Living In Sin: Back on the Bus

Dear Jen,
What happened to your column? Did I get booted off the list or something? I haven’t gotten it in months. What up?
- Troy

Dear Troy,
I am not proud to report that I didn’t, as planned, sit down and write several week’s-worth of columns before leaving on my big traveling spree to India. And today I was going to just slide back into the old smut Q&A and hope nobody noticed, but not only have I gotten several emails like yours, but I learned so much about humans and relationships over there that it seemed silly not to share the light, my column being about humans and relationships and all. Plus it’s the New Year and an opportune time to take stock of what we have, what we don’t have and what we want to change. So let’s do so, shall we?

India is about a third of the size of the US with more than three times the population. It’s a place heaving with humanity, full to the brim, sitting on top of you and sticking its filthy bare foot in your face while you fight for space on an overbooked train. Your only options are to go with the flow and chat with your neighbor or grow a big fat stress-related tumor, and the thing that made perhaps the biggest impression on me was how nearly everyone I met went for option number one. That and the fact that there are cows everywhere, even on the beach.

Indians will roll down their windows to chat with you in a traffic jam, spoon you on a train should you fall asleep next to them, stare unblinkingly at your whiteness, help you if you’re lost, insist you get in their family photos at historical monuments, invite you in for tea, burp, fart and laugh in your face - it’s like the entire country is a giant kindergarten class. It’s totally annoying. And sweet. And clearly knows something important that we forgot about.

I didn’t darken the doorway of an ashram or partake in any of the other thousands of spiritual options the country is famous for offering – who needs it? As far as I’m concerned you can learn pretty much everything you need to know about life by taking twelve hour bus ride through India during wedding season.

When I bought my ticket on the Super Deluxe Express Bus to Delhi, I was told I was paying a wise four hundred rupees extra for the luxury of a five hour trip that made only two stops as opposed to the ten hours and countless stops of the local. I was so extremely exhausted from the three sleepless days I’d spent whooping it up at a camel festival up in the mountains that the thought of hunkering down on the Super Deluxe and sleeping all the way to Delhi sounded good to me. But what I got instead was a seat next to Mr. Friendly, a middle-aged man who spoke three words of English and insisted on chatting me up, even though I was doing what I thought was a very convincing job of fake sleeping and a very real job of having no frikken idea what he was saying.

The bus left an hour late due to massive confusion and overbooking and took almost two hours to get out of town because it was peak wedding season. Weddings in India involve a ceremony followed by a parade through the streets complete with horses, marching band, explosives, a car with a loudspeaker blaring crackly music and important wedding announcements and a bunch of guys carrying table lamps on their heads. Apparently some god had done some important thing thousands of years ago that made this particular week an ideal time to get married – I read there were 20,000 weddings in Delhi in one day. My bus ended up getting trapped in wedding festivities pretty much every ten minutes, which meant that everyone on the bus, instead of freaking out and hollering complaints out the window, kept skipping on and off to join the party.

When we finally did get out of town, we kept stopping to let various people on and off (in the middle of nowhere), have some tea, a smoke, a chat, maybe light a fire in the brush by the side of the road and to strap giant burlap sacks full of something large and bulbous to the roof. At some point this guy got on and stood at the front of the bus, right next to my seat, and began hollering at us in Hindi. My bus mates responded by cheering, chanting and sitting in silence while I responded by seeing if I couldn’t find another seat farther away from his mouth. I got up and joined the group of people sitting on rickety benches around the bus driver who was in this "room" behind a wall of glass. The people huddled around him made room for me and suddenly I felt like I was watching an action movie on a screen the size of a giant bus windshield. We were careening through the narrow dirt streets of tiny villages with crazy Indian music blaring over the speakers while people, goats and monkeys leapt out of the way. The only time we slowed down was for the almighty cow, but I swear this guy drove our huge bus through spaces I'd be scared to ride a bike. Then all of a sudden, in some tiny nowhere village, he pulls over yet again. More chai perhaps? Maybe he's going to go visit a friend? Has to pee? Wants to take a walk for an hour while we all sit there? The driver waves for me to follow and gets off, as does the entire bus. It turns out that Mr. Yell In My Ear was some sort of holy man who was just warming up the crowd for a tour of the temples in this small, gorgeous skinny-alleyed town called Vrindavan. It is, I learned, the place where Krishna met his wife Rada and where they have over 5,500 temples in his honor. So for the next two hours I found myself wandering through ramshackle temples, gaily tossing flowers onto shrines, skipping in a circle around a statue of Krishna, solemnly listening to sermons, praying, clapping and all I could think was how fully freaked out a bus of New Yorkers on the express from NY to DC would be in a similar situation. Meanwhile not one person on the bus was expecting this and not one person complained, even though when we finally got back on the bus it was well past the time we were supposed to be arriving in Delhi and we were still a good five hours away. Instead they all thanked, and tipped, the holy man and spent the rest of the ride chatting up a storm. After that we stopped at a roadside "restaurant" for dinner, then another pee break, then I was waking up the family I stayed with in Delhi at 2am who, of course, acted like it was the middle of the afternoon and insisted I share a cup of tea.

Here are some things I am going to do in 2008:
Talk to more strangers
Expect, and appreciate, the unexpected
Find the humor
Join the party
Share my space
Loosen my bone, Wilma

I’ll be back with the booty next week…….

Comments

[Sidney]

Cannot imagine the immense backlog of fan-mail which must have accumulated in your absence, but what an AMAZING return - thank you SO much for sharing ... can't wait to see how your journey has changed you (and maybe some more photos & stories too if we're lucky)

[kim]

Hi Jen,
What a grand theme for 2008. I may just take that on myself.
Cheers,
Kim

[Kel]

Jen,

I heart you….you just don’t know. I am so proud of you for braving India. You go girl! I finally finished both of your books and they totally cracked me up. You have such a smart, witty sense of humor. I can only hope you will have another book in the works soon! Luv ya girl!

[David Bressler]

Jen,

People should just do what I did while you were away... curl up with your book(s). Welcome back.

David

[JLo]

Part of the reason I love West Hollywood. Too many people to live there, but working around the city in the public- you can meet and chat up the Most interesting people who don't mind telling you their life story.

[Kate]

A friend of mine passed this along to me as I just returned from India too and have some very similar experiences but the one word I summed it up was LOVELY.... all in all it a prefectly lovely experience with lovely people willing to help you at any point...