February 2008

Danger

While speeding down the desert highway, I had been forced to acknowledge that one problem I had with our driver was that he was driving, not me.

After spending six weeks in India last fall, my daughter Hortense made a confession to me. “India was a deathtrap,” she said. She then enumerated all the ways in which she could have easily been killed while there: the gas fire in her guest house might have burned the place down; the buses she took up the steep Himalayan roads might have crashed into ravines, as apparently happens frequently; she might have gotten Japanese encephalitis from mosquitoes, or rabies from wild dogs or monkeys, or ended up in the hospital from the dodgy food like everyone else at her guesthouse (as it was, she did spend two days with a high fever from what was probably salmonella).

Hortense’s list caused me to break into a cold sweat, even though her dangers had passed. I was glad she had been sensible not to share certain details with me at the time—such as the way the cook in the guesthouse was also in charge of emptying the used toilet-paper bins in the bathrooms, not pausing to wash his hands between tasks—but even in retrospect, I was haunted by all the risks she had taken.

I have always been an incredibly risk-averse person. I avoid driving behind trucks, especially those carrying piles of logs, since I have read of people being killed by things that fly from them. I’m an infamous germaphobe, and have literally leapt into the air to avoid sitting next to sick people. I never walk anywhere alone at night. I have constant medical checkups. In short, I do everything possible to prolong my own personal safety at all times.

Which was why I found myself wondering, as I sped down a road in Rajasthan in the back of a taxi with Hortense beside me, what on earth we were doing in India. I had talked Hortense into coming with me, even though she had just been there, because I wanted to go with someone who had already been there—check—and who knew her way around—check—and who would appreciate India as much as I figured I would—well, not so much. After six weeks there, Hortense was suffering from some pretty intense burnout, and had made it clear to me that in any case, she did not regard India as a tourist paradise.

But I had convinced her to come by buying her a plane ticket—a method I highly recommend—and now here we were, traveling from Udaipur to Jaisalmer at high speeds that looked even worse in kilometers. Speed wasn’t the scariest thing, though—it was our driver’s technique, the way he floored the gas pedal whenever there was no one in front of us, then slammed on the brake when there was; the way he wove through traffic on the two-lane road, creating a middle lane, then back into our lane or, when it suited him, into the opposite lane. It was so frightening that at some point, I gave up begging him to slow down—I can say this in Hindi, so I know he understood me—and read my guidebook instead so I wouldn’t have to see what was going on. (Hortense, mercifully, was asleep.) Every so often, I’d look up and see a large, colorful truck heading right for us. I’d just look down again and trust that our driver, who for all his lead-footedness, seemed highly skilled, did not want to die any more than we did, and that he would get us there safely, which he did.

Our trip took us past an endless landscape of military installations and checkpoints, since Jaisalmer, our destination, is 35 miles from the Pakistan border. Benazir Bhutto had been murdered the day before I left the US, and people were a little jumpy out there. The soldiers at the checkpoints examined us, unsmiling, as if we might be members of Al Queda trying to make our way home. At one point, as we crossed a particularly desolate stretch of desert, our driver pointed to a military camp not far from the road and said cheerfully, “Firing range.” I nodded and smiled.

It was dark when we reached Jaisalmer. Our hotel was part of Jaisalmer’s fort, a vast sand-colored structure that hovers above the desert like a mirage. The driver had told us that there had been terrible flooding in the fort during a recent monsoon and that as a result, its base was crumbling. “Danger,” he said. This served us right: Lonely Planet had told us that staying inside the fort was not a good environmental choice. We had chosen to ignore this warning because on its website, our hotel, which was part of the fort, looked ethereally beautiful.

In reality, it was not. Our room, whose wall was the bare stone of the fort, was freezing cold and not terribly clean. A window in the bathroom was open to the outside, and someone had stuffed an embroidered pillow into it. Though it billed itself as a “deluxe accommodation,” the hotel was actually rather shabby, and though it claimed to be run by a brother and sister who would treat guests as family, these gregarious siblings were apparently in Canada, and the hotel was run by a team of well-meaning but somewhat bumbling young men, most of whom seemed just barely into their teens.

It was one of these guys who recommended the restaurant next door. One of the urchins brought us a tray of what turned out to be the worst mattar paneer I’d ever tasted along with some stale, tepid rice.

By that point, we had spent over two weeks in India without the slightest digestive disturbance, but people say that it’s only a matter of time. By the next morning, I was down for the count. Instead of exploring the fort, I spent the morning throwing up and the afternoon in bed with aches and chills.

As I lay there shivering, I contemplated the weird, rapid change that India had brought about in me. Somehow, in the space of just over two weeks, I had gone from being a germaphobic paranoid who devoted considerable energy to anticipating everything that could go wrong and preventing it to being someone who would eat dodgy Indian food without the least trepidation. While I was now sorry about the food, and continued to be sorry for the next several days, I realized that perhaps overall, this change was salutary. While speeding down the desert highway, I had been forced to acknowledge that one problem I had with our driver was that he was driving, not me, and that I felt completely out of control of my own fate. I had always known I had control issues, trust issues, and fear issues, but now, though I was chilled to the bone, thanks to the wind whipping through the fort—we had a space heater, but there were daily power cuts, so it wasn’t working—I felt that I’d been liberated from a lifetime of apprehension toward all the dangers that await us in this uncertain world.

But the next morning, I called a nice hotel in Jaipur that someone had told us about, and we went there, spending the next two days in front of their pool, eating their safe food (Hortense) and drinking banana lassis (me). On the long drive there back across the desert, our new driver also drove very fast, often zooming toward oncoming vehicles, but I barely noticed. Even Hortense, who was awake, did not remark on anything except, later, the driver’s incessant loud belching, which had troubled her. We had a wonderful time in Jaipur, shopping, watching American sitcoms on cable TV, and resting up until I felt better.

Then, suddenly, I was home, with a horrible case of jetlag. Awake in the night, surfing the internet, I bump into a news story about listeria-contaminated milk in Massachusetts having caused the deaths of three people. Just before I left for India, the daughter of one of my coworkers was in a horrible car accident. She was seriously injured, and two of her friends were killed. There is nothing safe about life here, or anywhere; we are only safe when asleep, and sometimes not even then (the other day, a young friend of a friend of a friend of mine went to sleep and never woke up). But it feels safe here.

I’m still barely able to sleep, but when I do, I dream of teeming, colorful throngs of traffic, the roads full of people, cows, goats, monkeys.

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