First trip to India, January 2015

Day 27, February 4

Jaipur – Amer Fort

First trip to India, January 2015

Itinerary

The next day, February 5, Volchiy suddenly asked while we were riding on the train:
- How’s the diary going, have you already written about all our adventures?
- Yes, about everything except yesterday. And I’m not going to write anything about it, I’ll leave a blank page. Or no, better I’ll write in big letters, “I hate Indians. And monkeys.”
- Very eloquent, nothing to say.

It turns out that when everything is going wrong, you really don’t feel like writing in a diary. But since I made myself a promise, I’m trying to write even when I can’t bring myself to.
For the first time on this trip I’m listening to music, Mark Knopfler; his voice amazingly calms me…
To be honest, there is already a second version of this day. A version written for myself, but I don’t want anyone to read it.

In the morning we were heading to Amer Fort. Supposedly there is no direct bus there from the bus station near where we live, so we went by two buses. First to Hawa Mahal, then to Amer. The conductor on the bus to Amer tried to cheat us, asking for 20 rupees per person instead of 20 for the two of us. By the time we got to Amer we were hungry, and considering the scale of the fort — you have to walk around there for a long time — we decided to have a bite to eat.
For the past couple of days both of us have had stomachaches, not too bad, but still — a sign to think about it. It’s hard to figure out what’s causing it — there are so many possibilities here. We decided to at least leave out fried pastries for a day. So we didn’t consider them as a snack option. We went into some suspicious-looking restaurant — the prices weren’t high, so we decided to eat there. I wanted just plain flatbread with butter, and Volchiy was first thinking of ordering rice, but I confused him and we ordered what was called “fried rice with vegetables.” I thought it should be tasty — but they brought some awful slop. Volchiy ate a little, but it looked and smelled unpleasant, so I didn’t even dare to try it. The mood was spoiled by what Volchiy called “shitty rice”; after all, it cost money, which was somehow annoying.

So, once again, we headed to the fort in rather a bad mood. Although, to be honest, it is very beautiful here. Mountains all around, and on every mountain there are long defensive walls, as if growing out of the mountains themselves. And the Amer Palace itself is a very beautiful, golden building of impressive size. There is also a very picturesque lake, a garden, a stone path to the palace and to the fort on the top of the mountain — above the palace.

On the way to the fort I say to Volchy:
- Indians really infuriate me. They have absolutely no sense of personal space.
- Yeah, that’s true, I noticed that too when we were riding the bus. A woman came in and started pushing, I thought she wanted to sit down, so I moved a little, and she just stood right in front of me, that’s all.
- Mm-hmm, exactly, that’s what I meant. Just now we were standing by the wall, remember? Some guy came up, stood next to me and started yelling something to his friend. Why stand so close to me? There’s plenty of room. So it turns out it’s bad, we’ve completely failed to learn tolerance over this time….
- Yeah, it’s tough traveling around India for more than a month. It’s one thing to sit in Goa and relax. But for us, this isn’t a vacation at all, it’s one continuous test of endurance.
- Mm-hmm, we’re testing the limits of our abilities. It’s all the big cities that are wearing us out. It wasn’t like this before.

And so we made our way to the fort entrance. At the entrance there was a convenient bench in the shade, and we sat down on it. Volchy decided to study English, while I simply watched the world around me, the monkeys jumping along the walls, the wild boars trying to find something tasty in the trash, the visitors. We sat like that for probably half an hour, and then finally decided to visit the fort.

I was hungry (because the rice was awful and we barely ate any of it) — and I noticed that they were selling ice cream in the fort — so we bought some. We’re walking along, eating ice cream, all is well.
Then something extraordinary happens. An adult monkey runs up to us. Volchy somehow stepped aside, and I’m standing there rooted to the spot in front of the monkey. It was looking at me very angrily, baring its teeth, and clearly wanted my ice cream, which I had only just started eating. It felt so stupid to be so defenseless in front of an animal four times smaller than you. The monkey shifted from paw to paw; it seemed like it was about to jump at me to snatch the ice cream away. I got scared; judging by the monkey’s look, it seemed like nothing would stop it from getting its prize. I had to throw the ice cream away… If something like that happened in some abandoned, deserted place. But here, among crowds of tourists, who, by the way, were all chewing on something too, it all looked terribly absurd.

We went on, but inside me it was as if some little door had slammed shut, and all this surrounding beauty, all these people, everything that was happening — was nothing more than a backdrop, just a soulless backdrop that evoked nothing. You’re like a splinter in the sea of events, and nothing more.

We got to the bus station by taking two buses with a transfer. Volchy took us to a decent little restaurant not far from the hotel. I was really hungry. We ordered palak paneer and flatbreads. Everything was quite tasty, and the portions were huge. Then we went home. We didn’t really do anything. Volchy played his game, and I read about Nepal.

When it was completely dark, we suddenly decided to watch the movie Hurricane (1999). The film was so gripping that we ended up watching it until late at night. The movie shook me deeply (and Volchy, it seems, too). All my anxieties and worries seemed like nothing more than a made-up parody of a problem compared with what the film’s main character had to endure….
We were completely immersed in the atmosphere of the film, and as Volchy said afterward, after a good movie it’s as if you wake up — problems and hardships fade into the background, and you can keep on living again.