Quarter Year

Kali

Christian drug-dream stuff

Om?

In the station he rose and followed a man to a ticket counter where others stood. He waited for them to finish. Hand prints smeared the window. A customer walked away and two more slid in and another man pressed against the counter. Mike waited patiently behind, above them. A dark man with fresh-smelling hair shouldered Mike’s ribs and nudged him farther back, so he was now separated from the counter by a crowd. Victoria station would not suffocate the young traveler, he was determined. Mike grew into his frame, his wide shoulders and thick chest. He was much larger than the Indian men. He leaned into each shift of the crowd and carved a path to the front.

Later, on the ground again, Mike stared beyond his book at a child’s dirty toes wiggling at him from bare feet. She held out an open hand. He ignored the beggar and he ignored the metallic ache that arrived in his ribs and coiled there. She stood for a minute, hand out, looking at a strand of brown hair curled over Mike’s pink ear.

Bombay is fine during the day, but I haven’t gotten used to the night. I feel so vulnerable then. Really, at night, I wonder whether I’ll make it three months, and at dusk I don’t know what to do. Sometimes I pine to see Westerners; I understand why blacks in the US say there’s a race problem – when you’re the minority it’s so apparent and jarring. Each day feels like a week, that, honestly, I just want to be over. The poverty here is relentless and my wealth is relentless and I can’t close my eyes on either. What am I supposed to do with this? What good is relative fortune? I can pose all the theories I want about giving to beggars but when I shut the hotel door I’d better have it sorted out because I’m tested before I reach the street. Were I brave enough to be vulnerable I’d talk with locals and justify this travel, but I only talk to beggars. I tell them, “No,” because I don’t know what else to say.

The dirty toes turned away and she walked like a ghost with her hands down. What haunts that girl’s body is the want for little and the expectation of nothing. If only she’d be at peace, he thought. The ache smoldered.

He looked past his book now into the eyes of an Indian man suddenly seated on the ground in front of him. The beggar didn’t extend his hand; he examined Mike’s blue eyes. The man’s black hair curled over his dark ears and he looked strong in his frame with wide shoulders and thick chest, though his legs had been cut off below the knees. Crutches lay beside him. Mike knew the man was 25-years-old, and they studied each other.

It had been reliable as the moon until this point, then suddenly it hits the front of the restaurants during low tide. People fled. I ran to my hut to grab my valuables then went inland. Palolem is a one-road town from which one other road takes people away from the beach and back to the rest of India. That one road was packed with traffic and we walked past rickshaws and cars, past policemen who were uselessly directing traffic. I asked one policeman if he knew what had happened and he did: There was a big wave at 8:30pm or so, but the biggest was yet to come at Midnight. Of course he knew nothing, but the police wanted to appear to be in control, so they made up a story and stuck to it.

We went to the closest building that looked safe: a 3-storey hotel made of concrete. The owner was sending people to the roof. There were about 8 Westerners up there, one of whom had a cell phone, so I texted Azure that I had evacuated the beach and was now safe on top of a hotel. I didn’t know the tsunami was a big deal at that point (I didn’t even know it was a tsunami), but I assumed that it could potentially be. There was a pair of old hippy ladies on the roof, the kind of people who had come to India in the 70s and never left. One had worked for Mother Theresa, she had a puppy with her. We slept restlessly under the stars that night, and at some point I was prodded awake and led downstairs. The owner let us sleep on his floor – about 6 of us and a puppy – but it was more comfortable than the roof.

The next morning I went back to the beach and saw that the damage wasn’t too bad – there were a couple restaurants that had been hit hard, but the restaurants on Palolem weren’t much more than a collection of chairs & tables in front of a kitchen. Other than that the beach just looked dirty. The soft sand above high-tide wasn’t so pretty anymore. Since the initial wave, the sea retreated, then pushed back high onto the beach, then retreated, over and over again as if it were sloshing back and forth between India and Arabia.

Over the next few days the restaurants with TVs were packed, CNN or BBC giving us the details: 13,000 dead… 30,000 dead… 50,000 dead… 80,000 dead… and with each number was the feeling of wanting to wrap small around your aching heart but having to face a swell of souls so towering and powerful you couldn’t see the whole thing in one glance. Who can understand 100,000? And when I’d had enough of the TV I would walk out of the restaurant toward my hut and, for god’s sake, be approached by men on the beach wanting to sell me something: Jewelry, scooters, a room at their huts, a nice fish dinner. There were 100,000 freshly dead people, many of whom were their countrymen, and they took no break from trying to profit. At the time I was so angry, I glared intensely at these men through my red eyes and tears on my cheeks, hoping they would feel it, hoping they’d take a break and mourn. Still I don’t understand why they were selling immediately after such a tragedy. Maybe it’s only in our culture (or my mind) that profit & sincerity are mutually exclusive.

Later, I heard this story: On the day before the tsunami – Christmas Day – an old widow finally came out of her house after many weeks of mourning her husband’s death. She was dressed in black and she walked down the beach with a couple people on either side of her. She looked at the Western tourists, sunbathing in revealing clothes. She looked at the Indian men trying to sell sell sell to the Westerners. She looked at the restaurants and groups of huts that crowded the beach and hogged electricity, that blocked access by Indian families who had lived there for generations, that represented the materialism and greed spread wide down the beach. She angrily pointed to the sea and said, “That water is going to come and wipe all of this away.”

There were other signs, too. Christmas night was an awful night: a full moon with dogs that were going nuts, dog fights breaking out up and down the beach. The local men were lighting off fireworks that were way too close to other people, and I got uncontrollably drunk on just two glasses of whiskey. I knew something wasn’t right, and I told my friends that I was going to bed early. I threw up all night. Not that I could have seen it coming, of course, but in retrospect, the craziest, scariest night in all my time there was by far the night before the earthquake.

I was on the beach in India on a night when tens of thousands of people died on the beach in India. I never wondered or cared why I survived, I consider it luck. But I stepped back to look at my life and made sure that I was living the way I wanted with the person I loved.

His office was in his apartment. He had no receptionist, no assistants, just a chair and his tools in a room adjacent to the kitchen. I hadn’t asked how much it would cost, so as he worked on me I worried that I’d get ripped off.

When he finished, about 30 minutes later, he asked for “50 francs and a pint of Guinness.” That calculates to about seven dollars and a pint of Guinness. A few weeks later he came into the bar and I gave him his drink as the second half of my payment.

General badness of the body area, India 2004
For $2 the local doctor saw me right away and, after consulting, told me I should go to the private hospital. I went to the hospital and checked in with dehydration & a fever. They were going to inject me with a fever reducer, but then noticed that I was sweating. They asked if I’d taken paracetamol, and I had. That’s what they had in the syringe.

To treat the dehydration they were going to put me on an IV and rehydrate me right into the arm, but not wanting to be injected in India, I asked if there was another option. They said I could get some electrolyte packets and mix with water (Gatorade, essentially). They didn’t ask me to pay since they ended up not treating me (in the US the price of a consultation like this is enough to dissuade someone from seeking treatment).

Here in the US, when we go to the doctor we want SOME kind of evidence that we’re being heard & treated, so they’ll prescribe us some pills. Apparently in India their preferred consolation is an injection – that’s why they were going to give me two injections of treatments I could take orally.

Ear infection, France 2005
I waited in the doctor’s office in Chateau Neuf de Pape for about 2 hours before finally being seen as a drop-in. The doctor spoke to me in English even though I tried to speak in French – he wanted to make me more comfortable. He prescribed me a $10 course of antibiotics and charged me $10 for the visit. Cured like pork.

Broken teeth, Thailand 2006
It’s a crazy story, but the long & short of it is that I chipped a tooth (the picture above) and the dentist saw me the same day. I had the tooth fixed and three cavities filled, then a teeth cleaning. It was around $30. The side-note to this story is that, once again, I didn’t want to get an injection, so I underwent all this tooth fixing without any Novocain, only Azure’s hand to squeeze.

Fake rabies, Thailand 2006
Azure thought she might have rabies because a friendly dog licked her on the elbow, so we went to this stunningly beautiful hospital in Bangkok. It looked like what I imagine a 5-star hotel looks like. After an hour wait (again as drop-ins) we were taken back to a specialist for this type of fake disease. She was a great doctor – understanding and patient. Azure would be ok and we payed $15 for the peace of mind.