Until one month ago, I’d never visited Bangalore. Having been away from India for a year, I wondered how she’s looking these days.

I took a taxi from the airport and the city seemed peaceful, even serene. The airport itself was stunningly modern and would not be out of place in Western Europe. In contrast, the Bombay and Delhi airports can only be described as Indian circles of hell, as gruesome as the cities themselves. (I once stepped in cowshit at the Departures gate of the Delhi airport. Why are there cows at the airport?)

So far, things didn’t seem very Indian, in the way I remembered it. Could things be different here? I thought. Certainly this was different from Delhi. Signs were in a language I’d never seen called Kannada. The roads were clean and orderly. The weather could not be better. Palm trees swayed as only palm trees can. The city seemed to have its act together. Bangalore was becoming a major centre of IT wealth. Maybe some of that bounty trickled into public works projects?

Then our taxi went under a highway and back up, and we passed a slum. Then another slum. Tarpaulin roofs and mud roads, and skinny faces watching the traffic go by.

Nope, still India.

Bangalore does, in the developed areas, bear some passing resemblance to civilization, and in remarkable ways even surpasses the civility of our own. I am always remarking to my friends that the upper castes of India are more colonial than colonial England ever was. The Raj-era retreats and country clubs are still used for their original purpose, only now by wealthy Indians. Polo is played, and the sport of cricket, the “gentleman’s game”, is revered nation-wide. Club waitstaff are roundly and ritualistically abused, and seem to enjoy the pleasure. Our society has come to see such things as staid, aristocratic frivolities only to be enjoyed ironically, but India doesn’t. She appreciates the finer things, and I love her for it.

The financial area of Bangalore, the famous MG Road (MG = Mahatma Ghandi) area where I work and live, is a messy, incoherent, beauty-free urban patchwork, marred by incredibly poor upkeep. Walking on MG Road is a chore. The crumbling sidewalk disappears into a muddy puddle, or worse, a gaping hole you could lose an ankle to. Not to mention the myriad squishy things your foot could land on. In India you quickly learn to watch your step at all times.

That said, Bangalore’s residents are a happy bunch, and the city swarms with life. Much of that life is in the form of suffocating traffic, but nonetheless. While the city lacks any trace of man-made beauty, there are bushy trees and reasonably well-kept green areas everywhere. The best I can say is that Bangalore is unpleasant much of the time, but not most of the time.

The bar scene in Bangalore operates under a principle of compact and efficient party maximization. This is because all bars in Bangalore close at 11:30 PM, leaving little time for languid, prolonged tippling. In the English fashion, the Bangaloreans indulge ferociously over very limited time periods before the last-call bell rings (or all the lights are shut off—bar managers are equally fastidious). Service is instant, and in some places, prices rival New York. Pub music tends to the retro, mostly in the form of soft 80s pop: Stevie Wonder, Dire Straits, Madonna, a trend I quite like (the ability to talk to one another over bar music is a dying luxury). India’s relationship with Western pop culture is charmingly dated in places; mostly they are au courant, but every so often you hear a “Hey, you should check out this great movie called The Usual Suspects…” comment.

Indian booze, sadly, remains terrible.

The food is excellent. A love for fiery curry helps; I’d hate to be one of those “it’s too spicy” people here. A curious phenomenon of Bangalore restaurants is that after the meal the waiter gives you an elaborate feedback card to fill out before they give you the bill, with an astounding panoply of irrelevant questions such as Anniversary, Occupation, Spouse Name, Children’s Names, Mobile #, Address, Email, etc. Nobody flinches at filling in every box.

Bangalore has yet to absorb its rapid gains of wealth. Certain streets are well-kept, busy, and filled with slick, modern shops and restaurants. Duck down a side street and you’re in that other India of crowded roadside dhabas, sickly fruit vendors, oxen, and temples. It is a confusing sight, stemming from the insatiable Desi taste for poor public cleanliness.

The rickshaw men are the biggest cheats I have seen in India. While getting the “white guy price” is normal across the country, the going rate appears to be triple that of other places. Most rickshaws are adorned with Karnataka flags and few drivers speak any language but Kannada; the nationalistic fervour of Bangalore seems to emanate chiefly from its transport industry. There are daily political rallies (one last week shut down the entire north end of the city for seven hours) and it is not uncommon to see a convoy of painted cargo trucks filled with flag-waving patriots, their tinny speakers blasting unbearable Kannada music, shouting slogans through megaphones seemingly with the goal of maximizing noise.

Finally, Bangalore is an IT city. Therefore, I lack the source material to give comment on the attractiveness of its women. Any evaluation would be disqualified for insufficient sample size. Suffice it to say that, not unlike “Man Francisco”, Bangalore is a place for a man to write code and win wealth, not find love^*.

^* (I’d make a joke and call it “Mangalore” but there’s already a place called Mangalore. I’d hate to see their women.)

Hello, faithful readers (you’d have to be faithful still to be checking this ghost town of a blog).

As I’ve hardly heard from most of you, owing to my rather abrupt disappearance from the blog world, I thought I’d post a quick update on what has happened since the previous posting, oh so many moons ago.

After a few more months of travel, I made it back home safe and a little too sound. I loafed around my parents’ home for a while and took stock of things. The biggest difficulty I had was remembering how to speak English with other English speakers. A year of speaking to foreigners has a strange effect on the dialect, as you tend to use the barest vocabulary imaginable, and sometimes even deliberately mangle the grammar by simplifying it (”I go to hotel room, yes?”), so as to not confuse those who only know a few sentences.

I soon reacquainted myself with Western life, which turned out to be a little like slipping back into a warm bath from which you only made a desultory effort to get out of the water. “I think I’ll get up now… ohh, ahh, maybe not.” Progress was rapid; I was back to wasting time reading web sites and newspapers in no time.

It was time to get a job. A friend called me up from New York. His company was hiring. Two days later I was on a plane. Back on the IT scene with a vengeance. We worked hard and lived a New York life. It was sweaty, great fun, and just what I needed after a year of meandering.

The company then offered me an assignment in the India office, and I accepted. Which brings me to today, where I write this from an apartment in Bangalore, Karnataka, India, in a room with a bed, a desk, two chairs, and an electrical system that appears to be haunted by ghouls.

I plan to start blogging again, which is not the same thing as actually blogging again, but you know, “the best laid plans”, etc. Over time I’ll post the rest of my journal entries from my trip, which include more India, as well as Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar, as well as a couple places in the UK. I am also posting pictures sometimes.

After the retreat, McLeod Ganj looked empty. The tourist high season had passed, and the mountain air was growing crispy and cold. I was the only customer in my guest house, and the restaurants were empty. Even JJI Café lacked the buzz it once had. It was time to move on. One month had passed since I walked up this mountain for the first time, and tomorrow I would take a bus at 5 AM to my next destination, the Sikh holy city of Amritsar.

The bus peeled down the mountainside in the darkness, picking people up at random places, and even stopping for a much-needed chai break. A one-legged man sat next to me, practically on my lap. I tried to sleep, but as the bus rumbled, leaned, and chugged its way down I resigned myself to staring blankly out the window. It is commonly said that to leave Dharamsala is to go out into “India” again. By the time we reached Pathankot, “India” was staring me in the face, with all its choking traffic, determined beggars, curious eyes, sights and god-awful smells.

It took only a few hours and one spontaneous change of bus tires to reach Amritsar. When the bus turned the corner onto Amritsar’s main street, a bunch of touts boarded the bus at the corner and surrounded me and the two British fellows behind me. They babbled at us furiously about guest houses, rickshaws, taxis, crowding each other out as they competed for our attention. They were so close I couldn’t even stand up. I looked behind me and the Brits were completely blockaded. There must have been fifteen of them.

The bus pulled into the station and we shoved our way off. They didn’t let up. One was missing an arm, another had a huge goiter sticking out of his neck. They followed us as we got our bags, and kept at it as we walked through the parking lot to the rickshaw stand. One of them got to haggling with the Brits, who finally gave an exasperated “OK” to the offer. The pack scattered instantly, and every one of the touts disappeared as quickly as they arrived. (There’s a good India tourist trick for you.)

Amritsar is the home of the Golden Temple, one of the must-see sites in India. You can eat and sleep there for free, chat up the friendly Sikhs who make the pilgrimage from all over the world, bathe in the holy waters, and thoroughly enjoy yourself. The adjoining Sikh martyr museum is a bit, well, horrifying, full of paintings (and a few photos) of slaughter and death, bodies being sawn in half, etc., so if you want to leave your fine impression of the Sikhs’ tremendous hospitality unspoiled, I’d recommend skipping that part.

We also partook in one of the stranger rituals I’ve seen, the famous India-Pakistan border closing ceremony in nearby Attari. At the sole land crossing between the two nations sits a kind of stadium where spectators from both sides can watch Indian and Pakistani soldiers stomp, march, kick, and growl at each other, all in the name of nationalism. The ceremony ensures the national flags on either side of the border are lowered at day’s end at the exact same time, and at the exact same pace. Presumably the temptation to keep one’s flag higher than the other side’s is how the ceremony arose in the first place. This elaborate spectacle takes place daily, and is followed by a handshake between spectators on either side. I stampeded my way to the front of the line and stuck my hand into Pakistan, but nobody grabbed it.

We also visited a strange Hindu temple that was more like an amusement park. It was full of teenagers, and no parents. Touring the temple involved climbing, crawling, trudging through knee-high water, and entering ominous passages shaped like lion and snake mouths. A couple of garrulous kids followed us around to practice their English. We were certain they would beg us at the end, but they just left with a simple “goodbye English people!”

My tolerance for Punjabi hospitality has its limits, though. Shortly before leaving Amritsar on the train to Delhi, while I was looking in a shop, a transvestite, the first I’d seen in India, wearing a sari and a healthy five-o’clock shadow, tapped me on the shoulder, muttered a few sweet nothings, and then began caressing my face.

With his left hand.

Lonely Planet describes McLeod Ganj as “a major centre for Buddhist scholarship”, or something like that. There was certainly no shortage of monks, nor of Westerners following them around hoping to absorb some of their austerity and self-discipline. The buildings of McLeod Ganj were papered with advertisements for a vast curriculum of Eastern culture and philosophy seminars, covering subjects like the Tibetan Book of the Dead, reiki and crystal therapy, Tai Chi, hypnosis, past-life analysis, and traditional Tibetan medicine. An “Introduction to Buddhism” retreat in the mountains overlooking McLeod Ganj caught my eye.

I mentioned this retreat to Sonam, and showed him the brochure. He politely laughed at my trepidation. While ten days of hauling myself out of bed at 6 AM into the chilly mountain air for hours of meditation, menial labour, and chanting wasn’t exactly appealing, Sonam had survived seventeen years of this, and seemed to think it no big deal.

I had a little experience with meditation, and found it to be worthwhile the few times I’d managed to sit still. But my experiments typically ended with the frustrated acceptance of my fate as a fidgeter. As for Buddhism, I barely understood a thing about it. Might I be willing to try one last kick at the can?

After a few days of deliberation, I realized there was no reason to drag my feet. I could always leave if I didn’t like it.

So I said goodbye to the JJI Cafe gang and began the trek up the mountain, along a steep path of monasteries and guest houses and packs of sleeping monkeys at the roadside, arriving at the Tushita Meditation Centre coated in a layer of sweat. My fears appeared silly to me at that moment, as fears always do once you’ve overcome them.

What follows is my account of these ten days.

Day 1

More of a half-day really, for registration and administration and such. We fill out our paperwork and take our seat in the spotless meditation hall underneath a giant, golden Buddha. The walls are hung with thangkas of the Tibetan Buddhist pantheon: Shakyamuni, Chenrezig, and a stunning Green Tara.

The retreat starts with a Q&A and introduction session in the main meditation hall (or “gompa”). The group is around forty people, mostly Europeans but some North Americans as well, including a large group of teenagers on an exchange program from America.

After going around the circle for introductions, they show us to our quarters. I was to share a room with two of the American kids, and a French guy with a woolly beard, who in his introduction had said he lives in Mali (”in the forest”) and studies Shamanism there. In fact he had Shamanistic tattoos on his temples and when he was changing clothes for bed I saw a strange celestial diagram tattooed on his back.

The retreat follows a strict schedule. Morning bell at 6 AM, followed by morning meditation. Breakfast, then a teaching, yoga. Lunch, more teaching, more meditations. Then a small supper, one more meditation, and then bedtime. Short periods of “free time” scattered throughout.

Also, the rule of “noble silence”–no talking and no communication, even visual, except at specified times–was in effect throughout.

Noble silence begins at bedtime.

Day 2

The morning bell rings, and that means it’s meditation time. We file into the gompa bleary-eyed and confused, and take our cushions noisily. The meditation instructor, a sprightly Aussie named Cory, shows us the basics of sitting in the half- and full-lotus positions. The idea is to use the knees and spine as legs of a tripod, with one foot on top of the opposite thigh, thus placing no undue stress on the ankles or circulatory system.

I try the half-lotus with some success at first, making it through a good twenty minutes barely moving a muscle, though it could scarcely be called “meditation”–within minutes, pain flowed into my legs, and my thoughts followed.

Cory rings a bell to commemorate the end of the forty-five minute session, and everyone immediately expels sighs of relief. A chorus of cracking backs and knees is heard throughout the gompa.

We file downstairs for a breakfast of rice porridge, bananas, and delicious Tibetan bread, taken in total silence. The American kids all sit at the same table and communicate to each other with gazes and giggles. Nobody else makes eye contact.

We file back into the gompa for the first teaching, the meat of this “Introduction to Buddhism” retreat. The class stands up (a Buddhist show of respect) as a tall monk enters the room in saffron robes, our teacher. He is an American monk with a smile as wide as the moon. Cory had called him “Bob” but the name given him was “Lobsang”, a Tibetan name. He looks my age and has an unmistakable glow about him.

Lobsang sits on a meditation cushion at the head of the class and lectures us, on this first day, about “disturbing emotions”, and the Four Seals of the Dharma:

1. All compounded things and phenomena are impermanent.
2. All emotions are painful.
3. All phenomena are empty; they are without inherent existence.
4. Nirvana is peace.

Apparently, these are the four criteria for Buddhism. If you believe these four items, you are a Buddhist; otherwise, you’re not.

Lobsang is a terrific lecturer, moving effortlessly between detail and generality, and answering questions with aplomb (we were allowed to break silence during teachings). The discussion is lively and stimulating. He is simply incredible.

So far, so good. No mind-control tricks yet. I’ve never been much interested in Buddhism per se; to me, meditation is the most compelling part of the practice, and meditation doesn’t require much intellectualization. But I can’t say I’d given Buddhism a fair shot, either. The few books I’d read confused me greatly with their terse prose and aphoristic style, and a simplicity of outlook that was almost impenetrable. Like everyone else in here, I wonder how capable am I to believe in it. My mentality is that of a lawyer looking to find a slip-up in the available evidence, and I suspect I’m not alone.

For example, Lobsang and the other instructors start each session with three prostrations to the shrine at the head of the class. They don’t ask us to prostrate three times. But some of the students do, anyway. I’ll buy that these rituals help put you in the mood. But are they the only way? The answer is no, says Lobsang. So could I get in the mood by some other method like, say, listening to Russian techno music? Sure, he says, if it works for you. At what point, then, am I no longer practicing Buddhism but instead some other thing? That question, in various guises, comes up in every teaching. It seems that the primary question in most minds (including mine) is how many of the “traditional” customs we can slough off without losing the core of the philosophy.

Afterwards, we are ready to go outside to do some yoga. Men and women are separated, and us men are put through the wringer by a Dutch ex-soldier who volunteered as the teacher. We hold our power asanas a little too long, run a little too hard, and by the end, most of us can barely stand up from our Corpse Pose (”Shava-asana”).

Lunch features excellent, temporary-pleasure samosas, daal, rice, and dessert. The food here is just as good as anything you’d get in town. Never let the fear of bad food put you off a Buddhist retreat.

At the evening meditation, my inexperience starts to reveal itself. Within minutes of sitting on the cushion, my right knee and hip throb with pain. I’ve done some meditation before, but never longer than half an hour, and certainly not several times a day. Cory rings the bell and I stand up, legs quivering, and I hobble out of the gompa, not feeling anything like a bodhisattva.

Day 3

The solution, the instructor tells me, is to “observe the pain”. Observe it doing what? I asked. Turning my knee into goop? Observing, he says, is not the same as experiencing, for experiencing includes your reaction to the stimulus. To observe, you must instead restrain your body’s instinctual response to the pain, such as wincing or shifting positions, and instead watch that pain. Study it, observe its impermanence.

Well, screw that. My right femur was about to snap in half. Isn’t there a point where the pain is just too great to hold it at bay?

Sure, he says. But it’s only a forty-five minute session, and you’re not going to injure yourself. Just try playing with the pain.

Admittedly, there was something to this idea, for I occasionally lost track of the pain. Where’d it go? My mind would drift elsewhere, and as a result I’d stop noticing the pain in my knee. Only when I remembered the pain did it start to hurt again. “Shouldn’t you be in pain right now?” my mind seemed to ask. “Here you go,” my body obliged.

I have to think about this some more.

Day 4

Forest Man has been waking up at 4 AM every day and heading off God knows where. The world of McLeod Ganj seems far away.

No matter what happens during meditation, we can always count on a monkey attack. I’ve learned to regard monkeys as Satan’s minions, vessels of pure, undiluted evil. Their organized raids on North Indian towns call to mind the sack of Rome, degenerates trying to spread their culture and ideals, shrieking of revolution. The trees rustle in the distance as we take our seats on the cushions. By the time all eyes are shut in the gompa, hordes of marauding monkeys, sensing their opportunity at last, appear from the treetops like phantoms, swinging from branches onto the drainpipes and eavestroughs in single file, the babies following the mother, the mother following the chief. Tramping around on the tin rooftop, they wail in righteous contempt of the civilization under their feet. It is impossible not to look out the window while this is happening, and even harder not to snicker. Damn them.

The American kids have given up on the “noble silence” thing, and are now passing written notes around and taking long, clandestine walks down to the tea shop in their free time. In the other students, there is palpable irritation.

Day 5

Each of us was given a “karma job” at the start of the course, a daily chore to keep us humble. Some people had to dishes, others scrubbed johns or swept walkways. My job was to teach English to a resident monk for 45 minutes a day, much like I had with Sonam. But the monk has only been around one day of the four so far. I guess monk schedules are just as busy as anybody’s. In spite of the lovey, let’s-everyone-pitch-in atmosphere here, I can’t help but feel good to be relieved of the duty, because that means more free time.

I spent most of my free time reading books on Buddhism from the Tushita library. I grew to like Nagarjuna, Mayahana Buddhism’s first “scholar” of the 3rd century AD, the best. He is fond of writing things like:

Life is no different from nirvana
Nirvana no different from life
Life’s horizons are nirvana’s
The two are exactly the same.

and

How can seed, empty of mangos
create mangos?
How can seed, not empty of mangos
create mangos?

Buddhism has always positioned itself as a religion supposedly based on personal experience, not dogma, and it makes no effort to resist scientific inquiry (The Dalai Lama: “The contemplative method, as developed by Buddhism, is an empirical use of introspection, sustained by rigorous training in technique and robust testing of the reliability of experience.”). I’ll buy that.

But today, on his last day of teaching us, Lobsang has been straying into the more esoteric strata of the Tibetan tradition: hell-realms and hungry ghosts, the Eight Leisures and the Ten Endowments, mundane and super-mundane paths. He lectures with the same enthusiasm as on day one, but my attention is becoming fractured. I can relate to disturbing emotions and craving, but fall short when it comes to obscure Tibetan mythology.

What makes Lobsang a good teacher is that he anticipates all our suspicions and doubts, because he knows the inner lawyer in us all. He knows that if he posits something called “hell-realms”, some European is going to demand evidence of “hell-realms”, or at least a reasonable explanation. There is a tendency—perhaps Western, perhaps not—for students learning new material to probe the logical boundaries of that material with an assault of “what-if” questions, or demands for proof. All this is very good, and in fact Buddhist scholarship demands it. Lobsang punts a few times, offering these things up as traditions of Tibetan Buddhism rather than laws. He repeated a few times that he was only presenting the material as it is, and wasn’t “trying to convert anyone.” The lions are, for the time being, sated.

Questions nag at me, too. For example, the sheer amount of numerical classification in Buddhism boggles the mind: the Eightfold Path and the Four Noble Truths and the Three Poisons and Nine Stages of Mental Abiding. On and on it goes. I wonder how the gurus arrived at these numbers and not other numbers. Do these correspond with observed phenomena? Does the neurochemical state of someone in the sixth Bhumi differ from that of someone in the third?

For that matter, what does it mean to “believe” in hell-realms and hungry ghosts? How does a mere belief affect one’s life? If someone truly knows hell-realms exist in the same way he knows standing in the rain will get him wet, he would take great care to avoid landing in a hell-realm just as he would remember to pack an umbrella. But a person might believe in hell-realms without behaving as if they actually exist (Daniel Dennett calls this “belief in belief”). Belief is an imperfect thing. What’s the use of believing in hell-realms without actually fearing hell-realms?

“Take a break for lunch,” Lobsang says, “and we’ll come back to talk some more. About suffering.”

Day 6

The morning gong rings. Forest Man is gone again, presumably to his native habitat.

In the afternoons, there is an activity called Discussion Groups, the one time we’re allowed to talk freely with each other. They divide us into groups of five and hand us topics to discuss. The phrasing of the topics tends to steer us towards the Buddhist answer (”Can suffering truly arise by means other than craving?”), though in the austere surroundings the answers seem to form on their own.

But as the groups are generally unsupervised, the conversation meanders everywhere. We talk of our motivations for taking the course, tell a few stories, compare our Tushita experiences thus far. I am surprised to hear that others had found “noble silence” the hardest part. For me it was the easiest. Eating rice porridge every morning was the hardest.

After lunch, I struggle to teach the monk how to make a “vvvv” and “ffff” sounds (i.e. labiodental fricative, voiced and unvoiced). He has no idea how to do it, and I have no idea how to show him.

I return to my room to the sight of a large monkey trying to jimmy the lock. He runs off. I couldn’t see his face; I’m sure he was laughing.

Day 7

Today is a special day, for we’re being taken into McLeod Ganj to see a lecture being given by His Holiness, Tenzin Gyatso the 14th Dalai Lama, in the temple across the road from his residence. We’re allowed to talk freely to everyone, including non-retreat heathens. Security is tight; our bags are searched to the bone and Indian men in plain clothes patrol the aisles of the temple with automatic rifles.

The Dalai Lama walks past our section, surrounded by an entourage of fellow monks and security guards. He stops for a few minutes, waving and smiling and touching our hands. He is downright giddy, and seems almost overwhelmed by his own joy. His handlers nudge him forward towards the stage. As he walks away I see him shake his head, as if to stir himself out of his happy stupor, in preparation for serious business.

His teaching is on the Three Principal Paths of Lama Tsongkhapa. He gives the teaching in Tibetan, and it is translated on the fly into English, Chinese, and Russian and broadcast over radio into our headphones. The translation is stilted and most of us barely understand a thing, but the serious Buddhists that are His Holiness’ intended audience hang on every word. It is a fun day and we novices are grateful just to be there.

Day 8

Eight days. If we measure days by number of showers taken, I’ve only been here two.

The last two full days of the retreat are devoted almost entirely to meditation. We are to do guided meditation, walking meditation, chanting meditation, vipassana meditation, and probably some other kinds too. Physically, I don’t do very well at this, but after the third or fourth session I notice a change in my mental state. The chatter filling my brain begins to recede. It doesn’t disappear, it just moves a little to the left. If I listen to it, it pulls me back into the cyclone, and I’m off again.

This feeling is new to me. I’ve had moments where the chatter has disappeared completely, but never where my mind is merely ignoring it as if it were a fly buzzing around.

They’ve got us doing other types of meditation now. Chanting, visualization, compassion, other guided meditations. Admittedly, I’ve ignored most of them, because they required a level of concentration that I simply do not possess. I can’t even sit still and listen to my breath; what makes you think I can visualize a bunch of Buddhas extinguishing flames with their fingers?

I’m beginning to feel like the definition of “meditation” could be expanded to include just about any human activity there is. Even the simplest meditation involves some direction of the will towards a stated end (in this case, watching the breath). In Hindu philosophy, yoga is considered more meditation than exercise. What about ultramarathon running? Or practicing the piano? Everything can be done meditatively, that is, with full awareness of the presence of distraction, disturbing emotions, and craving. Traditional meditation is a means of practicing this awareness, and so are all of Cory’s guided meditations. But it is not the only way.

Day 9

I teach the monk one last time. He is overly interested in learning the phrase “mashed potatoes”.

Instead of the evening meditation, we were given a multimedia presentation by a representative from an Australian NGO about some kind of global educational reform incorporating Buddhist ideals of peace, love, equality, etc. Forest Man stood and left the room right away; I wish I’d followed. The presentation was chock-a-block with the worst assortment of nauseating “do-gooder” tropes, including pictures of starving children, the music of Jack Johnson, and all the “think globally, act locally” bromides you could ask for. I’ve long felt that the dreamy progressive NGO-neverland is ripe territory for satire, and I tried to enjoy the presentation in that light, but it dragged on so long that most of us could barely muster a round of tepid applause at the end. Comments during the end-of-retreat feedback session were particularly harsh about this little interlude.

For our final “meditation”, we go down to the stupa in a clearing at the edge of the Tushita property and perform a Tibetan “candle ceremony”, which amounts to lighting a pile of candles, walking around the stupa (clockwise, of course), and thinking good things. Thankfully the instructors do not try to imbue it with much spiritual significance. The group leans on the mountainside, well above the reach of McLeod Ganj’s mosquito hordes, and we watch the sparkling stars. Someone gets the idea to start naming things to be grateful for, a kind of secular prayer, so the group takes turns enumerating their blessings and remembrances aloud, veering ever closer to the banal with every passing plea but only truly attaining it with treacly mock narratives of motherless children and elderly rotting away in nursing homes. I see Forest Man slink off immediately. I wonder if there might be Enlightened beings walking amongst us after all.

Day 10

Any remaining pretense of noble silence is now gone. The only activity of note today is the picnic lunch, where we’ll peel off the veneer of seriousness and start living again. We mingle freely, and I finally get to meet everyone. Plans for dinner are discussed, emails exchanged. The American kids can’t wait to get out of this place and back to McLeod. Forest Man turns out to be a really nice guy. The NGO woman from last night is there, and we’ve all forgiven her by now, for we are free at last.

So was it worth it? I suppose even making it through the ten days counts as an accomplishment. The retreat didn’t feel like work. It felt more like a vacation, a vacation from me, from the immediacy of my thoughts, my habits, and my opinions (”Opinions are absurd,” says Nagarjuna). Having your mental life scheduled out in minute detail by someone else is an oddly liberating feeling. There’s no need to worry about anything because your life has no scope beyond the borders of the Tushita centre. Removed from the pressure of unending external stimulus, existence takes on a relieving determinism, quieting the mind and bringing into focus the irrationalities we all so foolishly carry along with us.

I walked the slope down into McLeod, not with a new sense of purpose, not with a rekindled joie de vivre or appetite for world conquest, but with a sort of passive stupor that felt a lot like immediate experience of life.

And then I realized I forgot my damned shoes under the bed, and had to walk all the way back up. So much for mindfulness.

JJI Cafe became our usual hangout. Each new day started with a JJI Special (eggs, Tibetan bread, stir-fried vegetables, and hot chai) and ended with a Tibetan thentuk or momo soup at the very same table, overlooking the valley. At night we’d go downstairs to the owner’s apartment to watch a movie or have a jam session (everyone in Dharamsala seems to be a musician).

One day some friends brought along a monk named Sonam, which means “fortunate one” in Tibetan. He wore a maroon fleece over his robes, with big floppy sandals, and a messenger bag filled with books. Sonam shook my hand silently, turning the corner of his mouth up into a smile. He was looking for a private English tutor. Teaching engagements in Dharamsala are fairly ad hoc, staffed by itinerant backpackers in their spare time. No time commitments, no curriculum, no obligations. Just sit with the monks and talk.

I was tired of travel already. Not tired of Asia but of moving around so much—a day or two in each town, see the sights and get out. Travelling this way allowed me to cover a lot of ground and keep my days busy, but it had become a little tedious. I certainly was not so smitten with sightseeing that I could justify quitting my job and hopping on the first flight overseas for it. Any traveller will tell you that sightseeing is only the backdrop; the main course is everything else.

I came to appreciate the cardinal rule of travel: don’t overplan (that is, if you plan at all). Most fellow backpackers I’d met in India had no idea what they were doing, no direction whatsoever, claiming to be in India just “to exist for a while” (you hear that phrase a lot). India is the perfect country for drifters; it’s cheap, slow, and endless. Plus they give you a six-month visa, renewable ad infinitum at the Indian embassy in nearby Kathmandu.

So I said Yes to staying in Dharamsala and teaching Sonam for a while. Why not.

We were to meet daily on the patio of Nick’s Restaurant over a pot of ginger-lemon tea, and read from the books in his messenger bag: a children’s adaptation of Siddhartha, a grammar book, some pro-Tibet political pamphlets, and several notebooks filled with assorted English phrases, all given him by previous teachers.

At our first meeting and I asked him some basic questions. He spoke enough English to make conversation. He was born in a small village in the east of Tibet and had come to India when he was eight years old via the familiar Himalayan hell-passage, suffering severe frostbite from which it took him months to recover. He spent the next seventeen years in a monastery in Karnataka state in south India, studying the Tibetan canon and meditating in the sweltering heat, rising at 4:30 AM each day for hours of tedious morning chanting, taking breakfast and lunch but no dinner. He had met the Dalai Lama eight times, and spoke of him like an old buddy. Sonam was twenty-eight years old; he and I were born only eight days apart. Aside from us both now being in McLeod Ganj at the same time, our lives had been different in every imaginable way.

Sonam had a curious demeanour. While I was eager to accommodate him and make him feel comfortable, he watched me with some good-natured suspicion. Rapport was difficult; he smiled at everything. He understood my words, but not how I said things. Even the simplest Western conversations have complexities that never really occurred to me until I was presented with this blank slate.

He picked up a spoon, slowly, carrying it without any wasted movement to the tea glass, stirring it three times, then pulling it out and laying it precisely on a napkin. All his movements were careful and deliberate. Grasping the rim of the glass with three fingers and raising it to his mouth, he sipped perfectly, and then set the glass down on the exact same spot, and turned the glass clockwise to face him. He turned each notebook page with similar care, easing each page gently over the metal binding, and wrote with the smoothest hand, even in English (Tibetan uses a different script, as does Hindi, both of which he spoke fluently).

I offered him a bite of my brownie (Nick’s Restaurant is famous for them), and he firmly shoved the plate away with a smile. Always with a smile. It would appear offering sweets to a monk is a faux-pas. I began to feel like my cordial affectations were indecipherable to him. Why would I give a brownie to a monk? I felt like a fool.

When I asked him what his long-term plans were, he said, learn English. Nothing could happen until he learned English, and his plan was to spend all his time learning English.

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

He said this in a way that made me the silly one. A monk living in poverty could be perfectly happy with his life the way it is, he was telling me. The cultural gap between us yawned. The idea of having such genuine and bone-simple conceptions of one’s future just sent my head spinning.

My mind now erased of good conversation topics, we moved on to the reading. He preferred Siddhartha so he opened it to the appropriate page. An American lady gave him this book, he said. I saw her address in Georgia written in his notebook, under the words “SONOM, YOU ROCK!” [sic]

“She crazy girl, very loud” he said, with a laugh.

He wanted me to read each chapter first, out loud, and then he would follow, and he’d ask about the words he didn’t know and I’d draw him a picture or explain it in simpler terms and he’d spend the rest of the session blurting out these words at odd times, sometimes scribbling them on his hand, getting me to re-pronounce them, over and over. Sonam practiced English every night by himself, reading each page out loud ten times in a row.

We read a chapter of Siddhartha per day. After two or three sessions I could see that he didn’t understand a word of it. I figured every Buddhist monk knew the Siddhartha story but he wasn’t following a thing, didn’t know what a naga was or why the Prince fled his father’s palace.

It didn’t take us long to become friends. At the end of every session he always tried to pay for the tea without me noticing. It became a little contest between us (I knew that he had almost no money, so we didn’t get carried away). He once asked me how much it was costing me to travel around the world. I told him the amount I had saved up, and he could not believe the number. Couldn’t even understand the number; he’d never heard of a person having a sum of money that large. What strange place did I come from? What was my life like back home? He wanted to know everything, but he hadn’t the slightest interest in trading places with me. There was only one place in the world he wanted to be other than Dharamsala, he said, and that was Tibet.

He drew me a little floor plan of the apartment he shares with three others: one small room, one hot plate, and enough floor space for all to sleep, but no bathroom. Instead, they walked to the other end of McLeod Ganj to use the public toilet (yes, Indian public toilets). His living expenses were about thirty dollars per month. He cooked all his own food, and showered once in a while at a friend’s place. And he was as happy as could be.

I saw Sonam often around McLeod Ganj, and he walked along the road with me, ignoring the beggars as I did, asking me about my day and how long I was staying. He always wanted to know how long I was staying in Dharamsala. Sonam was always laughing, except when the topic was my departure, when he became very serious. In fact he’d been asking me for weeks, always trying to figure out exactly how long we had left.

The day before I left McLeod Ganj, Sonam stood up from the table and looked me in the eye. He produced a white scarf, and put it around my neck. He then knelt, put his head down reverently, and handed me a beaded bracelet, a “mala” used in Tibetan chanting. He said something in Tibetan, stood up, gave a prayer-bow, and thanked me for helping him with his English. Stunned, I could only slide the mala on my wrist with a smile and thank him quietly. He was clearly dismayed that I was leaving, and frankly, so was I.

Perhaps my definitive memory of Sonam was when someone in our group got a laugh by teaching him a kind of “gangsta” hand gesture. You make a gun with your two fingers and thumb and flick your wrist while making the appropriate goofy facial expression and you say “Yo!” Sonam took this gesture very seriously. He asked us over and over to show him how to do it. And for the rest of the day, whenever I looked over at him, there he was, this maroon-clad, shaven-headed monk from east Tibet, studiously practicing the gangsta hand gesture to nobody, out loud, ten times in a row.

The first matter in Dharamsala was to confront Indian beer. We chose McLlo’s pub—hardly an ideal Indian venue, the decor of the place being clearly inspired by TGI Friday’s, but authenticity matters little to the travel-weary and unshowered. Besides, only two places in McLeod Ganj serve alcohol. McLlo’s is a three-story monster overlooking the town square, serving up expensive curries and paneer pizzas, and offering a wide selection of Himachal Pradesh’s “finest” brews. Over the entrance hangs a photo of Pierce Brosnan posing with the wait staff, an oddly reassuring sight, though it’s a stretch to imagine Pierce spending a languid evening pounding back bottles of Thunderbolt Lager.

We opt instead for Godfather, and it tastes like fermented hell. Some stylish Tibetans sit down at our table. The Tibetan youth are quite the party animals, it turns out, and lead a cosmopolitan life as far as North Indian hill stations go. Oblivious to the limitations of their surroundings, they live as though McLeod Ganj were NYC. They pile onto noisy motorbikes (often blaring dance music through speakers under the seat), speak English capably, abuse the Indian waitstaff in Hindi, stay out all night with tourists, chat up girls, drink their faces off, dress as sharply as anyone. Their calm, peaceful outward mien, their sharp eyes and Buddhist smiles, seem to melt away under the acid-bath of Indian ale. Bad booze, the great equalizer.

One of the Tibetans, Sangye (which means “Buddha” in Tibetan, I believe), has just returned to Dharamsala after two years spent abroad in Austria, and couldn’t be happier about it. He looks around the room excitedly, almost unable to believe he’s home. I practically have to strap him to his chair.

“I love this bar! I love Dharamsala! I love it! I love it! This is the best bar in the world!”

Jamyang, another Tibetan, buys me a Thunderbolt. Rotten. I notice that the quality of Indian beer varies by the bottle, owing to the complete lack of quality control. Even the shape and colour of the bottles themselves are subject to the laws of chance. You’re as likely to get a green or brown bottle as a clear one, which causes me to consider what other random variables are at work in the breweries of Himachal Pradesh.

We drank deeply, we drank hard. We drank with a professional cricket team, and we drank with Austrian hippies and American expats. So swept up in the moment we were, that we neglected to note the closing time of the front gate of our hotel: midnight. It was now well past, and we were locked out. I climbed the gate, as the monkeys do, but it was impossible to reach my room from the balcony. So Sangye brought us back to his place, escorted by packs of yammering street dogs vying for our loyalty, and we all slept on the hard floor of his tiny apartment, underneath posters of Tibetan pop stars and Lenny Kravitz.

It was there that Sangye drunkenly, but seriously, gifted me with his personal theology: “The main purpose of Buddhism, and of every religion, is to loosen the bowels. Religion allows you to shit freely. Think about it.” I had never conceived of religious worship in gastric terms, but I had to admit it warranted further study.

The next day, Jamyang took me to his family’s cafe on Bhagsu Rd for some Tibetan thentuk (noodle soup). I met a Dutch couple who had taken a six-month leave from their jobs to teach English and study Buddhism at the relevant local institutes here in McLeod. They ran an English conversation class at a local school at the base of the hill, and asked me if I might like to give it a try some time. An hour a day was all they needed, and no qualifications necessary. Sure, why not, I said.

I showed up at the school that evening at 5:30 PM, where I was matched with a group of eight students, Tibetan refugees, some newly-arrived, some longtime residents of McLeod Ganj. A few were monks or nuns, and all ages were represented. I sat at the center of a semi-circle and went around the room, trying my best to spread the conversation around equally. A few were better in English than others, and helped those who were having trouble. The monk to my right, in particular, understood almost nothing and got constant verbal cues from the well-dressed girl on my left, whose English was almost fluent. I wondered why she bothered with conversation classes, as she spent most of the class helping the others. But the conversation classes were also a great social institution of the town, and they seemed to be full of Tibetan twentysomethings who were presumably single. I left it at that.

I asked the students about their life history, where in Tibet they were from, and how long they’d been in India. A couple of them were born in Dharamsala, others had fled Tibet in childhood. Two of them fled later in life, because they’d been in jail in Tibet for political reasons, distributing leaflets or joining in rowdy protests. The oldest guy in the group, a leather-jacketed man of 38 years, had spent twelve of those years in the slammer. They told me this with a shrug, as if it meant nothing to them, like it was just a part of the Tibetan coming-of-age.

The story of the Tibetan exile is a familiar and sad one, and every visitor to Dharamsala hears it, for it is in fact the story of many of the town’s residents. Fleeing the oppression and brutality of the People’s Republic of China’s military presence in Tibet, the exile makes his way to Lhasa, leaving his family behind, probably for good. From there, they hire a kind of rogue sherpa who takes them on a punishing month-long trek over the Himalayas, through deep forest and under the cover of night so as to avoid snipers. They eat little (one guy told me he ate nothing but boiled grass), sleep barely a wink, suffer severe frostbite and snow blindness and often death, walking tirelessly towards the Nepalese border, where they are received by monks and kept in Kathmandu until they regain their health. From there, they are taken to Dharamsala to meet His Holiness, and brought into a monastery if they so desire, and their life as a refugee begins.

Things are much better here, the students insist. They rarely speak of China. It’s in the past. Their indifference amazes me. Tibet was once the great terror of Central Asia, the empire of the steppes. There is little of the conqueror in these Tibetans. They seemed to have moved past their own history. Sure, there are political rallies and uprisings in Lhasa, for which the Dalai Lama is typically blamed, but in general they have turn the other cheek (in the direction of the West, as it were). No Tibetan that I met spoke ill about the Chinese as a people, only as a government, and I never once heard a warlike word. The easy answer is that Buddhism played a role in their pacifism, but Buddhism was introduced to Tibet in the 6th century; I doubt that it took fourteen additional centuries to finally settle in. I don’t know.

I kept going with the conversation classes, but I found a monk to tutor one-on-one instead. Next post is about him.

(A note on the publishing schedule of this blog: I realize I’m way behind here, but there are lots more posts in the pipeline. Right now I’m in a country with little to no Internet access, much of it highly restricted [if I tell you it's in Southeast Asia, I'm sure you can guess the country]. But I am not dead, not even slightly. And this blog will rise from the ashes and terrorize the world anew, but only after I’ve had a proper week in a suitably cool place [did I mention it's hot in this part of the world?]. So I’ll see you then.)

Our bus arrives at midday in the hill station of Dharamsala. I’m on my way to McLeod Ganj, the famous Tibetan settlement, and home of the His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. Our bus wheezes its way up the steep Dhauladhar mountains, watched meaningfully by monkeys. The road grows steeper and starts to zigzag up the mountainside, forcing our driver to make wobbly hairpin turns at each corner. Oncoming traffic, mostly Tibetans on motorbikes, stops to watch our bus driver adeptly navigate the serpentine roads. The spectacle of the bus lurching forward, rolling back a little, bumping into a tree, spinning the tires, delights all of us; the crowd gapes and laughs with a mix of astonishment and horror, like they’d stopped at the side of the road to watch a doe give birth. We are even treated, after one perilous corner, to joyful applause.

The bus lets us off at the Dharamsala bus station, where we transfer to a more nimble jeep, which takes us up to McLeod Ganj for the almost-free price of seven rupees. I untie my pack from the roof and walk with the British girl I’d met on the bus in search of guest houses.

After two hard weeks in India, I’d decided to come here to boost my spirits a little bit. The place came highly recommended. McLeod Ganj is a little city sitting on the cap of a mountain, overlooking the stunning Kangra valley. It is a major centre for Buddhism, as well as yoga, meditation, etc. It is also the home of the Tibetan government-in-exile, presided over by that lovable “simple monk”, Tenzin Gyatso, aka the Dalai Lama (or HHDL, as he’s called). Monks in maroon and saffron robes walk the streets and bow politely to me as I pass. There are elegant Western ladies in saris, and men wearing skirts. People talk and hold hands and smile and hug. Steam rises from the pots of a small Tibetan lady’s roadside food stand. The air crackles with potential; there is vivacity and excitement, unlike the profoundly Indian cities I’d visited so far. Except for the cows prowling the streets, and the odd rickshaw, it looks like another country. I feel like I have entered the mythical city of Shangri-La, and it’s full of dreadlocked backpackers.

In any case, I’m thrilled to be here. I find a dirt-cheap, clean guest house that has a balcony with a view. On the balcony below, a ponytailed Columbian guy gives a Tai Chi lesson to a group of tourists. Across from me is the Kangra Valley, and to my left, a snow-tipped mountain with a crisp treeline.

I have lunch with the British girl on the balcony of the Kunga Guest House; we agree that it will be tough to leave this place and go back out “into India” again. I eat Tibetan momos, steamed dumplings stuffed with cheese and vegetables, and they are delicious. The customers passing through the restaurant are a varied and eclectic group indeed: a strange German wearing a rainbow vest covered in embroidered peace-and-love platitudes (and his email address), aristocratic English ladies, groups of Indian businessmen, a “New Age Chuck Norris”, Tibetan monks who order nothing but tea, various French people dressed like Indians.

I take a walk down to the temple, where monks debate in the courtyard, finishing off each point with a clap of the hands and stomp of the right foot, as if to cast it off to the higher realms. Around the temple are Buddhist bookshops, Tibetan medicine clinics, Indian touts, Western-style bars that serve pizza and beer. Dharamsala is a strange blend of the exotic, the spiritual, and the banal. A tourist town, it gives Westerners what they want, or more specifically, what Indians and Tibetans think Westerners want (pizza is less popular than thentuk; a nightclub on Jogiwara Rd, X-Cite, seems always to be empty). Under the neon signs and shouting matches, the “local culture” hums along, oblivious to the din of motorbikes and dance music, monks walking in silence to their evening discourses and elderly Tibetan ladies spinning prayer wheels and chanting: om mani padme hung. Both worlds are accessible to everyone. To be a tourist in Dharamsala is to be simultaneously a guest in the home of an ancient civilization of mystics, monastics, and seekers-of-truth, and, a place where you can buy bootleg Led Zeppelin concert DVDs and drink (terrible, Indian) beer under a mountain moon and a blinding canopy of stars. It is absolutely perfect. I’ll stay here for a while.

The bus driver is gone an awfully long time. Lonely Planet gives the population of Pathankot, this bus-transfer outpost, as 140,000. I step outside to buy a drink, which I bring back to the bus, dodging the shawl salesmen. One of the passengers, a young man with a thin moustache, is outside having a smoke. As I approach the bus he seems delighted by me, and his face lights up with excitement.

“Hello friend!” he says. The Indians like to call people “friend”.

“Hello.”

India’s enormity is only physical and economical. Culturally, it is vast, but surprisingly uniform. And there is no greater evidence of this fact than what I will call the Indian Friendly Five, which are the five questions that you, a tourist, will be asked by every random Indian you meet, without exception, no matter where you are in the country, from Kashmir to Karnataka, from Pondicherry to Punjab. The Indian Friendly Five are as follows:

1. “First time [city name]?” or “First time India?”
2. “Where you come from?” (or “Your country?)”
3. “How long India?” ([sic] - this could mean “How long have you been in India?” or “How long will you stay in India?”)
4. “What’s your occupation?”
5. “You married unmarried?” ([sic] - or “You have girlfriend wife?”)

The order of the IFF varies (some Indians want to know the last two before all else), but the delivery is always as given. If I were to try to read meaning into these questions, I would start by mentioning that Indians love to practice their English, whether amongst themselves or with tourists. But the nationwide ubiquity of the IFF is the real riddle. I assure you I’m not making this up; most tourists I’ve asked about this have laughed reassuringly, and a Dutch guy I met in Bulgaria told me about these same five questions before I’d experienced them myself. For whatever reason these are the data that Indians are most curious about. An explanation of the IFF would require proper methods of scientific inquiry, perhaps by dispatching a fleet of garrulous and clandestine European pollsters across the Indian countryside. But I suspect that, as the saying goes, there are no answers, only more questions.

The immensity of India doesn’t strike you right away. A visitor landing in Delhi or Bombay might comment sourly on the congestion, waste entire days in cross-town transit, or wince at the startling cacophony of car horns and Bollywood dance music, but he is unlikely to conclude that these places are too big. They look like any other big city, with buzzing business centers and markets encased by endless suburbia. While they are dustier and have higher cow and ox populations than most, Delhi and Bombay do not look otherwise like places unique to India, at least not in scale. The received wisdom of India as a violent crush of humanity, one big stampede between ticket windows, train entrances, and taxi cabs, is true to a point. But while the hum of daily Indian life is noisier and more bacteria-laden than perhaps it ought to be, there are always quiet corners to tuck away into, especially so in the cities. Yes they are enormous—13.7 million and 13.3 million people—but their enormity is neither oppressive nor confounding. We expect big Indian cities to look this way.

India’s size reveals itself when one drifts out into the regions. A typical Indian bus ride between here and there will take five hours, and will pass any number of towns and settlements on the way. Some are proper towns, with all the cows, choking traffic, bazaars, beggars, and dogs that don’t look half as sickly as they should. Others are little more than collections of squat tin-roofed shops, leaning on each other for structural support. Usually a family lives inside. The placard is painted with English text, and a Coca-Cola or Airtel billboard looms overhead. Underneath, racks of Kurkure chips dangle from the wall, and rows of bottled water for sale sit on display. The men of the family toil around the dirt lot, fixing motorbikes, hosing things down, or just waiting for customers to show up. From the bus window, you can see the white eyes of the women inside, who sit cross-legged on the floor, immersed in some chore or another.

We make a rest stop at a bus transfer station called Pathankot. It is little more than a dirt parking lot. The driver takes a walk. Tens of vendors board the bus, shouting their wares: snacks and drinks, garam chai, lentils, chocolate, blessings from a sadhu. And stranger things: cricket bats, noise-maker toys, electric razors. One kid is selling steel zippers (?). And there are beggars, usually children, who perform some menial task like sweeping the floor under your feet, or they just tug on your pantleg until you give in. Outside, other buses at Pathankot are enduring a similar siege. Salesmen prowl between the buses and jeeps with stacks of folded Kashmiri shawls balanced on their heads, hoping to sell to people changing buses or going inside for a leak. It is startlingly well-organized.

At every bus station in the country, at bus stops outside Chennai and Ahmedabad and Mangalore, and even at our next three rest stops, there will be tens (if not hundreds) of these men, whose sole means of subsistence is by walking onto hundreds of buses trying to sell a cup of chai or a cricket bat. And that they will sell to the affluent and the destitute of India alike, to the entrepreneurs and university students, the farmhands and the little old ladies, for everyone takes the same cramped buses.

Everyone in India seems to have a job. The sight of Indians labouring is the definitive image of the country (Salman Rushdie, in Midnight’s Children, defined the true religion of India as “Businessism”, which is hard to argue with). No matter how mundane, how trivial, how gratuitous, or how vile the job, there is always an Indian to do it, or usually hundreds of Indians who will do it. The division of labour is divided and subdivided again, and most are left with one small task to do, for eleven hours a day, to win a few rupees. And this economic ladder starts with the lowest beggar, climbs over the labourer and peasant, the street vendor and rickshaw man, the chai-wallahs on the bus, and up it goes, to the call-centres and mechanical engineers and property speculators, all the way to the moguls of Infosys and Tata, all rungs of this vast ladder visible from anywhere in the country, omnipresent in India. And that’s when you realize how big this country is.

After grudgingly stuffing a small billfold of baksheesh into Bashir’s shirt pocket, I climbed into the white jeep and closed the door. I was the last passenger to arrive, so I was given the passenger seat, a crumbling cushion sitting on a wobbly pedestal. Behind were several Kashmiri families piled high in their shabby seats. Some sat on their luggage. I felt their eyes on me immediately, but in India you quickly grow used to that. I stuffed my backpack under my feet and tried to get comfortable. For the next eleven hours, this jeep would drive through the Kashmir Valley, from Srinigar to the city of Jammu, the “winter capital” of Kashmir.

As we left Srinigar and made our way into the hills, the beauty of the Kashmir Valley started to reveal itself. A crystal-blue river slithered between the snowy peaks. Our jeep wheezed its way up a series of short hills, following the endless convoy of goods carrier trucks, veering close enough to the road’s edge to offer stunning vistas of the terraced farmers fields below. Monkeys prowled the roadside, watching us carefully with an unnerving simian vigilance.

Of course, Indian Army personnel stood at the roadside every fifty metres or so, making sure I couldn’t take pictures.

The road sloped at unfathomable angles, hugging the mountainside meekly, as if it could at any moment grow tired and release its grasp. On the sharper curves, I could stick my head out the window and look straight down and assess our probability of survival should the wraithlike, chain-smoking driver of this jeep attempt too daring of a pass, and that probability was usually zero. There was no room for error whatsoever. One hasty jerk of the wheel, or tumbling boulder from above, or wandering monkey…

In Canada we take certain road-safety privileges for granted. There aren’t many cliffhanger roads like this one, for one thing. Nor many avalanche zones. Also, our roads have guardrails and proper paving, our cars equipped with ABS brakes and expensive tires. The rules of the road are different, too, as is the psyche of the driver. One does not, for example, even think to overtake the truck ahead by doing a blind-as-a-bat pass around a sharp bend while the weight of his shabby jeep with bald tires leans ominously over the edge of a 2,000m cliff. But in the Himalayas, they do this. And on an eleven-hour trip, they do this hundreds of times in a single day.

The Indian approach to road safety in the Kashmir Valley, as practiced by the Border Roads Organisation, is to pepper the mountain roads with slogans advising drivers to take it easy, drive carefully, and so on, and to make sure that each slogan is expressed as a clever riddle or rhyme. For example:

• Mountains give pleasure, but only if you drive with leisure
• It’s not a rally, enjoy the valley
• There’s no race, arrive with grace

And my personal favourite:

• Better Mr. Late than Late Mr.!

After a few hours, my grip on the oh-shit bar loosened. Surely the driver makes this route every day, and he’s still breathing, though barely from the sounds of things. We stopped for lunch at a roadside cafe on a downward slope, the kind of place that every travel guide says stay away because you’ll get sick. But the locals crowded into the place and began shouting their orders to the young men tending the saucepans, so I gave it a try, and the food —fried dal and chapati—was delicious. I ate some strange Indian potato chips, and then we got back in the jeep. Somehow, I fell asleep for several hours, perhaps to assure that my death would be painless, but when I woke we were still hugging the cliff’s edge and dodging gravel trucks. Behind me, the Kashmiri eyes still warmed the back of my neck.

Arriving in Jammu was like entering the heart of one of those post-apocalyptic sci-fi outlaw towns, where motorcycle gangs prowl the streets, robbing and looting and shouting, and there is junk and garbage strewn everywhere, and half the city is on fire. The din of rickshaw horns and shouted Hindi blasted my eardrums. The jeep driver unceremoniously kicked us out at a roadside rickshaw stand, where I was besieged from all sides. Beggars pawed at my pantleg. I found a guy who could take me to Diamond Hotel, a place enthusiastically recommended by Lonely Planet, and quickly got in his rickshaw.

The Diamond Hotel staff showed me the rooms. They were horrible. Easily the worst hotel I’d ever seen. Brown stains on the walls and bedclothes, tattered pillows, bed like a slab of concrete, and a window that didn’t close. “Head and shoulders above the competition,” said LP. I’ll take it.

I sat on the bed and turned on the noisy fan. An exhausting day. I felt like a shower. I stripped, walked into the bathroom and turned on the water. Nothing. Tried flushing the toilet. Nothing. At least the lights worked. I’d been in India for about nine days now, and none of those days were good. It was true what everyone had told me, what people in Istanbul and Bulgaria and Vienna had told me: that India was a tremendously difficult place to travel in, and that you’d better lower your expectations all the way to nothing.

Tomorrow, another bus ride through the mountains, another day of breathing, smelling, rubbing shoulders against this crazy country.