1/16/2013 – 02:19 – Jammu-Ajmer Express

Six Punjabis are jostling and talking in the steel bunk racks above as this train clanks and rattles across Haryana south towards Rajasthan.

I am lying on the ground in Sleeper Class. I don’t have a berth because I don’t have a ticket.

After the long bus ride down from the Dhauladars I jumped on the wrong train, then, two hours into the ride, I jumped off and got on the right train only to find a young Sikh sleeping in my berth. Only after I shook him awake did I realize that my ticket was actually booked for the following month.

Thus I’m berthless for this 14-hour ride to Jaipur. I am lying on my shawl on the floor, which smells of aged urine and mutton curry.

Read about The Flaneur’s other train trips and (mis)adventures here.

07:00

Upon opening my eyes this morning I found a young boy staring at me.

He summoned me to his berth, gave me a cold samosa and we talked for a time. He told me he had just left his hometown in the Punjab and was heading south to Maharashtra to join the army. He showed me pictures of his life: his high school graduation, his girlfriend – a tall, innocent-looking Assamese. I’m not sure why, but he also showed me their love letters – lots of I love yous and I’ll miss yous and smiley faces in purple ink. Very Bollywood. I nodded perfunctorily. I was still very sleepy and my eyes were roaming the dark cabin in search of a place to lie down again.

I want to marry her when I get out of the army, the boy told me.

A love marriage? I asked. To an Assamese? You’re a Sikh, what will your parents think?

He didn’t know, but he knew how he felt. He asked if I thought such a love marriage would last.

I have no idea, I said. The military will change you. You will feel differently afterwards.

He smiled.

I’m gonna go lie down over there, I said.

No please, he said, barring my way. Take my bed.

Thanks but I’ll go lie down over there. I grabbed my pack.

No please, he said. You are my guest in India.

He sat on his suitcase in the aisle as I lay in his berth. We talked more about his girlfriend. He showed me more letters, pictures, then, before he got off in Delhi, he took a ten-rupee note out of his wallet and wrote ‘I will miss you’ next to Gandhi’s portrait and gave it to me.

 

10:00

The landscape is changing as we enter Rajasthan.

The first image from beyond the window is that of a donkey-drawn wagon commanded by a man in a tall pink turban on a scorched orange road, backdropped by a vast field of swaying yellow mustard flowers.

 

1/17/2014 – 11:03 – Jaipur Literature Festival

First morning of the festival, waiting for Jonathan Franzen to come onstage.

The security to enter this festival was a joke. Two unmanned metal detectors were bleeping continuously as me and others walked through unchallenged, one after the other. Then, a policeman with a wooden baton looped through his belt patted my left pocket, looked at (but not inside) my backpack and waved me through.

 

11:05

William Sutcliffe is sitting next to me. Sutcliffe wrote Are You Experienced?, a novel about backpackers in India. He is telling the person next to him that he feels bad because he hasn’t read the book that he is supposed to be discussing later.

 

11:10

Franzen has appeared beside the stage. His presence draws in the eyes, sends a low murmur through the crowd.

He’s much chubbier than I imagined. He looks like a 45-year-old boy.

 

12:34

I’ve drifted over to the “Google Mughal” tent, where William Dalrymple, Gaiatra Bahadur and Emma Rothschild are talking about slaves.

I have never heard of Emma Rothschild. Is she a true Rothschild? Is that why she is an authority on slavery?

 

12:50

I find myself unable to pay any attention to this talk. These intellectuals, so admirable for the vastness of their knowledge, but very hard to get a hold on who they are as people.

I ask myself why I admire them and can’t think of anything. Particularly the biographers, people who spend their entire lives in the lives of others, neglecting their own.

Writers in general have seemed unadmirable to me lately. So many hours alone, in the mind, hallucinating, self-obsessed. I’ll take experience over the words. As Whitman says, “Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopened!”

 

12:59

I’ve wandered off to the side of the stage here so I can look at the crowd.

Instantly I catch myself looking at their festival passes, which hang in different sizes on lanyards around their necks, to judge whether or not they are important.

Unimportant people like myself have been issued generic passes, roughly four inches in width and five inches in length, while important people have been issued passes that have an extra inch of length, in addition to their printed names.

Important, unimportant, important, unimportant – I scrutinize them one by one, attempting to discern whether those with the extra-long lanyard passes emit a special light, a extraordinary presence that might explain why they are distinguished them from the rest of us.

In the front row sits a dreadlocked, wizard-bearded sadhu-looking Westerner with straw sandals and a yoga bag.

 

1/18/2014 – 11:20 – Jaipur Literature Festival

I have encountered, for the first time in my life, Muslim proselytizers. Like smiling, sheepish Midwestern Christians they are handing out badly translated Korans and a pamphlet inviting the reader to “Get to know the prophet Muhammed” outside the festival gates.

 

15:20

I’ve wandered into this talk on Wittgenstein given by his preeminent biographer Ray Monk.

A man with black-framed glasses and a Nietzschean mustache is sitting next to me. As we wait for Monk he notices that I am reading Bukowski’s Last Night On Earth and says, I see you’re reading Bukowski.

You’re familiar with him? I ask. It was hard for me to imagine Bukowski being very popular in India.

Familiar with Bukowski? he says. Well obviously. Look at my face.

His face was ragged and pockmarked and there was a strange scar on his left cheek that looked like he’d been stabbed with a fork.

Is he well-known around here? I ask.

In my friend circle he was, but not in general. I think my friends and I were the only ones reading him in Bangalore. I would like to see him better known in this country.

Is there any Indian equivalent?

You find similarities among some modern Indian poets but nobody so blatantly self-destructive.

Just talking about him makes me want to drink, I say. He pulls out a flask and hands it over. I smell it. Whiskey. I take a drink. It’s surprisingly bearable.

The lecture begins.

 

16:40

All I’ve gotten from this talk is that Wittgenstein is that he continually requested to be posted at the Front during World War I so that he could have a direct experience of death in the hope that it would make clearer what it meant to be.

 

21:03 – Jaipur Hostel

Back in the hostel. The people in the room around me, none of whom I’ve attempted to communicate with, are all young Indian travelers. In and out of the room they walk, quietly, deferentially, trying not to stare at me but at the same time not being able to help themselves.

 

22:47

I just went outside to smoke a joint and am now attempting, unsuccessfully, to write about the festival.

This hostel is loud and busy. It’s hard to concentrate. Minute by minute, the atmosphere grows increasingly peculiar.

 

23:00

I’ve kept mostly to myself tonight but a few minutes ago I attempted to speak to a bearded young Coloradan in the bunk on the other side of the room.

I had eavesdropped on him earlier as he was guru-ing some drunk Indian girl who was complaining to him about her problems. The things he said were therapeutic and Buddhist in origin and I wanted to chat.

When the drunk Indian girl left I shouted, ‘Hey there’, waving my arms in the air from my bunk on the other side of the room. ‘Did you come for the festival?’

He gave a complicated negation. He hadn’t come for the festival, but yes, he had indeed attended. I asked if he enjoyed it. He responded in riddles. He gave me the impression that the charms of the festival had been lost on him. He said he couldn’t get around the ubiquitous corporate sponsorship and was suspicious about the fact that our name badges had barcodes. They scanned the barcodes each time we entered or left, he noted with a conspiratorial lifting of his eyebrows.

I’d given little thought to either of these issues, but for the bearded Coloradan they were cause for alarm.

But what did you think of the speakers? I asked.

He shook his head in disappointment. Small minds, he pronounced.

I was a bit taken back. How could he label Amartya Sen and Jhumpa Lahiri “small minds”?

He began to backtrack and apologize.

My mind is all jumbled up at the moment, he said. All I can think about is getting back to my teacher.

Your teacher?

My guru.

Where is your guru?

In Rishikesh. Getting back to him is all I can think about right now.

I left him alone after that.

 

23:52

I find myself unable to write anything about the festival tonight.