After a few weeks in Nepal, it was time to head back to India again. To be more specific, we were heading for New Delhi.
The event which I am about to tell you about is something that makes me laugh to this day.
We smoked a joint in the bathroom of the hotel room where we were staying, and shortly thereafter, I got the munchies. We therefore ordered room service.
I remember laying in bed and hearing a knock on the door. Having hardcore munchies, I more or less jumped out of bed and went over to open the door. Then I don’t know what happened. It’s like I went into some type of hypnosis.
For some strange reason, once I had opened the door and the staff-member stood there carrying a tray with our food and drinks, I got stuck staring at an insignificant point down on the floor, and just stood there probably looking like a fucking idiot.
Meanwhile, I could hear the staff members voice in the background, but in a distorted type of way. “Sir, siiiir, siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiir. Are you okay, ooooookaaaaay, oooooooookaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyy?”
I don’t know exactly how long it went on for before I managed to snap out of that little hypnosis session. It then took about a second before I got back to reality. I can’t remember exactly what I told the guy, but it was some bullshit like “oh, sorry, I am just really tired”, or something similar.
To this day, I am wondering what the hotel-guy must have been thinking. I felt like a complete idiot afterwards, but since his reaction to it was very casual, as if things like that happened all the time, I could shortly thereafter laugh at it.
It had felt as if I had been stuck inside some type of bubble, barely hearing what was going on outside of it.
We later moved in to this local woman’s house in Delhi, a person who my friend had previously studied together with in Paris for about 1-2 years before our trip. She was super-sweet, and I immediately took a liking to her as a person.
Staying with her was also an interesting opportunity to see the huge gaps that exist in Indian society firsthand. When we stayed with her, we lived like kings, had maids who took care of everything we might need help with, and even had our own driver. Then, if you just went a few meters down the block on the sidewalk outside of her house, you could see a whole family living on a shared blanket on that same sidewalk.
More from Memoirs of a Wandering Viking: Read Chapter 4: From Kathmandu to Chitwan, continue to Chapter 6: My Brief Bollywood Career, or browse all chapters.