STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND
I have been a stranger in a strange land.
–Exodus 2.22
When your luggage is in danger, that’s your clue you have arrived in India.
–V. S. Naipaul
This is the story of a traveler on a trip to a strange land. It takes place some 20 years ago, and follows the adventures of a forty-ish American tourist in India. By the time we join him there, he’s already been in Asia for three months and, generally speaking, the trip has been fairly successful, considering it’s his initial foray into this off-the-beaten-track part of the world. The few minor glitches are hardly worth mentioning–the near-fatal food poisoning in China; the half-day spent stranded on a desolate hillside in Nepal, teetering above a raging river; and, too polite to simply say “No thank you,” the big steaming cup of rancid yak butter tea he had to drink in Tibet.
Now he wasn’t foolish enough to imagine he knew much about Asia, not after only three months. But he’d been there long enough to learn one or two Important Lessons, foremost among them being: expect the unexpected, or put another way, don’t expect anything to happen the way you’d expect it to happen. The three words became a sort of mantra–Expect the Unexpected–that he repeated to calm himself whenever events went haywire, which they often did.
Before he left on his trip, he’d listened to reports about India that weren’t exactly encouraging, although they seemed at the time a bit exaggerated. Hot, dirty, crowded, noisy, hot, dirty, crowded, noisy, hot, dirty, crowded, noisy–the list went on but those four words seemed to crop up with disturbing frequency. Westerners tend to romanticize and idealize Mother India ... especially if they’ve never been there. But the people our tourist spoke with were hardened globe-trotters and old India hands, not the type to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse. The odd thing was though that most everyone, after methodically ticking off this litany of nightmares about the country, concluded breathlessly with, “And I just can’t wait to go back.”
Our tourist’s India entry point was the holy city of Benares on the Ganges River. Hindus believe that to die in Benares, even if you’re the most hardened criminal, is a ticket straight to heaven. Though he didn’t know it at the time, commencing your first trip to India in Benares is analogous to a non-swimmer jumping, without a life vest, into the deep end of the pool and hoping for the best.
He stepped off the plane from Kathmandu and cautiously entered the terminal building. Faster than you can say hotdirtycrowdednoisy, he was surrounded by a sea of waving arms and pleading faces, all crying, “Sir, sir, here, cab, here.” Desperately he looked for an escape route, but he was trapped like a rat in a diabolical maze; and anyway, he did need a ride to the hotel. So, poker-faced, he swept his eyes over the surging mass of humanity, and–Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Moe–randomly settled on and pointed to that one over there. Just as quickly as it had appeared, the swarm of cab-wallahs melted away, leaving only our tourist and Moe.
And so his trip to India started out slowly and, to paraphrase the description of a former US presidential candidate’s failed campaign, went downhill from there. As it turned out, whatever hardships he’d endured in China, Tibet, and Nepal paled in comparison to what he braved for the next five weeks. He eventually came to realize that the reports he’d heard about India, the ones he thought were exaggerated, were actually soft-pedaled, as if his sources had tried to subtly warn him but not frighten him off entirely. All through the trip, he felt like Alice at the Mad Tea Party in hotdirtycrowdednoisy Wonderland, where certain supposedly universal verities had somehow been surreptitiously canceled, or at least cavalierly ignored.
While the big things–the daily triple-digit Fahrenheit temperatures, the mountains of reeking garbage in the streets, the crushing hordes of people mingled with aimlessly roaming cows, the relentless nerve-jarring noise–granulated his will like a kernel of wheat in a grindstone, the insidious drip-drip-drip of tiny daily absurdities chipped away at his sanity, devouring his brain one ganglion at a time. Take the unforgettable Adventure of the Altered Bill. One day our tourist innocently accepted a 100-rupee bill (at that time worth about seven US dollars) as change for a purchase he’d made from some merchant who’d guilt-tripped him into buying a few silk scarves. The next day he tried to pay for something or other with this same bill. Consider his surprise-confusion-outrage–in that order–when the shop-keeper reacted to the proffered piece of paper as if it were saturated with toxic waste and refused to accept it.
What was wrong? Apparently the bill had, at some point in its career, gotten wet, which smeared the long row of red serial numbers in one corner and pruned-faced the paper. The owner of the bill then tried to repair the damage by crudely tracing over the blotchy numbers with a red pen. Our tourist realized he should have been more attentive, and had no one to blame but himself for getting stuck with the bill, like the Queen of Spades in a game of Hearts. After all, a week earlier, there had been a forewarning that Indians were particular about their money, or at least the paper the money was printed on. In a post office in Udaipur, he’d tried to pay for some stamps with a shabby 10-rupee bill, which the clerk rebuffed because, as the man behind him in line explained with a straight face, the paper was “too loose.”
He thought about all the American bills he’d handled over the years that were torn and taped, written on–“No War” was popular in the 60s–washed out, peppered with tiny holes. He’d never given any of it–nobody he ever knew had ever given any of it–a second thought. But here in India ... expect the unexpected. To a Westerner, a paper bill has only symbolic value, it stands for something else squirreled away in Fort Knox or wherever. The quality of the paper–as long as it’s still relatively intact and legible–is immaterial. But for an Indian–and our tourist, to this day, has never unearthed the reason why–the bill’s paper is a living presence that, if in any way flawed or prematurely aged, curses the bill and renders it chandala, an outcaste.
And so began the Adventure, which became curiouser and curiouser over the next several weeks. Everywhere our tourist went in India he tried to pass it off, openly at first, and when that failed, underhandedly. He tried sandwiching the tainted bill between two newly-minted bills, hoping the intended victim had his guard down. But the bill emitted some kind of high-pitched warning audible only to Indians, and despite the tourist’s best efforts, nobody anywhere would even touch the bill, not the humblest cab-wallah or shop-keeper.
Finally our tourist reached the capital of New Delhi, the bill tucked safely in his money belt. Of course, he could have taped the bill to his back with a sign reading, in both English and Hindi, “Steal Me,” and probably no one would have bothered. Since he now had only a few days left in India, he needed to either A) bring the bill home to meet his parents–as a matter of fact, he’d grown rather fond of his scapegoated paper friend; or B) get rid of it somehow. He contemplated searching out the most abject beggar in all of Delhi and, brazenly displaying the artlessly over-written numbers, magnanimously handing him the bill, just to see if the poor soul would take it. Then he hit on a brilliant idea: why not just go to the Bank of India and exchange the bill for another? Surely the Bank of India wouldn’t turn it down?
So off he went and, once at the bank, civilly explained his dilemma to a friendly teller, who ushered him into the bank manager’s office. The manager was a short, stocky, mustachioed gentleman with a gracious manner, wearing an expensive Western-style suit. Lulled into complacency by the scene’s un-India-like facade, our tourist quite reasonably expected that the exchange would be a mere formality, an anti-climactic end to an otherwise quirky and amusing tale from exotic India.
He sat casually at the manager’s large desk, its surface polished to a mirror-like finish, and once more patiently spun the epic tale of the 100-rupee bill. Then with a flourish, he laid the wretched thing on the desk. The manager leaned warily over the bill but didn’t pick it up, and this, the tourist intuited immediately, was a Bad Sign.
The manager examined the subject carefully, as if he’d never seen a 100-rupee bill before. After a minute or so he raised his eyes and stared intently at the tourist. “This bill,” he said with finality, much like Holmes revealing the meaning of some baffling clue to Watson, “has been altered.”
There was a moment of awkward silence while the tourist, jolted back into Indian Reality, mentally repeated his mantra–Expect the Unexpected–a few times. He wasn’t sure what had gone wrong, but it wasn’t the first time in India he’d been misunderstood after giving what he imagined was a perfectly clear explanation or making a seemingly innocent request. Indian English sounded like English English, but the meaning of the words were often subtly re-defined, sometimes right on the spot.
So he tried again, this time explicitly stating his goal: “I want to exchange this bill for another.” The manager looked perplexed. He spoke deliberately, like a first-grade teacher deciphering the intricacies of 2 + 2 = 4 for a slightly dull and indifferent six-year-old. “We ... can ... not ... accept ... this ... bill. ... It ... has ... been ... altered.”
“But, but, but,” the tourist actually sputtered for the first time in his life, “this bill is legal tender, isn’t it? And this is a bank, right?” The manager pondered these weighty questions for a few moments. “Yes, that is all true, but we still cannot accept your bill.
Again awkward silence, the mantra now forgotten. Even if our tourist had remembered it, it would have been totally useless in this situation. He gazed incredulously at the manager and the manager gazed back, impassive. In actual space they were separated by no more than five or six feet, but culturally, the tourist was standing on the Earth, shouting in Greek across a vast gulf to the manager on the Moon.
They volleyed back and forth for awhile, and at last the manager shrugged and sighed wearily. “I will tell you what I will do,” he said, palpably at his wit’s end with this thick-headed American, and hoping to be rid of him at any cost. “I will give you 50 rupees for your bill.”
The tourist’s immediate impulse was to burst out laughing, but he politely stuffed it, just as he’d politely gagged down the yak butter tea. Quickly sizing up the situation, he reckoned he had two choices: he could A) resign himself to the 50 rupees, and concede the final victory to India; or B) decline the 50 rupees and preserve his last shred of dignity, even if it cost him seven dollars.
And so in the end, after thanking the manager for his time, our tourist left the bank with the bill clutched in his hand, out into hotdirtycrowdednoisy Delhi. He wandered about for awhile, reflecting on what Important Lesson the Universe was trying to teach him with this one, but came up blank. Maybe, he thought, there were more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, and maybe that includes all of India itself.
Finally, near sunset, he happened across a small, street-side shrine dedicated to the elephant-headed god Ganesha, the patron of good luck and wisdom, and the remover of obstacles. Saluting the idol he silently wondered: Where were you at the start of this trip? Then he recalled that he still had to get out of India, and who knows what could happen? Expect the unexpected, and God forbid they wouldn’t let him go because ... well, just because. So as an offering, our tourist devoutly laid the 100-rupee bill at the god’s big-toed feet. Suddenly he realized he was trying to bribe an elephant statue with seven dollars, an obvious sign he’d been in India way too long. So before any more crazy notions invaded what was left of his mind, he briskly turned and walked back to his hotel to pack his bag.
–Exodus 2.22
When your luggage is in danger, that’s your clue you have arrived in India.
–V. S. Naipaul
This is the story of a traveler on a trip to a strange land. It takes place some 20 years ago, and follows the adventures of a forty-ish American tourist in India. By the time we join him there, he’s already been in Asia for three months and, generally speaking, the trip has been fairly successful, considering it’s his initial foray into this off-the-beaten-track part of the world. The few minor glitches are hardly worth mentioning–the near-fatal food poisoning in China; the half-day spent stranded on a desolate hillside in Nepal, teetering above a raging river; and, too polite to simply say “No thank you,” the big steaming cup of rancid yak butter tea he had to drink in Tibet.
Now he wasn’t foolish enough to imagine he knew much about Asia, not after only three months. But he’d been there long enough to learn one or two Important Lessons, foremost among them being: expect the unexpected, or put another way, don’t expect anything to happen the way you’d expect it to happen. The three words became a sort of mantra–Expect the Unexpected–that he repeated to calm himself whenever events went haywire, which they often did.
Before he left on his trip, he’d listened to reports about India that weren’t exactly encouraging, although they seemed at the time a bit exaggerated. Hot, dirty, crowded, noisy, hot, dirty, crowded, noisy, hot, dirty, crowded, noisy–the list went on but those four words seemed to crop up with disturbing frequency. Westerners tend to romanticize and idealize Mother India ... especially if they’ve never been there. But the people our tourist spoke with were hardened globe-trotters and old India hands, not the type to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse. The odd thing was though that most everyone, after methodically ticking off this litany of nightmares about the country, concluded breathlessly with, “And I just can’t wait to go back.”
Our tourist’s India entry point was the holy city of Benares on the Ganges River. Hindus believe that to die in Benares, even if you’re the most hardened criminal, is a ticket straight to heaven. Though he didn’t know it at the time, commencing your first trip to India in Benares is analogous to a non-swimmer jumping, without a life vest, into the deep end of the pool and hoping for the best.
He stepped off the plane from Kathmandu and cautiously entered the terminal building. Faster than you can say hotdirtycrowdednoisy, he was surrounded by a sea of waving arms and pleading faces, all crying, “Sir, sir, here, cab, here.” Desperately he looked for an escape route, but he was trapped like a rat in a diabolical maze; and anyway, he did need a ride to the hotel. So, poker-faced, he swept his eyes over the surging mass of humanity, and–Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Moe–randomly settled on and pointed to that one over there. Just as quickly as it had appeared, the swarm of cab-wallahs melted away, leaving only our tourist and Moe.
And so his trip to India started out slowly and, to paraphrase the description of a former US presidential candidate’s failed campaign, went downhill from there. As it turned out, whatever hardships he’d endured in China, Tibet, and Nepal paled in comparison to what he braved for the next five weeks. He eventually came to realize that the reports he’d heard about India, the ones he thought were exaggerated, were actually soft-pedaled, as if his sources had tried to subtly warn him but not frighten him off entirely. All through the trip, he felt like Alice at the Mad Tea Party in hotdirtycrowdednoisy Wonderland, where certain supposedly universal verities had somehow been surreptitiously canceled, or at least cavalierly ignored.
While the big things–the daily triple-digit Fahrenheit temperatures, the mountains of reeking garbage in the streets, the crushing hordes of people mingled with aimlessly roaming cows, the relentless nerve-jarring noise–granulated his will like a kernel of wheat in a grindstone, the insidious drip-drip-drip of tiny daily absurdities chipped away at his sanity, devouring his brain one ganglion at a time. Take the unforgettable Adventure of the Altered Bill. One day our tourist innocently accepted a 100-rupee bill (at that time worth about seven US dollars) as change for a purchase he’d made from some merchant who’d guilt-tripped him into buying a few silk scarves. The next day he tried to pay for something or other with this same bill. Consider his surprise-confusion-outrage–in that order–when the shop-keeper reacted to the proffered piece of paper as if it were saturated with toxic waste and refused to accept it.
What was wrong? Apparently the bill had, at some point in its career, gotten wet, which smeared the long row of red serial numbers in one corner and pruned-faced the paper. The owner of the bill then tried to repair the damage by crudely tracing over the blotchy numbers with a red pen. Our tourist realized he should have been more attentive, and had no one to blame but himself for getting stuck with the bill, like the Queen of Spades in a game of Hearts. After all, a week earlier, there had been a forewarning that Indians were particular about their money, or at least the paper the money was printed on. In a post office in Udaipur, he’d tried to pay for some stamps with a shabby 10-rupee bill, which the clerk rebuffed because, as the man behind him in line explained with a straight face, the paper was “too loose.”
He thought about all the American bills he’d handled over the years that were torn and taped, written on–“No War” was popular in the 60s–washed out, peppered with tiny holes. He’d never given any of it–nobody he ever knew had ever given any of it–a second thought. But here in India ... expect the unexpected. To a Westerner, a paper bill has only symbolic value, it stands for something else squirreled away in Fort Knox or wherever. The quality of the paper–as long as it’s still relatively intact and legible–is immaterial. But for an Indian–and our tourist, to this day, has never unearthed the reason why–the bill’s paper is a living presence that, if in any way flawed or prematurely aged, curses the bill and renders it chandala, an outcaste.
And so began the Adventure, which became curiouser and curiouser over the next several weeks. Everywhere our tourist went in India he tried to pass it off, openly at first, and when that failed, underhandedly. He tried sandwiching the tainted bill between two newly-minted bills, hoping the intended victim had his guard down. But the bill emitted some kind of high-pitched warning audible only to Indians, and despite the tourist’s best efforts, nobody anywhere would even touch the bill, not the humblest cab-wallah or shop-keeper.
Finally our tourist reached the capital of New Delhi, the bill tucked safely in his money belt. Of course, he could have taped the bill to his back with a sign reading, in both English and Hindi, “Steal Me,” and probably no one would have bothered. Since he now had only a few days left in India, he needed to either A) bring the bill home to meet his parents–as a matter of fact, he’d grown rather fond of his scapegoated paper friend; or B) get rid of it somehow. He contemplated searching out the most abject beggar in all of Delhi and, brazenly displaying the artlessly over-written numbers, magnanimously handing him the bill, just to see if the poor soul would take it. Then he hit on a brilliant idea: why not just go to the Bank of India and exchange the bill for another? Surely the Bank of India wouldn’t turn it down?
So off he went and, once at the bank, civilly explained his dilemma to a friendly teller, who ushered him into the bank manager’s office. The manager was a short, stocky, mustachioed gentleman with a gracious manner, wearing an expensive Western-style suit. Lulled into complacency by the scene’s un-India-like facade, our tourist quite reasonably expected that the exchange would be a mere formality, an anti-climactic end to an otherwise quirky and amusing tale from exotic India.
He sat casually at the manager’s large desk, its surface polished to a mirror-like finish, and once more patiently spun the epic tale of the 100-rupee bill. Then with a flourish, he laid the wretched thing on the desk. The manager leaned warily over the bill but didn’t pick it up, and this, the tourist intuited immediately, was a Bad Sign.
The manager examined the subject carefully, as if he’d never seen a 100-rupee bill before. After a minute or so he raised his eyes and stared intently at the tourist. “This bill,” he said with finality, much like Holmes revealing the meaning of some baffling clue to Watson, “has been altered.”
There was a moment of awkward silence while the tourist, jolted back into Indian Reality, mentally repeated his mantra–Expect the Unexpected–a few times. He wasn’t sure what had gone wrong, but it wasn’t the first time in India he’d been misunderstood after giving what he imagined was a perfectly clear explanation or making a seemingly innocent request. Indian English sounded like English English, but the meaning of the words were often subtly re-defined, sometimes right on the spot.
So he tried again, this time explicitly stating his goal: “I want to exchange this bill for another.” The manager looked perplexed. He spoke deliberately, like a first-grade teacher deciphering the intricacies of 2 + 2 = 4 for a slightly dull and indifferent six-year-old. “We ... can ... not ... accept ... this ... bill. ... It ... has ... been ... altered.”
“But, but, but,” the tourist actually sputtered for the first time in his life, “this bill is legal tender, isn’t it? And this is a bank, right?” The manager pondered these weighty questions for a few moments. “Yes, that is all true, but we still cannot accept your bill.
Again awkward silence, the mantra now forgotten. Even if our tourist had remembered it, it would have been totally useless in this situation. He gazed incredulously at the manager and the manager gazed back, impassive. In actual space they were separated by no more than five or six feet, but culturally, the tourist was standing on the Earth, shouting in Greek across a vast gulf to the manager on the Moon.
They volleyed back and forth for awhile, and at last the manager shrugged and sighed wearily. “I will tell you what I will do,” he said, palpably at his wit’s end with this thick-headed American, and hoping to be rid of him at any cost. “I will give you 50 rupees for your bill.”
The tourist’s immediate impulse was to burst out laughing, but he politely stuffed it, just as he’d politely gagged down the yak butter tea. Quickly sizing up the situation, he reckoned he had two choices: he could A) resign himself to the 50 rupees, and concede the final victory to India; or B) decline the 50 rupees and preserve his last shred of dignity, even if it cost him seven dollars.
And so in the end, after thanking the manager for his time, our tourist left the bank with the bill clutched in his hand, out into hotdirtycrowdednoisy Delhi. He wandered about for awhile, reflecting on what Important Lesson the Universe was trying to teach him with this one, but came up blank. Maybe, he thought, there were more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, and maybe that includes all of India itself.
Finally, near sunset, he happened across a small, street-side shrine dedicated to the elephant-headed god Ganesha, the patron of good luck and wisdom, and the remover of obstacles. Saluting the idol he silently wondered: Where were you at the start of this trip? Then he recalled that he still had to get out of India, and who knows what could happen? Expect the unexpected, and God forbid they wouldn’t let him go because ... well, just because. So as an offering, our tourist devoutly laid the 100-rupee bill at the god’s big-toed feet. Suddenly he realized he was trying to bribe an elephant statue with seven dollars, an obvious sign he’d been in India way too long. So before any more crazy notions invaded what was left of his mind, he briskly turned and walked back to his hotel to pack his bag.
