About the Author
Sarah Macdonald grew up in Sydney and studied psychology at university. Rejecting the idea of ever practising as a shrink, she travelled for a year hoping that a few months in India at the end of the journey would give her a vision of her destiny. It didn’t, bar a soothsayer’s prediction that she would return. After completing a cadetship at ABC Radio News, she worked as Triple J’s political correspondent in Canberra. Sarah then presented the youth network’s ‘Arts Show’ and worked on television productions such as ‘Recovery’, ‘Race Around the World’ and ‘Two Shot’. She presented the ‘Morning Show’ until the end of the century when she left to join her partner Jonathan Harley in India. And then the true adventure began. Sarah now presents ‘Bush Telegraph’ on Radio National.
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Holy Cow! An Indian Adventure
ePub ISBN 9781742742007
Kindle ISBN 9781742742014
Every effort has been made to acknowledge and contact the owners of copyright for permission to reproduce material which falls under the 1968 Copyright Act. Any copyright holders who have inadvertently been omitted from acknowledgements and credits should contact the publisher and omissions will be rectified in subsequent editions.
HOLY COW! AN INDIAN ADVENTURE
A BANTAM BOOK
First published in Australia and New Zealand in 2002 by Bantam
Copyright © Sarah Macdonald, 2002
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry
Macdonald, Sarah.
Holy cow: an Indian adventure
ISBN: 1 86325 326 2.
1. Macdonald, Sarah, – Journeys – India – New Delhi. 2. New Delhi (India) – Social life and customs. 3. New Delhi (India) – Description and travel. I. Title
915.456
Transworld Publishers,
a division of Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney, NSW 2060
http://www.randomhouse.com.au
Random House New Zealand Limited
18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland
Transworld Publishers,
a division of The Random House Group Ltd
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Random House Inc
1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036
To my mum and dad for having me
To Jonathan for taking me
and
To India for making me.
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
A Good Hand Job
Chapter One
Through the Looking Glass
Chapter Two
Death, Rebirth and Sputum
Chapter Three
Sex, Lies and Saving Face
Chapter Four
Three Weddings and a Funeral
Chapter Five
Insane in the Membrane
Chapter Six
Sikhing the Holy Hair
Chapter Seven
Indian Summer in Suburbia
Chapter Eight
Heaven in Hell
Intermission
My Wedding Season
Chapter Nine
The Big Pot Festival
Chapter Ten
Suffering My Way to Happiness
Chapter Eleven
Trading Places in the Promised Lands
Chapter Twelve
Birds of a Feather Become Extinct Together
Chapter Thirteen
Come to Mummy
Chapter Fourteen
Guru Girlfriend
Chapter Fifteen
Face to Face with God
Chapter Sixteen
Hail Mary and Goodbye God
Chapter Seventeen
War and Inner Peace
Chapter Eighteen
Land of the Gods
Thanks
PREFACE
A Good Hand Job
New Delhi airport 1988
‘Madam, pleazzzzzzzzzze.’
A high-pitched wheezy whine in my ear.
‘For the final time, fuuuuuuuck off.’
My low growl through clenched teeth is a shamefully unoriginal, pathetic response, but it’s all I’m capable of at two on Christmas morning. For three days my friend Nic and I have been sitting on plastic airport chairs waiting for the stifling, stinky smog to lift. For three nights I’ve lain on a bed in an airport hotel listening to Nic bounce the sounds of violent double-ender projectile vomits and diarrhoea explosions off the bathroom walls.
India is Hotel California: you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.
Tonight, in such a lovely place, the voices down my ear corridor belong to the airport toilet cleaner. He has abandoned his post at the urinal to pursue his part-time job as a professional beggar. Shuffling in a stooped circle, he hovers around us as patient and persistent as a vulture waiting for death. He can smell our exhaustion and weakness, and we can smell him – his blue overalls are stained with urine and stink of mothballs; his breath reeks of paan, the red chewing tobacco that smells like a mix of overripe fruit and fluoride.
At long last a nasal voice calls our flight. The beggar shuffles forward to make his final swoop.
‘Madaaamz, sweet ladies, any spare rupees, please give, please, no wife, many cheeldren, you reesh, me poor, pleeeaze.’
His pitiful eyes pierce consciences swollen with western guilt. His prey surrenders. With her final energy, Nic digs in her pocket and gives the man our last few filthy notes, saved for an emergency toilet supply. The dunny beggar straightens up, grabs her hand and smiles – his teeth a rainbow of green, yellow and red stains.
‘Good money, madamz, so I give you good hand job.’
Taking the horrified look on Nic’s face to be one of acceptance, he bows his head over her palm, looks up and drones, ‘Oh madam, very soon marriage, very soon babies, two babies. Oh dear, only girls.’
He shakes his head and stifles a tear of sympathy.
‘But nice girls, good girls. And madam, goodbye, never India again, goodbye.’
Despite my exhaustion and exasperation, I somehow find the energy to laugh. Nic doesn’t believe in marriage, never wants kids and, despite having shed half her body weight down India’s toilets, is vowing to return.
The old beggar bugger startles, stiffens and wheels around to face me. He grabs my hand in his claw, smoothes its lines with his thick thumb, spits a volley of red paan at my feet and perves at my palm. Raising his bloodshot eyes to mine he whispers ominously, ‘You, you, late marriage, old marriage, very sad. You get great jobbing, happy jobbing, meeting big people jobbing, but late loving.’
I yank my hand from his, pick up my backpack and storm towards the plane.
&nbs
p; He yells after me, ‘You, madam, you come back to India, you come for love, you love it, you love us again.’
I break into a run, push onto the plane and sink into my seat. As we take off I give smog-swirled New Delhi the finger.
‘Goodbye and good riddance, India, I hate you and I’m never, never, ever coming back.’
CHAPTER ONE
Through the Looking Glass
I have a dreadful long-term memory. I only remember two traumatic events of my childhood – my brother’s near-death by drowning and my own near-death by humiliation when I was rescued by a lifeguard while attempting my first lap of butterfly in the local pool. I vaguely remember truth or dare kisses in the back of a bus, aged about twelve, dancing to ‘My Sharona’ at thirteen, behaving like an absolute arsehole in my adolescence, and having a hideous hippie phase involving dreadlocks and tie-dye when I was at university.
For my twenty-first birthday my parents gave me a plane ticket and a blessing to leave home and Australia for a year. This middle-class rite of passage had become a family tradition – my mother had hitchhiked around Europe in the fifties and wanted us all to experience the joy of travel before we settled into careers. My trip through Europe, Egypt and Turkey is a bit of a blur and recollections of the two-month tour of India on the way home are vague. I can see myself roadside squatting and peeing with women in wonderful saris, sunset games of beach cricket with a trinity of fat Goan men named Jesus, Joseph and Jude, and the white bright teeth of a child rickshaw driver wearing a t-shirt printed with ‘Come on Aussie Come on’. I recall angst, incredible anger, deep depression and a love-hate relationship with the country, but I can’t remember why. I’d filed the soothsayer, his prophecies and my vow never to return under ‘young stupid rubbish’ and let it fall deep into the black hole of my brain.
Until now – a month short of eleven years later.
As I walk into the plane in Singapore, a seed starts to sprout in the blocked sewer of my memory; a seed watered by the essence of stale urine and the whiff of vomit coming from my window seat (where the pink and orange paisley wallpaper artfully camouflages the spew). The high-pitched, highly excited jumble of Indian voices almost germinates a recollection. But after too many going away parties, involving too much indulgence, I’m too wasted to let the bud bloom. I fall asleep.
Somewhere over Chennai I become aware of an increasingly rhythmic prodding of my inner thigh by something long, thin and hard. I open my eyes to see a brown finger with a long curved nail closing in on my crotch. The digit is attached to a scrawny old Sikh in a turban sitting beside me. He is slobbering and shaking with excitement. I’m too sleepy, shocked and, for some reason, too embarrassed to scream, so I buzz for sisterly assistance.
An airhostess with big hair, long nails and drag-queen makeup, slowly strolls over. She looks cranky.
‘What?’
‘This man is touching me when I sleep,’ I bleat indignantly.
The hostess rolls her eyes and waggles her finger.
At me.
‘Well, stay awake and don’t let it happen again, madam.’
She wheels on the spot and strides off, swishing her nylon sari.
Months later a friend will tell me that many Indian trolley dollies are rich girls whose parents pay a massive bribe to get them a job involving travel and five-star hotels. These brats view passengers as pesky intrusions way beneath their status, and detest doing the job of a high-flying servant. But right now, I’m floored, abandoned and angry.
I stay wide-awake and alert until the hostess with the mostest sprays the cabin with foul-smelling insecticide. She aims an extra jet directly at my head. I can almost hear her thinking, Slut germs no returns.
It’s now that I remember that India is like Wonderland. In this other universe everyone seems mad and everything is upside down, back to front and infuriatingly bizarre. I’m Alice: fuzzy with feelings about my previous trip down the rabbit hole, I’m now flying straight back through the looking glass to a place where women are blamed for sleazy men and planes are sprayed when they fly from a clean city to a dirty one. In this world we applaud a dreadful landing that’s as fast and steep as a take-off, we jump up and tackle fellow passengers in a scrum at the door while the plane is still moving, and the airhostess gets off first.
I get off last to be embraced by the cold and clammy smog. The cocktail of damp diesel, swirling dust, burning cow dung, toxic chemicals, spicy sweat and sandalwood wraps me in memories. The soothsayer and his prophecies of a decade ago boil to the surface of my brain.
For the old bloke did give a good hand job.
My friend Nic got married soon after we came home; she then quickly popped out two gorgeous girls and has never come back to India. I’m still single and at thirty-three, by Indian standards, I’m a spinster to be pitied. I’ve had good jobbing – only days ago I finished my last ‘Morning Show’ on the Triple J network. I’ve interviewed famous actors, crazed celebrities and brilliant musicians; I’ve talked with an audience I admire; and I’ve enjoyed a lifestyle of travelling, film premieres, theatre opening nights, music gigs and festivals. I’ve left the best job in the world for a country that I now remember hating with a passion. And I’ve done it for love. My boyfriend, Jonathan, is the ABC’s South Asia correspondent based in New Delhi, and after a year of yearning, soppy love songs and pathetic phone calls, we’ve decided we can’t live apart. I look to see if the toilet cleaner is here to gloat.
A different tarmac welcoming committee emerges from the mist – five men with massive moustaches, machine guns and moronic stares, each of them clutching his own penis.
I then spend hours inching along an impossibly slow passport queue comprised of harassed foreigners, while Indians swan past smiling. It takes half an hour to find my bags in the midst of a screaming and jumping porter mosh-pit and another twenty minutes to have my luggage X-rayed again. By the time I am near the exit I’m frantic that I’m late for my most important date. I rush down a long exit ramp that gets steeper and steeper, pulling my trolley deeper and faster into India. I hit the bottom with a bump and fall over. Dazed, disoriented and dusty, I sense a strange sight and sound emerging from the smog. A huge hurricane fence appears to be alive. It’s rocking and writhing – fingers, toes and small arms reach through wire gaps; heads poke over the barbed wire, and mouths pressed to the steel groan and moan.
‘Taxieeee, taxieee, madam, taxiee, baksheesh, money.’
Before I can pick myself up, an arm breaks through a hole in the fence, grabs my bags and starts to disappear back into the misty melee. I begin a tug of war with a person I can’t see. I start to scream. ‘Stop, come back, I’m getting picked up.’
‘No, no, you are too late, your car not coming, I am taking you,’ yells a voice from the end of the arm.
Could he be right? Could Jonathan have come and gone? Or been held up on a story? My doubt weakens me and I lose my grip on my bags and fall flat on my back.
Then, through the smog, a tall being with a familiar grin emerges. Jonathan rescues me, grabbing my bag from the invisible man and me to his chest. I’m momentarily comforted, then I pull away and hit him.
‘You’re late,’ I wail pathetically. Jonathan recoils like a wounded boy. This is hardly the romantic reunion we’d pictured, and not how I wanted my new life in a new country to begin.
Jonathan bundles me into the ABC car with a promise of a stiff drink and a warm new home. We drive slowly through New Delhi’s winter streets that seem like hell frozen over, or perhaps purgatory. I can’t see beside or beyond the car. Fog horns hail from huge trucks sailing too close for comfort, and every time we stop at a red traffic light, that impossibly instructs us to ‘RELAX’ in large white uneven letters, a ghostly torso or a gaunt face with an expression straight from ‘The Scream’ rises from the milky depths. Long, skinny Addams Family fingers rap on the window – death knocks from beggars. I shrink from the beings as if they’re lepers and then realise many actually are. Still freak
ed from seeing bits of people through the airport fence, I’m now scared by seeing people without bits.
We stop at a huge black gate opened by a very small man with an extraordinarily large moustache and an even bigger smile. It appears he has won a beauty contest of some sort, as he’s wearing a white pants suit with a red sash that says ‘West End’. Beyond Mr West End looms my new home. I hit Jonathan again: I’ve left a sunny apartment by the sea in Sydney for a dark, dingy first-floor flat on the intersection of two of New Delhi’s busiest roads.
Inside, the flat is large but lifeless; its white walls are stained with diesel and bordered with dark wood; its marble floors are cold, cracked and yellow; its rooms almost empty, bar some ugly, ABC-issue pine furniture. Jonathan is a house-proud bloke, but he left most of his things in Australia and has been travelling almost constantly for a year. He quickly promises we will move or renovate. I try not to look too disappointed and he perks me up with champagne and a bedroom strewn with rose petals.
We fall asleep rocked by the reassurance of a love reunion and the traffic vibrations.
The next morning, after a Sunday sleep-in, we wake wrapped in a noxious cloud of smog and dirty diesel. Marooned inside on the couch we sip chai – gorgeous tea made with cinnamon, ginger, boiled milk and a tablespoon of sugar. When the smog lifts we move to the deck to watch a roaring rough sea of traffic wildlife. All around us a furious knot of men and metal constantly unravels and reforms, ebbing and flowing and going nowhere fast.
Blokes – and a friend or two – perch atop tall, rusty bicycles. Entire families share motorcycles; toddlers stand between dads’ knees or clutch his back, and wives sit sidesaddle while snuggling babies. Auto-rickshaws zip around like tin toys. Ambassador cars – half Rolls Royce and half Soviet tank – cruise with class. Huge tinsel-decorated trucks rumble and groan, filthy lime-green buses fly around like kamikaze cans squeezing out a chunky sauce of arms and legs. Shoes dangle from back bumpers and black demonic faces poke out red tongues from windscreens; these are for good luck. But it’s probably the holy mantra written on the backs of vehicles that keeps things moving. It’s not ‘Baby on Board’, or ‘Jesus saves’, or ‘Triple M does Delhi’. Instead, hand-painted in swirling childish capital letters is: ‘HORN PLEASE.’
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