In the matter of Ostensible Roman Soldier versus Member of the Crowd, with 3rd party intervenors, Ostensible Jesus and Ostensible Judas.
The Court to the jury:
“All of the parties have stipulated and agree the film of the incident is accepted into evidence; the only controversies entertained before this court are matters of interpretation.
“The defendant, that is Member of the Crowd, holds because he is an illiterate Amazon tribesman, recently proselytized & converted by CIA under cover of Protestant missionaries, he cannot be held liable for retroactively correcting the course of history; with pre-empting necessity of Ostensible Jesus having to follow the line ‘forgive them, for they know not what they do.’
“The plaintiff, that is Ostensible Roman Soldier, argues this matter constitutes vigilante justice, no matter how sincere or a naïf in his belief defendant was saving Ostensible Jesus’ life, and no matter any sincere noble intent, a theologically wrong, Protestant inspired assault, even when stemming from deep misapprehension of reality, cannot be excused against a Roman Catholic actor.
“Over all parties objections, Ostensible Judas cause is joined by this court to the cause of Ostensible Jesus, both must be aligned with the plaintiff, that is if ‘collateral’ 3rd party damage inflicted on job security is found, were Ostensible Jesus to be rescued, rather than suffer ostensible mortal wound inflicted by Ostensible Roman Soldier. Ostensible Judas’ claim of irreparable harm to his reputation, if his betrayal of Ostensible Jesus were for naught, cannot be separated from Ostensible Jesus claim of future job security harm, as a compensated actor.
“We have heard considerable conflicting expert testimony on whether Ostensible Jesus’ position of harm to future taxable wages, when joined to the cause of Ostensible Judas, is consistent with the historical role.
“Consequently, this court instructs if you find for Ostensible Jesus, in all future productions, Ostensible Judas having been paid 30 pieces of silver cannot be portrayed as a bribe related to betrayal; but must be declared actor’s union wage, no different to taxable wages paid to the actors Ostensible Jesus and Ostensible Roman Soldier.
“A special note of instruction is, despite Ostensible Jesus’ words cannot ever be questioned, this does not automatically confer a decision in his favor and may not prejudice any award; it is your duty to fairly resolve on all parties part. This may or may not, wholly or in part, be to Ostensible Jesus’ favor. Anything Ostensible Jesus has ever said must be objectively contextualized to the circumstance, to be considered in your decision.
“This court orders members of the jury sequestered. You will now begin deliberations”
Jury note to the judge: “Juror seven insists to know, Ostensible Roman Soldier, having been prevented from delivering ostensible mortal wound, can mere ‘malicious intent’ negate compensation?”
Judge’s note to jury: “As a soldier of empire, the question of law is whether Ostensible Roman Soldier is entitled to Sovereign Immunity, also known as state impunity. Because the state is not a party to this suit, you may consider malicious intent.” [the CIA cum missionaries in the gallery put on a sour look]
Jury note to the judge: “Juror two insists to know, were Amazon Indian proselytized with the Protestant King James version? If so, would use of ‘hath, doth, thou and thee’, and the like, be mitigating factor or favor inability to grasp reality?” [the judge grimaces]
Judge’s note to the jury: “It is written ‘I am the same yesterday, today and forever.’ Thou must not make haste to excuse the Indian’s ignorance in thy understanding.”
Ostensible Jesus: “Uh, that was a bit harsh. Are you a closet Calvinist?” [judge turns beet red]
Judge to Ostensible Jesus: “Forgive me, I’ll be deferring to you in the hereafter.”
Jury note to the judge: Juror five insists to know, if Ostensible Jesus associated with tax-gatherers, how are they substantively different from the money-lenders?”
Judge to Ostensible Jesus: “How do I answer that?”
Ostensible Jesus: [looking embarrassed] “Well, I don’t know. Ostensible Magdalene always took care of the tax-gathers for me, but the money-lenders were gay, and wouldn’t resolve with her offering of ‘in kind’ contribution. That REALLY made me angry.” [the judge senses a migraine onset]
Judge’s note to jury: “There is no distinction, the planets didn’t align for Ostensible Jesus on the one occasion, that’s all.”
Jury note to judge: “Juror twelve insists to know whether 30 pieces of silver should be adjusted for inflation, 32 AD to present, and if so, what would that amount be today at the COMEX?” [with the side of his head pounding, the judge passes a note to his clerk instructing an Oxycontin tablet and glass of water brought to the bench]
Judge’s note to the jury: “Juror twelve is replaced by alternate juror one, who shall hereafter be identified as juror thirteen.”
Jury’s note to judge: “Juror thirteen insists to know [at these words, the judge sees floating sparks of advancing migraine] can St Augustine’s ‘just war’ theory be squared with Ostensible Jesus turning the other cheek? Moreover, juror four insists to know, is the ‘just’ in ‘just war’ an adverb rather than the widely assumed adjective?” [the judge looks at Ostensible Jesus with a helpless expression]
Ostensible Jesus: “Well, I’m ostensibly Jewish, I’ve always been ostensibly Jewish and I have no idea what the Christians went on to write in their Meforshim or whatever it is they call it.”
Judge to Ostensible Jesus: “I have a migraine and can’t think. With your ostensible infallibility, will you hazard a guess?”
Ostensible Jesus: “Well, it should be easy enough, if Augustine is a Roman, it can only be the adverb.”
Judge’s note to the jury: “It’s ‘just’ the adverb.”
Jury note to the judge: “Juror three insists to know, when Ostensible Jesus said “Give to Sid Caesar what is Sid Caesar’s”, would that be considered taxable income?”
Judge to Ostensible Jesus: “You said that?”
Ostensible Jesus: “It was a joke. Anyway, I said it backstage, but there was an open mic.” [Judge puts his face in his hands]
Judge to Ostensible Jesus: “Well, you said it. Now, whose image was on the coin?”
Ostensible Jesus: “It was 5¢ impressed on a wooden nickel. Look, it had to do with a conversation around political correctness in Hollywood and #Me Too jokes. We’re ostensible Jews and Sid, bless his memory, would have fallen over laughing.”
Judge’s note to the jury: “Anything ‘given’ to Sid Caesar, must be considered solely an undeclared, carnal tax.”
Jury foreman’s (Juror eight) note to Judge: “We have a hung jury: This foreman and jurors six, nine, ten & eleven insist on reducing Ostensible Judas award by half, because he changed his story of remorse, the other seven jurors want to deny him compensation altogether; on account of in one version he hangs himself, in the other version he leaps from a cliff and is disemboweled on the rocks”
Judge to Ostensible Judas: “You changed your story?”
Ostensible Judas: “It wasn’t me, it was the script writers, mid-production. They thought hanging wasn’t bloody enough.”
[at this point the Judge’s migraine required court medics administering the ‘nuclear option’ of a Demerol injection, direct to the brain]
Recovered from migraine, the judge: [with a great sense of relief and very high, in fact ‘almighty’ high] “Order! Bailiff! Clear the gallery, triple security and call in the jury!
The Judge: “Per Rule 56 (f)(3) Federal Rules of Procedure, this court may exercise summary judgment of its own discretion after identifying for the parties material facts that are beyond dispute.
“Per the aforementioned rule, and having read all the jury’s notes of inquiry, this court enters into the record the indisputable fact all of the jurors in this case are absolute, total and complete idiots. If they went with the argument of the plaintiff, they’d do it as morons. If they found for the argument of the defendant, they’d do it as morons. If they compensated the 3rd party intervenors, they’d do it as morons. [the judge looks at the bailiff]
“Hang them all.”
Bailiff: “Dismissed juror twelve?”
The Judge: [over his shoulder, on his way to chambers] “Consider him Ostensible Barrabas.”
I’d a couple of incidental encounters with marijuana in high school in the 1960s, but these had been nothing that attracted me to its use. I seem to recall it was mere matter of saying I’d ‘tried it.’ It was in Vietnam my only, serious, sustained use of the plant, had occurred. After Vietnam, I was an ‘on again, off again’ smoker of cannabis, through the 1970s. By the early 80s, I was mostly through the process of weaning myself of this plant altogether, with the rare encounter. By the time of penning this essay, I’ve not ingested this ‘drug’ in over 30 years. Here follows, is one reason why.
I’d recently encountered an anecdote that caused me recalling a story of a time I was staying at Helena, Montana, I think it was the fall season of 1980. There was a bust ongoing (undercover police work) of the local petty weed dealers and one of them panicked, brought a half pound of super-high THC content sinsemilla to an acquaintance who didn’t smoke dope but wasn’t adverse to people who did, for safe keeping. But then, this dope-dealer left town, no doubt due to the ‘noids.’ The guy holding his dope didn’t want it but knew an artist who smoked and went to drop it at his house; the intended recipient wasn’t home but the artists wife accepted the ‘gift’ and then something remarkable happened.
What the guy delivering the dope to his artist buddy didn’t realize was, the wife had had it up to her neck with her husband’s dope smoking, and his dope smoking buddies, because it was her attitude, now that they were married and had small kids, it was time to ‘get serious’ about life and stop with the dope-drain on their budget.
She put the half pound of sinsemilla, together with a couple pounds of butter, into a large wok, simmered it for some hours at very low heat, strained the now green fat through cheese cloth and made up a VERY LARGE batch of VERY STRONG chocolate (to conceal any flavor of cannabis) brownies sans any evidence of dope (included no leafy matter.) She then proceeded to send the brownies off to a large party attended by her husband’s friends, where a local political wag was to announce the formation of Montana’s new “NO-NOTHING” (correct spelling, a deliberate gag on history) political party. The platform of the party was, the Montana legislature meeting every two years for ninety days, should be changed, to meeting every ninety years for two days.
Everyone who attended that event was wrecked, for a week. And I mean wrecked. The party was on a Saturday night and it was Monday morning people showed up to work so dysfunctional, it defies description. One guy spent 40 minutes, panicked, looking for car keys which were clutched in his fist the entire time he was turning his house upside down, while looking for those very keys, in desperate attempt to get off to work.
And, no, nothing, came of the nascent political endeavor, it was as if it had been little more than a passing hallucination. It’s a pity, because, a legislature limited to meeting once in every ninety years, for two days, seemed (and still seems) like a good idea…
Disclaimer: My satire in the present genre is to be honest in the Native American way; in effect, constructing a joke story closely resembling real life, a sort of collage of facts assembled from bits and pieces of diverse experience, combined with anecdotal information to create the culturally intact inherent Native wisdom found in their humor. In other words, parts of the story consist of an autobiographical facts incorporated, multi-faceted rip-off of other peoples life stories and experience. And because unlike the White world, the Native world entertains paradox in daily approach to life, some aspects are simply made up from the imagination’s fund of plausible improbabilities –
On the 95th anniversary of Jack’s birth, it seems a pity the iconic misogynist (closet gay) hypocrite, criminal, pedophile and compulsive liar, Kerouac, didn’t live to read my rebuttal to his ‘On the Road.’
The non-fiction work, “Queer Chicken Dinner” (the title is based on a prank narrated in the book), rips into Alan Ginsberg as well. Care to discover the real Rocky Mountains character Kerouac & Company never stood a chance to discover? Maybe someday it will find a publisher (it’s never been submitted.)
A teaser from the book:
“We had what was known as ‘the line.’ The line was the old U.S. Highway 2 from Blue Moon Tavern at Columbia Falls to Freda’s Bar at West Glacier, Montana, in the 1950s, 60s & 70s. And it was every bar and pub between. Kids from ‘up the line’ were known to be particularly wild. The line was about 16 miles and 24 bars along a strip of pavement through what was in those days ‘wild country’ in ways that defy the stereotype. That wild country produced wild young people no Denver skid row kid could ever hope to compete with.
“A related personal note on so-called ‘Beat’ writers would be, likely this is why I could never relate to the work of Gary Snyder, also I’d met Richard Brautigan when he was living in Paradise Valley in the late 1970s and found him insufferable, conceited, rudderless, empty in ways that cannot be explained by Zen (and unapproachable as soon as he realized he’d met a real Montana country boy from a mixed White/Native American community.)
“Looking back, I have to say I was impressed at the man’s lack of reality, in a sense, a fraud. Did moving to Montana in some sense confer a Dean Moriarty-like authenticity in Brautigan’s mind? I suppose that might be motivation for an outsider, in process of trying to convince their self of something they in reality cannot and never will know. I see it this way: A country kid can go to the city and have his eyes opened. A city kid can go to the country and have his mind blown. There is a nuance here I am speaking of, for instance when you go into the wild country away from the ‘noise’ .. it takes about five days for all of the reverberations and echoes to vanish and find the stillness. City kids often freak out at the silence. Country kids often find it healing. At 61 years, I’m certainly not going to write my rebuttal correcting the western ‘character’ and ‘freedom’ in Kerouac’s style of three weeks Benzedrine psychosis (warping my imagination.) So I will browse ‘On the Road’ at my favorite horseback pace, a leisurely walk. And give my impressions of the book in juxtaposition to authentic recollections of those years alcohol was interspersed with mescaline, LSD, et cetera in a wild country with wild characters who oftentimes simply and soberly loved the area we lived in because it was absolutely BEAUTIFUL…
“I was riding horseback through the forest in the Great Bear wilderness on a moonless & overcast night, you could not see your hand in front of your face. The route was from the Middle Fork of the Flathead River headwaters country, across the Continental Divide at Badger Pass and out into the foothills of the Rocky Mountain Front on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. I had total trust in my barefoot Blackfoot pony to keep its footing in the pitch dark, know the route and to stay on and make a correct decision at any fork in the trail. Relaxed in the saddle, I brought out my rolling tobacco and made a cigarette I never saw until I’d lit the match ..”
As I bail out of the game, here is the gift of all (or nearly all) of the ronaldthomaswest.com articles in a single page of links; beginning with stories of travels through India, then, my personal life adventures largely centered in Native America, if only because I believe this is my most under-appreciated work and deserves greater exposure. Following these accounts are things I personally find interesting, next are external links to books authored by myself and then my satire. Lastly, scroll down to find that work I most detest, the work which had inspired the satire (a sort of therapy) – to discover the real evils of geopolitics.
My blog had begun attracting readers in mid 2014, when I’d been giving it real attention for several months. This upcoming week of 21 March 2016, coinciding with withdrawing from giving ronaldthomaswest.com sustained attention, it will pass the 100,000 hits mark (it stands at 99,685 as I write this.)
Hardly some mega-phenomena but not bad either. Now, it’s just another internet archive –
*
All original material copyright Ⓒ 2015 by Ronald Thomas West: For profit & mass paper media redistribution prohibited
The effects of this trip had reverberated in the core of my being for well over a month, following my return. Landed in New York, I traveled upstate and spent a week hanging out with a friend. It was a quiet scene, talking philosophy and spending time checking out the old Erie Canal. The mundane was beautiful.
Back at Helena, I was asked what I thought of the trip. By this time I knew the sisters had the then popular astrologer, Zipporah Dobbins, choose the trips date; it would be an ‘auspicious’ time. Based on this intelligence, I answered “Those girls should be jailed.”
I went to Starr School on the Blackfeet reservation, to pack up and head south for a few months, coming from the tropics into a Montana winter was not an appealing thought. I dropped by to visit Pat, my medicine man friend and he laughed at me … Native America has perhaps the darkest humor on Earth and the prevailing joke in the community was “Ron shot Mrs Gandhi.” It was a pun on the shamanic aspect of life not understood in western culture, but similar perhaps to a joke on someone who’d followed an astrologer into a disaster. Kind of like saying ‘your medicine man sucks’ relating to consulting over preparation for a journey.
Reprising a trip from over a decade earlier, when I’d driven a Volkswagen ‘bug’ to Arizona, to escape Montana’s cold, following my return from tropical Vietnam, here I was again, driving a Volkswagen bug to Arizona, to escape the Montana cold, following my return from tropical India.
It was at Agua Prieta, just on the Mexican side of the border with Arizona, I’d asked at the local grocery a simplest possible question; of a proprietor who’d probably never been beyond the borders of his native Sonora. My imperfect Spanish couldn’t find the impersonal ‘are there’ and instead I blurted out the personal ‘do you have’ .. eggs? His reply was:
It was mid afternoon on 4 November I was free in Cairo. I was able to amend my original return ticket from India and would be able to catch a plane from Cairo to New York with a plane change at London, on the 6th. I caught a taxi to Giza and checked into a ! Swiss Chalet ! or cheesy imitation thereof, a sort of motel configuration, not too expensive. I laid down and was dead-out until I heard the muezzin calling people to prayer at daybreak, or about 12 hours. It was that kind of sleep where you offload immeasurable amounts of stress. But surrealism apparently doesn’t simply vanish but follows some trips like a con-trail. Or maybe I was just tripping, but here is what I experienced: This ‘chalet’ had a dining room and I was by now thoroughly sick of curried vegetables, the mainstay on my diet for the past six weeks. I wanted red meat. English boiled beef, fine no argument with that. Feta cheese was a treat. But here is what made the journey cartoon just keep going on; the ‘chalet’ dining room had an American ‘Old West’ theme … with waiters dressed in paper-felt cowboy hats with plastic sheriff star pinned to vest and toy revolvers holstered on their hips! This was the very outfit American parents bought for their 10 year old boys and here we were in Giza, Egypt!! I understood I wasn’t hallucinating but still .. face in my palm.
May I take your order?
This was the evening of 5 November. Earlier in the day, I’d been visiting the home of the taxi driver who’d fetched me from the airport and brought me to Giza, his home village. We’d had lunch with his family and he was wanting to know when I’d like to see the pyramids .. Haji Hassan El-Koly was stunned to hear a westerner state, and his daughter nearly fell on the floor laughing at his amazement .. when I’d gestured to the window and said “I see them, they’re there.” It was almost inconceivable to him I was more interested in discovering who the Egyptians of the present were, than going to some presentation or touring any archaeology site. We spent part of the afternoon discussing contemporary Egypt and regional geopolitics, as well he became curious and was asking questions about myself. El-Koly stated he would never forget me on account of my name: “Where the Sun goes down.” He probably never did forget me; I had paid him an honest fare for my trip to & around Giza and return to the Cairo airport .. but then tipped him one inferior quality counterfeit USA $100 bill, courtesy of a Guardian Angel.
Arrival in London (L) from Egypt (R)
At Heathrow in London, I had to clear customs to walk across a street into another concourse, to catch my plane to New York. Two British counter-narcotics officers were waiting for me as I entered the second concourse, they wanted a look inside my carry on day-pack. I had a collection of perfume oils I was returning with, to give to a woman friend. Eight brown glass vials about 3 inches tall and one inch wide, probably seen in some x-ray scanner my pack had been through. Asking me questions about the movie ‘The French Connection” as they pulled out the flat box containing the vials, I merely replied ‘Not everyone’s life fits a movie script.” They sorted soon enough it was oil of musk & other scents and one of them asked “What are you West, some kind of a rat?” And then let me go. I ate a ‘drop into dead sleep over the Atlantic’ pill I HAD smuggled, just for that purpose, and woke up at JFK in New York.
On 2 November in my room at the Taj Palace, watching Indian state tv was like watching science fiction; with expressionless humanoid faces telling us not to believe “rumors of communal violence.” As I watched Rajiv light his mother’s funeral pyre on television, I could coincidentally look out the window at a column of smoke rising in the distance. Indira Gandhi’s body going up in flames or another Sikh home? There was no way for me to know, as these were simultaneous phenomena. So, what was the point of the television lie? Another trait India holds in common with the western democracies – ‘what you’re told isn’t the reality.’
Meanwhile I’d picked up a security detail shadowing me, no one believed for a New York second I was Old Babette’s grandson. It’d been better if she’d said nothing. I took care of that with fortuitous circumstance. I was sitting in a lounge in the morning when some vile looking, dowdy and incredibly wealthy (her gold and jewels hanging on her like kites tangled in utility wires) old woman decided to abandon her huge purse that appeared to be so heavy as to be filled with gold bars and leave the room. I spotted my security man across the room in a doorway, looking the other way. I walked swiftly over to him and, without mentioning the owner, I told him “There is an untended bag.” He immediately followed me into the lounge where I pointed out the purse, as it happened the old woman was returning to claim it. After, there was no further suspicions; they didn’t care who I was, other than an extra set of security eyes. No one wanted a bomb going off. A little later I frightened the ‘bejezuz’ out of myself with a stupid trick. Heading back to my room I turned the corner to see the elevator doors were beginning to close. With a sprint & leap worthy of some caped hero, I flew into the elevator as the door closed behind me: squarely into some VIP”s armed security detail! And fortunately for me, sans VIP. I wasn’t shot. If only they’d taken a photo of my face in that moment, some things are absolutely priceless. Recovering my composure in the stare of several ‘men-in-black’ security types, I simply said “Sorry” and pushed the elevator button to my level.
3 November simply dragged on in some sort of time warp that makes a day seem as though it will never end, as Indian television insisted despite rumors, there was no communal violence. Meanwhile I’d encountered an American who said a mob had boarded at a stop and killed Sikhs on the train he’d taken to Delhi.
Meanwhile Old Babette had been showering me with promises. Grateful, at least momentarily, for engineering our escape, she insisted I was going to be put up in Cairo and take a boat tour with her on the Nile, all on her dime. I listened but said nothing. Underneath, both of us knew we were absolutely incompatible personalities. That, and I recalled her brief episode of delusional belief she was a siren of eternal youth. That made me more paranoid than the rioting city we were looking to escape.
On the morning of the 4th, the Guardian Angel Sister’s Muslim travel agent manifest, to be certain Old Babette and myself made it onto the airport shuttle. For that fact, I totally forgive her for -on my departing the Hotel Imperial- passing off to me two, inferior quality, counterfeit USD$100 bills as a means of getting rid of them. On the other hand, her Bandit Sister was prone to absolutely angel moments (time to time.)
Cairo
In our (cheap) silk kimono jackets courtesy of 1st class tickets on Japan Airline, we were among the first people out of Delhi. No sooner than we we’re in the air, Old Babette’s immense gratitude began to wane; she was certain I wouldn’t mind a 2nd class hotel in Cairo. The truth is, other than reassurance as escort on absolutely insane taxi rides, there hadn’t been much I’d done she couldn’t have done for herself. It was the Muslim friend of the Guardian Angel Sister had made our departure possible. I don’t know if Old Babette had ‘male companion’ in mind for Egypt, but as far as I was concerned we were parting ways. As we were disembarking our plane in Cairo, her plans for us were getting reiterated and I said nothing until we’d passed through customs; her needing assistance with luggage, and myself with two carry on totality of luggage, I turned to her and said “I’ll take a rain-check” with a wave of the hand I strode away .. and the look of complete surprize-shock-amazement on her face was the last I ever saw of Old Babette.
Of the numerous photos of the 1984 ‘riots’ I could have chosen, of Sikhs being beaten to death, burned alive, arson of their businesses or simply bodies of children, women and men alike murdered by the mob, I decided instead to show a taste of the opulence I’d escaped to .. and is likely an accurate picture of the Gandhi family’s life; even as Rajiv was setting fire to his mother’s funeral pyre while powerless Sikh families were being burned alive in their homes:
^ Interior of Taj Palace Hotel at New Delhi
I’d put on my day pack and shouldered my small sport duffel, the totality of my luggage, grabbed one of Old Babette’s suitcases (she had two) and escorted her out of the Hotel Imperial’s gate, past the Sikh security contingent, all armed with swords or batons, one of whose face was severely beaten. We turned right outside of the gate and walked maybe a hundred meters or so to an area where there was a taxi business. The taxi people pointed us down an alley where there were a few taxis with drivers willing to risk exiting the area and hired one to drive us to the Taj Palace Hotel … for one hundred US dollars. Working was an affront to the memory of Indira Gandhi and could get a taxi driver killed, with no safety promise made to the passengers. We made the trip with a wide-eyed, nearly panic stricken driver speeding through the empty streets of Delhi – it looked like a ghost city with scattered debris and the occasional smouldering ruin. Suddenly we breezed through an army checkpoint into the upscale area of the city where life looked like a calm calendar holiday. We arrived at the marble & brass edifice that we’d call home for the following three nights, without incident. Then, Old Babette made her first screw-up. She quite spontaneously decided to create an alibi for the character she was traveling with (that would be me) and went into an unrequested, convoluted, unconvincing explanation I was her “grandson” at check-in. Of course all this did was raise suspicions; as I bore no resemblance whatsoever to her. A medium-short, dark, muscular male with no scent of money whatsoever in his attire, in the company of a clearly wealthy, slender, taller, translucent-White woman who’d burn in the sun in less than 10 minutes without her protective hat and sunscreen. For purposes of cover, I would never bring myself to pose as her male prostitute; as well, we had separate rooms .. otherwise that might have almost been the story that fit her unnecessary, unwanted, counter-productive attempt at an alibi. In a way, we WERE using each other. But now I was marked by hotel security in a venue that was filling up with high profile guests arriving for a state funeral.
Now, things became more stupid in a blessed sort of way; We discovered there was to be an ‘inaugural’ Japan Airlines flight out of Delhi on 4 November, the day the airport would reopen for regular commercial traffic. This stroke of luck made available to us was on account of the Guardian Angel Sister who’d an Indian professional travel associate who came to see if we’d made it to our destination alive. This Muslim man, I do not recall his name, impresses me as one of the finest people I’d met on our trip. The catch was, I subsequently discovered, in order to secure tickets, we had to visit the Japan Airlines travel agency office, precisely located one city block from Hotel Imperial! Old Babette and myself had to get a taxi and retrace our route and return!! Argh!!! None of the travel businesses were overtly open but if we went to the back door of the business, we were told, we’d be allowed in to acquire plane tickets. This would be my fifth trip across the burning city in two days, if one counted destination and return separately. I told Old Babette she could either come up with a few thousand cash for myself to transact the business for us or take the ride and bring along her credit cards. She got into the taxi with me. Two wild rides & two hundred dollars in taxi fees later, we were back at the Taj Palace with a pair of first class tickets to Cairo.
The term ‘surrealism’ in the common vernacular is about more than any school of art or literature. In the collective conscious of humanity, it is sometimes expressed in the vulgar tongue as ‘shit happens’ .. as when life itself becomes surreal. As surreal as my adventure might have seemed to now, suddenly it took on that psychosis that does not belong to the ego of any one individual, no matter it was both; arrogance & narcissism of the individual had initiated some few days mayhem & bedlam worthy of some South Asian ‘El Greco’ portrait. Except these inmate behaviors were exterior to the walls of the asylum. But first:
Indira Gandhi was an arrogant woman. From the time of the so-called ‘Emergency’, it was clear India is no exception to the general rule of democracy; it is the selfish ambition of the individual rises to rule, and the rights of the ‘little people’ are run over. After, when a militant Sikh separatist had taken over the Golden Temple (some would justly believe he’d been radicalized by Gandhi’s Congress party acts) she could have waited him out. Instead, this woman had her army storm the Sikh sacred temple, as Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale was an affront to her ego. Her long time body guard, the Sikh Beant Singh, consequently ended her life. Then, Gandhi’s Congress party empowered a massacre of Sikhs in Delhi. This is what I’d been caught up in. These organized (by Indian Congress Party officials who’ve never been held to account) riots were from the evening of 31 October, the day Gandhi was assassinated, through the evening of 3 November, when the authorities finally began moving to have order restored. Meanwhile, thousands of Sikhs had been murdered and countless Sikh businesses and homes damaged or destroyed. The Hotel Imperial was a Sikh owned and operated business.
I managed to get out of Delhi (and India) on 4 November and needless to say, I am no fan of the Gandhi dy’nasty.’ Reflecting on these events is not fun but I’ll seize any black humor opportunity in the narratives that follow.
The Hotel Imperial is first of all, a walled fortress. A late colonial period construction, it was probably built with defensive features in case of rebellion. There was a large population of Sikhs in the neighborhood and this resulted in two phenomena; every Sikh in the area that could make it alive, came to Hotel Imperial for refuge … and Hotel Imperial became a point of focus for the anti-Sikh mob or what was essentially an organized pogrom. It wasn’t the Alamo, but the potential for one seemed real.
Insofar as the surrealism, imagine this: after their evening dinner, European tourists are camped in lounge chairs in the garden by the pool, with waiters serving drinks while profoundly apologizing; for the occasional Molotov cocktail that comes sailing over the wall.
The morning of 1 November, I tested the waters beyond the walls; it was quiet during the day. Walking out the gate in my western clothes, past the Sikh guard contingent, I drew looks from the Hindu mob’s sentries across the street but no one made any move to accost me. Taxi fares were over the moon. You could get rides for wads of American dollars but it was clearly dangerous. I made it to the American embassy where I gave the details of our party and asked for their assessment. They said there appeared to be no hostilities directed at westerners but frequenting any Sikh neighborhood or associated business was definitely not good. I inquired what area of the city was secure and they recommended any hotel in the ‘diplomatic enclave’ as that was the only area the army had moved to secure. Back at the Hotel Imperial, I gave my report. Old Babette wanted out. The Guardian Angel Sister was more philosophical; “Oh, I love these Sikhs, I’ll stay here.” Of course that would have nothing to do with her carpets arranged for export having been commandeered to fortify windows; where muskets that looked to have been retrieved from a colonial museum were manned from behind her precious bales.
Meanwhile, Old Babette and myself struck a deal – using her money and my experience, we’d get out.
Ronald Thomas West 