Head Waggling in Delhi: And Other Travel Tales from an Epic Journey Around India

By Eytan Uliel

For centuries, India’s mystical allure has drawn in visitors in search of enlightenment, riches, romance, and adventure. In the mid-1990s, as a precocious twenty-three-year-old, author Eytan Uliel and his girlfriend set off on a journey of discovery, leaving behind the comforts of Sydney to backpack in India for four months.

Limited to a budget of twelve dollars a day, they lived, ate and traveled like locals. The journey around the sub-continent took them north to south, east to west: from the holy city of Varanasi to the modern-day playground of Mumbai; from the desert fortresses of Rajasthan to the bucolic backwaters of Kerala. Along the way they sipped tea in Darjeeling, experienced a train ride from hell to Madras, got bit parts in a Bollywood film, ogled at the incomparable Taj Mahal, hung with hippies in Goa, and met a whole lifetimes’ worth of fascinating, entertaining and memorable characters.

Head Waggling in Delhi offers timeless insight into life on the road in India—the good, the bad and the downright bizarre—filled with wry observation, affection, and humor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Nov 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781480867994

Eytan Uliel

Eytan Uliel is a wanderer, global traveler and seriously committed gourmand. After graduating from the University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia, he practiced corporate law for several years before moving on to a career in investment banking, private equity, and oil and gas finance. His work schedule has taken him to every corner of the globe, and he chronicles these journeys on his blog, The Road Warrior (www.eytanuliel.com). Born in Jerusalem, Eytan currently divides his time between Los Angeles, Nassau and Sydney.

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PRAISE FOR HEAD WAGGLING IN DELHI

"5 out of 5 stars"

Clarion Reviews

"Great travel writers practice alchemy: synthesizing the sights, sounds and smells of their travels into a transcendent reading experience. Eytan Uliel showcases such skill in this memoir.

A literary masala worth the tasting."

Blue Ink Review

Sharp, engaging writing, an intelligent balance between grit and splendor, and carefully selected anecdotes bring India’s diversity to life. In this accomplished travel memoir, India beguiles and repels and beguiles again, resulting in a fascinating journey that is as eye opening as it is dreamlike.

Karen Rigby, Foreword Reviews

"Candidly captures the essence of India and details the multi-faceted Indian lifestyle and culture with a lively fusion of witty humor and a grand sense of adventure. Uliel’s humorous way of story-telling made me burst out laughing more than once. An epic read.

4 out of 4 stars"

Online Book Club

www.headwagglingindelhi.com

Also by Eytan Uliel

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HEAD WAGGLING IN DELHI

And Other Travel Tales from an

Epic Journey around India

EYTAN ULIEL

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Copyright © 2019 Eytan Uliel.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

Archway Publishing

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.archwaypublishing.com

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Interior Image Credit: Jazna Cisler.

ISBN: 978-1-4808-6798-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-6797-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-6799-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018911201

Archway Publishing rev. date: 11/22/2019

Contents

Prologue

Map

Welcome to India

A World Cup in Varanasi

Darjeeling: Up in the Clouds

Calcutta: The City of Joy

The Train Ride from Hell

Down in Madras, and Other Tales from Tamil Nadu

A Day as a Bollywood Film Star

The Backwaters of Kerala

India Today, India Yesterday: a Visit to Bangalore and Mysore

Goa: Where Have All the Hippies Gone?

Impressions of Bombay

Exploring India's Forgotten Places

Udaipur: James Bond City

Snapshots from Rajasthan

The Camel Safari

The Incomparable Taj Mahal

Head Waggling in Delhi: The End of a Journey

For Camilla: my original travel partner-in-crime.

Thanks for putting up with me. I am forever

grateful for your friendship.

Prologue

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In India, people waggle their heads a lot.

Although when I say a lot, I kind of mean all the time.

You see, Indians have a seemingly national ability to waggle their heads. It is a subtle motion, a shaking of the noggin that is neither up and down nor side to side, but is more of a nondirectional wiggle. Like the movement of the head of a jack-in-the-box mounted on the end a bouncy spring.

Head waggling transcends all other boundaries in India. A five-year-old kid is just as likely to waggle his or her head as a ninety-year-old grandmother. Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jains, and Jews—they all waggle. From the mountains of Darjeeling to the coconut groves of Kerala, from the bustling markets of Mumbai to the depths of the desert in Rajasthan—head waggling is always there.

And, as I came to learn, the head-waggle is one of the keys—if not the key—to understanding, and surviving, India.

A well-timed waggle could mean "yes, it could mean no, it could mean maybe. It could mean, I don’t have a clue, or it could mean, Don’t ask me, I just work here." It could mean all of those things all at once, and maybe a thousand other things as well.

Or, it could mean nothing at all.

During our travels around India, when we would confront a person after they had lied to us or cheated us, their standard response was a confused look and a waggle of the head. When taking our orders in restaurants, usually the waiters would do the waggle so that we were left completely in the dark about whether they had even understood what we wanted. When we asked directions of a stranger, their reply was often prefaced with a knowledgeable head-waggle. Sometimes, a head-waggle was the only response.

Simply put, head waggling was an inescapable, ever-present part of life in India. And it had annoyed the hell out of us until we realized that we, too, could become wagglers.

At first, after a few weeks on the road, we tentatively tried waggling in response to specific questions. When that had seemed to go okay, we progressed to waggling in a variety of other situations—be it when negotiating the price for a box of spices in the market (waggle, waggle), hailing a rickshaw driver to take us to the bus station (waggle, waggle), checking on the availability of a hotel room for the night (waggle, waggle), or inquiring about the train departure time (waggle, waggle). By the end of our journey around India we were even waggling our heads at each other in private conversation.

Whereas at first head waggling had felt rather stupid, it became easier with practice. After a while, it even felt oddly liberating—an Orwellian reduction of the entire lexicon into a single, all-encompassing action. Plus, once we began waggling, our life as travelers in India became immeasurably easier, and far less stressful.

Because in coming to terms with the waggle, we also at the same time had to let go of our Western expectations and preconceptions. To waggle, I had to give up on familiar things like handshakes, nods and direct responses to questions, and embrace uncertainty in their place. Waggling meant I first had to accept that in India even basic interpersonal communication operated from a premise that was totally unlike anything I already knew.

It was not just head waggling, of course. India was, in a word, different: a more or less self-contained society housed in a more or less self-contained country that seemed to function in a more or less self-contained kind of way.

Thus the India we encountered was a country largely self-sufficient in food and energy production. The majority of vehicles on Indian roads at the time of our trip were domestically produced ones, churned out in their hundreds of thousands by the Tata and Bajaj conglomerates. Most Indian men still wore traditional clothing; almost every Indian woman wore the traditional sari; jeans had had almost no effect on Indian fashion trends.

Back then there were hardly any Western fast-food outlets anywhere in the country—local food was typically our only option. Hinduism was a self-sustaining domestic religion. A highly popular Indian film industry dominated the cultural scene, with most people completely eschewing Western cinema. Ditto with Western media; ditto with Western television. And ditto with Western pop music: Madonna could most likely have walked down the main street of Calcutta and no one would have so much as turned their head. (To be fair, they probably would have turned their head at the sight of a bleached-blonde foreigner wearing cones for a bra, but you get my point.)

None of which is to suggest that India was homogenous—far from it. As we discovered firsthand on our travels, there were significant, and sometimes very stark, regional differences played out all across the country. We were met by vastly different religions, languages, cultures, foods, climates and terrains, wherever we went.

Yet those internal variances only served to make India seem more, rather than less, of a self-contained world. So, for example, when average Indians went on vacation, they travelled not to Europe or the United States, but to Darjeeling or Kashmir—places that to a native of Madras, say, were just as exotic as Paris or New York. Or like the range of distinct regional cuisines, that meant there was no need for foreign foods in India—a Gujurati thali house in Calcutta was no less ethnic than a Mexican restaurant in Melbourne might be.

The myriad differences that defined and separated each of India’s 29 states and seven territories also served to bind them together. Making sure that inside of the one national border India contained all the baked-in diversity of a multicultural society. Outside influences weren’t required for that.

In many respects, it was this unique brand of insular diversity that made India such an extraordinary, memorable place to visit. Even if as a long-term traveler there I also often found it deeply unsettling.

Because it was tough to be completely immersed in a country that was so thoroughly and unremittingly different. If I woke up feeling nostalgic, I couldn’t grab a familiar newspaper. If I was struck by a bout of homesickness, I couldn’t nip out to catch a trashy Hollywood film, or eat a burger, or reach out for some other comforting reminder of home.

No, truly experiencing India meant accepting that for the whole of the time we were there, we were all in. It meant adjusting to the uniquely Indian way of doing most things. It meant leaving our Western ideas and expectations at the baggage check-in. It meant a basic reappraisal of familiar notions such as personal space, community, and identity.

It meant learning to waggle our heads.

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In 1996, after I had finished five years of grueling study at law school in Sydney, Australia, I needed a break. So together with Camilla, my girlfriend at the time, I set off on an extended voyage of discovery across Asia and Europe. I was a precocious twenty-three-year-old.

Our trip included backpacking in India for four months, in the course of which we undertook a complete circumnavigation of the subcontinent, north to south, and east to west. Along the way we lived like locals, not out of some misconceived notion of authenticity, but out of necessity—we were poor newbie graduates with a daily budget of twelve dollars. Not each, but for both of us. So we had little choice than to stay in low-grade hotels and hostels, eat street food, and travel third-class on busses and trains.

In the process we saw a lot of India—possibly more than most Indians ever will—and we had some amazing, frustrating, truly wonderful, terrible experiences along the way.

Most days our routine included sitting in a café around evening time. Camilla would write postcards to friends and family—that was back in the day before mobile phones, emails, or live Facebook updates existed. Meanwhile I would journal, writing down in a small notebook the events of the day: the places we had been, the people we had met, the things we had done.

Those journal entries blossomed into a series of short stories detailing our adventures, and the trials and tribulations of our life on the road in India—a country that for the most part was an incredible place to travel in, with amazing people and offering up a lifetime’s worth of unforgettable sights, sounds and smells.

But India could at times also be a horrible and exhausting place to travel in—dirty, poor, crowded and bureaucratic—where often people showed no compunction about cheating and lying, especially if to a foreign tourist.

So I determined early on that I was not going to edit my thoughts and feelings for the sake of propriety or political correctness. Sometimes I loved being in India; sometimes I hated it and wished the earth would open up and swallow the whole country in a cloud of dust. For better or worse, my stories tell it exactly like it was for me then—the good, the bad and the ugly.

I have since been back to India many times, both on vacation and for work. In these later trips I have been fortunate enough to experience India from a very different perspective: luxury hotels, fine dining and first-class travel. But revisiting my backpacker stories more than two decades after they were first written, it amazes me how little things have changed in India. In many respects, the events I described way back then could just as easily have happened yesterday.

I hope you enjoy the journey.

Eytan

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Welcome to India

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I had never been in India before, and now here we were, after less than a day in the country, in the holy city of Varanasi, stranded on the steps leading down to the Ganges River.

All around us were Hindu pilgrims—thousands and thousands of them—dunking themselves ceremonially into the sacred Ganges water. Frail old men, skin hanging off their bones like ill-fitting suits, dressed only in white loincloths with a smear of yellow paint across their foreheads. Women wrapped in beautiful saris singing mournful tunes to themselves; groups of young men doing yogic exercises; roving merchants selling incense, colored dyes, and other devotional items. There were beggars of all ages, families on pilgrimage, street urchins, and solemn funeral processions.

The air was smoky, the light wonderfully diffuse.

In short, it felt a lot like we had been airdropped into the opening credits of a National Geographic Channel special. But, it was still only day one of our journey. So sitting on the banks of the Ganges that morning we were not able to fully appreciate the wondrous scene playing out right in front of our eyes. Nor were we ready to grapple with noble intellectual concepts such as personal growth, spiritual enlightenment and self-awareness.

Rather, a far more pressing issue needed to be dealt with: where the fuck will we sleep tonight?

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It had been a less-than-pleasant past twenty-four hours. On a scale of one to ten, I’d say that our arrival in India had rated a minus three. Possibly even a minus four.

We had left Nepal at 7:00 a.m. the day before, having just completed a trek that took us from the foothills of the Himalayas to the edge of the Tibetan plateau, and back. The route had followed ancient trading paths and goat tracks, first through lush, green forests and lowlands, and then across plains of barren rock in the rain shadow of the mountains. Along the way we had passed through isolated villages, and slept each night in lodges run by wizened Tibetan matriarchs where the only source of heat was a burning log fire in the center of the room. Rickety old bridges crossed deep ravines and raging glacier-fed rivers. Occasionally our progress was slowed—sometimes even halted completely—to make way for passing trains of heavily laden donkeys.

For two weeks we ate well, breathed clean mountain air, laughed a lot, and slept soundly each night, tired but happy after six hours of hiking. For two weeks magnificent snowcapped peaks had been the constant backdrop to our lives. Trekking in Nepal had left us relaxed, energized and ready for adventure. I mean, we had just conquered the Himalayas. Compared with that, how hard could India possibly be?

Our first destination in India was the northern city of Varanasi. To get there from Nepal involved traveling by bus to the Indian border, crossing the border, traveling by another bus to the nearest railhead at Gorakhpur, and from there catching a train to Varanasi. It was a journey that, on the pages of our guidebook, had sounded like it would be simple enough to complete. Plus, the bus company in Kathmandu had assured us that the extra money paid for tickets on the super-deluxe-express-tourist-bus meant the ride to the Indian border would be only four hours long. So if we left Kathmandu in the morning, we’d be in Varanasi before dark.

In reality, however, the bus turned out to be a run-down old heap of dubious vintage. There was not a single other tourist on board. And we made numerous detours and lengthy, inexplicable stops the whole way. Consequently, it took almost ten hours to navigate the one-hundred-and-fifty-mile stretch of road to the Nepal-India border.

Then, like proverbial prisoners being tossed to the lions, we were made to disembark and cross the border on foot, running a gauntlet of hustlers, money changers, street hawkers, people who just wanted to practice their English, and beggars.

Entry formalities took twenty-five minutes. This was an astonishing amount of time given that the guard manning the border post only had to take the toothpick he was chewing out of his mouth, open our passports, and stamp them. Thereby recording for all posterity that we had in fact entered India via Sonauli—a godforsaken, dust-blown, and otherwise completely forgettable frontier town.

We, at least, were the lucky ones. As we walked away from the border post, the guard turned to deal with a particularly troublesome and frankly quite hysterical Israeli. His entry visa was somehow not in order, and he was being most unreasonable in refusing to return to Kathmandu (recall: a mere ten hours away!) to sort the matter out in person at the Indian consulate there.

Leaving the poor fellow to his uncertain fate, we went off to deal with a few problems of our own: one—extreme hunger, two—escaping from Sonauli, and three—ditching a seventeen-year-old budding financier in shiny red pants, who had attached himself to us in the hope that we would select him as our Indian banking and foreign exchange agent of choice.

Problem number one was easy to deal with, if not entirely pleasant. For the equivalent of a few cents, a man in a ragged T-shirt served us a mound of rice with some form of meaty substance slopped over it. Despite a distinct lack of hygiene, overpowering hunger (and a lack of any better alternative) drove us to eat. Although in a token gesture to self-preservation we declined the mugs of oily water offered as a free accompanying beverage.

Problem number two was actually solved by problem number three. That is, in an effort to win our business, Red Pants had escorted us to a waiting bus, where we joined a group of three other Western tourists cowering behind their backpacks.

A middle-aged German man—he said that he had been to India many times before and thus had assumed de facto leadership of our motley crew—indicated that I should climb onto the roof of the bus. He began passing me up the bags, one at a time, and I set about the task of strapping them down.

Meanwhile, Red Pants entered into serious negotiations with the German’s wife and a balding Israeli (the ex-traveling companion of the fellow who had been turned back at the border—backpack travel can be a fickle, loyalty-free world).

It turned out that Red Pants, in addition to his day job as a currency dealer, was also a bus-ticket broker of sorts. He proceeded to arrange tickets for the entire group of foreigners to Gorakhpur, from where he said we could catch a night train to Varanasi.

Not content, however, with a five-ticket sale, Red Pants then tried to put the squeeze on us by demanding a 100 percent surcharge for our baggage, plus a porterage fee. Never mind that it was me on the roof of the bus, busily tying the bags down while bleeding into my shirt from a gash inflicted by the rusty luggage racks.

The balding Israeli went berserk at the affront, Red Pants fled for his life, and the German man, looking up at me, uttered the following prophetic words:

India is not a holiday; it is hard work.

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Several bone-crunching hours later, we arrived at the Gorakhpur Railway Station. At the center of it were a large ticketing hall with dozens of booking queues, information boards announcing the comings and goings of trains to all over India, and thousands of people milling about. The noise was deafening.

A station attendant directed us to the far back recess of the hall, where we queued up in front of a sign that read: ‘Tourists Only’. We waited patiently for about twenty minutes while the clerk who issued tickets chatted eagerly with a friend.

At exactly 8:00 p.m. the ticketing clerk wound up his conversation, at exactly 8:00 p.m. the entire Indian Railways computer reservation system went off-line, and at exactly 8:01 p.m. the ticketing clerk informed us that until 8:00 a.m. the following day there was no way humanly possible for us to obtain tickets on an overnight train to Varanasi. He recommended we find a hotel room for the night and return the following morning.

Not at all thrilled with the prospect of spending our first night in India in a flea-infested hovel in Gorakhpur, I decided to visit the station’s Tourist Assistance Bureau. There, a helpful tourist information officer listened patiently to our plight, waggled his head, and then told me that although getting tickets on an overnight train to Varanasi may not have been humanly possible, it was still nonetheless well within the capabilities of the train station mafia.

All of which serves to explain how, less than five hours after arrival in the country, I found myself fraternizing with the Indian underworld.

The tourist information officer made a call. He mumbled something into the mouthpiece and then hung up. Please follow this boy, he said, pointing to a teenager who had mysteriously emerged from the ether. He hadn’t been there just a second before.

The lad led us back out through the booking hall, through the crush of people, and to a dim corner where a representative of the supreme commander was lurking in the shadows. In a conspiratorial whisper this fellow explained to us that the black market price of the proposed train tickets—considerably more than face value—reflected the fact that everybody, from the station superintendent down to the train conductor and the tourist information officer, had to be rewarded for their participation.

Do you agree to the price? he asked, his voice sounding vaguely sinister. Meanwhile, the man’s head waggled in a way that said, I might be phrasing this as a question, but really, it isn’t—so don’t mess with me or I will fuck you up so bad you’ll wish you’d died last week in a Nepalese avalanche. Or something like that.

Obviously, we agreed. I nodded meekly.

Okay. Then return here at 9:30 p.m. exactly. And do not be even one minute late!

I nodded meekly, again. Everything felt incredibly cloak-and-dagger, like we had become stars in our very own spy movie.

At the appointed hour we were back in the corner of the hall. The teenage boy was waiting for us, and a complex chain was initiated whereby he led us to an old man with a pointed mustache, who, in turn, led us to a gorilla of a man with a hairy chest, oily skin, and a fake gold chain around his neck. I handed over some rupee notes, and Gorilla Man produced two cardboard stubs and a scrap of paper covered with some indecipherable squiggles.

These are your train tickets to Varanasi, he muttered.

Yeah, sure, of course they were.

Strict instructions to board the 11:00 p.m. train on Platform Ten were also provided. We therefore had some time to kill and realized we were hungry, not having had anything to eat since Sonauli.

Camilla noticed a sign pointing the way to the Railway Station Canteen, and we followed. There a waiter, dressed in a smart safari suit, seated us and brought us a heavily embossed menu. He hovered nearby until we were ready.

Can I take your order?

Yes, may we have the chicken curry, please? I asked.

The waiter’s head waggled. "I am sorry, sir, but