Thursday was very exciting! We got up in the morning, had a nice breakfast of yoghurt, milk, and cereal and got ready to go to the airport to go to Srinagar. My finger was quite swollen, and so was Jo’s hand where she had been stung by two wasps. I couldn’t get my wedding ring off, but thought it was because it was hot in Delhi and my fingers frequently swell in the heat.
All of the guide books had recommended that if one wanted to rent a houseboat, you should wait until you got to Srinigar to check them out and pick the one you wanted. There were lots of warnings in the Lonely Planet about how people regularly got scammed, had their passports taken and they were then held hostage for lots of money, made to spend ridiculous amounts to get boat rides from the house boats across the lakes, harassed by salespeople in boats who wouldn’t leave them alone, etc.
David had tried to book us a room in a hotel recommended by the guide books but they had no availability for the night we arrived, so the owner offered another place for us to stay and David booked us a night in the Hotel Sunshine. We planned to only stay in a hotel one night and move to a houseboat the next day anyway. How bad could it be? Pretty bad. Hotel Sunshine made a Motel 6 look pretty good. The place was truly falling apart. There was a big chunk of carpet missing outside of our bathroom, so a little piece of fake carpet was plopped on top of it.
But the major problem of the day was that my ring finger was swelling and it was looking more and more unlikely that I would be able to get my ring off. David’s contact told Jo that Nick the Jeweler down the Boulevard could cut the ring off if necessary. It would take him one hour to get the equipment, and he would stay until 7. Well, that certainly increased our efforts to get the ring off. I put my hand in ice and icy water but it in fact made the swelling worse, so after 30 minutes or so we moved on. Jim tried to massage the fluid out of my finger, but no better. I kept my hand up over my head, but no better. In the meantime, no one had had a chance to go look for a houseboat. So Jo tied my hand in a black scarf and tied the other end to the light fixture over the bed so that my hand was suspended over my head – it looked a little kinky, but maybe it would work. I took 50 mg of Benadryl, an Advil, and put a scrapbooking video on to keep me amused.
Unfortunately, while pictures of this scene do exist, there potential for blackmail prohibit me from posting them, you'll just have to ask to see the scrapbook
ff David, Jo, and Jim went to look for a houseboat. They started at the Houseboat owner’s Association and were assigned a shakar boatman to help them find a houseboat. He actually took them to another lake and showed them two houseboats that belonged to him or his family. The other lake was far away and would have required a car to get back to the town. The man was not interested in showing them any other boats, and ultimately brought them back to the hotel. Jo thought he was “swarmy” and we shouldn’t trust him.
I had already decided that keeping my hand above my head in the black scarf hadn’t worked, and, in fact, the finger was more swollen. Now I could not move the ring at all. Off we went to Nick the Jeweler, who did not have the equipment to cut the ring. He offered to take us to the “factory” where someone could cut off the ring. David said he would go with me, and off we went in the autorickshaw with two men. We had no idea where we were going, and I must admit, I would have been very nervous if I were alone with two men from a different culture, driving through small alleys in a city I had never been to before and knew not a word of the language. However, David was there with me and that made me feel much more secure. We stopped at a closed door in a small alley and one of the men knocked on the door but no one was there. Off we went again, down some more small streets. We stopped in front of a building and a man came out, looked at my finger, and told us to come with him. We got upstairs where two other young men were working on jewelry. The man in charge first looked at the ring carefully to see if there was any place he could try to cut the ring. Unfortunately it has rubies and diamonds closely spaced around the entire ring, so there was no good place to try. However, he decided where he was going to try and attempted to cut the ring with a scissors-like object but he could not do it. Then he switched to a miniature hacksaw and made a groove in the top of the ring, but couldn’t saw through the ring. He looked very unhappy and the way that I have looked when I am trying to do a bone marrow or spinal tap and things are NOT going well. Finally he took the tiny blade off the hacksaw, fed the blade between my ring and finger and reattached the blade. Then he began to saw back and forth on the undersurface of the ring. The ring began to heat up, and it was pretty painful. However, soon he thought he had made enough of a groove with the hacksaw so he went back to the first instrument. I think he was able to get the jaws in the two grooves and with one snap – my wedding ring was broken. He had to pull it apart so there was about one-third of an inch opening before I could get the ring off. The gentleman was so nice and said he could fix the ring, but I said that I didn’t want to decide on the size until the swelling was gone and I would have it fixed at home. He would not accept any money. We went back to the hotel, and gave the two men some money. I will definitely stop at Nick the Jeweler’s to see if I can find a piece or two to buy before we leave Srinigar.
We had dinner at a vegetarian Indian restaurant next door where we had spinach paneer, chick peas, a mixed vegetable dish, roti and rice. I was so wiped out by everything had happened that I was in bed before 9 pm, and even though the noise from the street was deafening, I fell immediately to sleep. Quite a day!
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