Surprisingly I was invited to stay even though my hosts had no idea about my existence until I showed up at their doorsteps. I felt like a derwish asked to rest in the maharajah's palace. Quite a shocking transition from the siesta on the roof in Jallandhar to a white, spacious living-room, with white coaches, armchairs, and napkins. I tried my best to transition myself into an East European lady on the world tour but it was so uncomfortable to wear that skin again. My hosts were wonderful. I was given a white bedroom with a view and a servant Ram again - deja vu from Karachi. After I took a nap I was invited for a five o'clock tea served in porcelaine cups. Ever attentive servant quickly put a knife, fork and plate in front of me when I carelessly grabbed a banana from the well decorated table. Well, I sort of knew then how Tarzan felt in Greystrokes... We talked and talked and I minded my manners... Couple days later, after some nearby sigthseeing, I longingly asked my hosts about whereabouts of Polish exchange students in New Delhi. Shortly later on I took a rickshaw, smoked biri with a driver (a very thin rolled tobacco), exchanged some casual words and showed up at the dorm. Somehow I felt much more comfortable on a rolled blanket in the corner of the tiny room, surrounded by people from all over the world who shared the same passion as myself - to absorb the new and maintain lack of destructive judgement in favor of acceptance of the surroundings. I had a wonderful time. I wandered on my own or in a group, depending on my mood, throughout the city. I spoke Hindi, dressed in my my now favorite shalvar-qameez, watched people, learnt how to color my hair with henna, visited a local healer...

There was quite a queue to see the healer. I sat on a wooden bench in front of a falling apart hut in Delhi's poorer region of the city and waited my turn. When I finally made it inside there was a healer dressed in white or sort of yellowish white, with long beard and moustache who made the next group of five sit on chairs there and without a word proceeded to put whiteish eye-liners into nonprotesting eyes of customers/patients. It hurt !! Hurt produced tears and those were supposed to clear vision... I was the third in line. The healer took my hand and told me in broken English about a bunch of medical problems that I had or was about to have and gave me a small bag of colorful pills (visibly hand-made). Few rupees later I was on my way to recovery...:)

Days turned into weeks. My rolled over blanket was slowly becoming uncomfortable. So was the necessity to climb through the window of the dorm at sunset in order to avoid being thrown out by the guard as an unpaying dorm guest. I'd seen most of what I wanted to see (for a detailed description of New and Old Delhi turn into India pages of VT members for I never remember names of the places) and I was ready to roll...

One more memorable experience or rather memory: A bus trip had been arranged for foreign students to visit a famous brewery of Indian King Fisher beer. Of course I got myself into the bus. Of all things...As we were visiting we ran into another group of onlookers. And among them I saw an easily identifyiable face of a Vietnamese student whom I had known from my dorm in Tashkent ! All the memories of my short-lived pet of a turtle came to life and gave way to a short prayer over Vietnamese turtle soup on the 6th or 7th floor of the dorm in Tashkent but I was so shocked over meeting Duan there that I finally forgave the hunger which had led my collegues from the University to consume my dear friend...the pet....

One hangover later I decided to split. I ran into a guy from Poland who, by then, was living elsewhere and who decided to visit his girlfriend who happened to be in India at that time and also happened to be experimenting with a guy from Fiji and suma sumarum to make it less complicated I gained a travelling companion on route to a place I had never heard before and which became my most favorite place on earth which was Goa. I loved that trip. Lowest possible class in a train. No space. Coctail-party train mingling. Families, singles, healers, sadhus. One particular sadhu caught my attention. Almost bare-dressed with a bit of something covering his hips, with a face smothered with some white stuff, wearing a significant and distinguished looking pichfork in his right hand, he stood there like a tower in the the crowd and the crowd was giving him way in a hallway, kissing sadhu's hand. He didn't look at anybody, gone in his thoughts, a holy man. All around him people were screaming, complaining, pushing and he just stood there with his pichfork, being above and beyond. I have finally secured a luggage net over some people's heads, dropped my tiny backpack there and went to sleep. The train was swaying through the fields and hills. Every once in a while there was a stop with fresh coconuts and food sold through the window of the train. It was taking forever - my disrupted sleep, heat, humidity, screams, smells - the only natural safety was in my backpack under my head in a luggage compartment. Close to midnight a nature call and upon securing my strategic position I started pushing my way to W.C. My sadhu was still standing there. A momentary recognition. My eyes were saying "hey, I know you are a fake but you look cool with that pitchfork". His eyes registered it and responded "I know" followed by intertranscontinental wink. By 4 am we reached suburbs of Bombai. Or, should I say, an open, free for all urinal for the first image that greeted my eyes was a row of bareasses along the train tracks. Bombai was waking up to face another day............