1.
Every traveler’s report on India opens with a discussion of the heat. In an unbearably hot country, the temperature is hottest away from the coasts, during the summer, right before the monsoon arrives with cooling downpours. This Build Up, with only wispy clouds and a few drops of moisture, brings humidity as well as heat.

So maybe the mid-afternoon flight to New Delhi, in late June, was a bad idea.

This is how hot it was: we exited the plane, Jet Air from Kathmandu, on a staircase attached to the rear door. A stream of heat from the engine roared past as we began to descend. Incredibly, the heat from the engine was cooler than the air down on the tarmac. The temperature read 48 Celsius – nearly 120 Fahrenheit.

Here is where I note that India doesn’t much believe in air conditioning.

The summer heat, however, captures the India travel experience in a microcosm: it’s unlike anything else in the world, but even so it’s an enormously frustrating place to visit.

2.
A brief interpolation: There is something about India even more noticeable than the heat, but this something goes unmentioned by most Hindustan correspondents: the woman are of a phenomenal size. Not all the women, of course. Recent development notwithstanding, India remains one of the world’s poorest places. And the young, perhaps, haven’t had enough time to pack it on. But essentially every middle-class woman I saw was an absolute giant. On dirt tracks, the heft is literally ground-shaking.

The novelist Aravind Adiga likes to pick on this fact – women in his books always “become plump at just the right age” and his men would have it no other way. As a traveler, this trend is made all the more clear by the sari, that uniquely South Asian wrap of a garment. The “summer wrap”, as it were, seems almost designed to display as much weight as possible, shoving the choicest portions of flesh into the open like gaudy royal jewels.

I ought not pick on the women too much, though – Indian men still love their utterly ridiculous mustaches, an unfortunate result of India’s colonial period occurring during the Highest Era of English Facial Hair.

3.
India should be a no-questions great destination. As much of the world continues a long march to sameness, India remains as crazy as ever, e.g., Hindus with vermilion hair and bindi filling religious sites by the millions – the millions! - on auspicious dates, clothing in outrageously bright colors, camel safaris, tigers!, snake charmers wearing nothing but a white sash luring cobras from their baskets, a national cuisine that includes dishes like paneer cheese with raisins and peppers, regional cuisines of even greater diversity, a English literary culture more British than Britain – Roy and Ghosh and Desai and Rushdie – with stubborn old broadsheets like the Calcutta Telegraph that refuse to allow the new transliteration “Kolkata” to appear on its pages.

And politics even crazier: two legendary national parties, Nehru’s Congress and the Hindu Nationalist BJP, attract only a small portion of the overall vote. Uttar Pradesh is a fiefdom of the statue-loving dalit Mayawati, the restive east elects some combination of Christian, ethnic minority and gangster, and West Bengal, its state headquarters in the colonial Writers’ Building, has seen the hammer and sickle wave its red banner for decades. In much of the middle, the Naxalites and related Maoist insurgents, violent 1960s style Maoists, do their extorting and kidnapping and decapitating with little federal opposition.

Cows and water buffalo still walk the streets, undisturbed in even the biggest cities. A story in the largest national newspaper in early July mentioned that a major interstate highway was shut down when a herd of wild elephants blocked the road for hours while stealing food from the quickly-emptied stalls of roadside vendors. This story was judged so commonplace by the editors that it merited only a blurb on the left corner of page 16.

Smells are overpowering. There are the smells of those spices that brought Marco Polo and Vasco da Gama and Ibn Battuta to the sensuous East so many centuries ago: cardamom, cumin, various mixtures of curry paste, rosewater, fenugreek. There are the equally ancient smells of rotting garbage and human urine that permeate every railway station and back alley and roadside gutter.

There are Muslims with red-colored beards, half-naked ascetics with mangy locks, Punjabi Sikhs with towering turbans. There are, regular as the summer Monsoon, periods of interfaith violence. There are, regular as the winter Dry, periods of non-religious violence, leaving a full five states for all purposes presently closed to tourism. There are incredible wedding ceremonies, with brass bands in bright regalia, marching animals, the raucous energy of the latest Bollywood hit songs, hundreds and sometimes thousands of revelers under lights, morning to late night.

The colonial legacy, India being the Jewel of the Empire, has allowed a piece of the past to live on to the twentieth century. Hawler Station in Calcutta has a soaring entryway, wooden carvings rising thirty feet, with a Cloak Room on the right, a much grander name than Luggage Storage. New Delhi’s wide tree-lined boulevards, statues, arches, and Greco-Indian Revival public buildings stand out incongruously from the dense bustle of other Indian cities. Cricket is played everywhere, bowled with the arm straight. “Toy trains” still steam their way up to cool, breezy hill stations. Fantastic Ambassador taxis, still the most common on the roads, look like something out of Casablanca.

But the pre-colonial past is even more fantastic. If the Taj Mahal was all that India produced before the British East India Company arrived, it would be enough – Shah Jahan’s mausoleum is the greatest building in the world. Perfectly symmetrical and inlaid with elegant blue Arabic script, soaring white marble domes and minarets reflect back the sun as the building slowly shades from white to orange at sunset. This is to say nothing of Jaipur’s Pink City, or ancient Varanasi’s steps along the Ganges, or Amritsar’s massive temple.

It is no exaggeration that India has more That Was Unexpecteds than any other country in the world.

4.
So why didn’t I like the country?

There should be no surprise at India’s vast proliferation of ashrams, silent, silent, ashrams. In a country of over a billion loud and aggressive people, peace and quiet is the most valuable commodity. If you’re a foreigner, the problem is even more acute. Every rickshaw driver, or drink vendor, or shoe shiner, or begging child latches on to you with a firm grip. Every poor country has these, of course, but nowhere else has such persistence among the tradesman’s qualities. Beggars will follow you for an hour on end, and giving a donation only doubles their resolve. Shoe shiners will try to dab polish onto your Nikes, or even your Birkenstocks. Rickshaw drivers will hail you from a hundred meters, unconvinced by your claims that their services are not needed.

Salesmen play the most odious game. They come to you, often in pairs, claiming to be nothing but young men interested in conversing with a traveler from a faraway land. Pleasantries are exchanged. Small talk is bantered. Eventually, an offer to sit down for tea is given. Inevitably, the tea happens to be served in the young man’s souvenir shop, or fabric store, or travel agency, and since you’re such friends now, he just wants to show you a bit of product. Exactly this series of events happens every five minutes or so if you are walking the major tourist cities – the Delhis and Agras and Varanasis. There is no shame in such deception.

And worse that the sales tactic is the attitude it thus engenders in the traveler – that of aloof impoliteness. Indians on the whole are enormously friendly, and greet you with expressions such as “May I ask your good name, Sir” that make you feel like a pukka sahib circa the era of Kipling. But the time spent fighting off salesman/impostor friends stiffens any outgoing nature when friendly non-salesmen come calling.

Should an actual conversation begin, it is not long before India’s pungent religiosity proves itself. If one is sick, the Hindus offer strange explanation relating to their proliferation of Gods. If one is bearded, the Muslims turn into a particularly missionary bunch, a trait I’ve never seen among Muslims anywhere else in the world. If the conversation is with another traveler from the West – inevitably dreadlocked and dressed in the “gone native” style – talk will soon turn to obscure eating habits, pseudoscience, and particularly powerful gurus. My poker face is poor; each of the above eventually question me with an astonished “You don’t believe it’s true?”

It’s all simply too much. India is the only place in the world where, when traveling, I’ve spent a full day in my hotel room because I couldn’t bare to go outside and run the gauntlet another time.

5.
So I find myself mired in contradictory thoughts. On the one hand, a reserved society, where no one talks to outsiders, and no strangeness is evident in the culture, would be no fun to visit at all. On the other hand, there is a lot to be said for bursts of familiarity, for conversations where each party shares the same basic axioms, for the ability to wander and gaze and contemplate at leisure.

Perhaps this is a case where memory will differ from experience. From a distance, a thousand pinpricks become merely pinpricks, whereas vibrant colors and sights and sounds retain their brilliant hue. And if memory sifts in this way, the stature of the Subcontinent may increase in my mind over time; surely a few touts can’t bring down a country with elephant-induced traffic jams.