India: Day 11: The Taj

We had it with the stupid Meadow's Inn. The dirty sheets and tiny blankets and lack of supplies just blow my top. So we went to get a pedicure in the morning. My first one! My first time letting a man touch my toes for so long. First time all those calluses got rubbed away! I felt so refreshed and cleaned.

Besides, it is Jennifer's birthday! She deserves some pampering.

And to make that happen while also escaping this stupid hotel, we moved to the Taj, the most luxurious hotel in the state (well, maybe the one in Agra, where the Taj Mahal is, is better). I am writing from the Taj now, and wow!

But first, some observations before arriving in the room:

Had to haggle with the rickshaw-wallah again. First one agreed finally to 30 rupees, but then some other random dude came in and so we said that it would be 20 rupees for us together. The driver refused so we walked out (along with all our luggage). Truth be told he and we were both stupid. He should have accepted it because with Indian passengers he would have gotten less. We should have accepted his (new) demand of 50 rupees because the difference is dimes and it's over 110 degrees outside in the shades. But we, being human, refused to have our honor insulted. So in the shade we waited a few minutes for another rickshaw to show up and ended up paying 50 rupees together anyway to the most luxurious hotel in town (I meantion that it is luxurious because rickshaw drivers know that too!)
We passed by this new construction project mentioned in one of the newsletters Jennifer read to me. It costs 90 million dollars with the statue of some demogogue whose party funded the project. Jennifer thinks that the money is much better spent in things like lifting poverty or put in sewage system! I saw the work being done, and although it is indeed beautiful, the beauty is made not for the poverty stricken majority but to paint an image that ultimately serves only the already wealthy.
Finally we arrived at the main gate of the Taj. My first impression isn't awe at the beautiful architecture I saw in the pictures, but at the awkward reaction of the rickshaw driver. He asked me, "andar?", which means "inside"? His face was full of embarrassment and the question puzzled me. I wondered, was he trying to get me to pay him more just to drive up? More fight over dimes? But Jennifer said he probably wouldn't be allowed to go in. I didn't want to believe it so in my broken Hindi I asked if they'd let him drive all the way up to the main entrance. Before he could understand a man with a handlebar moustache came and asked for our baggage. I understand now. The answer is "No." This rickety, poor man's mode of vehicle cannot be parked in front of the most luxurious hotel in town, part of the most luxurious hotel chain of India, a pride of the new wealth. I was not upset, just sad.
Sadness disappears quickly in new countries. Here is a list of wow's inside the Taj:
- The key is old and made of brass, wow! Not plastic.
- It is sooooooo quiet here. Maybe because my ears are so used to the hums and honks of the Indian city. I even hear parrots!
- The bed is sooooooooooooooo soft. Soooooo soft! Not like that thing I slept on the last four nights.
- Perfect English; I could understand these people!
- A sofa in this "standard" bedroom!
- There's a little golden sticker on the new roll of bathroom tissue!
- The soap is beautiful, almost didn't want to use it! It's transluscent, soft brown.
- The chai they brought up is the best yet! Though it doesn't have the traditional cardamom taste.
- A nice, unchipped, unscratched desk of my height with a very comfortable desk!
- So much natural light!
- A glass table! Wow wow wo!
- After we went out for a few hours, we found the room to be in order again; the books we moved around were placed back in the right place, trash bin emptied, bedsheets straightened. Such attentiveness.
- And most of all, everything is clean!

The boy who came in with the chai was very polite, always "Sir" this "Ma'am" that (British "Ma'am" sounds like American "Mom"). I feel a little uncomfortable. I feel I must belong to some upper class, the oppressor class. I don't want to. I just want something human, meaning comfortable bed, clean air, peaceful setting, just for a little bit. The boy was very polite, asking if I wanted him to pour the tea or not, very attentive. Shouldn't we all deserve this treatment? It's not gold, it's love between human beings. We all deserve this attentiveness from other human beings, not just those who fear us, who need us for their own semi-comfort.

Yesterday I forgot to mention that I saw more slums. I got a better look at the "houses" people were "living" in. They were just bamboos or wooden sticks propping up worn-out tarp. If it were in some green mountains in the Appalachians I would think it's fun, like camping. But this is where people and their families lived, and a pang of sorrow momentarily overwhelmed me, as it does to me now, writing from a "comfort" that somehow is a "luxury." Comfort isn't a prerogative of the wealthy and powerful; it's what everyone deserve, but somehow most people in this city, this country, maybe this world, settle for a hot, dirty, dusty lot of maybe 50 sq feet in a place with probably no access to sanitation and under constant threat of hunger and diseases.

In other developments:

I rode in the back of a motorcycle for about 15 seconds when this apartment broker took me across the street to get water.
More men biking with rifles slung on their shoulders; they are security guards going home or work, not sure.
Dogs everywhere in the shades to hide from the angry sun but they wake up and howl through out the night in packs.
Saw more cows eating from garbage heaps.
Witnessed rush hour traffic (though it's a Sunday) where all the rickshaws became "shared autos" where people pay per person to share an auto to go where they needed to go, much cheaper and faster than a bus, which I haven't dared to take.
We were put off by the apartment broker who just left us in the middle of nowhere when he didn't sniff a sale from us, who weren't very impressed with the apartment. We had to play a James Bond act of "Oh, Guoneng, what time do we have to meet our friends at the mall?" "In 45 minutes, I think, not sure." "Oh, then, sorry, we have to go now, we will call you later."

A word about Indian security. Every mall, store, or anything where the wealthier (meaning people who aren't looking at us like money trees) go has metal detectors and guards holding a hand-held metal detector. It's a country with a serious problem with terrorism, probably second only to Israel, but also these people (not the metal detectors) are there to prevent the poor from skulking off with their goods. But from a foreigner's point of view these things are a joke.

Do these people know what a bomb looks like? Because it ain't going to have some wires and a digital clock showing number of seconds left in red like in a Bollywood movie.
Do they think I will steal anything from, say, a grocery store? One grocery store went further by sealing the plastic bags of your goods so you don't put more stuff in it on your way out. Well, I guess you can't give better favors for foreigners, fine, I don't want to be acused of being a colonialism apologist.
But, today was even better. I had a bag on, so usually they had to take my bag away, which would be fine if the place where they stored bags isn't on the other side of the building! So I showed them all I had in the bag was a camera. So they took me to a woman who scribbled on a sticker. I thought she would put the sticker on my bag to indicate that it only had a camera on it. That would have made sense to me. But no, she put that sticker on my camera! To indicate that it is mine and that I didn't steal this camera worth $1,500 from this discount store! :-O Of course, on my way out, no one bothered to check anything anyway.
The Taj also has a metal detector, new since the Mumbai attack that involved the Taj in Mumbai. The silly thing is that when we returned the second time, and the metal detector rang, indicating I had metal on me, no one bothered to check us. The security guard (amazingly, a woman!) just opened the door with a smile and "Good evening, Sir; good evening, Ma'am." So no checking if I had just gotten an Uzi from my Larsh-e-Taiba contact after checking in?