Rupee Millionaires

by Frank Kusy

  Spud shook his head in disbelief and hailed a passing camel.

  Back at the Paradise, I tried to interest Spud in some of the local attractions. Where would he like to go first? The Dop Khana cannon point? The fanciful Salim Singh haveli? The massive Mandir Palace? Or the five ornate merchants’ houses collectively known as Patwon Ki Haveli?

  Spud just eyed me stonily. ‘What’s nearest?’

  What was nearest were the famous Jain temples, just a short walk from the Paradise. I was just stepping up to the entrance when voices were raised behind me.

  ‘Shoe off!’ shouted the priest, nearly ripping Spud’s flip-flops off his feet.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ cried Spud. He grasped desperately at the ground, vainly trying to recover his footwear.

  The irate Jain kicked Spud’s shoes down the temple stairs. ‘I am priest of this temple! You will respect this place of worship!’

  Spud practically vibrated with fury. ‘Look here, you holy git!’ he ranted. ‘If you don’t pick those up, we’re not going to get along at all!’

  Both of them were spoiling for a punch-up, so I decided to intervene. Steering Spud away from the angry sage, I guided him inside the temple.

  His first sneering words were, ‘Is this it, then? All we’ve got here are three hundred cross-eyed, naked fat men!’ I suggested he lower his voice, since he was publicly insulting the Jain saints, but Spud was on a roll. ‘What are all these polished little fat blokes doing staring at me?’ he scoffed. ‘They all look the same, they do!’

  I decided Spud had had enough sightseeing and ushered him outside, then towards Jaiselmer’s famous bhang shop.

  ‘What’s bhang, then?’ he demanded.

  ‘It’s a stewed juice made from the mashed leaves of the marijuana plant,’ I explained, ‘and when you put it in a cake or a lassi drink, it can be lethal. Nearly every Indian in Rajasthan smokes, eats, or drinks bhang. It’s sacred to Shiva. Though I’ve only come across four places in all India where it’s cool for foreigners to smoke it: Goa, Manali, Pushkar and right here in Jaiselmer. And even then only in the privacy of their own rooms. Anywhere else and they run the risk of a big fine or a lengthy jail sentence.’

  We stepped inside the shop, and Spud’s curious eyes were everywhere. ‘Look at the menu!’ he marvelled. ‘It tells you exactly what to expect from your experience. “Do not anticipate or analyse,” it says. “Just enjoy. You will not sell, drink elephants, jump off all buildings, or turn into an orange, and you will remember most of your experience in the morning”.’

  ‘What it does not tell you,’ I remarked drily, ‘is how to get back to your hotel at night when you’re off your head and there’s a power-cut.’

  I bought four cookies off the guy and later found out that Spud had bought four also. Never mind the elephants. We had a very hard time getting home that night. And we didn’t want to remember our experience next morning. We surfaced around noon, with sore eyes and sore heads. Spud had lost a shoe somewhere, and I had no idea where I’d left my hat. We had breakfast when everyone else was taking lunch, then popped in on Mr Bank-Rupert to say our goodbyes since we had little energy to do anything else.

  To our great surprise, we found Damoder lounging fatly on his divan, his previously empty shop crammed to the ceiling with yet more spectacular goods.

  ‘Today lucky day!’ he cried with glee, struggling to his feet. ‘Bedspread go, toran come!’ Yes, he had spent all our money on highly decorative wall-hangings and was once again bank-rupert.

  Spud and I exchanged a look of despair then said in unison, ‘Do you take credit cards?’

  The trip back to Pushkar should have taken nine hours, but it took twelve because of the minefield of dead animals littering the highway. ‘You won’t believe this,’ Spud woke me to say, ‘but I’ve seen two dead donkeys, a pitted skeleton of a cow, three dead dogs, and a dead lorry driver. I’ve also noticed a breed of desert goat which appears to be crossed with a lemming. It lingers at the side of the road and deliberately throws itself in front of vehicles which are travelling at eighty miles an hour.’

  Spud spent forty minutes in Pushkar, just long enough for a wash and a meal. Then he was off with our truckload of precious embroidery, headed to see Gordhan in Jaipur and to ship everything home. I waved him off with a sigh. For the next week or so, I would be stuck here in Pushkar on my own.

  Or so I thought.

  I climbed the stairs at the Palace hotel, only to find that my favourite room had been given to someone else. The “someone else” was an old friend of mine, American George, and the room in question was 111, which was the only room in Pushkar with a decent shower and no cockroaches.

  I bumped into George on my way to room 112, which cost twice as much for no hot water and a roach in the sink.

  ‘Hey, my man!’ brayed George. ‘I had no idea you were comin’ into town!’

  He slapped my back so hard I nearly dropped my luggage. I stared at George, slack-jawed. In addition to his usual frizzy mop of black hair and round Lennon spectacles, he now sported a long, droopy moustache and a perky little army cap. I couldn’t decide who he looked like more: Frank Zappa or “Radar” out of M*A*S*H*.

  George was from Pittsburgh, and he was very intense. He liked loud thrash music, deconstructed jazz, and composing his own songs, which he strummed on a tiny ukulele he’d picked up in a Varanasi backstreet. Grumpy by day and only sociable after dark, George was a real night-bird. He wrote most of his songs in the wee, wee hours, and was fond of dragging people to his room in the evenings and entertaining them with whisky, dope, and endless tunes on his mini-guitar. When he was in a particularly good mood, he waxed lyrical about God, the universe, and (being half-Greek) Greek Orthodox religion.

  ‘Do you believe in God?’ I once asked.

  ‘Totally, man!’ replied George.

  I had struck up a friendship with George the previous year when I had rescued the irascible American from a punch-up with an Israeli in Delhi’s Paharganj market. He had been strolling past the hippy-dippy Khosla Café on his very first day in India and stopped to investigate.

  ‘Hey man, my name’s George!’ he had accosted the Israeli sitting there. ‘What’s yours?’

  But the Israeli hadn’t responded, just kept staring out at the road.

  George couldn’t believe his rudeness and growled, ‘What’s your problem, man?’ in his ear.

  Whereupon the Israeli looked up very slowly and said, ‘Do not bother me. I am sitting here. I see dee cow, I see dee holy maaaan, I see dee paan-wallaaah, den I see you. You are not part of my Indian Experience. Go away!’

  I stepped in just in time to stop George from committing murder.

  The Pushkar shopkeepers liked George. He thought it was because he was so friendly and outgoing. I thought it was because he bought a lot of rubbish they couldn’t sell to anyone else. They called him George Bush, partly because he was a Yank, and partly because of his bushy moustache. Every time he walked down the street, it resounded with calls of ‘Booosh! Booosh!’ and the traders rubbed their hands together in anticipation of approaching dollars.

  George’s main business was silk. He was back in Pushkar to quadruple his order, and he could not believe I was not buying any silk at all.

  ‘It was good while it lasted,’ I explained. ‘But ever since Ivan flooded London with damaged silk this summer—the result of his cobra accident—none of our shops will touch the stuff.’

  ‘Where is Ivan?’ George asked. ‘This is the first time I’ve hit Pushkar when that mother hasn’t hoovered up every piece of silk in town.’

  I was surprised he hadn’t been informed of the latest news. ‘Haven’t you heard? He’s been in jail for the past four months. He had an argument with his landlord in London, and “someone” decided to settle that argument by blowing up the landlord’s house.’

  ‘Someone?’

  ‘Yeah, the courts ruled against Ivan, but I actually don’t think it was him.’ I hesitated,
then said, ‘I think it was Spud.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  I shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t put it past him. He’s had Ivan on some kind of “death list” for messing with our business. Plus he’s good at blowing up things. He used to work for British Gas.’

  ‘Phew,’ George muttered respectfully. ‘You English guys sure play rough!’

  Chapter 11

  Colourful Characters

  George was sharing room 111 with an equally crazy American named Amy. She wasn’t his girlfriend, but the best friend of his girlfriend, and she had been sent out to be George’s ‘minder.’ As far as I could make out, Amy was supposed to stop him from being picked up by itinerant hippy bimbos.

  Amy didn’t look like an American. With her olive skin, long raven hair, and aquiline nose I immediately put her down as a continental. One of her parents, I later learnt, was Italian, so I wasn’t far wrong. Amy was beautiful but short on conversation. The only thing she waxed lyrical about was the Grateful Dead, her favourite rock band.

  How I ended up in bed with her, I’ll never know. Perhaps it was the gallons of duty-free scotch and ouzo we put away. I vaguely remember playing a card game of Amy’s invention called ‘Spit’ on the hotel lawn at 2am, but little else. I don’t know what happened to George. I think he might have collapsed somewhere with alcohol poisoning.

  The next morning passed in a blur. Off in the distance I heard a Grateful Dead tape playing. I think that was Amy in the toilet. My head felt like Hangover Square and I wanted to die.

  Was Spud in town, I wondered dimly. Had he pulled the same stroke on me as he had with Ivan, and bribed someone to seduce me? To be honest, I just didn’t care.

  Breakfast happened at noon. I quickly discovered that George and Amy had a language all of their own. I think it was called American. These two were into ‘too much fun’ and their stock phrases included ‘Thank you, motherfucker!’ and ‘Right back at you, girlfriend!’ Apart from the Grateful Dead, they had a fixation on bhang lassis. These they described as ‘truly awesome.’ According to them, George and Amy were in India to do some ‘serious styling.’ George was ‘into’ shopping and Amy was ‘into’ vegetarian food. They were like two hyped-up alien hippies, and in my present condition I couldn’t understand one word they were saying.

  I was just about to retire back to bed when George leapt to his feet and dragged me off to the barber for a ‘male bonding’ experience. This involved my losing my beard and George his Zappa moustache. George then treated himself to a ‘famous head massage’, which turned out to be a mistake. The barber whipped out what appeared to be an electric dildo and buffeted George around the cheeks with it until they were red-raw.

  Amy didn’t like my naked face. I guessed that when she booked herself on a video bus out of Pushkar barely ten minutes after seeing it. Where was she going? To help out some women’s development programme in a remote village north of Bikaner.

  Yes, that’s how bad I looked without a beard.

  Strolling into town later on, I was puzzled by the catcalls of ‘Two-Up Kusy!’ from passing shopkeepers and puja boys. It was only then that I remembered the second girl, whom George had picked up two nights before, and who had passed out in my room on the back sofa. She had fled town even earlier than Amy, hoping to hide her embarrassment. Nothing had happened with her of course, but nobody was to know that, so I let the rumour stick. It upped my street-cred no end.

  Two days later, Amy returned from her desert sojourn, totally disillusioned with the development programme. The village where she’d stayed was apparently bristling with highbrow western intellectuals who knew all the theory about how to relieve poverty and distress, but had neither a practical interest in the villagers nor any understanding of their real needs.

  To cheer her up, George and I bought her some space cookies and shoved her on a bus to the Amber Palace, thirteen clicks out of Jaipur. Amy was so blissed out by the sight of the high yellow fort, glowing ethereally bright on top of its rocky ridge, that she started shouting, ‘Geooorge! I wanna palace! A palace with elephants in it!’

  Our rickshaw driver shot her a look of alarm, ground the vehicle to a halt, and ran off somewhere, presumably to hide.

  Later on, still tranced out on bhang cakes, Amy boarded another bus to a different slum project in the middle of nowhere, never to be seen again. Pity about that – my beard was just growing back.

  To cheer me up, George showed me a fat Italian he’d collected in the market called Ferruchio. This guy was wearing just a lunghi—a piece of patterned cloth wrapped round his waist—and he had about as much command of the English language as an Eskimo.

  George introduced him to me, saying:

  ‘Ferruchio. This is Frank. Say hello to Frank.’

  There was a long pause, and then Ferruchio leant forward and said haltingly:

  ‘Hey....Fraaaaaank!...COUNTRYMAN!’

  ‘Is that IT?’ I whispered to George. ‘Where do you find these people?’

  ‘I....Yoooou.....NEETY-GREETY-DIRT-BUNT!’ followed up Ferucchio, and George gave a pleased grin.

  ‘That’s his favourite group—the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band! He must like you!’

  But then Ferruchio simply ran out of English.

  ‘Emm....you know...uh, uh....sometime you like to....ah...ah...FUCK?’ he suggested brightly.

  ‘This guy is not going to last long in India, is he?’ I told George, but George did not agree. ‘Of course he is!’ he snorted. ‘Indians just love mad people. They’re already stroking his head and touching his lunghi for good luck. By next week, he’ll probably be a plastic god inside a video bus!’

  George and I had dinner that night at Gopal’s Rainbow Rooftop Restaurant, sharing a table with a couple of Canadian vegetarians who spent the whole meal toying suspiciously with their mushrooms. Their hesitation wasn’t actually their fault—after they’d ordered their meal, George had informed them that the local mushrooms were filled with bacteria and were not to be trusted. He had this thing about vegetarians, did George. He just loved to wind them up.

  As we waited for dessert, George passed on a philosophical nugget which the Colonel had shared with him in Jaipur.

  ‘What is more important in life,’ the Colonel had mused, ‘than the relationships one makes?’

  ‘I thought that was brilliant,’ said George, ‘and so true!’

  ‘Around midnight, just as I was preparing to go to bed, there was a loud knocking at my door. It was George again, and he had with him a curvy young lass called Hella from Greenland. She was even more lacking in English than Ferruchio had been, but she made up for it with a big grin and a fun personality.

  ‘Whaddaya mean, you’re going to bed?’ ranted George, barging into my digs. ‘It’s a Full Moon, man! Time to party!’

  The party kicked off with a bottle of Tequila and a couple of joints, then moved on to a game of stud poker with a bunch of metal ankle-chains as the stakes. By the end, all three of us were totally wasted and our fingers were black with kerosene from the oxidised chains. Nobody even saw the Full Moon, let alone celebrated it. The last thing I remember was George and Hella staggering off to find another bottle of duty-free.

  In the morning, I woke up in the same chair, fighting yet another hangover. George—incredibly and infuriatingly cheerful—burst into the room and informed me he had a new trolley man. Every buyer in town, I knew, needed a trolley man to wheel their goods from the shops to their hotel room, and George had recently sacked his old one for getting drunk. In his place now stood Baru.

  Mendu had put George onto Baru, saying, ‘You give him anything, he don’t care. But you must watch him, because he push your things in the lake.’

  ‘Baru is crazy,’ George admitted. ‘I put some goods on his trolley the other day and he headed down the road three steps at a time, inventing a new song at each stop. First came gori gori gori, which means girl, girl, girl, and then iggy jiggy jiggy jah, and then eee eee eee eee.’

  It
was only when George mentioned the last song that I finally placed Baru. Spud had used him the year before. Spud had thought the ‘eee eee eee eee’ was the sound of the trolley wheels squeaking, but he had found out different when Baru materialised in his room one night—waiting for his tip—still singing this spooky little song.

  Speaking of Spud, he returned from Jaipur a few days later, complaining bitterly.

  ‘Two jeeps were a fuck of a bad idea,’ he informed me. ‘The lead jeep had me and half our goods, and a non-English-speaking driver whose entire conversation consisted of “Me Muslim!” The other jeep carried the rest of the stuff along with every living relative of the other driver. He took us on a tour of Rajasthan, dropping people off at various points, while “Me Muslim” crawled along waiting for him to catch up. It was supposed to be a three-hour trip. Wanna know how long it took?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Six. Double the time. The entire trip I was worried about reaching Jaipur before a) Gordhan shut his shop, and b) the Arya Niwas hotel gave my room away.’

  ‘But you made it in the end.’

  ‘Oh yeah, I made it all right,’ Spud grumbled. ‘Though the Arya Niwas is going downhill fast. It’s become a refugee centre for middle-class English people who are trying to escape from the rest of India. Everyone’s too frightened to go outside the hotel. They’ve been to Delhi and they didn’t like it, so they’ve gone to Jaipur and booked into the Arya Niwas. Now they’re thinking, “Well, this is nice – croquet on the lawn and buttered scones for tea, mater!” – and they just stay there without setting a foot outside.’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t think that’s entirely true. Some of them do get out. I’ve seen them.’

  ‘Oh, you mean people like Derek the Gardener?’ scoffed Spud. ‘I met him. He had “Mr Victim” written all over him. He only came to India because he was a landscape gardener in Wigan and wanted to see the famous 17th century gardens in Kashmir. So he paid lots of money to go up there, only to be told, “This is prohibited area. You cannot see gardens on your own. You must have guide and taxi.” So he paid this Kashmiri a ridiculous 500 dollars to drive him round these seven Mughal gardens for a week.