HAPPY BIRTHDAY blowtorch_betty

I had a disturbing dream a few weeks ago that I haven't been able to get out of my head. I'm going to write it down.


It is a bright day, sunny and warm. I am sitting in a large SUV type vehicle with a group of other people. I don't recognize any of them but it does not feel unusual to be grouped with them. I'm sitting in the front passenger seat of the car but I'm facing the rear of the vehicle. We're parked in a large square next to a tall, glass building. Somewhere in the background, a man is lecturing and we are listening to him. 

Suddenly, a girl in the car jumps out of the car and runs into the building. The man lecturing makes some remark about how she "must already know all she needs" and we all understood she was running because of something she had seen in the building. We're looking up and see lights flickering on one of the floors in the building. Barely seconds have gone by and then, so quickly, before anyone has a chance to look elsewhere,  a woman comes leaping out of the building from the floor above the flickering lights and plunges to the pavement. It happened quickly but I can recall every detail about her fall. She was wearing a long, full, brown skirt and a cream colored top. She had a hippy-like quality to her dress and had colorful scarves and beaded necklaces wrapped around her neck. She was carrying an army green canvas bag that was across her shoulders. She had shoulder length brown hair and the most peaceful and serene smile on her face I've ever seen. I turned my head just before she landed.

She hit the pavement hard and only a few feet from where we were parked. The window of the vehicle was open and her blood splashed inside and onto my arms and the side of my face. I spent a few minutes paralyzed, covering the left side of my face with my arm so as to not see her body on the ground. I kept picturing how it looked though so although the image wasn't technically something I was looking at, it was visible to me. 

I woke up, feeling terrified and still trying to shield my eyes. 

Sunday was the big day. It had been planned all week. We were going to Agra. We were going to see the 7th wonder of the world, the Taj Mahal. Now for the most part, people choose to drive to Agra which is about 4 hours by car. John had already made this drive once and said it was way too hot and uncomfortable to do again. He wanted to take the train which is only 2.5 hours. No problem, I said. What did I know...

I arranged for the train tickets and for a driver and guide to pick us up in Agra that would take us around to see Fatehpur Sikri (an abandoned city about 26 miles west of Agra), the Red Fort of Agra and, of course, the Taj. They also took us around to some of the local markets where, somehow, 7 pairs of shoes were mysteriously purchased by John and I (3 for him, 4 for me - I regret nothing!).

The day started early (5 am) as our train left Delhi at 6:15. We arrived to the bustling chaos of New Delhi Train Station, found our platform and waited patiently for our train to arrive amidst the families eating breakfast on blankets around us. The train ride itself was uneventful...I did notice it had started to rain about halfway through to Agra but tried not to worry about that even though the Monsoon was scheduled to hit any time now. Upon arrival in Agra though, the polite drizzle of the rain on the train had turned into fat bastards of rain drops plopping itself every which way. We found our driver and shloshed off to meet our guide. We stopped briefly at a restaurant where I was invited to try what was easily the worst tea I've ever been near in my life. We moved on quickly.

So it was off to Fatehpur Sikri. It was a longish drive through very rural India. Pictures are hard to take here and honestly, words can't describe to you what the eyes see. Poverty unlike anything I've witnessed and living conditions that run a shiver up your spine.  The rain continued to come down. I'll post pictures of everything we saw when I get home (I forgot one of my cables so I can't download from my camera). From there we went to the Agra fort and then it was time for lunch. I'll admit to feeling tremendous guilt here. We had just spent the past 3 hours driving through some of the worst living conditions I had ever seen. Water to your knees, piles of trash floating through the roads, children playing in the same water and animals...EVERYWHERE.  So when we walked into the squeaky clean conditions of the beautiful Oberoi hotel that stands just 600m from the Taj...it was hard to reconcile it with the images we'd just seen.

We made it to the Taj after lunch and had waited long enough for the rain to stop. It was everything you think it is and nothing at the same time. From afar it's breathtaking and it gives you that "holy shit I'm looking at the Taj Mahal" feeling you would expect. But I'll be honest, the closer you walk to it, the less impressive it becomes. Its ethereal quality starts to wan the closer you get to the actual building itself. Once you are standing right in front of it, it doesn't have that same kind of awe-inspiring, drop-to-your-knees thing that would make you wipe tears from your eyes and say "yes, THIS is a wonder of the world." Maybe I'm just cynical. Maybe I was still thinking about that naked two year old I had just seen within 10 ft of a leaking raw sewage truck.

Far be it for me to let my witness to extreme poverty take away my taste for shopping though, because after this we hit the stores. I was on a mission for shoes and it was fulfilled. Everyone I spoke to in the Delhi office said Agra was the place to go for shoes and they were not lying. Beautiful quality shoes. I will post pictures of my two favorites. Again, it's hard to reconcile my reality with that of the people I saw. I spent 4000 rupees on shoes in an hour. I suppose I can feel good that this money goes back into the local market (the factories are all in Agra) but it's hard to see that level of hardship and not feel pangs of guilt. 

Ok, time to go back to the train station. Let me set the stage for you.

It's been raining all day. And a very special kind of bug is born to celebrate this rain. It's huge, fluttery, and there are millions. 
The electricity for the entire train station is spotty at best and frequently goes off completely and it is pitch dark.
There are beggars (mostly crippled with no legs or very very useless legs) everywhere and they are aggressive. Grabbing at you, following you around, etc.
Did I mention the bugs?

We're waiting for our train to arrive and about 10 minutes before it's scheduled to show up I happen to be talking to a lovely Australian woman who is on the same trip. On a whim, I asked to look at her train ticket because I wanted to see what car she was in. I noticed it was a different train number. I asked her if this was the same ticket from this morning, she said no - she had two. I said "oh shit." Turns out, the guy who had booked the train for us in the office only booked a one way. We raced through the pitch black train station with bugs in our ears and beggars at our feet to try and find an open terminal to buy a ticket for the LAST TRAIN OUT OF AGRA FOR 24 HOURS that was leaving in 10 minutes. I'm not sure if I was sweating from fear or heat. I'm being light about how terrifying it was. At one point, I was literally hyperventilating from all of the bugs that were in my ears, hair, shirt, cleavage, etc. And then when the lights go out and you feel hands grabbing at your legs and you can't see...and the bugs...and...and...well, you can understand why I couldn't breathe.

The good news is we got the ticket and we made it back to Delhi. The bad news is once we arrived our driver wasn't there. When we called him, he said he had sent someone else. That someone else wasn't there. Anywhere. After an hour of searching for him we decided to try and get ourselves a local cab. Because of the rain and the train that had just dumped a ton of passengers to the train station, there weren't a lot of options. We eventually considered ourselves lucky to have an old, unlicensed car that had no working headlights, seatbelts or windshield wipers. We were still traveling with the lovely Australian woman so we offered to take her to her hotel. As we were driving there we quickly realized that by going to this hotel, we were also availing ourselves to a new lot of cabs that would hopefully be in better condition than ours. We made it, we got a new cab, we made our way back to our hotel. On the way there, we hit something but at this point we were all too traumatized to take on any other fucking weird shit so we didn't look. The driver kept going. He said it was some wood. I don't know if that's true but I'll take it. 

I'd do it all again. But I'd bring a better umbrella.

My morning commute had me driving straight into oncoming traffic.

Not to be out done, my evening commute had oncoming traffic driving straight into me (he missed us by a few inches), a car back up into us (he had missed his turn so naturally just wanted to reverse several feet in bumper to bumper traffic to correct the issue) and a bus come within inches of smushing us (literally inches, maybe centimeters).

Does anyone know what happens to a white girl stranded in the streets of Delhi at 9 pm? I don't and I sure as hell hope I never find out. If we got into an accident...I have no cell phone, no working knowlege of the language, no nothing. Scary.

In other news, Indian radio personalities are as annoying as they are in the US and Indian pop music is not a soundtrack I want playing at my funeral. For all of the conversational style overlays on the music (in random bursts of strange english "Do you feel Corporate!" -- I shit you not) it sounds more like commercials than music. For all I know, I could have been listening to a 20 minute ad for Sprite.