Back in Bikaner. (it is long, but it's worth it)

So—back from the desert. Ah. Oops. Already misrepresenting things. It’s not a desert, I have decided. It is a plain. And an ocean. And generally just a confused patch of land. You know—just going through one of those awkward geographical phases. This post is going to consist of excerpts from my journal. It will be a bit random and disjointed, and at parts, a bit lewd and perhaps disgusting, but it just may, collectively, impart a reader with a general feeling of what my life is like, as an American traveler in India, living the camel caravan life in the middle of an almost-desert.

First day:
Life in the desert is good. It is not a deserted desert. There are towns, houses, people, paved roads, farms, trees, bushes—lots of sand, but lots of other things too. Power lines. Cell service. We aren’t exactly dragging weary camels up mountainous dunes, walking the ridge between gold and shadow-black, peak after sandy peak. There are children asking for bottles and pens and money, adults guardedly eying, motorcycles, cars, trucks, sometimes. But the desert is good. Largely because the food is good, and plentiful. And the tea. Chai. And the evenings are simple, and the bed is comfortable enough, and warm enough.

Second day:
It is not a mountain range of gold and sharply shaded peaks, nor is it an endless, flat expanse of barren, cracked earth. No… it is more… lumpy. It is here and there. Occasionally it offers a mildly convincing attempt at a dune… And now and then it gives a go at the parched flat, but seldom does it fail to have enough trees, shrubs, and full-fledged, sprinkler irrigated farmland as to arouse doubt for the classification of the Thar as a ‘desert’ at all. More of a dusty prairie, really. Ah, but it is beautiful in its own ways. We love it because it tries. It is reasonably hot, in the sun (although the temperature in the shade is prime, totally prime, for reading, or napping, or lazing about, or doing some journaling). And the people who live in it—all over it—are reasonably nice. Especially the children. The antelope and the foxes are a fun sight. The sheep and the cows aren’t bad either.

3rd day:
The stars. Finally. They are all there. There are so many, it seems like the universe falls down around you in 3D, and you are one, tiny, infinitely small spec of darkness among a great, vast, black emptiness, sparkling intermittently with pinpricks of infinite light, infinitely small, but so, so large… And while you are so infinitely small and dark and insignificant, you lone creature, you tiny pillar with your neck cricked upward in awe from your lonely dark little earth, you are in that moment and in every moment infinitely important—you are the black hole, the one and only black hole in the universe, because you represent, in your amazingly, mind-bogglingly compact little body and mind, all that matters and has ever mattered and ever will matter, to you, in the entire universe, which is everything… And as you look out there, at the great Everything Else which, in terms of ratios, and depending upon how long you want to run out those decimal points before you get tired of drawing zeros, is Everything Ever, Basically (since we rounded, we have to throw in the capitalized qualifier), you feel that enchanting glimpse, that instantaneous contact with the unknowable, that flash, when all at once you dip in and out of a greater understanding of who and what you are in this universe, your place in it, as it were, laid out before you, to scale, in your particular district of infinity, and it warps your mind a little bit toward ecstasy and a little bit toward enlightenment, which may be the same thing, and you come back an instant later in that reeling wonder, and all you know is that there is love in the universe… Not Love love, but, you know… Whatever love might be. It’s a handy subject to throw around when you are referring to something indefinably cool, something wonderfully, escapably… ineffable.
It is easy to live on a world that is flat like a piece of paper in a universe that is flat like a piece of paper and is the size of the world, with nothing beyond it, just that pretty picture painted on the flat piece of paper that is the sky and those pretty pictures in the books which say there is more out there, which of course is so true it isn’t even worth thinking about, you say as you sit comfortably on that flat piece of paper… To live on a world that is round like a globe, or like the earth, is hard enough, because it seems so much more like it is just a flat piece of paper, and is so much simpler to visualize that way… But to live on a globe that is blitzing around through three dimensional blackness, dodging dark matter in a void of infinitude, and is infinitely small (what does that make you?!), and is kept company (although not very close company, like in Canada) y a gazillion other little bits and pieces of things that probably exist hurtling through their respective portions of that infinitude which we all share… It is hard to live in that reality without a good it of neck cricked, dark night, sandy-footed sky lookin’, and a piece of imagination.

I am so small, so small, so small, in this great big universe…

Day 6 or 7?

The little antelopes are funny. They strut around in their little brown and white bodices like apron clad housewives, neat black tails perpetually at work, swishing back and forth across their little white backsides, fastidiously and publicly tending to that little matter of uncleanliness that obstinately resides in that unmentionable spot on the rear of every dutiful young antelope. They do not know what I know. They do not know that the application of one object to another does not change the net makeup of those items as a unified whole. And since they do not know this, since they lack my superior knowledge and wisdom and cynicism that allows me to grasp this most essential fact, they continue to swat away at their little white behinds with their little black brushes, as I am sure they will continue to do, in the ever important maintenance of prim antelope decorum, right into the glowing, rapturous sunset of each of their individual, tiny, eternities.

Our diabolic camel driver (this title will have to serve him, I forgot his name as soon as he gave it to me—he deserved less, as I realize now, but it was the best I could do at the time) appears to have taken this morning’s sunrise (in the east, for a change) as a clear omen and indicator that he should busily spend his allotted time under its ample light busily at work, abusing his camel. Earlier, he repeatedly whipped its hind legs with harsh, glancing blows until he drew blood—a whole new meaning for redlining your means of transportation. This was a first, for us. Usually he just goes for the ribs. He is definitely a fan of repetition. Perhaps he listens to trance. His theory is, apparently, why do something once (whipping camels comes to mind) that could be done over and over again, regardless of the poor camel’s deathbed groans, regardless of the fact that our blunt chariot is already doing max speed, regardless of the camel’s obvious age, only to stop, what, when the whipping arm gets too tired, or the other camel driver mercifully says something to him in quiet, urgent Hindi, before turning around to cast the “Yay camels! Everything just fine, right guys!?!” smile back toward our reproachful eyes, the hopeful fisherman casting into the polluted pond full of limp, dead fish. …continues…

Day 10
Last night I walked out into that sand and lay down on my back to gaze up into the everything. There may have been more stars out than I have ever seen before in my life. I lay there, and tried to imagine myself as a part of it all—as another star among stars, looking out upon my twinkling brethren as I do every day, every night, every year, every eternity. I enjoyed it. It was amazing. It was easy to see the three dimensional nature of things, because there were so many secondary and lesser stars visible to make up the further back areas of space And still it was mind warping, because even as I lay there and imagined it, I knew I couldn’t possibly imagine it. I couldn’t possibly fathom the distances my mind laid out for me between foreground twinkle A and background twinkle B—everything, all the scales those entities are constructed upon are so far beyond my ability to visualize, all I could do was lie there, and gaze, and think about how small the world is, and how everybody here, myself included, is so caught up in the infinitesimal tediums of life, ignorant of this looming reality that crouches, vast, black and sparsely spangled out into distances unimaginable, so much more than anything here, as solid proof as I have ever experienced that we (humans) are an unimportant spec, invisible in the universal perspective, and it crowds around us forever, and it would not change the cosmos in the slightest if it finished what it has been doing for the last 4.5 billion years, if it just moved that millimeter, that last nanometer, and deleted earth from existence and all history and filled it with a black emptiness and the sparse, transitory rays of distant stars, and the universe would be unchanged, and nothing would matter, and everything would be the same… And that is not a sad, or bleak, outlook, from my perspective. I love it. I think it is empowering.

[later
--this one I wrote with the intent to share]

     I just ate the most disgustingly monstrous lunch. Grandma learned food-pushing from this guy, and was probably expelled from school for lack of zeal. Josh told them he wasn’t feeling very well, told them he didn’t need much. Did they listen? Did they?! No. Pile upon pile of piping hot chapattis, scoop upon scoop of a scalding, spicy potato dish, oh, unending bombardment of my entrails… Josh held strong for a while—I’ll give him that—but eventually dropped out, claiming his supposed sickness. I was left alone—Just me, my dish, and an endlessly refilling supply of thick chapattis, abused vegetables, and salty, spicy broth. A moment in the action:
     I was doing quite well, considering. I had dealt with almost all of the vegetables, and was doggedly bearing down on the remaining 3-4 chapattis and a small sea swimming with red oil, when, with a sympathetic chuckle, Josh pointed to our chapatti-roiling guide. I looked. I saw. The man was rolling a monstrosity, half an inch thick, maybe nine inches in diameter, pure flour, water, salt, and menace, right there before our very eyes. He was forging the one chapatti to rule them all. I returned to my plate, meekly hoping I would be able to resist its whispering curse if its diabolic maker ever attempted to set it upon me. I continued eating.
     Presently, I forgot about that looming disk of nutrient density quietly browning over the fire beside me. I succeeded in putting away the majority of my plate’s remaining contents, with only the slightest gurgles of protest from my straining stomach. I was nearly there—nearly completed, perhaps one melancholy chapatti left—when, with one phrase of unintelligible Hindi, one phrase of nearly as unintelligible English, and one, thick-fingered, brown hand, the guide proffered to me the aforementioned creation, in all its malevolent beauty.
     And I was like, hell no! I didn’t want that chapatti! He pressed it at me, juggling it in his hand like a hot potato, whining that it was burning him and I must take it—and I, in my weakness, and my greed… REFUSED, for the Shire, to take that chapatti! I employed common, universally understood four-letter words to help drive home my point (glowing blue, for those stalwart LOTR fans who wish to carry this dead horse further), and I said NO, I will not have that chapatti. I will not, Sam I am. Send it back to the fires from whence it came.
     And—he conceded. He kept it. He ate it. I was saved, sort of. End anecdote.
     I finished my plate, with the help of half a liter of water and a growing, desperate belief in the afterlife, rose, and hobbled over into the relative shade of this bush to share my bloated feelings. I was stuffed. Uncommonly stuffed. There are levels of stuffed, I have decided, and until now, Thanksgiving Stuffed has topped my list for the most stuffed a human can possibly be. This, ladies and gentlemen, was beyond Thanksgiving Stuffed. I believe it may even have been beyond Thanksgiving Stuffed, from the hypothetical, apostrophic perspective of the turkey itself.
     So, I came to pick up this journal and unload the irate, self-righteous contents of my mind, and I started to, but it quickly became apparent to me that I had other contents in far more urgent need of unloading.
     Precariously achieving a standing position once more with my newly misbalanced body, I checked to make sure I had some toilet paper in my pocket before venturing off through the sand and shrubbery to desecrate the far side of some innocent hillock.
     My imagination was running. The state of my body, the logic of its operations, was clear. Too much input. Must output. And it doesn’t matter what. Anything available goes.
     My imagination trembled with trepidation as I foresaw in my mind’s eye the contents of this premature discharge, result of my all too recently conceived, over-salted pregnancy. Half of me expected something like an anal-mounted automatic weapon, typical shells replaced by half-chewed organics; hastily swallowed chapatti chunks, mis-munched potato pieces, perhaps a spray of tomato-onion-garlic mulch. The other half of me expected something even less appetizing, roughly along the lines of a Frankensteinian reproduction of my recently deceased lunch. I could see how it would play out: Mary Shelly’s ghost would marvel beside me as, after the ordeal, I turned to look upon my creation. And there we would see it; mangled chapattis haphazardly stitched with my own sinew back into recognizable wholes, 8, 9, more of the damp, limp basturds, and beside them, arranged with artistic, culinary expertise, the semi-masticated remains of those poor, underappreciated vegetables—all of this, laid out as if upon a plate of sand before me, reanimated, as it were, by the hasty, mysterious toil within that dark laboratory of my bowels. And both of these options—the steady, automatic fire of undigested remnants, and the Frankenstein lunch— I imagined occurring in tandem with a urinary operation powerful enough to make Noah think twice about waiting for all the bleeding animals, ending with me standing at least ankle deep in rich, hot curry. These, with perhaps a modest degree of literary hyperbole, were the contents of my mind.
     I found my hillock. I dug a slight trench with my heel. I dropped trou. I squatted. And I gave birth.
     Let the record show: I had already shat that day, no more than two hours before, and had shat well, thoroughly emptying myself of a respectable quantity (and consistency) of healthily brown nastiness. I did not plan on any more bowel movements that day, much less within the next two hours. I had gone several 48 hour stretches of poopless safariing in this desert already—I would not have described myself (as if anyone would…) as a bowel-happy man. Therefore, to unload twice within two hours seemed impossible—and yet, clearly the deed was about to be done. Considering where I was in my bowel cycle, a reasonable reader who was not fooled by my earlier hyperbolic waxing (creative forecasting, if you will) might predict my relieving myself of, at most, a very small quantity of very apologetic shit. But this was not the case.
    Ladies—I am going to refrain, out of something that at least aspires to be decency, from making any more metaphorical comparisons between taking a dump and giving birth to a child. It is, perhaps, an element of my slowly receding childish immaturity that I still enjoy pointing out this tasteless relationship, but I beg you to understand—I am not trying to degrade a beautiful and sacred ritual. I am merely floundering in search of imagery that conveys with sufficient exaggeration (wherein lies my cheap humor) my experience. If I have offended, I am sorry. We proceed.
     I disgorged myself upon the sand. The product failed to eject itself like machine-gun fire, failed to be some mysterious reconstruction of my lunch, and failed to apologize. But it was quite large. Or, I should say, they. And it was all rather normal looking. There were some bits that were identifiable as vegetables, but I have decided to believe that those were the slow-boats from yesterday’s dinner, not the track stars of today’s lunch.
     That’s all I am willing to report on the topic of feces. It may sound grotesque, but as a traveler in India, talking about your bowel movements is about as normal as eating rice. Josh and I at least mention the topic daily. As May (pseudonym), of Great Britain (though currently residing in Spain), put it, roughly, “You can’t travel India without talking about shit.” She then proceeded to elaborate on the consistency and spacing of her recent episodes, and her suspicions for Guardia as the culprit.
     It was a big lunch, but it was manageable. A good hour or two later, camel safari over, on the bus back to Bikaner, I hiccupped, and a sampling of that fateful repast decided to pop on up for a bit of fresh air and a quick tour of the mouth that had so grudgingly processed it miles back along the sand. With a swallow, I hastened to send it, like the sex slave in the basement, back down where it belonged. But this goes to show—hours later, all it took was a hiccup, and the pressure in my gut was enough to invite a small-scale regurgitation. I think I have pounded the point in hard enough, but I will say it once more—it was a tremendous meal. That is all.

--End journal entries—

To those of you who emailed me, this is the best I can do for replies at this time. I miss you people. I will probably respond later, sometime when I have not just spent hours transcribing sloppily written entries using an annoyingly plastic-wrapped keyboard. We are going to Jaisalmer tonight. Perhaps it will happen there.

Stay well.
Chance