Vortex Control

Have you ever had one of those unexpected impulses to do something really inappropriate? We call this the Vortex.

Say, for example, you’re walking down some stairs with a friend and you suddenly get the urge to trip them. Or you’re talking to your lecturer and, for no reason, you feel like it’d be great to kick them in the shins. Or you’re out in a restaurant eating soup and just really want to crack it over the head of your date, the way you’d crack open a soft-boiled egg.

That’s the Vortex.

You don’t know where the feeling has come from. You might be annoyed at the target of these feelings, but you might just as easily not. The Vortex doesn’t even need to be directed someone specific – maybe you just feel like kicking a stranger.

The Vortex can also apply to other urges. Maybe you want to shout “POO-FACE!” as loud as you can in a crowded shopping mall. Or blow a raspberry when you’re meeting the president. This can also fall under the domain of the Vortex.

We’ve found the best way to deal with this, especially when the Vortex is directed at someone in your immediate vicinity, is to warn them what you want them to do and then ask if you can do it, but gently. “Babe, can I kick you in the shins softly?” “Mr. President, may I make a quiet little farting sound with my lips?” Then you give them a gentle shin-tap with your foot. And you feel pretty good afterwards. Generally, the Vortex is satisfied. And they feel good because they haven’t been unexpectedly brutalised by someone they had felt was a close personal friend.

Other times, however, there is no appropriate way to satisfy the Vortex. Your desire is so specific, so unpolite, or will get you in so much trouble – and there is no way to gentle it down – that you just have to deal with it. An example of this kind of Vortex might be wanting to push a stranger off the edge of a cliff for no reason.

To the drunk guy with his pants around his ankles, pissing off the mountains in Dharamsala while singing European pop songs at the top of his lungs: if you’re reading this, now you know what was going through her head when the girl behind you shouted, “OH MY GOD, VORTEX CONTROL!”

under the fort

When we were staying at Yogi’s Guesthouse in Jodhpur, I found it impossible to ignore or avoid the owner, Apu, who would prowl the grounds getting drunk on rum or gin and being aggressive, friendly, generous, and threatening all at once.

One night, he told us what he thought of smoking. “I don’t do it,” he said. “Sometimes, if there’s some chariss going around, yes I will share some, but normally, no. I don’t like it.”

The next day, I was sitting on the roof at sunset. I was watching the birds flock about the battlements of Mehranga Fort and the cliffs they rest on. They were cheel birds, also known as black kite, or more awesomely, Pariah Kite. They would take off and glide and land in great groups, moving together to give the impression of gently rolling waves. In the distance I could hear a holy man singing, his haunting voice echoing over the city. Though I’m not a spiritual person, I found it infinitely relaxing.

Usually so crowded with traffic, Jodhpur always seemed quietest at sunset.

Suddenly I was smacked on the shoulder. Startled, I turned to see Apu standing behind me smoking a biri.

“Hey,” he said, “Do you smoke?”

“No,” I replied, looking at the cigarette in his hand and remembering our conversation from the night before.

“Why you don’t smoke?” he asked.

“Because I don’t like it.”

He stared at me for a second and made some kind of strangled sound with his throat, like he was saying “Ahh” for the dentist but really annoyed about it. He finished his biri and threw the butt off the balcony. Then he stole my laptop to show some English girls who’d just arrived a clip from his favourite movie and yelled at me when the power went out.

the man with one eye

We actually found decent coffee in Kevala in the Paravati valley. So far in India I’ve been able to find one type of coffee I can handle: black, sugary Nescafe. There are places with ‘real’ coffee, by which I mean filtered, but it’s worse than the Nescafe. So it was great to discover there’s a little coffee shop next to our guest house that sells coffee that’s pretty close to delicious. Of course, a single cup is the same price as a whole dinner.

The cafe is tiny and when we first went there it was crowded, so we shared our table an oldish Nepali man. He was giving a couple of young Indian guys tips on how to smoke chillum, but it wasn’t long before he turned his attention to us.

Now, we’ve long since gotten used to the fact that every conversation we have with any local who wants to say hello to us follows the same script. This is how it goes.

First they ask which country we’re from, and we say Australian. And they ask whether we’re from Sydney or Melbourne (and if you’re not from either of these cities it’s easiest just to pretend that you are because nobody in India has heard of Brisbane).

And then they say, “Ricky Ponting! Michael Clark!” and we smile and pretend we know who they’re talking about. Then we realise it’s a cricket thing. I’ve stopped telling people I don’t follow cricket because I’m always asked to explain why. Even when I went paragliding, in tandem, the guy who jumped off the cliff with me only wanted to talk about cricket. There I was, suspended hundreds of metres in the air by nothing but a sheet, faking my way through a sporting conversation.

So when the Nepali man asked whether we were Scandinavian, we thought we had our half of the conversation all prepared.

“We’re Australian, actually,” we said.

“Ah, Australian!” the Nepali man replied. “I can always tell if you’re Australian or Scandinavian,” he said, “Because you all have the same skin condition.”

He was not following the script.

“Do you mean to say that we’re pale?”

He sat back and shrugged. He only had one good eye, which was quite a dark shade of brown. The other was faded and milky and looked off in an odd direction.

“Whatever you want to call it,” he said.

retreat ceremony

On the border of India and Pakistan, near Amritsa, a daily retreat ceremony is held when, every evening, they close the borders for the night. We forgot to bring our passports. We left them at home, as we usually do, and didn’t even think about it until the taxi dropped us off and we realised we were at a location set up purely for the purpose of checking visas.

We mentioned it to our driver and he just shrugged. No matter, he said, your white faces will be passport enough.

The ceremony itself is held in a little amphitheatre. Before being let in, the military searches you for weapons and bombs. I got patted down by a soldier who wouldn’t stop giggling as he felt up my legs. Then we were asked for our passports and we said, sorry, we forgot ‘em. So they asked us for some ID, any ID, and we said, sorry… we got nothing. Driver’s licence? Nope. Student card? Nuh-uh. The most I had was a credit card which apparently didn’t cut it, but the soldiers, with their rifles slung over their shoulders, just shrugged and let us through anyway.

As foreigners, we got pride of place. Our spot on the grandstand was very close to the actual gates and only one step lower than the Indian upper-caste members. I’ve never seen such obvious segregation of the castes before: upper caste closest to the gate, then tourists, then middle-class. The lower caste were basically locked outside and forced to fight for a good view through the amphitheatre’s gates. We were told that that mob was full of pickpockets and to stay away from them, but one German guy we were with ignored that advice and had his wallet, credit card and passport stolen right out of the front of his jeans.

There was a lot of marching and cheering. A guy in a white jumpsuit got on the microphone to rev up the crowd every time something was about to happen. Flags were waved. Pairs of soldiers, one Indian, one Pakistani, on their respective sides of the borders, marched back and forth with parade precision, straightened their hats at each other and stared each other down. When orders were shouted, it was one long call – “Huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu-ut!” into the microphone. This would be shouted from both the Indian and Pakistani sides of the border simultaneously – just as they tried to out-march each other, just as they tried to get the civilians on either side to out-cheer each other, the soldiers calling the orders would try to out-shout each other. Despite the fact that they were on opposite sides of a military dick-waving contest, they harmonised every time.

It was interesting to see but it left me with a bad taste. Every day, the military forces of two different nations with a history of war and violence between them basically give each other the finger to say, “We’re better than you. We’re not shooting each other right now but if we were we’d totally beat you.” And civilians turn out in droves to cheer their respective sides on. As an Australian, it was remarkable to see so much national pride, but I can’t help remembering that in my country, you can’t show national pride without also hinting that you’re a racist homophobe.

THE NIGHT OF THE PLUMMETING ASSAULT

Around midnight, on the train from Mumbai to Marwar, Milos dropped Tanya’s laptop off the top bunk. He’d fallen asleep sitting up with the laptop on his lap and it just slipped right off. Luckily, the train was packed, and the father of the family below us was sleeping on the floor between the beds, so its fall was broken by his face.

Tanya, Milos and I had caught the train with only two tickets between us, so they were sharing an upper bunk bed with each other while I shared another with our luggage. There were people sleeping on the floor all down the aisle. When I went to the toilet, I woke three separate people, but they didn’t mind because there was literally nowhere to put my feet without shifting people around to find the floor.

I was listening to my iPod with my eyes closed when someone started tugging on my arm, and I looked down to see two Indian men glaring at me, holding up Tanya’s laptop and asking if I owned it. One of them kept rubbing his jaw and looking in a mirror to check how badly he was bruised.

Milos was still sitting up but he was pretty much dead asleep. He kept rocking dangerously from side to side. Whenever he would tip too far he would snort and shake his head and sit back up again, but he never opened his eyes. It was funny enough that it helped diffuse the tension by giving me and the angry Indian men something to laugh at together.

Eventually I started to get worried that Milos was going to fall right off, but I could see that Tanya, curled up on the other half of the bed, had her bum in the perfect position to create a nice comfy pillow for Milos if he’d just fall in the right direction, so I leaned between our bunks and gently tried to push him over. He sort of woke up as soon as I touched him. I mean, he was just awake enough to be confused. He was dopey-eyed and kept looking around as if lost. The two Indian men were still glaring at him. I tried to push Milos over again, hoping he’d just lie down and go to sleep, but he refused. He started looking for the computer. I told him I had it. The men kept glaring. Milos gazed back at them. I wanted to go to sleep, so I had to do something. “Milos,” I said. “LIE DOWN.”

And he finally did.

I apologised to the guy he’d brutalised, and in the morning, after we’d all woken up, we only had to spend six hours sharing seats with him and his family. But nobody mentioned it so it was all ok.

as bad as they get

It’ll be obvious to anyone reading that Thailand and India are two different countries. (Stick with me, kid, we’ll get you a pass on that geology exam yet!)

This next paragraph that I’m going to write would work very well if I began it with the phrase, “Never has this been more clear to me than when I stepped off the plane from Bangkok in Delhi.” But that sentence would only be vaguely true. Then again, “One of the times I was humouressly reminded of this fact was when…” sounds passive, boring and clunky. Also, “humouressly” isn’t a real word. I’m gonna have to try and find some nice middle ground.

I didn’t really even consider the comparison between India and Thailand until about four days of being in Delhi. I’m just gonna put it out there and say that there’s nothing to see in Delhi. Well ok, that’s a lie, but whatever you do find to do is not gonna be particularly fun. Unless you know somebody rich who lives there. Anyway I’ve gotten sidetracked. What was I trying to talk about? Thailand.

Thailand! The king country of sex tourism! In its two most popular hotspots you can’t turn around without tripping over a scantilly-clad prostitute or a strip club. Girls in tight shorts and bikinis dance on all the bar tops. Get in a taxi at eleven in the morning and he’ll offer to take you to some good boom-boom. “Really,” he’ll say, “I know a place. Nice, clean, very good!” And he won’t let up until you lie and tell him you got heaps of boom-boom the night before and are all boom-boomed out for now.

And walk down Thao Khao San at night, listen to the tuk-tuk drivers making little wet puk-puk-puk sounds with their mouths and try and pretend you don’t know what they’re really selling. To be fair, that’s kinda what you get when you name your two most popular hotspots “Phuck It” and “Bang a Cock”.

Contrast with my first week in Delhi, where the most sexually charged images I could find were signs advertising “PG Girls”.

a quick update on hampi

I don’t think I mentioned being mugged by some kids in Hampi.

I loved riding my rented motorbike along the lake, through tiny villages which weren’t anything more than collections of huts around a farm. Jack and I rode together one day, and stopped briefly in one where we were surrounded by kids asking for chocolate and playing cricket with a banana leaf.

Later we came across three boys swimming in a run-off from the river, and they made a chain across the road and forced me to stop and surrounded me. The eldest one couldn’t have been more than thirteen, and he was smiling and his voice was confident and commanding when he said, “Hello! Give me your glasses.”

“No,” I said, and tried to zoom off, but the two younger boys grabbed the back of my bike and held it in place. It wasn’t the most powerful of bikes, admittedly, and they held it fast. “Stay, stay!” they shouted. I pushed the throttle to full power and the bike coughed smoke into their faces. The oldest boy grabbed the back of the bike, pushing the youngest out of the way, who just stood beside me, touched my shoulder gently and grinned sheepishly.

“Don’t go!” the older two shouted, but I put my feet on the ground and added my own strength to that of my bike’s feeble motor, and straddling the bike, it working as hard as it could, me pushing with as much strength as I could awkwardly leverage, we started to creep forward.

The first step was hard, the second step was harder, but by the third I’d built up a little momentum and all of a sudden the bike surged forward, slipping out of the boy’s hands and sending one of them sprawling. They laughed as I zoomed away.

On the way back I saw them again, from a distance, and they waved happily.