More Catching Up

It is already the 5th of January and I am in Allahabad a couple of hundred miles east of Delhi. I have been sick again. In fact, Ben complains that I have been sick ever since he arrived and unfortunately, it's true. I was recovering from my stomach thing and then I developed a cough. At first it didn't seem serious, but by the time I arrived in Allahabad, the cough was deeper and I had a fever. So I saw another Indian doctor, my third. He gave me antibiotics and some palliatives (i.e., Tylenol, cough syrup, etc.), and I am feeling better, but the first full day in Allahabad I slept all day and yesterday I was very spaced out. I feel better today, but I am staying close to town while Ben explores the mela. My blood pressure is also high which is unusual so I am taking blood pressure medicine. I will check all this out with a doctor in Varanasi where I am staying for two weeks.

This trip has turned out completely different than I had planned. Instead of traveling all over I am mainly staying in Delhi and Varanasi with (so far) excursions to Mathura and Allahabad. We are in Allahabad because of the Ardh Mela which is half of a Kumbh Mela. The Kumbh Mela happens every 12 years in Allahabad. It is a large religious gathering at a propitious time to bathe in the confluence of the Ganges and the Yamuna rivers, which are real, and the Saraswati river (mythical). I went last night for the first time last night. It is a very, very large county fair laid out on the sands of the Ganges. It is a huge tent city with metal plates laid out for roads. I was interested in staying in a tent, but Ben thought it would be noisy, dusty and buggy (which it would have been even though we were looking at extra-deluxe tents). I wanted emmerse myself in the experience. The hotel is 6 miles from the site and it takes about 1/2 hour or more in a bicycle rickshaw. Anyway, it's just as well. The doctor is across the street and the chemist (pharmacy) is down the road (King's & Co. dating from the colonial era) and I am well away from the dust.

My cold got worse because on New Year's Eve I was at a great party and spent too much time on the roof watching my hosts shoot off fireworks. I also danced more than I have in ages. I would dance for a while, then I would get a coughing fit, and I would stop and then I would start dancing again. It wasn't very smart but it was a lot of fun. There was a lot of disco music alternating with Bollywood songs. Everybody was dancing to YMCA but only Ben and I seemed to know the proper arm movements or maybe they were spelling out the words in Hindi.

Then the next day we were to fly to Allahabad but at the airport our flight was canceled due to fog. We were put on a flight to Varanasi which arrived 2 hours late. We had arranged for a car and driver to take us the 100 miles or so to Allahabad. The driver was late, even later than the plane, so that was stressful and then we started out on the Grand Truck Road which I love but is a narrow, two-lane highway which carries all the truck traffic of Northern India from the Pakistan border to Calcutta and so is very crowded, especially at night. We had the foresight to have the driver stop at a roadside dabha where we had a very good meal -- rice, a delicious dal (lentils -- split moong beans, I think), a mutton curry and an eggplant dish with a lot of ginger. It was one of the better meals we have had in India. The driver was apologetic about it, but it was fine.

Then we hit the road. It was crowded but we made relatively good speed until we were not far from Allahabad and then were were trucks parked first in our lane, and then on the shoulder on the other side of the road and then in the other lane itself. We came to a stop. The driver had a co-pilot who got out of the car and walked forward. After a lot of talking, some cars were extricated from the mess, trucks moved slowly to the side and traffic began moving in the opposite direction and then, after what seemed like all the trucks in India had passed, we began to move. It turns out that because of the mela, heavy trucks had been stopped from entering Allahabad at night so they just parked wherever there was room. The last time I was on the Grand Truck Road going in the opposite direction from Varanasi to Bodh Gaya where the Buddha became enlightened there was an even worse traffic jam on the state border between Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. It was at the customs check. I read in the paper today that they are finally eliminating interstate taxes over the next four years and replacing them with VAT. For the tourist it means that hotels, restaurants and some other services will be more expensive. India is still cheap, but it is rapidly catching up to the rest of the world, especially in the tourist sector. You can still travel cheaply, but at a much comfortable level than you could travel for the same money a few years back.

So after New Year's Eve and the long car ride, my lungs were trashed. I am getting better, but as the doctor reminded me, I'm old and I don't heal as rapidly as I used to.

I had fun at the mela. I followed Ben around and major gurus and saddhus have their own camps into which one can walk and listen to them singing, drumming and chanting or just sitting around pit fires smoking dope. There is a lot of the latter going on. I am going back again this afternoon and try to find the river (it's a long ways away from the camp entry), and maybe even take a boat ride. The boatmen were on strike on the first day but I think they were working again. The government was restricting them to one landing site and they didn't like it. Their is a lot in the press also about the low water level and the high bacteria count. Now the government is trying to shut down the tanneries upstream for 10 days, but many of the tannery owners are Muslim and don't want to lose money for "some saints," and the government isn't offering compensation. Communal tensions have been high in this area because of protests organized by a Muslim party against the hanging of Sadam Hussain. The protesters allegedly stoned a temple and trouble ensued. In Allahabad, the protesters tried to close some shops that didn't want to close and there were tussles but not in my part of town.

A couple of things I have been meaning to write about but haven't so far.

Toilet seats -- the toilet seats on Western-style toilets are made of thin, hard plastic and the contacts between the seat and the porcelain are made of very hard slippery plastic as well. If you align the contacts on the porcelain, sooner or later the seat will take a sudden lurch to the right or the left. After awhile the pressure applied to the hinges is too much for them, and one or the other of them breaks and the seat becomes even more unstable. I guess nonslip supports for the seat are too expensive. At any rate, in all the Western-style bathrooms all over India people are lurching, some to the left and some to the right.

Prescriptions -- In India, the doctor's prescriptions serves the same purpose as a chart does in the United States. It is a large sheet of paper on which he lists all the prescriptions and makes little circles to indicate how many pills you need to take a day. For liquids, he makes an equal sign for each dose. You take this to the pharmacy and they fill it and give it back to you. You are expected to take the prescription to the doctor the next time you visit because he makes no other record of your case. The slips of paper are treated by the doctor and the pharmacist with reverence and you are expected to do the same.

O.K. Signing out now. I hope to have more time in Varanasi to catch up on the back log.