One Crap Night

Oh how I chuckled in Boots as I plopped the box of Imodium into my basket, ha! Won't be needing those I titter to myself, but better to be safe than sorry. How wrong I was. Oh how wrong!

Feeling around in the dark at 4am for the light switch I know there is something wrong. I'm awake and my stomach is making noises it has never made before, I'm reminded of the film Alien, it sounds as if there is something alive and groaning inside of me trying to get out and I know with certainty that this can't be good. Oh God. This can't be good......................and it isn't.

It's a bad situation made even worse by the fact that I'm sharing a room with someone I met only days earlier. I'm up like a bullet and into the bathroom. The light, the light, where is the fecking light. The light has decided it is not working for me today and so what follows takes place in complete darkness. I'm gasping and heaving, the many faces of the street sellers and the Gods from the postcards I bought earlier with their multiple limbs and trunks are floating in front of me, mocking me. Ha Ha! Silly Irish girl, even the Taj Mahal appears at one point. Oh poor me, poor me, I wail internally. I hate India right now, why is this happening to me? I don't deserve this. I'm preying to God, to Vishnu, to Lord Ganesha, to basically anyone who can hear me and make this stop.

My brain feels like a Christmas ham in the pot to boil. I'm pasty and I'm Irish and I'm just not built for this I whimper to myself as I take another gasp of air with tears streaming down my face.

When it's all over I skulk back to bed like a wounded animal, knock back a Motilium to settle my stomach and duck under my sheet. I look across at the twin bed beside me and wonder what she's heard? Shudder! She's all curled up and not a meg out of her, at this point I don't even care, I just want to put this whole sorry night behind me. It never happened it just never happened OK. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Of course I'm writing about it now on my blog, ha! Something the though of which would have made me recoil in horror only a few short weeks ago. Me of all people sharing my bodily functions, never! But truth be told once you've been in India a few short weeks (days in my case), most people have an Imodium moment to share (or at least wimpy Westerners like me) and indeed you find yourself becoming a lot less precious about things that would really have irritated you at home. Thanking God in this case that I was actually close to a toilet. I think of the eight hour bus journey I had the day before and the horror show it could have become. I mean where would one go, I wonder? What would one do? Even if the bus stopped for you there are people everywhere. There is no quiet spot. India has to be one of the most heavily populated places I have ever been to. There are literally just people everywhere. I played this game with myself a few days ago as I watched out the window of the bus on the country roads, how many seconds I could go without spotting a person and I couldn't go longer than ten seconds. There is so much we take for granted at home, like just having clean running water in our taps and being able to brush our teeth and rinse our mouths out without having to worry about bacteria, germs or parasites. We really don't realize how lucky we are!