Holy Cow! an Indian Adventure

by Sarah Macdonald

  ‘I am Billie’s lower-class refugee friend from the Punjab who drinks street chai and ruins Billie’s reputation. She shall never get a husband until I go to New York and stop making trouble.’

  I ask Billie what she’ll be up to on New Year’s Eve and she mentions television and her dogs. Thankfully Razoo overhears and swoops.

  ‘You must come to a parrrrrrrrrty with me, you will never see anything of Delhi if you ask Billie. I have five parties and will decide which will be the coolest and you will come.’

  I want to kiss her. But I dare not. Kisses are rather rare in India and Razoo has already mentioned how she found it difficult to walk in Melbourne’s parks with ‘All those couples treating the parks like they were their bedroom – shocccckking!’

  All the gang agree.

  New Year’s Eve gets off to a late start. In my new life, Jonathan’s work comes before anything else and, as luck would have it, a big story breaks. An Indian plane, hijacked on Christmas Eve, has been stranded in Afghanistan on a seven-day stand off. India released three jailed Muslim militants who will soon be exchanged for the passengers at Kabul airport, and the plane is due to return to New Delhi two hours before 2000 begins.

  Going to the airport could be a death wish. Computer companies are predicting chaos in the streets come midnight and the Australian High Commission is advising we stay inside with a flashlight and canned food. But Delhi already has power cuts, water shortages and hopeless communications, and I’m not sure I’d notice much more mayhem. Besides, Jonathan and I made a pact last year – we would see the new century in together, kissing or not. So I go with him to the airport.

  After spending days on the tarmac, blindfolded, sick, and some pistol whipped, the hostages emerge looking weak, traumatised and exhausted. But the crowd of about four hundred well-wishers couldn’t care less. The hostages are gang-planked down the same ramp I fell down only weeks ago, and fed to the mob. The crowd surges and starts hugging them, touching their feet, shaking their hands, handing them flowers or looping leis of marigolds around their necks. The armed police, who are meant to be keeping control, are jumping up and down with excitement and giggling like goons. Some of the hostages collapse and faint, others cry and wail. Only the captain of the plane seems to be enjoying himself – he punches the air as he’s carried on the shoulders of a mob of men cheering ‘Hip Hip Hooray’ and ‘Indeeaaa, Indeeaa’. A sadhu emerges wearing an orange robe, and I get close, hoping to hear a sensible comment. But he scolds the Indian government for saving his life.

  ‘They should have let us die rather than give in to militants.’

  After interviewing a few passengers, Jonathan tries to do a piece to camera with the only camera crew he could find to work tonight – five young blokes who don’t speak English, don’t own headphones and are far too excited to concentrate. When we turn the camera lights on we’re mobbed. A man sticks his small smiling sons under each of Jonathan’s armpits and a group stand directly behind him as star struck and frozen as Marcia in the game show episode of ‘The Brady Bunch’. The only one who is slightly animated slowly and carefully picks his nose. Just as Jonathan delivers a decent voice-take, a tiny plump woman jumps into shot, puts on her spectacles and begins to recite a poem she’s written, called ‘Ode to a Hostage’.

  For a long cold week

  Our Great Nation held its breath.

  We prayed and wept

  And held our faith

  While you were at the mercy of Pakistani tyrants.

  Welcome home, our heroes of Hindustan.

  We film it, Jonathan claps and the crowd cheers. I dig my fingernails into my hands and try to look moved instead of hysterical.

  By midnight we’re back home so Jonathan can file the story. The brown, heavy, toxic smoke follows us up the stairs. The pollution is starting to get to me – it’s slowly but surely leaching moisture from my face, blackening my skin, leaving an acidic taste in my mouth and starving my brain of oxygen. Tonight, I don’t need a drink or drugs to feel out of it. We shiver on our roof as the new century begins. It’s all bang and no beauty; not one firework makes it above the smog. Sydney’s harbour extravaganza and happy face seem a million miles away.

  We drive through an eerie silent streetscape to Razoo’s preferred party. It’s in full swing in a photographic studio in a village called Haus Kaus, and there’s food, chai and even black-market alcohol. But the partygoers can’t really handle their piss. It’s a scene from my schooldays: girls are passed out with their heads in plates of food, guys are vomiting in corners and there’s bourbon and Coke stickiness underfoot. Those sober are dancing up a storm on a dance floor straight from the set of Saturday Night Fever that lights up under their feet. We join in.

  The DJ has an interesting style – mixing (or rather clunking) from the Beastie Boys, to Craig McLachlan, to a Hindi movie number where everyone sings along and perfectly performs the dance from the film. There are lots of hand signals, wrist flicks, head wobbles and pelvic thrusts. The boys dominate the disco. None are standing on the sidelines doing the Aussie drunk boy head thump; instead, they spin around, doing the Punjabi dance move (which involves a manoeuvre akin to changing a light bulb).

  A nice bloke introduces himself and shakes my hand, but a girl beside him slaps him across his face. We try to keep a low profile, but apart from a group of young blonde Russian prostitutes in taffeta dresses straight from Pretty in Pink, we are the only westerners. The Russians seem to be gatecrashers cruising for business. While the Indian boys are standing staring at them with horrified horniness, the Indian women are throwing them daggers from big dark eyes.

  We end up in the alleyway with Sunil showing Jonathan how to perfect his cartwheels while avoiding huge splatters of cow shit and green goobers of spit. The dancing and the ridiculous nature of this exchange with Sunil tickles me. I’m warming to the Indian exuberance and energy and for the first time I feel perhaps I’ll learn to like this country after all.

  At five we wake up our cab driver, jump in a taxi reeking of sleep and sweat and try to head home. But the smog is now so thick we can’t see the road, or even the front of the car; we crawl along while the driver blasts the horn, coughs up his lungs and chants ‘Bap re Bap’ (Oh my God). Jonathan dozes, I shiver. The warmth of the alcohol and the blood rush of the dance floor flow from me and the smog seeps in. I feel claustrophobic and a little crazed – as if suffocating from the cling of a desperate lover who now makes my skin crawl.

  Suddenly the smog parts like a curtain. A being emerges. Naked, straight-backed, as grey as a ghost, his dreadlocks trail in the dirt. He carries a trident like the devil’s rod. It’s an aghori – a sadhu that lives in a cremation ground. A sadhu that smears himself with the ashes of the dead, drinks from human skulls and looks for salvation in stoned madness. His red eyes look straight at me and through me. It’s a look from another world, a window to nothingness, and a black hole of emptiness. I feel liquid freeze injected into my veins; my bones snap dry, my blood stands still, my breath is suspended. I’m being shot by a supernatural shotgun. The aghori merges back into the mist. Jonathan wakes and I can’t talk to tell him what happened.

  In the morning I wake up feeling like a truck has run over me. It’s my first ever full-scale flu. I blame the smog, or perhaps the Ganges Christmas dip for this bug. But after four days of huge headaches, body pains and coughing fits, I worsen. One night I find myself in a nightmare; I see dead bodies hanging from the ceiling, my lungs black and putrid on the outside of my body, my back impaled on a pitchfork, and there’s a big beast sitting heavily on my chest. I’m gasping and retching and trying to push the thing off me but I’m blacking out and choking and gulping. The beast becomes the aghori sadhu, his trident has speared my lungs and back, his bloodshot eyes are gnawing into my pain. I know he has done this to me.

  Jonathan wakes me up and calms me down. I breathe a rattled rasp and gasp like a goldfish in air while he makes a panicked call to the medical insurance company
in Australia. Before I’d left home I’d joked with a doctor friend about getting sick so he could come and retrieve me. But of course I’ve got the one disease that means you can’t fly.

  Double pneumonia.

  The overly respectful neighbourhood medic somehow confirms the diagnosis while putting his stethoscope on top of my jumper and trying to listen to my lungs through thick wool, a skivvy and thermal underwear. He warns that pneumonia is dangerous in Delhi and can be deadly. It’s hard enough to breathe here with healthy lungs, there’s no such thing as an ambulance (some people buy a siren and stick it on their car in the vain hope that the traffic will part but it doesn’t) and the only decent hospital is an hour away on the other side of the city. He warns me that if I stop breathing again I won’t be able to get help. I’ve never been in hospital in my life, I’m phobic of needles and all I can think about is golden staph, dirty injections, AIDS and a ward full of groaning people. Still, I’m too weak and terrified to argue. I get in the car. Abraham drives gingerly, grim-faced, and I pant in the back like a geriatric with emphysema.

  Apollo is a private hospital that boasts first-world facilities. It looks like a wedding cake, has a Hindu temple on one side, a wasteland full of rubbish and cows on another and a train line across the way with a small slum stretched along it. At a small entrance ‘FOR POOR PATIENTS’ families squat and cook. The large entrance is for the rich, and inside the place is dead posh, with clean(ish) floors and scrubbed nurses in starched white dresses and caps. I’m shoved into a wheelchair, pushed onto a bed, blood tested, X-rayed and delivered into a room of my own within an hour. An oxygen/steam mask is strapped to my face so I look and sound like Darth Vader, and a device like a plastic tap crossbred with a TV remote control is attached to my hand. On the end of it hangs a drip. Every three hours I’m injected with intravenous antibiotics, which feel like cold hard lard in my veins. The sweet nurse has a dreadful needle technique and only knows one word of English.

  ‘Paining?’

  She understands my answer.

  ‘Bloody oath.’

  My hand swells, my rings are cut off and my arm flowers with green, purple and blue track-mark bruising.

  Jonathan stays in the room on a couch bed (and not just because I’m deathly ill – apparently it’s not uncommon for women in Indian hospitals to be raped). But even with him sleeping beside me, the first night is long and the fear is real.

  At four in the morning I stop breathing again and press the buzzer. The nurse comes in and attaches a mask to my face, but I can’t get the oxygen to flow and I panic. I can see the black tunnel of death. Of course, intellectually, I’ve always known I’m mortal, it’s just that I’ve always pretended I’m not. I’ve gambled with my health, taking dangerous substances and pretending I’ll be eternally young, strong and invulnerable. For the first time, my body has betrayed me. I now fully comprehend my vulnerability and my finite future and I’m entirely unprepared. I’ve been raised in a family of atheists. At school I’d chosen to attend non-religion classes and developed a skepticism and disdain for faith that I expressed as open contempt. I don’t believe in anything but never-ending blackness and aloneness and that scares me senseless. Yet in this hospital bed, with the nurse’s tiny hand in mine, I glimpse the preciousness of existence. I realise that no matter how many spunky lovers you’ve had, how much you earn, what you do for a living and how groovy you look, all that really matters is how you live. I’ve always said such things, but now for the first time I truly believe them, deep in my bones and my diseased flesh.

  Such blinding flashes of obviousness keep me awake all night and numb to the morning parade of care. Every fifteen minutes or so a nurse comes in to give me a new mask, take my blood pressure, stick a thermometer in my mouth, or give me drugs. In between, people with clipboards come asking how I am and if everything is all right. There’s an administrator, a trainee doctor, a big doctor, a dietician obsessed with my poo, the head of maintenance, the tea deliverer, the soup deliverer, the main course deliverer, the mosquito eradicator, the men to make Jonathan’s bed and the men to make my bed. I mumble absently to them all.

  Then in march the ‘sputum brigade’: a group of doctors and physiotherapists in white coats that make me feel like the world will end if they don’t see green goo. The specialist tries to teach me the Indian morning croak and spit that I so detest.

  ‘Madam, you must be getting all the sputum out, all must come, do it with me come on. ‘Crrrrrrrrrroooooooooooaaaaak.’ He runs to spit in my bathroom. ‘Pppttttaaaaaaaaaaab. Now you try.’

  I’m exhausted from my early morning existential crisis and can only manage a pitiful ‘croak, ppppppttt’.

  Another few medicos come in to help. Together they bend their legs and limber up.

  ‘Let’s all show her how to sputum. One, two, three, ccccccccrrrrrrrooaakkk.’

  I just can’t perform under this kind of pressure.

  The senior doctor’s patience snaps. He huffs, ‘Madam, you are not leaving this hospital until you fill this.’

  He slams a specimen jar on the bed and marches out.

  For the next week I’m forced to frequently suck on a huge china bong full of steaming water, wear the fighter pilot mask, blow into a machine and suffer ten-minute sessions of being whacked on the back. It’s all to little effect. I’m just not a snotty person. Eventually I hack up a blood clot and they seem slightly impressed.

  ‘It’s a start,’ the specialist says gravely.

  Today, exhausted by all the effort, I sink back in my bed to watch the afternoon cleaning team – three guys with a talent for slapstick. Their supervisor is Jim Carrey trapped in an Indian body. Tall, lanky and elastic, this Indian Jim has a rubber face and impossibly white teeth. While the others clean around him, he stands at the foot of my bed and performs a bizarre routine where he impersonates both Shane Warne and Sachin Tendulkar, using my drip as the umpire, his broom as the bat and the head of his second-in-charge as the ball. I laugh, which starts off a wretched round of coughing. Indian Jim stops the performance and gets serious.

  ‘Are you going to die today?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’m not that sick.’

  ‘Ah, madam, but you could and you must be ready.’

  I close my eyes. He’s immune to the hint.

  ‘We Hindus accept death is there, death is our fate. You western people, you pretend death is not there, you plan and plan as if life is chess game, is game but you not playing. Isn’t it? Your karma and kismet is playing, God is playing, and only thing for sure is you will die one day, isn’t it?’

  ‘So what to do?’ I borrow the Indian phrase and head wobble. Indian Jim grins and wobbles back.

  ‘You must die while doing your duty.’

  ‘But I don’t have a duty.’

  He steps back from the foot of my bed, disbelieving.

  ‘No job? No husband? No children? No being good daughter?’

  I shake my head at each. He sighs sadly.

  ‘It will come, madam. Get your health good and be rich, be good, be enjoying, it will come.’

  Reducing my ambition and simplifying my life; that’s a prediction I should heed.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sex, Lies and Saving Face

  A week later I’m sent home in a different body. Thanks to a lovely little hospital souvenir, a stomach bug, I’m grey and scrawny and sickly. Puffing and panting, I slowly climb the stairs. Rachel, Mary and Moolchand stand at the door with flowers, open-mouthed at my transformation.

  Rachel gasps, ‘Oh no, you look terrible.’

  Mary raises a hand to her heart and Moolchand begins to cry.

  In India, skinny is not sexy. Fat is beautiful and bountiful and befitting a good woman of pedigree, and I am causing shame to the compound.

  Rachel pulls me inside and quickly shuts the door. ‘You are not going out until you look better.’

  Jonathan leaves to cover some stories in southe
rn India and Rachel and Mary become my loving jailers. Our water purifier wakes me at nine by singing a dinky digital version of ‘Jingle Bells’ to alert us to the fact that it’s working. I eat fruit and vitamins while Mary makes my bed and I’m ordered back to it at ten. Three times a day I lean over a bowl of boiling water and eucalyptus – Rachel demands more sputum and less sick and I dare not disobey. Mary worships symmetry – she organises my medication in order of bottle size, with a second classification of colour, and aligns all the cushions diagonally to the couch. I give up control of my personal belongings and sacrifice privacy and spontaneity for Indian-style slobbery.

  My Australian friends ring and tease me about having a cook and a cleaner but my days of feeling like a dickhead are fading fast. I’m already so desperately dependent that when I’m alone on weekends I feel quite helpless. The sickness is slowing me down but so are India’s idiosyncrasies. It takes hours to put the tap water through the jingling purifier, boil it to kill the remaining bugs, strain it to remove the white flecks of pipe and pour it into the storage urn. All the tiny, tired-looking vegetables have to be washed with purified water and purple iodine, and even then I’m not sure what to do with them; I can’t buy pasta and I don’t know any Indian recipes. I have to watch the washing machine because it clicks off every time the power cuts and it takes four hours to clean one load. It takes all day to do a few household chores and by nightfall every surface is covered in a thin layer of black dust. A part of me thinks I should be working – perhaps writing some freelance articles for newspapers and magazines – but most of me is aware that I’m too worn out to even make a phone call. The ambitious career girl has gone, replaced by a spoilt skeleton in need of some rest and recuperation. I’ve worked my butt off for ten years. Perhaps it’s high time to take off a year or two.

  But without a job or a focus I feel vulnerable and useless. In New Delhi even simple acts like shopping are highly specialised skills that require a great deal of training. There’s no such thing as a supermarket, and I have no idea where to go for safe fish and decent veggies.