A passport to India
By Athea Marcos Amir, Oct 13, 2006

All of us, I believe, privately harbor certain suspicions about ourselves.

Despite a lifetime of yearning for The Good, The Beautiful and The Ineffable, I have long suspected that the depths of my superficiality have yet to be plumbed, and that I—not Madonna—am the original Material Girl.

Anyway, such were my musings as I made ready for my first (read: final) trip to India, a trip I had been wanting to make yet postponing for longer than I care to publicly disclose. True, there had once also been dreams of Holland, Nether Nether Land, but tulips, windmills and dykes can’t hold a candle to lepers, temple bells and men relaxing on beds of nails. Besides, when I go window shopping I want to see mannequins wearing Eileen Fisher, not prostitutes lounging around in butt flossers waiting for their next trick.

I don’t recall how old I was when this hankering for India commenced, but it was sometime in elementary school that I first gazed longingly at pictures of dark, sexy-spiritual men swathed only in their bath sheets and gorgeous, sloe-eyed women draped in slinky silk, bangles gleaming on their slim wrists, sporting a red dot where their third eyes should be. I knew that beneath my pleated plaid skirt and saddle shoes lurked somebody barefoot wearing toe rings and a sari.

Then, too, were those poignant images of ingenuous believers who came daily in droves for a dip in the sacred, filthy waters of the Ganges. They never failed to bring tears of admiration to my eyes.

Later in life I fell into burning incense, hanging beaded curtains wherever I could, and reveling in the tastes of curry and chutney and chapatis. Ravi Shankar and his sitar could transport me to heights nothing short of vertiginous. Fortunately, my basic survival instincts never allowed for the piercing of any body parts.

Naturally, I recognized possible problems in visiting a country so, well, foreign, as India. First there’s the language. I have always marveled at the Indians’ incredible cleverness in speaking English in such a way that no native English speaker could possibly understand them. 

And I can’t even count on being able to decipher the English spoken by the English! I vividly recall the anguish and humiliation of having to nod, smile and feign understanding when the Cockney proprietor of my London B & B answered my question “Do you happen to know what time it is?” He could have been speaking Tagalog for all I gleaned from his mutterings.

Then there were the culinary and hygiene aspects to consider. Not only have I never wanted to eat gravy with my hands, but the sight of anyone else doing so puts me off my feed. And should a fly make a landing on anything I’m poised to bite into, I need to lie down with a damp rag on my forehead until I recover. 

It was inevitable, however, that the time would come when I found myself in Delhi late at night, the temperature ten degrees hotter than a bagel oven, with the flies taking gratuitously vicious bites out of my exposed flesh. There must have been an Amway or Tupperware convention in Delhi because I counted several million more people than the statisticians claim for the city. Desperate to be out of there, I handed over the bulk of my children’s inheritance to a guy who got me a car and driver for Agra, four hours away.

We eventually arrived at the hotel, the sight of which was enough to drain the sap out of the most positive follower of Norman Vincent Peale. I collapsed on what passed for a bed and prayed the night would go by quickly and that someone would find my body in the morning, from which the mosquitoes had drawn the final drop of blood.

Miraculously having survived the night, I descended the stairs the next morning to the hotel restaurant, where I was introduced to India’s amazing system of employing five or six waiters to service one solitary customer. In some kind of sleight of hand they manage to pass around the plates and cutlery to one another innumerable times before it finally reached the table. Still, the coffee proved potable and the toast passed muster, so thus fortified I headed through the sizzling streets of Agra toward the Taj Mahal. I had barely gone a block before I was waylaid by a cute young Indian who demanded I make him a list of the best colleges in America. As he was searching for pen and paper he kept instructing me to look at his father’s marble (“No need to buy! Just look!”), huge slabs I immediately pictured myself carrying back on a plane, decapitating several passengers as I struggled to get into my seat with a 200-pound keepsake in my lap.

A needle in a haystack could have been located more quickly than writing materials, but after they were produced I jotted down “Harvard, Yale, Princeton, UC Berkeley,” with a twinge of guilt for leaving out Cornell, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia…

As I approached the Taj, it became apparent that somehow, during the night, everyone else in Delhi had also taken off for Agra, and a stampede appeared imminent. Ever courageous, I turned on my heel and bolted, reflecting that the many lovely travelogues I’d enjoyed that depict the famous shrine would do nicely for this particular incarnation.

Early that evening, despite the pleas of Raj, the handsome hotel desk clerk, that I stay for his sister’s upcoming wedding, I departed Agra by train for the ashram in southern India that was my true destination. Out of compassion for the devotees there—plus the fear they might insist on giving me a free trip back—I choose not to disclose the precise location of this ashram, from which I did not immediately flee, as I’d have liked, but at which I suffered two weeks, mainly because I was too sick to leave.

No, it’s not what you’re thinking. My bowels staunchly maintained their customary inertia. But I had picked up a cold on the plane from Houston and then I developed a sore on the right side of my nose that throbbed, pulsated, vibrated, glowed in the dark and did everything short of ejecting balls of fire, so inflamed it was. When I finally punctured it with a needle (sterilized beforehand)—you don’t want to know what oozed out—and it began to heal, I realized what a dark and ironic sense of humor God has. A perfectly round, red scab appeared exactly where Indian women pierce their noses and insert a jewel! It was sort of a rough ruby, and I am proud to say I got three compliments before it dropped off.

They tried to starve me at the ashram, and nearly succeeded. O.K.—maybe they weren’t actually trying, but how can even the most unskilled cook boil rice and veggies until every last nutrient has been destroyed and the grains of rice have morphed into pabulum? Although there was virtually nothing edible, I must have some good karma in the bank because there was an espresso machine from which I could obtain my daily infusion of vital fluid. My food fantasies grew more intense than any TV cooking show could inspire. I won’t say it was the worst food I’ve ever tasted. Let’s just say I’ll never again utter a discouragin’ word about airplane cuisine.

Having returned to my beloved San Miguel, I was able to sit down and reflect at my leisure on what went wrong. (Be assured the Indian people I met were courteous, friendly, beautiful, helpful and kind.) So what, essentially, was my problem? I think I have that figured out. Timing, they say, is everything, and I got to India half a century too late. I’m certain I would have loved it during British rule.

Lest I make the same mistake again and find myself in Sri Lanka or the wrong Georgia, I have compiled a list of what I now consider my Basic Needs. In the hope that I might save even one soul the misery I endured, I give it to you here:



-Never go anywhere that’s more than two kilometers from a major university and a liquor store.



-Always ask the management, “Is there a reading lamp and does your library contain anything more current than the Bhaghavadgita?”



-Don’t just inquire about hot water. Stand in the bathroom with the water running until you have a third-degree burn on your index finger.



-Say to a native, “Thank God there’s no McDonald’s here!” and if he doesn’t immediately correct you, grab the first rickshaw out.



All right, so I’m not Mother Teresa. As that modern-day philosopher, Popeye, says, “I am what I am and that’s all that I am.” After all, on The Path, as we Seekers like to call it, Self-Acceptance is one of the first stops, isn’t it? And by the way, does anyone out there have the skinny on a cheap flight to Vegas?