Delhi day three

 Not a super early morning today but I don’t get to sleep in either. I have a few errands to run around the city and to turn the work into play, I’ve arranged a motorcycle rental for myself. Royal Enfields are iconic out here and the little thumpers are a common sight in the roads here in Delhi. The tour van driver knows a guy and conveniently, he’s located near a metro stop. Easy peasy. Getting around in India is complicated, operating a vehicle doubly so. Now that I’m comfortable with walking and it seems like motorcycling here is a kind of an extension of those behaviors, I figured I was ready to take a crack at it.

It’s raining today. I hate rain. Ehhh whatever, it’s not coming down too hard. All part of the experience and besides, I’ve got a rain coat. I make my way to the rental location and the man comes out to take my info and arrange payment. 1500 rupees for the day plus a 5000 rupee deposit. As luck would have it, I’ve only got about 200 in my wallet. Off for an ATM. On the way here the rain started coming down harder. The roads are full of puddles, dirt, and garbage. Even using the sidewalk is hard now. I find an ATM and it doesn’t work. At this point I decide that between the rain and my inability to pay, God was telling me not to motorcycle in India today. I tell that man it’s not happening, next time. 

On to the next errand. Traveling with undeveloped film is a pain and I’ve got a roll. Luckily for me. There’s a lab in town that can process and scan. Honor handed me her shot rolls to process as well. Getting a car is hard and I’m trying to conserve my cash. The Auto Wallas are everywhere but they’ll need all the money in my wallet to get me to where I need to be. Since the morning rush has impacted the Ubers bad enough, I hail an Auto and unwind in the backseat.

He drops me off at the film lab and predictably they take cash and UPI only. Now that my wallet is thoughraly cleared out, I need to go for a walk in the rain in a market on the hunt for an ATM. Trudging through puddles, shoes squishing into piles of who knows what. Four ATMs later with four different reasons to not give me money and I’m spooked. Once again I’m in a cash hungry place with no cash and the way to get cash isn’t working. Flashbacks to my Berlin trip this summer whip through my mind. I hop on the phone with my bank to figure out what it wrong and the call disconnects after we’re 10 minutes in to a diagnosis with no real smoking gun.

Fuck it. I have a shave appointment to hit. I’m betting that this fancy schmancy shave place in Jor Bagh will take a credit card payment and let me in even though the morning’s debacles have set me back by about an hour. I walk through the doors to a serene oasis. Quiet music punctuated by the sound of sharp blades slicing through facial hair. The barber drowns me in hot towels and all of a sudden, life doesn’t seem so stressful anymore. I close my eyes as he slathers me in every cream and oil in his arsenal and hacks his way through the last three weeks of bushy growth. I emerge from my slumber and am immediately handed a cup of tea. In the mirror a new man gazes back at me. All of my stress is gone.

Before I grapple with my bank again, I decide to try the ATMs at the bank of Punjab one last time. They rejected me once but maybe now that the world feels nicer, I’ll get what I need. The machine beeps and spits out a pile of sweet sweet rupees. It’s stopped raining. All my troubles are gone. The hunger pangs of lunch are creeping up to me and on the way to the photo lab to pay for the film development, I stop off at the Golden Arches. Their menu here is quite different from the standard US fare. The McAloo Tikki is delicious their menu might be even better than Indian Taco Bell. This is, in my humble opinion, a drastic departure from the state of things in the US. Even the masala chai is better than a lot of chais you’d find in the states. What a place.

No longer hungry and still enjoying an air of relaxation, I return to my room for a nap. When I wake it is time to head again to South Delhi to The Claridges, another fancy hotel but not nearly as stuffy as The Imperial. Kristen, Honor, and myself have a table for three booked for the hotel’s high tea. The Imperial is known as the place to go locally but Claridges’ menu deviates from the typical English tea tradition. I’m in India, let’s eat Indian. This was good fun. A large buffet with some of the English classics and a lot of Indian influence alongside. I’m definitely taking notes for my next tea party. Pani Puri bar anyone?

After tea we have some time to kill and head to the mall. Here I’m reminded of the consequences of a major Modi win, UPI. Now that everyone is linked in on UPI, a country that was never a big fan of credit cards is pushing their foreigners to use more cash. Now that cash is falling out of fashion, cash handling is getting poor. I bought a charging cable from a shop for about 230 rupees and handed the man a 500 rupee note. Sounds sane right? He asked if I had 30 in my wallet to make the change easier. I do, and I hand it over. This means he can now make my change with as little as two bills, a 200 and a 100. He pops open the drawer and so begins the debacle. The store had a single 100 rupee note. They had to dig through their stores to make me change which included a sky high stack of 10 rupee coins. I come out laughing, you have to laugh at these India moments. The only other option is to go crazy.

Our next destination is Piano Man again. We have a table booked for tonight’s performance, a five piece sextet. It is Honor’s first time at a jazz club and Kristen and I have a duty as Americans to teach her how to behave properly. The band starts and we’re about a drink deep. We start to holler and whoop. The band smiles. This crowd is stiffer than an American audience but a night and day difference compared to Istanbul. The band is killing it. The vocalist’s performance was astounding. Incredible range, vocal control, and musical sensibility. That made the bassist all the more incredible. It would have been enough for her to simply hang out in the back and bless us with the juicy funky lines she was laying down. She had a mic and sang backing vocals, matching the lead’s tone perfectly and chasing her melody lines. Insane. I’m reminded of the saying that Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did but backwards and in heels.

The band ends and we thank them for their performance. They appreciate our enthusiasm for our work and as we wait for our respective cabs, we’re chatting some more with the musicians. They’re all locals and all career performers. It makes me happy to know that this occupation is still a possibility out here. In so many places it isn’t. Honor and Kristen say their goodbyes and jump into their cars.

I’m waiting for mine. I’m waiting. Eventually a driver picks up my request. He stops moving about a block or two away. I cancel the ride and get a new driver. When he’s about a mile off he calls me to tell me something in Hindi. I let him know I only speak English, naturally he repeats himself. I cancel the ride. Another driver comes and starts asking me where I am. He is about a mile away. I tell him I’m at the pickup point. He says he is too an doesn’t see me. I cancel the ride. At this point in the night I’m fed up and ready to talk to the vultures, er, autowallas. I walk up to the first guy I see and give him my destination. I hop in and begin to regret this choice. Cracked windshield (oddly a rarity) and no curtains on this cold night. Actually there was one curtain but the plastic sheet he’d improvised was doing little to keep out the weather. We get to the main road and are crawling along. He turns around, smiles and says “Auto CNG” with a laugh. The auto responds by sputtering and slowing down even more. I pull a 500 rupee note out of my wallet, hand it to him, and walk out of what is at this point a barely moving vehicle. The man beckons me to return, wanting to finish the ride. I wave him along and the auto stalls. I call an uber. He begins to push. Luckily the rest of the ride back to the hotel was boring.

A very India ending to this country.