----DOWN AND OUT IN INDIA
-----Jodhpur was driving me crazy -- until I met Julia.

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By Erik Braun

June 11, 1999 | Amazing how hard an octogenarian can swing a stick. The 6-foot lathi bounced off my arm with a sickening reverberation, still thrumming in the old man's hands as he reared back to strike me again. "Cello Pakistan!" I shouted as I jumped away from him, the only insult I knew in Hindi. It means "Go to Pakistan!" -- a serious insult in India. The old man glared and spit mushy Hindi out of his toothless mouth as he brandished his stick. He planted his bare feet squarely in the dust of the road to balance himself, his long gray hair fanning out from his balding pate and his scummy dhoti stretched tight across his thighs.

I had impatiently waved away his proffered hand seeking baksheesh, or alms. My heartstrings had been so stretched by two months in India it took more than an old fellow to pull them. He wasn't even missing a significant limb or either of his eyes, both of which continued to bore into me.

I circled to my left and headed down another road, looking over my shoulder every few feet until his vituperative mouth was a tiny rictus against the background of the intersection. Luckily, the street down which I had made my escape was the one I wanted to follow, or so it appeared from the map in my guidebook. Road shoulders in India often double as bathrooms, and so I treaded carefully in the sand, breathing in a miasma of exhaust as I dodged the thousands upon thousands of piles of human feces.

Westerners have the riding pants to thank for the familiarity of Jodhpur's eponymous name, but the big draw for tourists is the Mehrangarh Fort, a massive edifice of red stone jutting out of the desert. However, Jodhpur was just a delay for me, and all I wanted was sleep. The sun's wan rays from the west indicated late afternoon, and I had been up most of the night, traveling second class on the top bunk of a three-tier stack. When you are trying to sleep, there is little more miserable than freezing vinyl, vociferous snoring and an old train's rattling. I caught only snatches of sleep. Completely enervated as the night wore on, I watched a roach on my wrist crawl inside my sweatshirt. I just closed my eyes and let it be. Asia had demoralized me.

I had first arrived in Japan to get resoundingly dissed by the woman I had followed there, and the pall of that rejection had hung onto me through four other countries and now the Indian subcontinent. I felt no wonder at the exotic sights or mystery at the holy places. There is so much to Asia, so much to India, but for me it might as well have been Oakland: There was no there there.

But while the lovelorn make terrible travelers, they do make excellent tourists. I had no creativity, so I dutifully followed my guidebook. It had last stationed me in the desert town of Jaisalmer, where the sun breaking off blond stone creates a sublime airiness (not that I could have told you that then). I was desperate for structure, sad and relieved that it was finally time to go back to Delhi.

Purchasing my ticket in Jodhpur, I learned that the next train to Delhi wouldn't leave until early in the morning. I struck out to the south along a main road that began at the train station. A sidewalk is a mercurial thing in India and intermittently I found myself in the road, traffic whizzing a few inches from me. Overcrowded buses weaved through with rickshaws hugging their sides for clearance like remoras on a shark's body. No lights regulated this vehicular chaos and I debated trying to cross. I stepped forward, then back, feeling caught in indecision. A gap in traffic appeared and I made a move three feet into the road. Suddenly a speeding rickshaw cut over and came at me. I jigged in place, back and forth like a rabbit in headlights, before I stepped back toward the curb and ankle-deep into a black pothole.

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