IndiaIndiaIndia

On Monday we were in Calcutta. Our hotel room was clean. It was our refuge from the garbage outside, the exhaust in the air, the beggars grabbing keith's arm. But still, I was distraught. I cried, saying I hated India. But what I had forgotten was how much worse it would get.

That afternoon, K and I took a taxi 20 min. away to Howrah train station. I had a horrible throbbing headache which got worse and worse as we sat there, hours early for the Rajdhani Express. It was medlam in there--so horribly noisy and echoey--there were even cars inside. K and I sat on our backpacks and I felt dead inside--numb--so overwhelmed. On the train we got lucky as two seats by themselves on one side of a compartment were empty, and the family opposite said we could have them. The train men wore odd red flannel shirts and came 'round with tons of food and drink--although I had nothing except yogurt, tea and a few bite-fulls of dubious ice cream--as we'd brought our own food from a restaurant and I was nauseous. Finally my great hunger this whole trip had abated. As K said, India will get rid of all your desires. And so we unfolded the seats into a bed and layed down with pillows and blankets, my head throbbing as strange Italian sounding music was piped through the cars--harmonium sounding like accordian. The couple nearby reminded us not to travel to Bodhgaya (from Gaya) until the morning, as it was very dangerous--the Bihar bandits...

Off the train, they pointed us towards some hotels, telling us to go straight there and not to "entertain" anyone. Only the hotels directly across the street wanted $20 and were nasty. The owners mean when we asked where Hotel Vishnu was, refusing to tell us. After seeing a room at the second place--sonmoisy above a restaurant and right on the road--when we asked again where Hotel Vishnu was--the man said, "What happened up there!"--offended we didn't like his room. It was midnight-1:30 AM for us--still on Thai time...K floundered and I piped in, "It's just too noisy for us..." The man said he'd have one of his employees, "He works for me, he's not some other person," take us to a nice place one minute away--the Roxy Deluxe. The name sounded promising.

And so we followed the skinny man wearing a peach scarf around the corner, down a dark street lined with garbage to the place with "comfort"--as we'd been assured. The Roxy Deluxe had a room wit white sheets covered in streaks of black, the grates over the windows were painted yellow and black with mold, the walls had streaks of grime and the bathroom--oh the bathroom--had a toilet full of brown sludge and a nasty sink which let out just a trickle of water. All along the tops of the room's walls were long rectangular windows with no screens or glass, which spilled in huge shafts of light. The room echoed with the sounds of the street--trains and honking autorickshaws and worse, the sounds of the employees and other occupants yelling to each other, a movie playing unbelievably loud.

We took the room--as we were too tired, and it was too dangerous to walk the km to the Hotel Vishnu, or take a rickshaw. We took it, and were brought a mosquito coil for the floor. We donned mosquito nets for our heads, climbed into our silk sleepsheets, and gingerly pulled the filthy woolen blankets up to our chests.