Relaxing in Tikli Bottom, Gurgaon (Haryana, INDIA)

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Relaxing in Tikli Bottom, Gurgaon (Haryana, INDIA).  We flew from SFO-Frankfurt ( 11 hours) without incident, spent 4 cranky hours at the Red Carpet Club, and then another 9 hours flying FRA-Delhi. Arriving at about 1:30AM, we whisked through Customs and were met by Kemal, our driver from Tikli Bottom. We drove on an extraordinarily congested highway, cars squeezing through the truck traffic, making up lanes whenever necessary. The immense truck traffic was headed in both directions, on a beat-up road laid over a path that was hundreds of years old.  Delhi, after all, has been a city for a thousand years, part of a road that variously goes through the Khyber Pass, toward the Hindu Kush, and to the Arabian and Bengal Seas. Motorized vehicles are just the latest innovation on this ancient route.

The side of the road was equally clogged with trucks--stopped for the night, stopped for repairs, stopped while the driver got petrol, or food, or some human conversation. Yes, at 2AM we saw dozens of little roadside stands, lights twinkling, benches half-filled with resting figures. In between we so not-so-well- light places, and I recalled how prostitution and long-distance truck routes combine to make AIDS the heterosexual epidemic it is outside the U.S. & Western Europe. Men gone from home for weeks at a time, frequently married to women for whom sex is painful (from clitoridectomy or other ritual procedures) or unwanted for a hundred other reasons. Prostitutes for whom the willingness to have oral sex or unprotected intercourse means the difference between eating or not. Welcome to India.

The place is gorgeous, relaxed, elegant without being at all stuffy.

We turned off the highway onto a rutted dirt road, and a half hour later arrived at Tikli Bottom ( http://www.tiklibottom.com/ ). My friend Dr. June Reinisch absolutely demanded we stay there as a way of relaxing for a few days before engaging the tumult of India, and I am very much in her debt. T.B. is a farm/ranch/guesthouse run by British expats who have spent the last 15 years in India. The place is gorgeous, relaxed, elegant without being at all stuffy. They grow their own food, and the cuisine is exquisite--again, without being too precious. Surrounded by mementos of Anne and Martin's families, we felt as if we were in a film about pre-war London, or a summer during the Raj.

We spent most of the first day there sleeping, reading, eating, and sleeping again. We slept under mosquito netting, and shared the night with the sounds of buffalo, pigs, nightingales, and a rooster whose time sense was apparently as off as ours.