Going Crazy in Delhi
Chapter 7
When I arrived back in Delhi, Natasha was ecstatic to know that Clive was so close and she handed me 3 passionate letters to send him. As Clive was so often on the move and the scanning and fax facilities in Delhi were so useless in Delhi, I ended up typing the letters in an email to him. Their correspondence alternated between vows of eternal love and bitter allegations that the other didn’t really care at all. In the noble tradition of Shoot The Messenger, they both screamed at me each time they had a falling out between the lines of a love letter.
Clive had planned to come down to Delhi himself but finally flew back to Holland for two reasons: one, a business associate named Jules had ripped him off to the tune of $8000 and two, Clive realised that as tough a cookie as he might be, he was no special forces soldier. We’d be better off finding some unemployed Kashmiri militant to do the job.
Natasha fell into despair when she learnt that Clive had returned to Europe. She looked like her lifeline had been cut and all the cinnamon rolls in the world couldn’t make a bit of difference. Soon she no longer needed the blankets and instead it was the rising heat that made her cell unbearable. She complained about the bad food, the nasty prisoners and guards and most of all the lack of sex.
“We don’t even have any bananas in here.”
Natasha and I got to know each other about as well as two people can with three wire fences between them and a hundred screaming Indians around us. She was a young girl in need of attention; she apologised for her appearance, she told outrageous stories of her days as a party girl and all the acid and ecstasy she had taken.
“I’m a number one space cadet.” She would tell me proudly.
Even through the wire meshing she could see that I was beginning toi crack. The weeks of visits to the jail, the ongoing negotiations with Sethi and the incessant madness of Pahar Ganj was beginning to kill me. I stopped saying my Buddhist mantras and started hating everyone with a passion. When I walked out of my hotel in the morning I rarely last three minutes before some asshole pissed me off.
The illogic of India came in all sizes and seeped through you senses like a nerve gas. There was no escaping it, each way you turned there was someone waiting to fuck up your day. It might be something as simple as the waiter who brought your glasses of chai with his finers curled around the inner rim of each one. I’d ask him what the fuck were his fingers doing in my tea and he’d hold his hand up to the light.
“What problem? My hand not dirty!” These people had no trouble in believing in multi-coloured gods but not something as unlikely as the existence of bacteria.
One afternoon I took a rickshaw from the centre back to Pahar Ganj. It was a ten minutes walk but it was hot and I was tired after a wild goose chase at the court. The journey seemed to be taking a long time and I didn’t recognize any of the scenery. The driver finally turned around and asked me:
“Where do you want to go?” His plan seemed to be to drive around randomly in a city of 10 million people until we chanced upon my destination.
The wealthy top dogs of Indian society seemed to snub, scorn and exploit anyone below them in the social order who then beat the bicycyle rickshaw men and beggars who didn’t get out of the way. These then beat their wives and children who in turn took a goof kick at any mangy starving dog whose only company was a host of parasites. That’s right, Hinduism, all life is sacred.
Shopkeepers told me that the Pakistanis were wicked people and when I asked how they knew they told me:
“Because they eat the cow and she is such a kind animal!” yet even while they spoke a cow would pass in front of us and chew up a plastic bag lying in the street. 30 cows died a week in Delhi from kilos of polythene clogging up their intestines.
One day I was looking for an address (naturally no one knew where it was but all issued varying directions anyway) when a rickshaw came along and knocked me off my feet. I was up again in seconds, trying to kick in his rear light. I suddenly realised that in a moment it would be 25 rickshaw drivers against one foreigner and I slipped away through the crowd, cursing. Ah man, if I had a rocket launcher…
I returned to the hotel and almost bumped into the manager, the small and kind Mr Singh.
“Mr Singh, you’ve lived on this street for 50 years. How do you stand it all? The noise, the ignorance, the chaos?” He smiled, understanding exactly what I meant and replied.
“It is no use. It is no use to get upset about it all. There is nothing you can do about it. It is no use.” It was the single most wise thing I’d heard said about India in years.
My Israeli friend, Eitan, was feeling the same way.
“These days I’m looking at things and thinking ‘how would I break that?’
Eitan was one of the coolest people I’d met on the road in years. His sister was in Tihar for the same reason as Natasha. He’d been over here for a couple more months than me and his friendship had helped keep my head above the water in Delhi. Eitan came from a kibbutz in the north of Israel where he used to raise cows. He’d never lived in a city before and had never really wanted to. His kibbutz had decided to meet all the costs of keeping him in Delhi and paying for his sister’s lawyer. This struck me as a beautiful gesture.
We played pool at night and with him I could hang out with the rest of the Israeli posse. We went to jail together and the waiting time passed easier. We no longer worried about arriving on time at Tihar and just walked to the front of the queue to sign our names now. Then we walked back to the street and drank tea for three hours until 1pm. We sat on the rope beds of a chai stall and then walked to a nearby restaurant to buy containers of rice and curry for the girls inside.
Eitan was a tall, wiry guy who would have liked nothing better than to destroy Delhi with his bare hands. He understood though that that door to anger and violence could never be opened and he just strolled through the mayhem without ever leaving second gear. It was good having him around sometimes though – like the day when it was in the news that 35 Sikhs had been murdered in Kashmir. We were waiting by the gate to the jail when a mob of fiery young Sikhs came racing down the road. One of the bigger youths grabbed my arm and yelled at me in Punjabi. I smiled and tried to twist my hand away. Finally his friends pulled him away and the mob passed on.
“I didn’t come because I saw you were still smiling.” Eitan told me. I knew all along that he was only a moment away but was glad that he was smart enough not to aggravate a volatile situation. We later learnt that the mob had burnt down the house of a Muslim family while they were still inside.
Another guy we saw from time to time at then jail was an English guy of Jamaican descent called Tony. Tony was as cool and nonchalant as they come, riding his motorbike barefoot and not even sweating under his mass of dreadlocks. His girlfriend, Emma, had been inside for four years now and Tony wasn’t giving up on her.
He had realised from the beginning that to be there for the duration he’d need to integrate more with Indian society. He lived quietly outside the tourist areas and taught Ashtanga yoga, a discipline that gave him great strength and calm.
Like Eitan and I, he never talked about his girlfriend’s case or about how he was feeling about it all. We’d talk about Delhi, India, the weather – anything but our particular missions. It was like an unspoken agreement. We weren’t in competition and didn’t need to keep any secrets but we all had enough on our plates already.
As summer began Tony had to go back to London to renew his visa. He hadn’t been gone for two weeks when Natasha told me excitedly in the visit:
“Emma got bail! Tony’s girlfriend, Emma – she’s free!” We both leaped in the air with genuine joy, even though I didn’t know the girl. You had to be happy for anyone getting out of this place.
We later learnt how Tony had heard the news. Emma had gone to stay at the home of the British Ambassador and the first thing she did was to call Tony in London. When he heard her voice he dropped his cell phone on the street in shock.
