Not many people have had a better time in India than in the Maldives.
I am one of them.
Yes, the Maldives are paradise – a crystal-clear sea full of multicoloured fish, white sand, a fabulous hotel…. But unless you're a diver, it starts to get samey. The monotony of the perfect daily routine on my Maldives holiday got me to the point where, the moment I'd finished lunch, I'd start wondering what we'd be having for dinner. A memory that matches 100% my mother's memory of her boring Young Pioneers' camp in Varshets in '67, from which she came back 15 kg heavier.
India is another story. There you wake up in the morning with no idea what will have happened to you by evening. The adventures leave you no time for the half-baked problems of the developed world.
The culprit behind my landing in India's Golden Triangle (Delhi–Agra–Jaipur) was a Black Friday. My office back then looked straight onto Paradise Mall, and from the top floor I watched the crush around the mall. From a bird's-eye view I watched thousands of people pouring out of the building, dragging washing machines, TVs and shoes with a 0.05% real discount on the price. It looked like a giant kicked-over anthill.
When you look down from up high, you start wanting to think bigger and with a flourish. That picture gave me an idea: what if some airlines had launched a Black Friday too?
I went on the Qatar Airways website. It loaded with difficulty, but once it had loaded, an ocean of deals opened up before me… First I got greedy for Seoul for 800 leva ….. I couldn't even click on it. It had frozen from the sheer traffic. Same with Tokyo… I started trying at random… clicking on everything from Colombo through Mauritius to the Seychelles… no joy again. By now trembling from the adrenaline rush, I began to feel like the people down in the mall, who felt OBLIGED to carry something out of there on Black Friday – anything at all, even if it was marked down from 1000 to 995 leva. In this state of extreme consumerist frenzy, clicking blindly, I found myself the owner of 2 tickets to Delhi for 3 months' time.
I felt a bit like a friend of mine who chats up, say, 10 girls on Messenger with the same line. And as the conversation goes on, the girls get bored and stop replying one by one, until there's just one very patient one left who'll put out. That's called being a "machine-gunner", he explained to me proudly. Well, it's usually the one with the lowest self-esteem who "puts out", but ….., at least "the machine-gunner never goes home dry" (quote).
I've basically got something manly about me, and this was proven by my behaviour on the Qatar Airways website. I don't regret my machine-gunner behaviour – not only did I not go home dry, but once I got to India, I had a far more fun time than in the glitzy Maldives.
Emo, my husband, took the fact that he'd be going to Delhi very hard. He's a man of glitzy girls and glitzy destinations. Me, on the other hand, being a Sagittarius after all, I'm thrilled with any destination at all, as long as I haven't been there yet. Once I've visited it, I lose interest. Yeah, well, there's something manly about me.
By chance I got talking to a Facebook acquaintance of mine from India whom I'd never met. We'd never seen each other in real life, but one thing led to another and he offered to be our tour guide in Delhi. This man, his name is Deepak, was our blessing, thanks to whom we survived his country psychologically.
The day of our trip arrives. As usual, Emo has made sure to take care of a few things of HIS utmost necessity exactly at the time we're supposed to be getting on the plane. The flight was at 11:00, meaning we had to be at the airport at 09:30. At 7:30 I wake up, but Emo has already vanished. From experience I assume he's probably dashed off to wash his car. When he still isn't back at 08:50, in a state of extreme agitation, I call him. Emo picks up in an angelic voice:
"Yes?"
"Don't let me find out you're washing that bloody car again! Be home in 10 minutes, I'm calling the taxi."
"I won't make it, Piponi. I'm waiting for the Econt office to open, I've got to pick up something important." Emil calls me Piponi only when he's messed up. Since it's impossible for him to say "Sorry" to me, "Piponi" is the stand-in for that little word. If I hear "Piponi", I know he's feeling guilty.
"Nothing can be important to you right now, unless you're picking up your passport or your Indian visa from Econt!"
"I'm only picking up parking sensors for the car. I'll come home, pack my bag and we'll be at the airport on time. Just don't start with your hysterics!" Emo's voice bubbles with the quiet manly dignity of a Balkan lion who'd rather die than admit he's wrong. After all, he's already called me "Piponi" once, how many more times is he supposed to apologise…
"YOU HAVEN'T PACKED YET???????" (And – yes, I just knew it would be something for his stupid car)…….
My next memory is of us at the Qatar Airways desk in Terminal 2, just as they're about to pull down the shutters. Because of us, though, they stay a bit longer and kindly check us in. Phew, I tell myself, now that my bag is on the belt, nobody, not even Emil, can stop us. Once again I'd underestimated my husband:
The check-in ladies want to see a visa for India. It's issued electronically – you apply by email and after about 48 hours they send you back an email with the approval. You save it and print it, because it serves as your visa. I show my printout of the visa. Then it's Emo's turn.
"Aaaah, visa, uh-huh, yes, one moment….." He starts poking around in his phone…
I'm on tenterhooks. Emo carries on poking around in his phone with irritation – if it were something about parking sensors, if it were something about leather seats for an Audi on special offer – that would keep him busy, but these people here are wasting his time with some visas or other.
HA! Emo triumphantly finds the email. The ladies tell him to forward it to some email address and rush off to print it in the insurers' office on the upper floor of the airport….
"But the plane will leave," I whimper pitifully, seeing that our flight status says: Boarding – Final Call, and we haven't even been through baggage screening yet… What baggage, we haven't even printed our visa yet…
No need to worry, the ladies smiled benevolently – they'd warned them we'd be late. If I hadn't had my visa ready, they would probably have sent me home already, told off and in tears. But Emo has one magical quality, which I call "the Boyko Borisov Effect". The bearer of "the Borisov Effect" secretes some specific pheromones from birth. They work unfailingly on all the female employees in every possible department and directorate across the whole country. Starting with the civil service, going through the ladies in the kiosks and canteens all over Bulgaria, and finishing with the girls at check-in. Whatever their job, Emo addresses every one of them chummily as "colleague". The moment they see him, some half-maternal, half-erotic instincts start bubbling deep in the hot depths of the colleagues. After which, all together, melting, they rush to help the "boy". Whatever mess he's got himself into.
This time, however, the employee comes back sulking: "But you've forwarded us your visa application – we need the actual visa they issued in response to your application." That's all very well, very well, very well, but to smooth over a blunder of these proportions, you need a shock dose of "the Borisov Effect":
"Well, if I applied, then obviously I got the visa, hahahaha." The only thing he didn't do was grab one of them and give her a patronising peck on the head.
The little ladies stay silent, heads bowed. "Right, Piponi?" Having lost all outside support, Emo fell back on good old Piponi again. Piponi, however, stayed sullenly silent, arms crossed.
Emo sighed, poked around in his phone and found what was needed. He talked one of the "colleagues", such a little doe she is, into trotting off to print it, and a moment later we're in possession of Emo's visa.
***
The main thing worth knowing about India is that, despite the feeling that dangers of every kind are hanging over you – in fact nobody there will do anything to you. The main aim of Indians is harmless. To sell you some rubbish at a very high price (by their standards). Which, in our eyes, is perfectly cheap. You may feel you're in mortal danger in the following situations, which will happen to you several times a day:
1.While, out of misfortune and necessity, you're taking part in street traffic – some things have to be experienced, here's a video https://www.facebook.com/EmEl007/videos/10155616137007758
2.While you're eating something from Indian cuisine. Tip – ask for the spice level to be "for non-Indians". I love spicy food and asked for the spice level "for Indians". While you're eating it, you feel like your tongue and your brain are swelling up so much they're about to touch any second. When the food, after stomach processing, decides to come out, the exit is also accompanied by burning at the point of departure.
3.When the taxi driver asks you to take a picture together as a souvenir, and 2 minutes later he's put your "happy family" pose photo up as his WhatsApp profile picture. It's normal to get worried. In our world this is a sign that he's probably obsessed with you to the point of building a shrine of your photos at home and elevating your person into an unhealthy cult, even though you've known each other for 2 minutes. In fact there's nothing to worry about – Indians love having their picture taken with Europeans and showing off to their friends. That's it. Nothing more.
Without our guide and by now friend Deepak, we wouldn't have known any of these things. He taught us how to haggle with the locals, how to flag down a tuk-tuk (the local form of transport, which Emo stubbornly called a hip-hop), and which prices for goods and transport are acceptable. Also, in the mornings, when he came to pick us up from the flat, he'd bring us Indian breakfasts he'd made himself and Indian tea.
To illustrate the Indian machine for making money out of naive foreigners, I'll use our elephant ride in Jaipur. A Guide to Global Business could be written about it. I noticed long ago that the most profitable businesses and entire industries are built on the formula:
" CREATE needs and problems which then only your products/services can satisfy."
This is a picture of the fort where the action took place – Amber Palace.
The business model in Jaipur is as follows:
You queue until a free elephant comes along. As your turn approaches, they put you up on a tall platform from which you can climb straight onto the elephant's back, so you don't have to clamber up it. Payment, for some reason – I found out later what it was, isn't made in advance at a till. The transaction is designed to take place only once you're sitting on the elephant and it's giving you a good shaking along the winding little streets up to the fort. The price is 1250 rupees, and I'm clutching a single 2000-rupee note in my sweaty palm.
The elephant driver has his back to us the whole time; he's steering the animal, after all. But while we were getting on the elephant, he'd told us that once we set off, mark you, during the ride, not before, we'd have to pay him 1250 rupees. And once the elephant gets going, even your cellulite gets broken up by the shock waves you're subjected to. As a result, any movement on the passengers' part becomes risky. It feels like being put through the spin cycle of a washing machine.
Right from the start, a local begins hopping about at the elephant's feet and running alongside it down the narrow cobbled street with its considerable slope. Like most of his compatriots, this one wants to provide us with some service too. This one in particular wants to take nice pictures of us. No need, I wave at him to clear off, we'll take pictures with our phones, won't we. I'll just pay the driver and we'll start the photo shoot.
I try to lean forward to give the driver the money. I shrink back in a flash – the swaying is so violent that every manoeuvre is life-threatening. Especially if I have to stretch my whole body forward and try to hand the folded note to our driver, who stubbornly refuses to offer us anything but his back.
For his part, after several unsuccessful attempts, Emil establishes that it is ABSURD to take any souvenir photo whatsoever of the experience. Our faces are frozen in vain in photo poses. I've got my eyes innocently widened as far as they'll go. My lips have subconsciously formed the fleshiest pout they're capable of. Emo has a manly squint and a flexed tricep. The whole set-up is in vain. Because of the heavy swaying, all that comes out in the photos is blurry lines on erratic trajectories. Riding an elephant in India and not getting a picture is like setting a 5 km personal best and not uploading it to Strava. Nobody will believe you, simple as that! Which automatically halves the pleasure.
Our driver manages, through the back of his head, to remind us that we owe him money: "1250 rupees, when?" His back radiates offence that he still hasn't been paid. At the risk of my life I lean forward again to hold out a 2000-rupee note to him and learn that he won't be giving me change. Well, sorry, I think, as I carefully slide back to my seat bum-first, keeping low – but I don't find him nice enough to deserve any tip at all, let alone such a big one.
But that's been thought of too. The Indians rolled out the precise solutions one by one, at the very moment each of our needs arose – needs which, as had become obvious by now, they had created in advance.
Once I've established that I won't be given change, it's only natural that I should want to break the big note somehow so as to have the exact amount. In ordinary life, while you're on an elephant's back, it's hard to find someone to change 2000 rupees for you.
But Jaipur isn't ordinary life. At the base of our elephant, where the photographer was trotting along taking pictures of us a moment ago, a new Indian entrepreneur is now scurrying about. Now it's his turn to be of service. This one wants to sell us some of his pots and rugs. The souvenirs in question were very beautiful, and his presentation and timing were impeccable. Since their seller was running at the feet of our elephant and we were about 2–3 metres above him, he'd come up with an artistic way of showing us his pots up close. I suppose you've seen circus performers who balance on their index finger a very long rolling pin spinning at high speed around its axis. On the top of the rolling pin they fix various objects, which don't fall off but spin along with it.
Well, that's exactly how the pot seller was tempting us with all sorts of pots, vases and little bowls. While at the same time keeping pace with our elephant. This was a self-taught talent who, if he lived in our world, would be part of the Cirque du Soleil troupe and earning crazy money from his talent. Only the man lived in India. Because of the killer presentation, I buy a few little bowls and a small rug. Also so I can break the 2000 rupees.
But how do I throw them down to him, the note is so light, I can't aim it. And more importantly – how will he toss my change 3 metres up and not just run off? Where there's a will, there's a way – I buy rugs and bowls for 750 rupees. The multi-talented man, who has won my sympathy, puts them in a little bag, which he hangs, with the help of his rolling pin, on our driver's footrest. At the end of the ride, I give the elephant driver 2000 rupees and he hands me the bag of pots. Clearly the two of them are in cahoots and will sort out the money later.
Emil and I climb down from the elephant with bruised backsides. If we had cellulite before the elephant, we don't any more, and we've also acquired a whole bag of pots. We have everything except the most important thing – proof that we ever rode an elephant. On the way down to Jaipur we pass the photographer who'd offered to take our picture. We don't recognise him, but he recognises us. He isn't finished with us yet. He waves a SIM card at us – "friends, IF you didn't manage to get a picture (oh you dirty dog, you know perfectly well we didn't manage to get a picture), I've snapped a few of you here."
"Oh?" With a trembling hand I scroll through the perfect pictures. There are about 10 of them and exactly as I'd imagined them. You can see not only Emo and me and our elephant, but part of the landscape behind us too.
"How much do you want for the pictures?"
"100 rupees a picture." 100 rupees a picture is something like 2 leva a picture. We'll have such lovely memories…. I don't have any cash on me, and in India the cash machines rarely manage to connect to a European bank so you can withdraw cash. In Delhi there's a 1 in 3 chance a cash machine will connect to our banks, but in Jaipur I doubt there are any cash machines at all.
Emo has some rupees on him, which he's keeping for basic needs like getting back to Jaipur, having dinner and paying for the Jaipur–Delhi intercity coach tomorrow. But 1000 rupees isn't a problem. He counts the money and hands it to the photographer.
The photographer's face radiates offence.
"The 1000 rupees are for the pictures. And who's going to pay me for the SIM card I now have to hand over to you?"
Blimey, we hadn't thought of that. The guy starts loading some websites on his phone to show us the prices of these SIM cards in rupees. In case we happen not to believe him that they cost 25 dollars. Well, if he has internet, he could give us a bit of hotspot and transfer the pictures to us, Emo suggests naively. That way he won't need to part with his precious SIM card.
"Tsk." The photographer shook his head and quickly pressed something on his screen – he'd just run out of data.
"We could transfer them over Bluetooth," I suggest. The Indian throws me a good-natured look which read: "stay in the kitchen cooking curry, madam, don't go knowing too much about technology."
Emil and I are gripped by the same consumerist fever that seized me on Black Friday and got us here. Having seen the pictures, we want them so badly that Emo hands over our last rupees to buy the photographer's SIM card too. We buy ten-odd versions of this:
We're left without any money to get back to Delhi the next day. Our only chance is to find a cash machine in Jaipur which might possibly connect to a European bank, but I'm not pinning big hopes on that.
As we walk to the hotel, we take stock. We've been on an elephant ride, we have proof of it, and we also have a bag of Indian pots and rugs. We've had a free anti-cellulite massage too. I think of one more non-material gain with which to cheer up Emo, who loves getting something for free.
I once came across a Facebook post that had prompted deep reflection in quite a lot of people:
It was about some musician who played in the New York subway. People walked past him soullessly, nobody paid him any attention and nobody slowed down to enjoy his music. Only the children stopped to listen to him. It turned out to be an experiment. One of the greatest musicians, whose concerts at Carnegie Hall are sold out years in advance at outrageous prices, had agreed to take part in it by playing for free in the subway. But outside the image created for him, people couldn't recognise him and properly appreciate the value of his music, for which they'd otherwise be prepared to wait for years and pay outrageous prices.
How true that story is, I don't know. But if we assume that tickets for Cirque du Soleil are, say, 200 dollars, we'd actually just saved 400 dollars. A person needs positive thoughts when walking to their hotel with no money for dinner and maybe no money for a coach to Delhi tomorrow. I share this with Emo, who doesn't seem impressed by these 400 dollars that, in my view, put us "ahead". He doesn't even understand what I'm talking about.
"Look, the pot guy was incredibly good, that's what I'm trying to say, Emil. If he'd been born in the West, he'd definitely be a performer in Cirque du Soleil, and the tickets there are very expensive. And the act itself, balancing the pots on the rolling pin, was virtuoso! From that point of view I'm telling you it's as if we'd been to an expensive show without appreciating it… just like the people who walked past the musician in the subway that morning but didn't appreciate the virtuosity of his music. It's as if…"
"Nia, shut up already, I can't listen to your nonsense. People go to concerts at Carnegie Hall for the image and for networking. That's what they pay their money for, not the music. But what else can I expect from you, you're the person who prefers India to the Maldives after all…."
