Curry Tour 2014

Was the precious, stagnant well water the cause of my irreversible bowel damage? Or was it the unlimited curries, fresh camel milk, sand washed dishes, and the utter soaplessness of it all? No, I thought, it was probably the rum.

I was in the Rajasthan wilds to help Roop Singh build his Party House, a place he hoped would soon attract paying tourists to his village.
I started well, moving rocks across a field, happy to work off a 3 curries a day diet, but, by midday, a boy arrived with rum. It burned like the sun, and productivity fell.

The final night, I was comatose in the shed, wrapped in 10 layers: they stop the frigid night but not the shivering. Ritual peacock feathers waved over my crippled form hadn't cured my condition. Nor had an Immodium overdose. Roop and the lads had come and gone; vaguely I remember them squatting around the fire to fry pakora, and offering me rum (‘regular use medicine’ apparently). They were predrinking for an aunt’s funeral, their hair respectfully shaved to the skull.

Eerie dirges disturbed the night, wailing sitar and mournful cries fizzed loud with static turned up to 11. The tabla’s heartbeat shook the desert air. Delirious, my poor brain, already addled with rum, curry, and microbes, became haunted by visions of the past week. Camels. Dusty paths. Rapt stares. Worse: Roop’s very unhappy marriage, yet more rum. Bent backed figures in the fields. No healthcare, no amenities. No money. No toilet.
But there are grimmer things buried beneath the sand than my soiled boxers: the lack of education and poor prospects for the children depressed me the most.

How long before Roop’s kids, now jumping djinns whose laughter would bubble and fill the Party House to shake the corrugated roof, become gnarled and twisted as lonesome trees weathering the dusty storm of desert hardships, their skin sun baked brown bark?

The stars raged above, visible from a hut with only 3 completed walls: a pale spotlight on poverty ignored in the ghostly white sands of that vast, beautiful, indifferent desert. It was with relief then, as the music fell and the sun rose, to know I would be leaving. I would be leaving but no other would. Here, the only escape comes with the help of knock-out rum.

I felt guilty to abandon a people who give with the greatest generosity, when resentment might have been more natural: a resentment towards one who has been granted every opportunity in life, yet required a week in the desert to truly appreciate it.