Saturday, Deepak, the Technical Director of Color Chips, did us a complete first timer sightseeing tour around Hyderabad. We started by driving to his home where we picked up his congenial wife.
The Hindu gods where with us, when we started our real tour at their temple, located on the very top of the city’s highest hill. The view of the ciy was simple excellent, wih a clear blue sky and the october sun heating the almost dry air to just below 30°C.
As always, being part of Indian traffic was as entertaining as venturesome. In Hyderabad’s center is a huge lake with a big omnipresent Buddha statue. It is strictly forbidden to have a beer at the alameda though. The problem is the complete lack of environmentalism in India. People drop their waste wherever they feel like doing so — including the lake’s esplanade. The city’s authorities have thus created small police watches every one hundred or so meters, that immediate take care of any violation of the rules for enyoing the lake view.
A bit later we toured the Charminar landmark, dominating a busy roundabout in the center of the Hyderbad’s Muslim quarter, Afzalgunj (no, typo!).
The window in my room is made of four parts and one of them was missing. I told our servant to fix that today. Before, I had actually liked it, as it ensured my room was always well aired.
It must have been about 4 a.m., when I saw something entering my room through this very gap left by the missing quarter section — something the size of a big cat or fox. In a second, I was wide awake and feeling for the light switch, my mind meanwhile clearly showing the haunting image of a big, mutated rat (mutated by Indian/Pakistan nuklear arms tests, of course), that wants to spread its pulsating canine madness by biting into my toe.
It is hard to say who was scared more, but the monster squirrel, sitting on the bed opposing mine, paniced completely, when it saw me. For a moment I felt lucky that it was just a giant squirrel and not a rat — a rat of that size would have bitten my food off, instead of just into a toe!
In the split of a second, it put five big piles of poo on my two white linen shirts, then, miraculously avoiding all other colored clothing, laying on the bed, pissed on my beige linen trousers in the bed’s opposing corner and tried to escape through the window. As its first attempt failed, it ran through the room’s door, I had just opened, and quickly slipped through the dining room balcony’s fence, into the night.
After cleaning the poo and soaking my trousers in the basin, I sticked the curtain to the missing window’s frame, using good old Leukoplast from my first-aid kit, then sealed everything off by putting my travel bag and rucksack on the mobile air conditioning system in front of the window. Neither MacGuyver nor Michelangelo could have invented a better monster squirrel defense, given the assets I had to choose from.
After that, I had a more or less delightful bag of sleep, seasoned by the fading reminiscences of squirrel dejecta odour.
“Are you a player?” asked the custom official. “Sure.”, I replied. “Ok, this way, please, Sir.” Thanks to the Asian-African games being held in Hyderabad and not looking Indian at all, I was able to pass customs in a second …
The luggage took an eternity to arrive. In the entrance area and outside the airport, hundreds of locals are waiting, waving flowers and hands to welcome their relatives or friends. “Mr. Gawson?” — no, I’m defnitely not the one, the bold gentleman asking the queston, is looking for. Like him, another ten dozen Indians wait ouside. Desperately shouting and helding signs with the names of foreigners they are here to pick up.
Finally, I see two young men with a board that has “Color Chips” and my name printed on it.
As we wait, I’m photographed by a guy who, too, obviousy has mistaken me for a player attending the games. Another ten minutes later the Ambassador car arrives and off we are into the hell that is Indian traffic.
Lanes are for loosers, the three wheeled cabs with their imbécile variety of klaxon sounds flood between the busses, Ambassadors and sporadic newer vehicles like mad bugs. The late october rain is evaporated by over 20°C and ensures that the cars’ exhausts stay in the streets, making breathing taste like you’re a suicidal, who locked himself in his garage.
Over the worn facades of instanced concrete clumpsyness, that means home to most of this city’s people, the stridently colored billboards of western hemisphere influenced advertising, absorbing the Indian multi-ethnic society’s roots in every second that flushes down the veins of this organism, like blood drops into a sluice.
“Hyderabad is crazy, but Mumbai is ten to fifteen times as crazy.”, says a 24 years young 2D supervisor Sri Vadsav of Color Chips. We end our shopping expedition with some overly expensive beers in a Pub called “Easy Rider”, obviously frequented by people of a rather superficious provenience.
A pair of handmade leather shoes, copied from those I wear and which I bought in Milan this spring, will cost me 1,000 Rupiees — ;about 20