| Submitted by: Mark R. Leeper and Evelyn C. Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 07 February 2005 |
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Mark can remember thinking that
this was about the time we'd arranged to go to the Ram Lila Festival. Moona
had seemed to think the driver wouldn't show up anyway, but when we finished
eating at about 8:10 PM, the waiter informed us, Driver waiting. Moona
was supposed to take care of the driver. Mark went to find Moona and found
him on the first floor.
Moona, you were supposed to take care of the driver.
I take care. No problem.
But he is waiting outside.
Be polite, he said helpfully.
You said you were going to take care of the driver.
Yes, I take care.
Well, are you going out?
No problem, he said, without moving. Mark went to find Evelyn and
tell her the situation.
What should we do? he asked.
I don't know. I'd like to just have it over.
I think we should tell the driver, 'No,' and pay him Rs20.
Moona said he'd take care of it, she said.
He is doing nothing.
Mark said we should just pay off the driver. Evelyn did not want to
pay off the driver, partly because she suspected he might have been lying
and partly for fear of angering Moona, since we were dependent on the hotel
staff so we could catch our 6:10 AM train the next morning. Mark told her
the situation was a mess and with less than a dollar we could end it. We
should risk Moona screwing up our ride to the railway station but pay off
the driver. Eventually Mark said he was going down and pay off the driver,
and Evelyn went with him. He explained to the driver that Moona had told us
the Ram Lila Festival was over. The driver said that it was still going on.
Mark told him we'd decided not to go out since we'd have an early train
tomorrow. That was true. He said he would take us to the train. How much?
Rs50. Evelyn said it should not be so much. Now we are talking US$1.50 or
so. Evelyn is refusing to pay that much, since it was only Rs25 to go to
the Agra Cantonment railway station and that was further away. First the
driver said that we didn't realize how far away this railway station was,
then when he realized we did, he said he couldn't get a return fare. The
story seems to change from moment to moment, making Evelyn even more
suspicious that he may have been lying about the festival as well. But Mark
is worried because we don't know if we can get a ride from Moona arranging
it or not. The driver won't come down from Rs50. Evelyn won't pay Rs50.
Mark gave the driver Rs20 for his effort and said not to come in the
morning, and we went back to our room.
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Mark woke up about 4:30 AM just from nerves. At
least we were not dependent on a wake-up call. We were glad to be getting
out of Agra and away from Moona.
We went downstairs and Moona was already up. He asked how we were
getting to the railway station--there was nobody here. He said he would
take us. He did, in a mini-van that had to be push-started. And he charged
us Rs50. But at least we made a clean getaway. Moona had said, Every time
you see the moon, think of Moona. Mark says that's a pity: previously he
had enjoyed looking at the moon. (We passed the Ram Lila grounds on the
way. They were not completely empty, but not really set up either. If
anyone out there can tell us if there was a Ram Lila festival in Agra on
October 16, that would solve one mystery.)
In summary, everyone else seemed to like the Hotel Sunrise, but Evelyn
says she can't recommend it unless you're into shady business intrigue.
In the early morning there is already a bustle in the railway station.
Little is very well marked. You step over people sleeping on the floor
looking for the right platform. We found it with some effort and some help
from people pointing in different directions.
Next came the search for our car. When we had taken trains in Thailand
it was never a problem to find the seat you had booked. There were labels
on each car as to what number it was. Here they had the brackets to hold
the number plates, but there were no plates. Somebody pointed to a car as
being the only first-class car on the train. So we boarded. The inside of
the train had few lights on. Mark used a pocket flashlight to find a
compartment with what looked like the right numbers for our seats. Well, we
were looking for seats four and five, and the compartment listed seats five,
six, and seven. We sat there and suddenly the lights went out. We opened a
window for a little light.
The conductor came in with a businessman and put a briefcase in our
car. The conductor asked to see our tickets. He said we would have to move
and he put us in a compartment with four Indians, a woman and three men.
This compartment was listed to have seats one through four. But there was
room for six so we smiled and nodded to the Indians.
A few minutes later the conductor told the four Indians they would have
to leave and brought in five Indians, all men, to replace them. Apparently
the protocol is not to label anything very well, let the passengers get on
and find seats for themselves, and then have the conductor work the seating
arrangements.
We had been told to try to get air-conditioned cars, not because they
were cooler but because they were cleaner, with less dust. First class had
no air conditioning on this train and the car was dusty. Also, the ashtray
had cigarette butts from a brand that could have gone out of existence five
years before. Mark pushed his bag under the seat and it smeared something
that was on the floor. He says, I prefer not to speculate what it was my
bag smeared.
Hawkers came around to the window selling tea and water. They have no
paper cups and instead serve it in small earthenware cups. They are
apparently disposable. The open windows have space for beggars to put their
hands in and ask for money.
At 6:49 AM the 6:10 train left the station. 6:49 AM is not a good time
to be looking out a train window in India. We must have passed over a
hundred and fifty people, almost all male, using as toilets the train
tracks, ditches, puddles, or just stretches of grass. You could pass a
puddle ten feet across and see seven people using it at once with everything
exposed to the passing train. (Evelyn commented, I haven't seen so many
penises and buttocks in a long time. India seems to have a very strict
nudity taboo for women, but not for men, which is somewhat the reverse of
the United States, at least United States movies.) Even the tribes on the
Amazon have learned better sanitation. It is bad enough to have cow and
horse dung around. You see disks of manure sold in the streets for fuel--
often with a big handprint in the middle as a trademark. But animal
parasites are not all that likely to affect humans. But with no containment
of human manure, it is amazing that this country is not ravaged by a lot
more disease. These people must have cast-iron constitutions. Mark also
saw the skeleton of a horse that a pack of dogs were picking clean.
Evelyn reports, It appears that most men squat even if just urinating.
And circumcision is not all that common, at least among the sample set I
observed. Just thought you'd want to know.
The ride was uneventful. It was five hours of rocking, dusty ride. We
had no scheduled stops between Bharatpur and Jaipur, but we seemed to have a
lot of unscheduled stops in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason.
The trip was 208 kilometers (about 130 miles), so we averaged about 40
kilometers per hour (or 25 miles per hour). And this was an express!
We wrote a little, slept a little, took pictures from the window a
little. As we entered Rajasthan the area started reminding us of the Middle
East. There were some palm trees and a lot more camels, and the people
looked and dressed a little more Arabic. Green farmland gave way to more
arid farmland with more sand and rocks. It was desert country--not Sahara-
type desert, but scrub desert.
The train was about forty minutes late pulling into Jaipur Junction,
arriving about noon. We were immediately besieged by rickshaw drivers. We
took refuge in the tourist office and arranged for a city tour for Sunday
(tomorrow) and asked about rooms. We got a room at the Ganguar (pronounced
like the character in THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME) Tourist Bungalow. We had
hoped to take a tour to the Sariska Tiger Reserve on Sunday, but the
Rajasthan Tourist Development Corporation was no longer running them. We
got an auto-rickshaw to the hotel for Rs10, but had to fight the driver off
with a stick to convince him we did not want a tour from him. An air-
conditioned double room was Rs400, just what the Lonely Planet guide said,
but the 24-hour coffee shop mentioned in the guide was being renovated. Our
room was far enough away that the construction didn't bother us, so we
decided to stay.
For lunch in the hotel Mark had mutton soup and vegetarian thali.
(Okay, so I am inconsistent, he says.) By the way, thali just means
platter. It is a sampler of several vegetarian dishes. That's usually
about what Mark gets in the United States also, though it is much more
expensive there. Indian cuisine is the only one Mark knows of that has such
a good variety of dishes that are vegetarian.
Our plan for the afternoon was to see a Hindi movie. Yes, a movie.
Jaipur's Raj Mandir Cinema is listed in the Cadogan as being the second-
best cinema in Asia. (Our tour guide later claimed it was the best in the
world--who is rating these anyway?) Even if we couldn't understand the
movie, we had to see the theater. We walked down Mirza Ismail Road. It was
a long haul to the theater and we had to dodge traffic and fight off
rickshaws as we went. We passed a billboard advertising AT&T Home Country
Direct just as a camel-drawn cart was passing in front of it, and Evelyn
took a picture, but we were too far away for it to come out very good. It
was supposed to be only a mile to the theater, but it seemed like more. We
were starting to wonder how we would recognize the theater when we saw it.
In Bulgaria, we wondered if we would be able to find the synagogue in
Sofia since it was down a side street. It turned out to be the size of a
cathedral, taller than any of the buildings around it, with a big Star of
David on top. Well, the Raj Mandir wasn't *that* large, but it was
unmistakable, with its name on top in letters fifteen feet (five meters)
high. As we approached, a huge movie board announced it was showing Saawan
Kumar's KHAL-NAAIKAA.
The Raj Mandir is a movie theater in the grand old tradition. During
the Great Depression when people were working long hours for small rewards,
the film industry decided that people need glamor in their lives. Movies
became more glamorous and movie theaters became movie palaces. You paid
your few cents for a ticket and you entered a world of opulence. Most of
the palaces are now history or falling apart. Here in India, however, where
the world's largest film industry still thrives, the concept of the movie
palace is still going strong.
There is reserved (assigned) seating and six different prices (Rs7 to
Rs18). We decided to go for the most expensive, which turned out to be like
balcony seats and away from the crying babies in the cheaper seats. There
are separate lines for the more expensive seats and also for Ladies and
Gents. So Evelyn got in the Ladies line and Mark got in the (much longer)
Gents line. |
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