The Lunatic Express

by Carl Hoffman

  When it was time to go, she called three taxis and three of us left the party. But there was only one taxi outside and I had the farthest to go, had no idea where I was. “You take it,” she said. I said goodbye, and she started walking away. Suddenly she stopped. Looked at me, looked at the taxi. Took a step. Stopped. It was tiny, the barest motion and expression, but I couldn’t help thinking she wanted to get into the taxi with me.

  Her e-mail arrived the next morning. She loved my blog, and I could tell she’d read every word. I pressed her for criticism; she was younger than I, a creature of the web. “You have to interact with your readers, your commenters, more,” she wrote. “Your videos are too static.” My stomach was feeling better; I was dying to go out, and wrote back that if she and her boyfriend were hitting the town any night, I’d love to tag along.

  “I’m throwing a party on Monday,” she said, “and you’re welcome to come.”

  I got there late and was still the first to arrive. I came up the stairs onto a roof deck and she emerged, long brown hair wet and sweet-smelling, fresh from a shower. It was a moment. Wordless. I fumbled with a bottle opener to crack the wine while she stood close, too close, not close enough, just the two of us and those hands. After so long without a real connection to anyone, separated from my wife and living apart from my family for almost two years, the attraction couldn’t have been more fresh or surprising.

  NISA, AS AN EAR CLEANER I befriended later called her, and I met for lunch in a park a few blocks from her office the next day, had a quick drink that evening after work, and over the next days kept up a constant stream of texts, e-mails, and quick lunches and stolen drinks. We were connecting hard and fast and deeply, and I told her everything, my life spilling out like Victoria Falls. And the more I told the more she listened, questioned, wanted to know. And vice versa: she seemed a whole unexplored continent waiting to be discovered. Travel had taken me out of my life, had shaken loose my already eroded sense of home. A further complication ensued: I needed visas to China and Russia, and a letter of invitation had to come from Moscow. The Russian one would take at least another ten days, a process that would eventually stretch to three and a half weeks. After months of movement, I was suddenly stopped, going nowhere.

  A week after we met, we were spending long nights on Delhi rooftops drinking wine and talking, talking, talking and days in parks amid gamboling gymnastic beggars and on the crazy, crowded streets of Old Delhi.

  And then, at a bookshop one afternoon, she reached up to a shelf and pulled out a book: East of Eden. “One of my favorites,” she said. “Read it.” I did, and it was all about men’s complex but stunted emotional lives and I saw my life and my journey in every word. No book had spoken so directly to me since college. That we might, if we wanted to, tried hard enough, rise above ourselves and be strong enough to forgive ourselves. That we might rise above our own mistakes not because we must or because some deity commanded us, but simply because we could choose to. It should have been obvious, of course, but I’d gotten lost somewhere over the past decade, had done what many men did all too often: focused on work and let their wives take care of everything else, from friendships to social events to family. I was gone so much. If my sister or my parents wanted to organize anything, they called Lindsey. If I wanted to know anything about my children, I asked Lindsey, who also organized most of our social events, started new friendships. She held up our world, but it was a world in which I too often failed to contribute, literally and emotionally, and thus felt too often a stranger. Instead of admitting my distance from it, instead of trying to talk to Lindsey or anyone else about my unhappiness with the status quo, I just worked, running farther away. I’d lost so much of the intimacy and closeness I was envying in Indonesia and India and that I’d felt with Lily in Peru. But it wasn’t hopeless. It wasn’t the end. Every moment we had the choice to forgive ourselves and try again. And suddenly I didn’t want to run anymore; I wanted to be those people on trains and ferries and on Buru, lying in tangled piles, holding hands instead of running. Travel—my journey—was showing me what I wanted, craved, giving me perspective for the first time in seven years.

  I FELT LIKE I’d been scoured clean, sandblasted by the travel, and that’s when I met Moolchand. I’d seen my first ear cleaner on the Rocket in Bangladesh, and the thought of some street person sticking sharp sticks into my ears horrified me. But I was fascinated by the tens of millions of street entrepreneurs, from ear cleaners to eye washers to shoe polishers to touts, who prowled the parks and railway stations and dusty corners of the world. I wanted to know them, and Moolchand caught me at a good moment.

  He knelt beside me on the putting-green-short grass of Palika Park in New Delhi’s Connaught Place and did his best to convince me that, no matter how clean I thought my ears were, they could use his skilled attention. “You will not believe it!” he said. “Pay me nothing and let me do my work and you will see, and then you can pay me. Whatever amount you wish.”

  There was something about him. I engaged, deflected, danced, joked “but my girlfriend loves to clean my ears, and if you do it, well, she’ll be unhappy.”

  He slapped his leg and howled with laughter. “Your ears need to be cleaned by a professional!”

  “Yes,” I said. “But what about my girlfriend?”

  “She won’t give you any lucky-lucky if she can’t?”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  He roared again, pressed his case, and we laughed together, at each other. He had six children, rode the bus, the notorious Blueline, an hour and a half into and out of the city every day. That was it; I’d been meaning to ride the Blueline ever since arriving in New Delhi. A private line of battered buses, it was notorious for high speeds, plowing into people, driving the wrong way, anything to make time and make money. “Let’s ride the Blueline tomorrow!” I said.

  “Don’t move,” he said. “I’ll get some chai.”

  We met again the next morning. We lurched and jolted through hours of traffic and, to be honest, my Blueline hours were pretty tame. Just crowds of people packed into slow buses. Once a passenger in another bus attacked one in mine through the windows from three inches away; and once we raced a bus going the wrong way up a divided avenue head-on against traffic, a tout hanging from the doorway waving at the swerving, oncoming tide. But we didn’t crush anyone against a tree, run over any bicyclists, kill anyone. It felt good to be plunging into the world again, listening to Moolchand’s life, one so typical in India.

  He’d left his village near Khajuraho, a town notorious for its Kama Sutra sculptures, when he was ten, coming to Delhi with an uncle, and started shining shoes in the park. At fifteen his parents found him a bride; she was fourteen. He met her at their wedding, briefly, then returned to Delhi for three more years until she finally joined him. “We slept together and talked for the first time that night.”

  He’d been cleaning ears now for twenty years, had four daughters and two sons, had lost one child to starvation. “In my next life,” he said, pressed against me on the bus, “I will not have so many. They are very expensive.” He sent money home to his parents, shelled out 1,000 rupees—about twenty dollars—a month to the police, hustled seven days a week, cleaning the ears of sometimes two people, sometimes none, sometimes many in a day, and somehow kept his family clothed and mostly fed and usually in school.

  We ate spicy something with chapattis off the street, strolled through crowded traffic and dust in distant Rohini, and he said, “Is it true that in America people kiss on the street?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I have seen it!” he said. “I have seen tourists do it here!”

  Then he asked me about lesbians. Did they really exist? Did women really kiss each other? They did and they did, I said. He was amazed.

  We talked about women. He was stumped about something—foreign women, Western women, were supposed to be so easy. They wore tight clothing. They bared their shoulders. They met a guy in the movies and
the next thing you knew, clothes were flying off and everybody was doing everything. But he hustled Western women all the time to clean their ears, and every once in a while he angled for a little bit more, but none of them would ever sleep with him. He didn’t understand.

  It was almost impossible to explain. As I usually did with questions and perceptions about America’s beauty and bounty and easy riches, I tried to tell him that Hollywood was one thing, reality another. That, yes, it was probably a whole lot easier to sleep with an American woman than an Indian one, but that most women just didn’t let it rip anywhere at any time. “Yes, but why do they wear such tight clothes? Why do they kiss and hold hands in public?” He just couldn’t wrap his mind around the idea.

  In the afternoon we headed back to Connaught Place and I told him that I’d be honored if he cleaned my ears.

  “Wait,” he said, smiling. He left, then returned with his baseball cap and canvas satchel and tools. Sat me on the grass, the sun streaming into my ears. Gripped my head firmly but gently and went to work. I had, in fact, just gone at them with Q-tips several days before. No matter. He knew his craft, and scooped and scraped—here I will not get too graphic—stuff from my ear canal that he wiped on his hands. And he noticed that my right eardrum was scarred, blown in an old diving accident.

  “Doesn’t that disgust you?” I said, as my ear wax collected on the back of his hand.

  “Hold still,” he said. “It is my work and it is nothing.”

  He wound cotton onto the end, swirled it around after the scraping, and rinsed out my ears with something. “Ayurvedic medicine,” he said. And then polished them with mustard oil. “Now your ears are clean,” he said.

  Every couple of days I plunked down in the park with Moolchand and the boys. We sat on the grass and drank chai. To look at Palika Park was to see a small and overused urban mound of grass dotted with trash and the red spit of paan chew-ers, full of the kind of sad hustlers that you usually tried your best to avoid, to not even really see.

  I knew it well after a couple of weeks. There was order there, an Indian cosmos. Everyone had a job, a trade, and each trade came from the same area. There were the shoe shiners. The ear cleaners. The masseuses. The touts, who earned 100 rupees if you just went into a shop with them, and fifteen percent of your purchase.

  The shoe shiners were from villages around Khajuraho—every single one. They knew each other, were born near each other, knew each other’s families. Their wives were plucked from their villages. Ear cleaners all wore a round, red hat from which protruded their sticks and swabs, and they were all Muslims. They were poor, but not alone; they belonged and knew who they were and where they were from. Moolchand wore a red baseball cap. He was an exception—he was Hindu, a shoe shiner, who switched professions, hence the baseball cap, the only ear cleaner from Khajuraho and the only non-Muslim ear cleaner I ever saw. Maybe that’s why I’d liked him. His small stab at difference in a sea of tradition.

  In May and June they all would go back to their villages for two months with their families. Moolchand’s family had six acres, “but sometimes the rains come too much and sometimes they don’t come at all. What to do?” Today it was cold and cloudy and the park seemed dirty, as if it really belonged to the crows; no tourists today, they said. What to do?

  One of the shoe shiners noticed a broken zipper on my bag. He pulled it between his legs and went to work, with the attention to detail and care of which only a poor Indian seemed capable. I pulled and yanked and always made it worse; he slid and worked with his fingers, greased it with wax from his wooden shoe-shining box, sliced stray strings with a razor blade, and it was as good as new. The park hustler asked for nothing in return.

  Moolchand lived in a single room with his wife and six children. “What to do?” he said, and smiled. “Tell your friends here in Delhi,” he said, “that you know a good man for a job. I need a steady job. Cleaning. Washing. One thousand rupees a month.” It was twenty dollars.

  I’d been treated so well by so many people, poor people, in the past months. But with people like Moolchand I never knew whether we were really connecting or if their attraction to me, their openness to me, was because I was a white foreigner. Were they just hoping for visas? For jobs? Yet I also knew from my experiences on Buru, for instance, that it wasn’t that alone. Could we ever really be friends across such gulfs of culture and wealth? There was no way to know in the limited amount of time I had; I’d been in Delhi for three and a half weeks, and it was time to go; my Russian visa had finally arrived from Moscow. I said goodbye one morning to Moolchand and the others.

  “What to do?” he said. “When are you coming back to India? And what about Nisa?” Moolchand said, his brow furrowed in worry.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I would need to deal with things at home before I could consider moving on.

  Moolchand was quiet for a moment. “Next time you will come to Khajuraho with me!” Moolchand couldn’t imagine that I might never return.

  “Yes,” said the others, sipping their tea and smoking and chewing tobacco, “we will all go to Khajuraho.”

  I would like to go, I told them, honestly, and I shook their hands and walked away from a little world that was part of a much bigger one in a tiny park that I had gotten to know just a bit. Sad, a little, that there was still so much to know and that I would probably never get to a village that sent its sons out to be shoe shiners in Palika Park.

  What to do! I had been hoping to get home by Christmas, had been saying I would, but because of the visa delay I wasn’t going to make it. And I knew that whatever growing closeness I felt with Nisa, there was nothing I could do unless I resolved my situation, met the challenge of home head on. I had to go. And that meant Afghanistan. On a Saturday I went to the Ariana Afghan Airways offices to buy my ticket for Kabul. It was one tidy room with wooden desks, the walls decorated with posters of Afghanistan as tourist paradise. The shimmering blue lakes of Bamiyan. Rugged and charming peasants. No hint of a country under siege, one of the most dangerous places on earth. “The flight is on Sunday,” said Rajesh Kumar, writing my ticket out by hand after I’d forked over a pile of cash, “but I am writing the ticket for Monday. We don’t know when the plane will leave. Sunday I hope, but I can’t say for sure. There is fog here, fog there.” He shrugged his shoulders, wrote my cell phone number down. “I will call you and let you know.”

  “What time does it arrive?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “How many airplanes does Ariana have?”

  “Six,” he said. “They are very old. But do not worry about their airworthiness, sir!”

  I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening and into the night with Nisa. We walked. We talked. We ate. We roamed across Delhi on foot and in rickshaws. We drank chai in a room piled with marigolds in Old Delhi and too much wine on a rooftop terrace and could figure nothing out. She had a job in India. I had a family 8,000 miles away, wanted to be there for them. I could promise nothing and neither could she. “When you leave, let’s not talk again,” she said. “Unless. Unless we can. I’d rather risk everything we have now to have the possibility of what could be.”

  And the next morning we hugged briefly, barely—we were on a streetcorner in India, after all—and I climbed into a taxi and she a rickshaw and a second later I was alone again.

  Four armed assailants kidnapped a German aid worker dining with her husband at a restaurant in Kabul in a bold midday attack, as the Taliban said negotiations for the release of 19 South Korean hostages have failed. Meanwhile, a suicide car bomb attack killed 15 people and wounded 26, including several women and children, in Afghanistan’s southern city of Kandahar.

  —Denver Post, August 19, 2007

  TEN

  Scariana

  NIGHT AND DARKNESS, the airport dim, nearly empty. Outside I could see nothing but blackness. No cars. No buildings. No signs or streetlights or life. A driver from the hotel had been supposed to meet me, but no
one was there and the airport had emptied out quickly. I was alone in Kabul, Afghanistan, unconnected to any organization, and I was scared. I tried to call the hotel, but my phone wouldn’t work. I went into the darkness and got hit by cold, something I hadn’t felt in ten months. Stood there a moment, trying to get my bearings. No taxis. Nothing. Just a huge, empty square paved in concrete. I went back into the airport, but a soldier with an AK-47 stopped me. “Taxi,” I said. He didn’t understand. We pantomimed a few minutes and he got it. Out there, he motioned. Just go. I had no choice. I couldn’t believe it, though; the thought of arriving in Kabul and getting kidnapped right from the airport seemed ridiculous but also more possible than any Peruvian bus plunging off a cliff or Bangladeshi ferry sinking. I took a few paces, rifled though my bags, found my Indian knife, and slipped it up my right sleeve, the handle in the palm of my hand. A quick left-handed slash across the face, followed by the power shot with my right—that should bring an attacker’s hands up, at least—and break his leg with my right foot, then run; I played the scenario out in my mind and walked on. And then felt foolish: a wall surrounded the airport, with a gate in it; beyond it waited a handful of figures in the darkness and a man yelled, “Taxi!”

  I said “Gandamack,” the name of my hotel. He had a beard, wore a black leather jacket, grabbed my bag, and led me to a Toyota minivan. I got into the front seat, said “Gandamack” again, and he nodded. But I knew nothing that night and I couldn’t see much from the car. Brokenness. Dim streetlights. Sandbags and blast walls and razor wire and roadblocks manned by machine gunners. We stopped outside of a high concrete wall, a small steel gate. “Gandamack,” he said.