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Down and Out in Delhi
Every traveler has a "worst day ever." Here's one from the Flyer's designated wanderer.
By Paul Gerald
NOVEMBER 24, 1997:
One of the nice things about writing
a travel column is that you get to tell people about really cool
places they should go check out. But I havent been to any
particularly cool places lately, so Im going to dip into my
bag of stories and pull out the story of the worst day I ever had
on the road, October 11, 1989. Its a day that was so
painful that at the time I wasnt even able to write about
it in my journal. I do so now for the first time ever.
It all started with a hangover. I had flown into Delhi the night
before, and what began as an innocent, tourist-oriented drive
around town that evening for some reason turned into an ugly
night of drinking, from which all I remember is being scorned in
a fancy restaurant because I was dressed like a bum, suffering
the flashing lights and pounding music of a dance club full of screaming teenagers, and then having to literally push two crazy-drunk Indians out of
my cab. The staff at my hotel had laughed at my drunkenness, and
they are probably still trying to translate the cursing I gave
them in return.
It was insanely hot, even at night, so before crashing I had
cranked the air conditioner up all the way. When I woke up, my
mouth was so dry that my first act was to gag. In my sleep I had
knocked over my water bottle, and I would no sooner drink tap
water in India than play Russian roulette. My contact lenses were
chemically bonded to my eyeballs. My nose was so clogged from the
temperature change in the room that breathing was impossible. All
this in a room that was somehow spinning both ways at once.
But all I had to do on this day was check for mail at the
American Express office, send a package at the post office, and
get to the airport by 4 p.m. No worries, right?
So I go out to look for a cab, and the heat hits me like a
thousand hair-dryers on every part of my body. The
English-language paper said the high was supposed to be 97
on October 11, remember but I think they were off by about
20 degrees. For the first two hours of that day I lingered on the
verge of vomiting. I ducked into a cab, which was soon stuck in a
traffic jam. I never gathered what had caused a traffic jam at
10:30 in the morning, but on several occasions I saw streets get
clogged while one or more bulls ambled among the cars. This
traffic jam was a no-mover, which was real pleasant in the
million-degree heat. So I rolled down the back-seat windows.
Thats when the beggars found me. Their arms, coming through
both windows, could just reach me in the middle of the back seat,
so I rolled the windows back up. After five minutes of that, I
was out of water again, and my head started to swell to
basketball-size. Down went the windows, in came the arms. I asked
my driver what would happen if I gave them something, and he
said, Oh, sir, it would be veddy bod.
I didnt want to know how much worse it could get, so I
bailed out of the cab. I had 12 blocks to walk to the American
Express office, during which time 10 people followed me. There
was a guy with one eye gone, a woman with four kids, a man who
had a note saying he was a refugee from Bangladesh, and a
particularly persistent gentleman who was dressed like a
fortune-teller and kept saying, Ah, you are a veddy lucky
mon, yes, a veddy lucky mon. Let me show you how lucky you
are!
This little crew followed me right to the door of the American
Express office. Inside, I was second in line. At last a
break! Id get my mail, tear through the crowd outside, hit
the post office, and wait out the rest of the day at the airport.
But the guy in front of me in line was having some sort of
dispute with the guy behind the counter, and soon they were both
shouting and waving their arms at each other. I went up to ask if
I could just get my mail and: NO SIR, you will WAIT with
EVERYONE ELSE! The man behind the counter was all alone
back there. His argument with the man in line lasted two and a
half hours.
During this time, a crowd of probably two dozen people crowded
into the room, which was about the size of your typical utility
closet and also not air-conditioned. The man behind the
counter spent most of the time on the phone, occasionally
emerging to trade some more screaming and arm-waving with the man
in line, who would occasionally turn to the rest of us and jabber
wildly in a language none of us understood.
When I finally got to the counter to get my mail, two and a half
miserable hours after I got there, it took less than two minutes.
I had one piece of mail.
(This is part one of a two-part story.)
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