Safe again, somewhere in Delhi

I am in a new home now, in a different part of Delhi. It is the most "affordable" place I have stayed in all India. No, no -- the most affordable place I have actually paid for. This is a major perk of having been on the padyatra. All India is open to me now: the roads, the fields, the flophouses, and certainly anything high up there enough to call itself a hotel, or "guest house." No more expensive hang-ups with mysterious discolorations and strange, oracular toilets who tell stories of other worlds. Here in the middle of India's second largest city, this place is cheaper than the rathole I stayed at in little Shivpuri. It has white-ish walls splattered and stained with substances red, brown, and black. There is something called 'pan' in India. When you get here you will wonder why there is blood all over the walls. That is pan. It's this stuff that people put in their mouths and then spit all over the place. Only some kinds have tobacco in them. It has a long history, and I hear it's even supposed to be good for you. It makes a lot of walls look pretty disgusting, though.

This is pan saliva smeared into a picture on the wall of the room in which I slept two nights back in Gwalior. Pan spit is everywhere.

This room has a place in the floor covered by a small pile of loose tiles to hide a hole through which you can watch raw sewage pass by as it tumbles through the building's cavities on its way to the next inappropriate place. Tiny flies jam together to get a little piece of the action. A mild fecal scent fills the room's thick, humid air every time someone upstairs flushes a toilet. I have good incense, though. The street is no different, so I can't complain much, but later I might see if they have a room without an observation window. I've got other problems right now.

It has become so hot in Delhi that all at many times I find myself paralyzed, able to do nothing but lie on my back and breathe slowly while rivulets of sweat drip in starts and stops down my temples and my neck, my skin sticking to damp hotel bedding I wouldn't have touched in my previous life. Like the rat thing, I look at it and I just don't care anymore. I can't care. I am so tired. I want to move somewhere cold as a base from which to travel places like this. I think I could handle anything at all if I knew I would spend just one month a year in San Francisco.

I must mention something lovely. The first and second movements of Chopin's Sonata No. 2 in B flat minor. It has roped Delhi and tied it to my fingers. Close your eyes and listen to it, if you have a copy. I miss playing piano so much -- I don't know how I've been able to live without it.

So, I had to move because strange people are following the foreigners. Presumably these are people from India's Central Bureau of Investigation. There is another very suspicious woman who has shown up starting conversations both in Bhopal and here. I have a strong suspicion she is not who she says she is. She asks too many questions about all the wrong things and remembers too many details. She can't be from the Indian government, so if she's on the job then I suspect she is paid by private entities -- either Dow or some ungodly industry alliance that includes Dow. Other Indian men ask strange questions. When I follow them, I look behind me to find certain faces that never seem to want to pass ahead. I can thank the ridiculously overzealous NYPD for several years of a first class education in how to detect undercover/fake people. The last straw for me was when, in a conversation on the street with a strangely friendly man who was very interested in me, it came out that he knew what hotel I had been staying in and had been in communication with the management. It's hard to tell what is weird and what is just part of being in India. Questions about him were answered with smoke and then he disappeared incredibly fast. I wonder if it is dangerous to post this up. I think it's better. Someone turn the lights on. I am here visiting friends with big problems and a quite a few people in India's capital are apparently very uncomfortable with the subject of Bhopal and Dow Chemical.

Here we can see corporate globalization in action. Several people from the group have been meeting with a wide range of people very high up in the Indian government. More than half of these people are on a direct phone and personal visit basis with the Prime Minister. Through all the fog and circumlocution, a common theme is emerging. They simply cannot piss off Dow Chemical. It's not that there is no money, nor that it is technologically impossible to clean up Bhopal, nor that the Bhopalis' medical problems are beyond the Indian medical establishment. The problem, more than any of those things, is that Dow is watching and Dow is listening, and it seems that everyone in the Indian government is too afraid almost to even talk about that fact on the record. Off the record, though, we have been told that Dow has explained that they can never clean up Bhopal because doing so would set a terrible precedent and force them to clean up all kinds of messes it has made all over the world.

From the point of view of the Indian government, cleaning up Bhopal would 'send the wrong message'. This leaves us to ask what the right message is. The right message is that you can come over here and save a lot of money by abandoning all safety standards and if things go wrong, well, hey -- shit happens. You certainly won't have to deal with it or anything. We're cool like that here in India. We'll never stand in the way between your projects and our poor. It's all about maintaining a good "climate" for business. The ways in which it happens can be very complicated, but the end is very simple. The authority of the largest technically democratic government on the planet to protect its people has been lost to the deadly game of cultivating corporate playgrounds.


"you've thrown the worst fear
that can ever be hurled
fear to bring children into the world
for threatening my baby
unborn and unnamed
you ain't worth the blood
that runs in your veins

let me ask you one question
is your money that good?
will it buy you forgiveness?
do you think that it could?

i think you will find
when death takes it toll
all the money you've made
will never buy back your soul"

bob dylan

Where I am now.