Allahabad

The train ride to Allahabad (after a jaunt to Satna by bus) , was the most crowded we had seen. As a woman, I, at least, was offered a seat. According to a book I picked up on 'the life of a Hindu,' (first published in the 1890s), this practice is some sort of compensation for the fact that more likely than not, a woman will die giving birth to her first child around the age of 15. Apparently they also have a big party when she gets close to going into labor, explicitly to give her a last taste of life.

So, as compensation for the hardships I endure as a woman, I was forcibly offered a square-foot perch on the corner of a third bunk, with about 2.5 feet of head room and a fan spinning inches from my nose. (August got a groundfloor seat a few minutes later. Sigh.) As much suffering as standing would have spared my spine, this position at least gave me a bird's-eye-view over the aisle. Are those men watching me amusedly as I take take pictures like the tourist I am? No. They were staring before I got out the camera, and long afterwards. I think that is the main reason I've heard that foreigners don't take second class. It doesn't really bother me too much, though, strangely. I just think about how Americans would react to a 8-foot tall albino.

Allahabad turned out to be the most expensive stop we made in India, being more of a pilgrimage sight than a tourist destination. The cheapest hotel we could find was Rps. 550 ($14) and dinner cost a whopping Rps. 400 ($10)! It's funny how upset we were about it - we really have learned to think in rupees. Just think - Rps. 550 will buy you 100-200 cups of delicious chai, or around 90 samosas.

Then next morning we set out with the pilgrims to catch a boat to the exact spot where India's three holy rivers converge - the Ganges, the Yamuna, and the Sarswati (a mythical underground river). We found an early breakfast standing at a sweet shop, and eventually decided we liked the polite but persistent rickshaw-wallah who had been chattering at us in hindi as we finished our cold coffees. It was a nice long ride across town, with the shade-roof pulled up to keep the sun off our necks. Before we even got within sight of any of the rivers, we had a boatman ride up along side us on his bicycle. When we got there an outright crowd of them descended. It became clear that the first boatman was a kind of boat-pimp. We regularly use the term 'auto-pimp' to describe the one guy in a parking lot with good English who aggressively catches customers, haggles marked-up prices, then distributes the customers to the actual drivers, keeping a profit. Usually the auto-pimping system works out for the drivers as well, because the mark-up is small, and they don't have to lower their prices competiting with each other. And in exchange, we tourists get to haggle with someone we know understands English. I don't mind a little unionization.

The boat-pimp was intolerable, though. The beach was covered with Indian pilgrims and tourist, peacefully piling into boats for a charge of 20 rupees a head. The boat pimp insisted we pay him Rps. 350 for a private boat. When we explained we wanted to share, he said, okay, we could share, then quoted the same price. We walked (or rather nearly ran) along the beach trying to approach a boat, but every time the pimp would sprint ahead and fix the price (or at least some price, since the boatmen didn't seem to speak English). After about the fifth time, we were pretty frustrated, and went up the beach, trying to lose him in the chaos of wet pilgrims changing their clothes after bathing. He kept reappearing, though. I suppose we weren't that hard to pick out in the crowd.

In the end I resorted to my usual maneuvre in difficult situations - throwing myself upon the goodwill of youngmen. I spotted a group of five men in their 20s negotiating for a boat and temporarily confused the boat-pimp by talking to them instead of the boat man. They seemed a bit shy at first, but agreed to let us share their boat. I trusted myself to the flurry of Hindi that exploded between them and the pimp, and didn't question when one of them abruptly turned and said 'Get in.'

The five young men turned out to be soldiers from Darjeeling (explaining their asian-ness) completing an excercise in Allahabad, and taking advantage of a few hours leave to make their pilgrimmage. We rowed out to the middle of the water, where dozens of boats were tied together, held in place against the current by poles lodged into the shallow riverbed. Once we were moored, the men performed a short prayer ceremony, sending a little paper boat down stream, with flowers and a lighted candle. Then they stripped to their underwear and went to bathe in the murky polluted water. I took off my shoes and dipped my feet into the water, not taking various boatmen's advice to follow the men's example. Most women would bath fully dressed, but I didn't have a change of clothes and was wearing white besides. The men seemed pretty amused by my purified feet, though.

It was amazing how you really could see the line where the two rivers came together - the yellow waters of Mother Ganga swirling together with the turquoise Yamuna. When we got back to shore, the boatman started arguing with the men, and it became clear that he was demanding Rps. 1000 for the boat, and saying they should just make the foreigners pay for it. The boat pimp returned and I would hypothesize that the men from Darjeeling swore at him with the phrase "No, these are our friends" thrown in somewhere. I'm not sure exactly what happened, but we all walked away as a group, with one of the men holding the proper fare out to the boatman, who wouldn't touch it demanding something higher. So in the end, I think we paid less than Rps. 20 each. I never would have tried that myself, but I think the soldiers were outraged at their country's way of treating foreigners. I hope the boat pimp learned a little bit of a lesson, at least. We offered to buy them a coke or cup of tea, but their commander herded them back into a giant truck, and they drove away.