Message #16: The Ballad of Baba H.

(Message sent Sat, 18 Nov 2006 00:34:47 -0700)

You check into the Baba Hotel in Udaipur, and are intrigued to find a large temple visible outside your window, just a few metres away across a busy tooting square. You are happy, but tired and grimy from the day, so you have a shower in water that is almost hot delivered to you by plumbing that almost works (each a minor miracle for India), and retire to your comfy bed by about 10pm. The noise of the road traffic isn't so bad, and you look forward to a nice sleep.

At 10:11pm the priests at the temple across the way turn on a public address system and blast chanting music at you, accompanied by bells clanging at about five Hertz. The volume is so loud that the amplified chanting is severely distorted. You wonder how the devotees can even make out what is being said.

At first you take it with stoical good humour, but by the end you are entertaining fantasies involving high power sniper rifles. But end it eventually does, the gods are placated, and you nod off to sleep. Until the dogs start barking.

For some reason a huge pack of dogs decide to use 12:30 in the morning and the square outside your hotel to sort out some long-standing doggy differences. They howl and bark and yap and run around in excited little circles. You get out the imaginary sniper rifle again, then chide yourself for such unvegetarianmanlike ideas, and switch to tranquilizer darts, or maybe electric cattle prods, instead.

You single out one dog for especial opprobrium. This particular turd factory has a very distinctive bark, and every time the pack seems to be settling down this dog rarks things up again.

You start to wonder if maybe it's true that animals can detect immanent earthquakes, and maybe that's what all the excitement is all about. Then you find yourself wishing that the earthquake would hit, for then at least the dogs would shut up, hopefully by virtue of them being dead.

But no earthquake happens, and eventually the dog moot reaches some sort of agreement, and by 4am complete silence descends and you drift off into grateful oblivion.

And then at 5am the temple starts playing its delightful racket all over again.

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