I am ridiculous and disgusted with myself.

Raibes and my OBGYN

An imam is currently giving the call to the faithful across the street from the mosque. It’s a long and mournful call, and the sadness in his tone is only multiplied when he calls at 5 in the goddamn morning and I want to sleep. We made it back from Udhagamandalam alright. We took a different road down the mountain than we did up, so we ended up driving through Mandhumalai (spelling?) Reserve. We saw two elephants, a baby and its mother, eating. We also saw a peacock and more deer than I care to think about. It was snazzy.

I suppose I should get back to that story about my rabies scare. Last time I really didn’t mean to end on such an important note; a dramatic pause wasn’t what I was going for. My hour at the computer was just up and I didn’t feel like paying an extra 30 rupees for another hour, even though that only translates to about 75 cents. My rabies story involves this: rabies symptoms, two trips to a gynecologist, a diabetes scare, and a visit to one of the sketchiest pharmacies this side of Lawrence.

A few days back when we were at Jyotimami’s house I woke up in the middle of the night with a fever of about 101.4 that subsided within two hours. Then the next day I kept getting headaches which I’ve never gotten ever. Then I kept getting dizzy, I had no appetite, while I ate I felt like throwing up, and I stopped producing saliva normally so I began, essentially, foaming at the mouth. In my head I thought back to two things: first I thought about that dog bite I got at the very beginning of April. The dog had gotten all of its necessary shots just three days before it bit me. Second I thought about an episode of some talk show I once saw (I think it was Sally but forgive me if it was Jenny Jones). Some dude had never gotten a Polio vaccine. But his baby daughter did. One day he was changing his daughters diaper and her shitty shit got on his hands and somehow from that he contracted Polio and his legs went to shit and Sally (or Jenny) gave the guy and his family a wheelchair van and all was well in Oz. Anyways. I was thinking about the effects of a live agent in a vaccine if administered in close proximity to my exposure. I know that before this trip I ended up getting some crazy ass salmonella typhi pills to protect me against typhoid fever, so I didn’t know if that dog had been given a small amount of live rabies (however small, however ineffective) to protect it. So in my head for a day and a half I wondered if I had rabies.

My dizzy spells got worse and twice I had to leave the breakfast and lunch tables because I couldn’t sit up. After I lay down for like 5 minutes I was totally fine, but while I would eat I wouldn’t be able to sit for long. Sometime Tuesday Shalu and I hit up a cyber café, so I casually googled ‘Human Rabies Symptoms.’ The list one website presented me included: fever headache nausea loss of appetite malaise and dizziness as some of the very early symptoms. As I read on, the website said that rabies has an incubation period of two weeks to about six months, so I was still fair game. It also said that if rabies is allowed to incubate to the point where clinical symptoms show, it is almost certainly fatal. I sat there for a few minutes, and for a little while I was okay with my dying of rabies in a remote mountain town in the hills of south India. But I promptly got up and asked if we could please just hit up a hospital.

So we went to the local hospital. Shalu has a good picture of me walking towards it. It looks something like a modified KFC, same color scheme, same air of sickness. It was bad. However once inside they brought me into the consultation room where an elderly Indian woman, a nun I think, asked me what the issue was. I looked into her eyes and said ‘I think I have rabies.’ She grunted a little mmhmmm and went off to get the doctor. The woman called me over and started talking to me. (I only later learned from my father that he thought she was a gynecologist. Also, when my mom saw her she said “She is woman doctor. I don’t want woman doctor. I want many doctor. Man doctor is smarter than woman doctor.” When I relayed this to my sister she told my mom she sucked at life. ) She was about 60 years old and really nice. When I told her about the rabies thin she said not to worry. She said various Good Things to Say to a boy who thought he had rabies. Then she took my blood sugar that was apparently far too high for anyone my age and she promptly freaked out a little. Then she did some other stuff (none of this involved stirrups though) and by the end of it she gave me a prescription for a stomach pill, B vitamin complex, and a mild tranquilizer (my sister wonders if that’s what it really is or if it is just a mild relaxant, either way….I got some good shit.)

So then I took that prescription to the neighboring pharmacy, which, with the addition of a little hay, would have made a lovely stable. Honestly, it was dark, smelly, and just called for a horses touch. I got my mild tranquilizer and other pills and was on my way. The story pretty much ends there. I went back the next day for blood sugar tests that turned out to be okay, and even though my saliva isn’t working yet the other doctor I spoke to that day (gynecologist number two, I think) said I could have this thing called Sjorgenis syndrome or maybe I’m just fucked up from the viral infection that caused the fever. Either way they say I’m healthy and just to keep hydrated. I think I have rabies.
We were in the car for about 10 hours today to drive back to Bangalore. I’m currently at Jyotimami and Anilmama’s house. We go to Mumbai tomorrow. I’m sure I’ll have some sort of story there. I’ll keep you posted. I need to remember to write about how my dad wanted to adopt our driver and make him his new son. That’s seems important to mention. We also went to the Tipu Sultan’s burial place. Hmm… I’ll write when I have more time.

Okay, a long ass first installment

So Alitalia megasucks. I refuse to ever fly with them ever again ever. Being conscientious my father and I got vegetairan meals thinking that since we were going to India such would be proper. Neither of us likes meat at all and we certainly weren't going to get any here, so it seemed right to start on the flight over. Our "Asian Vegetarian" dinner on the flight out consisted of green beans in some sort of yellow bath of spices and, I think, floor cleaning agents. The spice was more like Pinesol than it was pepper. But, that said, I think I should address the accomodations. Allitalia feels the need to fly Boeing 767s from Boston to Milan, and Boeing feels the need to make the most ungodly airplane ever. Not only were our seats near the back, far from any sort of movie screen (not that that was a loss. They played Hutch and some Italian movie that involved a Jazz band and a cat getting hit by a car), but there was no leg room to speak of. I didn't sleep a wink, and this was on Monday, June 13th, after I had slept 6, 5, 3, and 3 hours in the nights before respectively. So I was awake for the entire nine hour ordeal. I had two glasses of wine thinking maybe it would help lull me to sleep, but all it did was dry my mouth out and kind of make me gag because it was little more than cough syrup blended, again, with some pinesol like agent. On the bright side, I read two books and my Breakfast was utterly lovely. When Alitalia serves, they bring out all the special diets first. All the Kosher meals, the Vegetarian meals, the Asian Vegetarian meals, lowfat meals, low sugar meals, etc. So when it came time to serve breakfast all us special folk were served first, but we all got exactly the same thing. Apparently Special Folk get a sugar packet, diet jelly, margarine, and a single unsalted rice cake wrapped in saran wrap. Nuff said.
Milan airport was beyond boring. I tried to change my dollars for euros to get some actual breakfast, and the money changer charged me a 43.49% comission. $12 US got me 5 euros. I'm bitter. But I'll live.

The flight to Mumbai was a little more accomodating. Airbus (may they live long and prosper) knows how to build a plane. We had leg room, and seats in the absolute last row. So we had neither people walking by nor fear of reclining out seats. That was classy. The food, however, was standard fare. Our snack consisted of white bread with some sort of green mash pressed into the middle. I think it was mashed potatoes with grass clippings. But that is of no matter, it had no taste. After some more wine I happily fell asleep and then passed between sleep and waking.

As soon as we got off the plane (at Mumbai airport they dont have those nifty walkways, instead you get one of those regal staircases pushed up to the door of the plane reminiscent of Richard Nixon's little pose), the smell hit me. India smells exactly as I remember it. It's not a bad smell, just a smell that is distinct. The smell tells you that you are in a country of over a billion people with just about as many cows running through the streets and that even though it is 10:20 PM the outside air temperature is, no lie, 92 degrees. When we got to the customs line the guy who was supposed to give foreigners their forms must have been taking a piss or consoling his dying mother, because he sure as hell wasn't there to give me a form. So after i was separated from my father (he was in the line for Indian Nationals) I got to the customs desk where they demanded some forms I clearly did not have. After fearing I would be nailed for some crime or other, I went back out to get the form and filled it out with other disgruntled foreign nationals. The India Tourism board is getting an angry letter because of that.
We went to collect out luggage from the luggage belt, only to find that it was all there, yet it was all damaged. Each bag had some sort of rip, one was entirely missing a buckle strap, the hand thingy of another had been pushed down so hard it blew through the bottom, and another one looked like it had taken a bath. My dad and I went to the line to complain about our bags and wasted an hour and a half to file a claim, only to have th em tell us they probably couldn't do anything. THat's okay. Whatever. None of our stuff was stolen. Another guy lost a pair of jeans.

We got out of customs okay, and moved over to the domestic side of the airport to make our move to Vadodara. On the bus between airports I fell into a seat with a girl from Georgia. I still have no idea what her name was, but we ended up hanging out and being board for the duration of my six hour layover. (Our flight landed at 10:20 and our next one was at 5:50 AM). During that time a few interesting things happened. I realized that my father is the single most popular Indian man in the merrimack valley. He met 4 people in the Mumbai airport that had either known him from his Puja work or heard of him through that. We would just be walking around to kill time when someone would say hello. And once someone we didn't recognize stopped us and said to him, 'You are panditji Shelat?' My dad said yes. "and is this your son who got into Harvard?" At that point I both died and shat my pants a little. I've come to India, can't I escape anything? A little while later one of my mom's old co-workers found us so we hung out with her and her family. They were coming to Vadodara too so that was cool. The flight up to Vadodara was fine.

Once we got there it was snazzy. I got out of the airport and was hurriedly thrown from person to person who I did not know or care to know at the time. I touched all their feet (it sounds strange in English, but it's an Indian thing, trust me) and we sat in a car. It was 7 AM and already 87 degrees. God bless India. Vadodara still smells the same, too. It's like the people and the cows of Mumbai, with the added attraction of thousands of stray dogs, homeless orphans, traffic, and Jasmine gardens. It's a fitting medley to go with the country.
Driving away from the airport was another story altogether. In India driving is a strange critter compared to that in the States. There are no lanes to speak of, and the horn is used more often than I would ever use the seatbelt, break, blinker, or accelerator pedal combined. We never passed a single traffic signal, and had to stop a couple times to avoid hitting some of the street cows. We did pass a donkey, too.

We got to Bhanumama's house okay. The first thing he told me was that once when I was little (which is the last time he saw me) i tried to drink a bottle of maple syrup, when he tried to stop me I bit him, and when he told me he'd throw me out of the house I said I'd call the police. I love me. My dad and mom and I all promptly passed out on various couches and slept through the hottest part of the day. The details after this point all get a little blurry. My days for a while last week were sleeping and waking and sleeping and waking to eat then sleeping again. Between the heat and the time change my body didn't know what to do. Come to think of it, it still doesnt. But that's okay. One other fun thing I realized is my terrible Gujarati. I learned basically in order to communicate with a deaf grandmother and very understanding parents, so all the little shortcuts I have been taking in speaking could work. Here, it is not so good. At one point instead of saying we were leaving to go to Jyotimami's house, I said we were going to go start flying. Another time instead of saying it was raining really hard outside, I said there was diarreha outside.

On the 18th we left Vadodara to come to Bangalore. Bangalore is the most fantastic city in the WORLD. The climate puts the rest of the world to shame. Even though it is in the south, the weather is mild and wonderful and fantastic. There are palm trees everywhere, and the whole place has the feeling of paradise. We stayed there one night where at four in the morning I woke up with a fever of 101.4. That was classy. It was also the beginning of my rabies scare. More on that to come.

The next morning we woke up and my uncle arranged for us to have a driver who came to pick us up (between the aforementioned road situation and the driving on the left, doing it ourselves wouldn't work.) Shalu and I were really freaked out by this. We've never had a driver before (they're fairly common here, as are maids and servants and cooks. Poverty makes many things possible). We weren't exactly digging the idea of putting all our luggage into this car then going to visit various tourist locations. But we did. That morning we went to Sharavanbelgolga, this giant mountain with the world's largest monolithic statue at the top. It was a giant naked man. We have photos. From there we went to the most beautiful 15th century temples at Halebid and Belur. The architecture is amazing and we have photos of that too. But you won't see a giant stone penis in them. Sorry to disappoint.

That night we stayed in Hassan, a calm little town nearby. The hotel was fine. But Shalu got some stomach bug and the next morning it was diarrhea city for her. Is that how you spell diarrhea. I bet it's not. But this computer doesn't have any goddamn spell check. Either way, we were worried about her. You know you’ll get a stomach bug when you get to India, I've avoided it thus far but who knows. So we weren't too worried. We just didn't want her leaking when we were in the car. On the bright side, she's healthy now, and we figure she's developed the necessary immunity.

We went to Mysore palace the next day which was really, really fantastic. It was built in 1912 by some stately prince that was the bitch of the local British so it was extravagant to no end. After that we left Shalu at the hotel and went to the Brindavan gardens. They had those lighted fountains. Brindavan was really beautiful after dark, when you couldn't see that the fountain pools were half empty, dirty and mildewy and that t here were no flowers to speak of. Fountains were decent though. We only stayed for 10 minutes. After that we drove up to Udhagamandalam. Here i thought I had rabies. I still do think I have rabies. If i die, just know that it's been real. If not, I'll let you know why I think I had rabies later. I really hope I don’t have rabies and I don’t die. That would be a drag. I have to go now. Shalu says time here is up. Stupid diarrhea girl. Shut your ugly face. Well, miss you all. Bye.

Access

If I get any internet access over the next few weeks while I'm in India, I'll try to post something or other.

urvesh