guns and monkeys

I am ok. Just arrived in Gwalior after three days in extremely remote bandit-dominated country with no electricity, hardly any water, and certainly no cellular internet connection. Walking 20 miles per day (32 km). My whole body hurts so bad. I have a slight fever tonight, but less than last night. Don't know what that is, hope it goes away. The foreigners on this padyatra aren't doing too well right now. There are two right now -- a 35-year-old woman from the UK just joined -- Becky. Has volunteered a lot at Sambhavna in the past. She's got a really bad fever tonight, vomited all last night. Kept getting up in the middle of the night. We also had rats crawling around our heads. Been sleeping with a lot of rats. Have basically got over my fear of that. (Subway tunnels, here I come). In Shivpuri there were gangs of them jumping and scurrying all around us and squealing. Every time I'm lying there in the pitch blackness listening to that I think there's no way I can sleep, but really there is no way I can stay awake. We are all so exhausted we could sleep through anything. The other foreigner, Daniel, the documentary filmmaker, has gone all but completely mad and has left the group for the night, maybe for the rest of the week.

Everyone else is ok. A little wet. It's supposed to definitely, definitely not rain at all in India (at least this part and 99% of the rest of it) until the monsoon, which comes after June. This was a key detail for the feasibility of this journey. It has now been raining for three days. Little bits, but enough to get us all full of mud, which believe me you don't want to see in a place like Gwalior. Gwalior is a pretty big place. Has an airport and all that stuff. We're going to stay here for two nights -- my first layover. So excited. Need to sleep and catch up on work, maybe look for a few supplies, stuff like that.

After Gwalior we're back into the bandit country, for a much longer stretch. I think we're pretty safe, though. People like us. Word spreads up and down the highway that we're cool people. We had a police escort for one especially dangerous stretch. They police out there have special, walled camps from which they wage their ongoing war on the dacoits. Apparently there are hundreds and hundreds -- one job might involve over a hundred of them surrounding a group on motorcycles and horses. One of the padyatris was a dacoit girl in her youth. She's wild. Tells a lot of stories. Probably shouldn't relate too much here. The bandit country, though, is interesting. No farms. Looks a lot like New Mexico. Brush and sand. Lots of guns, bandits or not. As soon as we left Shivpuri, the first place we stopped for tea had a guy standing out front with a full-barrel shotgun with no shoulder butt, only a pistol grip. Black gun. Just holding it there with one hand, limp, pointed at the ground. He looked as if he was just about to start his day when we arrived and he stopped halfway to the road to just stand and watch us. Everyone just stares at us, partly because some of us are foreign, but also because no one ever walks through that land. Half the guys on motorbikes have their faces covered in cloth -- unusual for India. Lots of them have guns slung across their backs. It's just a different culture -- where everyone is half-in, half-out of the law, like old Brooklyn.

I'm ok, though. I've been in a lot of pain for the past few days. To stay connected and kill the discomfort I walk along side one or another padyatri and start asking them questions about where they live now, where they lived in 1984, what happened to them, their family, what their health problems are and whether they are from the gas or from the poisoned water. It kills all my pain immediately. These people are truly incredible.

I should go for now. Will write more tomorrow. M.