

"In the darkest hole, you'd be well advised
Not to plan my funeral before the body dies, yeah
Come the morning light, it's a see through show
What you may have heard and what you think you know, yeah

Let the sun never blind your eyes
Let me sleep so my teeth won't grind
Hear a sound from a voice inside

Sure to play a part, so you love the game
And in truth your lies become one and same, yeah
I could set you free, rather hear the sound
Of your body breaking as I take you down, yeah

Let the sun never blind your eyes
Let me sleep so my teeth won't grind
Hear a sound from a voice inside

In the darkest hole, you'd be well advised
Not to plan my funeral before the body dies, yeah

Let the sun never blind your eyes
Let me sleep so my teeth won't grind
Hear a sound from a voice inside"

-Grind by Alice in Chains