'The Dead Dog Inn' - A Taste of Travel in India

Due to the fact that the train was seven hours late, not an uncommon occurrence in India, I arrived in Jodhpur at three in the morning. Even at this hour, an assortment of rickshaw drivers were at the station to meet the incoming train.

In the disarray outside the gates I tried to explain to an uncomprehending, half asleep, driver a cheap hotel I wanted to find. With the bleary-eyed fellow excitedly nodding his head, and saying with a faintly British lilt in his voice, "Yes Sir! Yes Sir!" as if he understood, I climbed on his rickshaw, and we headed away from the reassuring lights of the station into the darkness.

At three in the morning, Jodhpur, like most Indian cities has a creepy, almost medieval quality to it. Along unlit streets lined with squalid rows of shacks, fires burn surrounded by small groups of people huddling together trying to stay warm. Nearby, cows mill about, while shadowy, destitute figures wrapped in the silence of the night sleep in doorways.

I would have been utterly amazed if the driver had taken me to the hotel I wanted. Instead, we pulled up in front of a seedy looking adobe structure, sort of a Bates Motel East, with a dog carcass stiffened well into rigor-mortis beside the entrance. Across the dirt street several other mangy, half-starved dogs lounged in the dusty, eerie stillness. As I climbed off the rickshaw I smiled at the pleasure I would get from telling friends about what I immediately named, "The Dead Dog Inn."

Hoisting my pack over my shoulder, I entered what in a kind of theoretical sense could be called a lobby; a cramped, dimly lit room straight out of Somerset Maugham with the proprietor slumped fast asleep over a desk while a ceiling fan slowly thrummed overhead. As he shook the manager's shoulder, the rickshaw driver said something in Hindi, probably something to the effect of "Here's another sucker."

After rubbing his eyes awake with the heels of his hands and smoothing out his Rajput mustache, the manager just stared at me blankly for a moment. Then, clearing a bunch of empty peanut shells off the desktop, he abruptly said, "One hundred rupees," (about two dollars) and blithely gestured me toward two guest registers (sometimes, in this bureaucracy-loving country, three must be signed.)

As I registered, the driver and the manager leaned over my wristwatch, examining it as if it were a rare mineral. -"Expensive?" asked the manager. - "Uh ... no," I replied, "about twelve hundred rupees." I was so beat, I didn't even ask to check the room, something you should always do in cheap hotels in India.

As it turned out, the "Dead Dog" wasn't too bad. Although the room was an austere seven by ten feet and the bed had no sheets, just a rough blanket, there wasn't a single bedbug. And since I didn't have to worry about being robbed of a watch worth only twelve hundred rupees, I got a pretty good night's sleep.

The next morning a bucket of hot water was brought up for me to wash with. - Later, exhibiting a level of attention to detail that would do innkeepers the world over proud, they even removed the dog.

* From "A Journey Through India," 1997